Day One: The Move

The Astoria is packed into moving vans and taken back to the Cobalt. The opium addicts who run the hotel won't let us move the bar tables and stools inside due to their own paranoid, delusional politics, no doubt. So we park it all in the Carriage Way and buy off-sales from the Ivanhoe, setting up shop until further instructions. Once we get the go-ahead at roughly 11 p.m., we move back in to find a junkyard full of needles, mattresses and two years worth of dust, dirt, dried blood and a broken pool cue with a knife duct-taped to the end. It's Hell's Waiting Room. We have our work cut out for us.

Day Two: Bathroom Duty

Oh, the joy of bleach! With the help of a girl named Tara, we tackle the girl's room first. Surprisingly it's not as bad as I imagined it to be, save for the bloody toilet that Tara tackles with sound effects so she can pretend she's cleaning the toilet in her own place. From there, we move to the boys can. Because Tara dealt with the blood, I get the boy's stall. With trepidation, I cautiously open the stall to discover a heap of floating poo and a scattering of flies. Hell, it could have been worse.

Day Three: Beer And Pizza

Try to clean the tables, only to find dirt dries into new streaky patterns. Four coats of water rinses and spray-bleach later, streaks simply begin producing kaleidoscope patterns. Needles and mattresses have been cleaned out, construction of stage is underway. I watch while drinking beer and eating pizza (hello, bathrooms!?) Discover the graffiti behind the stage is a depiction of Geoff and Lisa, of local Pyschobilly band, The Slickjacks, who are part of the construction crew (including Xinit and Cannibal).

Day Four: Hole In The Ceiling

It isn't a leak, it's a downpour of God knows what, from God knows where. Cannibal makes a joke about seeing corn in part of the puddle. Wendy Thirteen, the Queen Pin behind this operation gets the mystery liquid in her mohawk. Norm stops by. He is drunk, giggling at the leak in the ceiling. I make a Subway run. Why doesn't anyone like toppings?! Sati shows up to the sweep the post-needle dirty carpet. Final installments of the stage are completed, despite accidentally trapping Ashtrey underneath,which leads to jokes about the phantom of the Cobalt, lurking beneath the stage with half a paper plate stuck to his face.

Day Five: Tight Pink Bicycle Shirts

Light system where showers were once installed for strippers has been cleaned up. I clean behind the bar and empty several buckets of black water in the process. Cannibal brings a box of tight, pink bike shirts from the sweatshop where he works. They are a hit because it is discovered the built in pockets for water bottles can hold several cans of beer (Lisa was soon customizing them for each of us with a sharpie). Dentor, who biked over, leaves wearing one.

Day Six, Seven and Eight: Working, Can't Make It Down

Day Nine: The Gong Show

I stop off first at the Ivanhoe for off-sales and find Wendy Thirteen in the smoking room. She's now Drunk Wendy Thirteen - cracking, she said, after two weeks of intense sobriety. We meet up with a friend of hers who's a hooker. As we're leaving, Wendy Thirteen's friend takes a call from a "trick" and tells him she's busy. Back at Headquarters, we meet up with Elvis Hitler and sit around a streaky table. Wendy calls Mr. Plow and demands he come down and play some tunes. He obliges.

Soon, we are partaking in Jamie Ball's cigar-sized joint and listening to everything from "When You're Drunk ("I like you better, when you're drunk"), to faves, "Crackhead Moma" and "Are You Really A Guy?" We sing along. In between tunes Wendy's friend regales us with hooker stories stranger than Science Fiction. Plow says he wants to go downtown to a birthday party for Civixen. The ceiling leaks and we ignore it, piling into the Plowmobile. We end up at the Lamplighter, where Married to Music are playing. They are very good. Even if I don't like their name. Drunk Wendy smokes outside and starts fist fights. She may have done some flashing, and tossed a stack of Nerve magazines into the street. Plow drove us home and Wendy chooses to sit in the foot space of the front seat.

Day Ten: Too Hungover

Day Eleven and Twelve: Working

Day Thirteen: Wendy Thirteen Doesn't Remember A Thing

I have to fill her in on the Lamplighter escapades. She says she wasn't trying beat me up and that we were just "wrastling." I decide to seek out wrastling lessons. She is also surprised (in a giggly sort of way) at the Nerve mag-tossing, as they've supposedly called a "truce." She hasn't touched her Redheaded Sluts (Jagger and cranberry juice) since. Geoff and Lisa are starting on the tile project for the bathrooms as per the inspector's directions. Job turns out to be harder than Tetrus on super-fast mode but they plug away. I spray more bleach and avoid the difficult jobs.

Day Fourteen: Trike Chandelier

Sati stops by again with a package of zip-straps from the dollar store. We attempt to lock trikes from the old days of Game Show Night together, so we can hang them from the ceiling. Unfortch, the zip-straps are faulty and the ones that work break in half when yanked into lock position. We chain trikes together. Sober Norm and Cannibal try to hang them from the ceiling while we chant, "Higher! Higher!" without offering assistance. Four-tonne, 1940 air-purifiers are dislodged from the ceiling. Besides construction the place is starting to come together.

Day Fifteen: Cobalt-Style French Manicures

We're three days away from final inspection/grand opening. I discover a cheap way for a DYI French manicure when Lisa appears from the tiling project to show off the white grout that's lodged under her finger nails. Her husband, Geoff, demonstrates his impressively disgusting Stupid Human Trick and shoves four-inch nails up his nose. This leads to Cannibal wanting to try. I can't watch and go wipe down the God Damn self-dirtying tables. For the eighteenth time. Ashtrey stops by but leaves when someone asks him to do something. The basement needs to be cleaned up and it is discovered there is apparently a Cobalt ghost. Cannibal finds out from a long-ago regular that the word Phoenix is etched into the cement somewhere in "haunted basement". Ooooh...

Day Sixteen: Final Countdown

The construction crew from the hotel stops by to build a new staircase into the basement. It takes them three tries to get it right; one staircase they try installing is upside down and backwards so that it resembles a waterslide with steps slanted downwards at a 90-degree angle. Elvis Hitler is drunk but manages to cut rubber for the back door entrance using only a butter knife. I talk to a friend later that night who comments on how much I've been working lately, and I tell her about the Volunteer Army. She says, "I don't know why you're doing that." I want to smack her, tell her that the music I've seen and heard since knowing the Asbalt/Cobalt is stuff I'll never forget, and more potent and real than anything else I've experienced. But I don't say anything because suddenly I don't ever want her to come to the Cobalt. Her ignorance is my bliss.

666: Grand-Opening (Pre-Show)

Ironically, the bathrooms are now dirtier than they were when I first cleaned them. Oh the joys of bleach! Wendy gets the thumbs up from the compassionate inspectors, which is not an oxymoron as it turns out! CTV, Canadian Television, stops by for an interview. I accidentally break a tile when I step into bathroom but no one cares, because it didn't break when the inspector stepped on it. Everything has been recycled. The tiles were found in the basement, the wood from a left and over pile. The stage is part Astoria and part Cobalt and the furniture originated from the long-defunct Love Affair. Hallucinogenic shows up, I think he's on something, he keeps saying how excited he is.

666: The Show

We finish clearing the tools and sawdust away at 7:30p.m.--doors open at 8 p.m. At first, we're unsure how many people are going to show up but we know the Volunteer Army party is a wrap when we're cut off from smoking inside. Five minutes after 8p.m., I'm nearly kicked out for trying to sneak out the front door for a cig and getting head locked by Serious Plow, who throws me out into the alley. Pffft, the thanks I get! There are more people out back than inside, and bands start showing up to haul in their equipment.

When the Business Associates hit the stage, the bar's already well over half-capacity. Despite the lack of Malice, they put on a decent show, Stefan, as usual, is a wonder to watch and once Alex Obnoxious gets his vox sorted out he manages to scream his way through the band's set, dispelling any confusion of why he's up there in the first place. When East Side Death Squad hit the stage there's so many people it's hard to move. The band does not disappoint, much in part to Newfie Mike, whose energy is infectious. What I like about this band is the unique change up of melodies within their songs. They've got a touch. Well, a touch of somethin'...

Afterwards I approach Newfie Mike about a future interview. He's neither here nor there about it, but he wants a beer. Note: do not give money to a starving musician to buy you a beer. There is a 101.01% chance he won't remember to get you one. Regardless, the bar continues to fill and at a $5 cover is it any wonder?

Next up is the Joint Chiefs. During a cigarette break outside I find Dentor, who looks like shit. Apparently he's been bed-ridden with the flu for the last four days or so. He coughs up a lung, black eye-bags and all, but proves just how hard he can rock with the expeditious band unleashes. Even if he shared the vocals you'd never know he was singin' with one lung left. Even if he didn't make it through the first round of Rock Star: Vancouver, Dentor rules and we're lucky to have him.

While waiting for the Draft to shut the place down, I see a bleeding guy and hear about the poo that is floating on the floor of the boys can. I go to use the ladies room and find some one has tried to flush a beer bottle down the toilet. The tiles of the floor have broken and mixed with wet glue. Ahhh, it's the good ol' Cobalt all right.

The Draft, in case you've been living in the West End or something, was kick ass. With Mya Mahem's mind-numbing vocals and a powerful trio of sweaty young men to back her up, they'll leave you stunned or rolling around the floor of some mosh pit wondering how the hell such a tiny little thing can produce that bone-rattling howl. It's now difficult to differentiate between the mosh pit and the beer "line-up." Wendy, understaffed at the bar, is trying to appease the rugby scrum. She looks bloody exhausted but she's smiling.