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Working Nights in the Artificial Day, Working Days in the Artificial Night - by Melissa Petro

I don’t remember what I said, but after a while I convinced Rick to let me drop him off at the lab in the mornings so that I could borrow the car in the afternoons. Maybe I told him I was going to the library. Or working days at the shelter. I forget what I told him. I lied. I borrowed the car because I wanted to start dancing again. I knew where. I’d seen the place. Forty-five minutes out of Cincinnati, right off I-75; there’s a dilapidated forty-foot billboard with a cartoon of a woman with enormous breasts and black stars for nipples. Leroy’s Topless Cabaret: exit 42...

Confessions of a Pilsner Drinker - by René Georg Vasicek

The bartender, Robert, is a dead ringer for Milan Hlavsa, the late bassist and founder of the Plastic People of the Universe. His bulging eyes, elfin grin, shoulder-length mullet, and large caveman hands conjure a magic troll. Robert came to America in 1977, the same year that Czech dissident intellectuals like Václav Havel signed Charter 77, a petition protesting the arrest of the Plastic People and other human rights violations perpetrated by the Czechoslovak government. If Havel served as a sort of doorkeeper to the Czech underground, Robert is the barkeeper to the Czech émigré underground in America. He watches over a society of drinkers and thinkers who gather at the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens...