“Welcome home, boy.”

Louie greeted me the same way, every day, from just inside the metal door of Legion 298, his voice thick with gravel and Polish singsong. He was the beer hall’s unofficial greeter, and when he wasn’t welcoming members or giving the stink eye to newcomers, he sold trays of homemade cabbage rolls from the trunk of his sedan out back.

Vancouver’s Legion 298 on Main Street had gradually become my second home, so Louie’s welcome both warmed and wounded a heart that knew better. What started off as an eccentric escape from work and household duties was now my watering hole, my living room, my numbing station. I once considered the rugged regulars here with the healthy distance of amused character study. Now I was one of them.

It was Friday, four o’clock. That meant Meat Draw time—when we gathered to drink draft and buy tickets in hopes of winning butcher packs of steaks, wings and pork chops. For outsiders and drop-ins, it was a funny story to share at work on Monday, but for us regulars, the Meat Draw was a definitive ritual. It gave structure to the structureless pastime of drinking for hours inside a windowless bar.   

I walked to the head table, to my designated barstool. The tavern looked and smelled as if it hadn’t changed since my grandfather’s first shave. Everything at the Legion bled a hue of bygone red—red Naugahyde chairs, red terry cloth tables, red threadbare carpet. Even the cheeks of the drinkers here burst spidery veins of hard-lived crimson. Patronizing this wine-coloured place was like living in the belly of a very sick animal. And I absolutely loved it.

I took my seat at the long, narrow stretch of table we affectionately called the Ironing Board. In the morning, it sat about ten devout drinkers sharing the same newspaper, trading turns with the word scramble. By happy hour, it buzzed with dozens of extroverts standing, leaning, and elbowing to get a word in or to tease each other with inside jokes. At the Legion, a place at the Ironing Board meant you’d made it. For me, it was a sense of patron pride, of community. For my wife Cathy, it was more a cause for concern.

The seniors from the Ladies Auxiliary Club circulated the Legion and began selling the Meat Draw tickets, dressed in ceremonial navy uniforms. They hosted the lottery every weekend to raise money for their luncheons. Every half hour, from the cooler behind the bar, the ladies hauled out oversized packages of meat bursting from cellophane skins—T-bones, roasts, chickens, chops, anything—and spun a metal cage of ticket stubs to pick the winners.

Tickets sold three for a toonie. Some guys, like Bad Ted, would buy entire arm-lengths at a time, and win over and over until the room booed him. Then he’d drink until last call, a towering pile of warm meat gathered at his feet.

I could never put my finger on why—as a professional, as a family man, as someone who knew healthier ways of connection—winning meat with this crowd excited me. Even when the old-man-tavern novelty faded, the quotidian practice of buying tickets, drinking and bullshitting with this bunch was ambiguously reassuring. 

“First draw’s up,” called Sophie, today’s Meat Draw host. She had a thick roll of red dollar-store tickets hooked on one meaty arm. “We got a breakfast pack this round. Eggs, bacon, hash . . .”

Loonies and toonies hit the Ironing Board with a clang.

Thirsty for a cold one while doing renovations on our first home off Main Street in the summer of 2005, I asked the guy renting me a floor sander where I could grab a quick glass of beer. He pointed me directly across the street to a white, Tudor-style building with colourful crests as its only signage. When I walked in and surveyed the scene of old timers, pickled eggs and a raffle for Thanksgiving turkeys, I discovered a lost city of kitsch and comfort. I came for the meat draw and stayed for the next ten years.

Legion members schooled me in Meat Draw history: The raffles began as a British response to WWII food rationing, and the draws eventually grew into a sociable tavern tradition for veterans. Then, with a financial need to attract a clientele without canes, most veterans’ clubs no longer required mandatory military memberships to drink the cheap alcohol. That meant Legions like mine became boozy melting pots of old-timers, millennials, labourers, artists, bachelorette parties and drunks—all happily sharing tables and pissy draft. And at meat o’clock, the place was packed.

The community of characters provided as much a buzz as the booze. Peggy the Vet often brought in her homemade Scotch eggs and Trucker Ron cut them up with his pocket knife for the table. Lawyer Larry wowed the Ironing Board with his tales of locking up criminals using unlawful shortcuts. Ray, a career guitar man, played on a forgotten Grammy-nominated jazz album and Donna the bartender ordered pizza for the regulars, sending us home too stuffed for our real, more nourishing family dinners.

It was there I learned how to do crosswords (“pens are for pros, pencils for pussies”), how to buy cheap, hot items like tires and cheese from local thieves who took orders, and how to appreciate Main Street’s old guard, far more genuine than the influx of young couples like me and Cathy. It became the place from which I brought home mountains of meat over the years.

My winning streaks were exhilarating. I racked up every edible animal like chips at a roulette table—lamb chops, beef pies, chicken breasts, back ribs, flats of eggs. But the problem became how to take the prizes home to Cathy. If the smell of booze didn’t give me away, an armful of ground beef would. Sometimes, I hid my winnings inside the little-used freezer in our garage or just immediately traded my meat for another pint and a shot. Not only was I enabling a drinking burden, I was oddly addicted to winning provisions I could afford to buy elsewhere—like, say, the grocery store.

“If I could, I’d burn that place to the ground,” Cathy said once, as we drove past the Legion on a Saturday Ikea run.

I agreed, but that didn’t relax her brow. No matter how ludicrous it was, I still wondered which regulars were inside and what fun I was missing.

In the middle of the scuffed dance floor, raffle host Sophie sat at a folding table upon which five packs of glistening meat awaited adoption. She spun the metal cage with a clank and pulled a folded ticket. “Your first number is . . . nine-four-eight-one.”

Larry the Lawyer leaped from the Ironing Board and jogged up to her, waving his stub.

“That’s a good ticket,” Sophie confirmed.

The room catcalled Larry as soon as he chose the steaks. Steaks were always the first to go.

We went through one raffle every half hour, five prizes per session. We scowled at strangers who won and cheered on our favourite regulars, especially those who really deserved the win, like 89-year-old Ruby or the poor loner in the dirty disco jacket.

Dead ticket stubs gathered in front of me, soggy from beer spill. My chances of having anything to show for the night dwindled as the stakes—and steaks—skyrocketed, right over my head.

“Your last ticket of the five-thirty draw’s been drawn, ladies and gents,” Sophie announced.

I looked around at my competition. Almost all the regulars were sporting meat.

“Nine-seven . . .”

In my range . . .

“Eight . . .”

So close . . . This is it . . .

“Five.”

Dammit. We cried foul.

Then Bad Ted threw his arms up in victory. “Adios, losers!” He sashayed down the aisle, politely giving everyone the finger, and claimed his prize: a mammoth package of chalky raw chicken wings we knew he’d never bake.

Pete the Painter leaned over to me. “You’re always here, bud.” 

“So are you,” I said, and downed a shot of bourbon.

We sat, silent, watching muted sports highlights. The regulars around the Ironing Board carried on—same jokes, same stories. Louie was hauling out the last box of meat from the walk-in cooler.

“Being here is different for some of us,” Pete said. “That’s all I’m sayin’.”

I sipped at my warm draft.

“Just make sure you really want this.”

Then he left.

The next Friday, I was still winless, continuing a bone-dry month of meat.

“Last call on the final meat draw!” Sophie shouted over the tavern’s din. The handymen, the hipsters, the office mates and the barflies all reached into their pockets. So did I.

“Nine-nine-nine . . . FOUR,” Sophie yelled over another Bob Seger song.

That sweet, sobering rush. My dopamine bell rang out with one carnival mallet smash. Instant elation. I slammed down my glass of Molson and threw my fists up. “Suck it, fellas!”

The Ironing Board flung cardboard coasters at my back as I slow-walked to the prize table. I picked the package of stewing beef over the goosebumpy drumettes. A solid choice. The moment was invigorating, and my bar time felt validated, if only for a flash.

With the draw done, a few young guys helped Sophie fold her table and carry the raffle cage and speaker to the storage room. Then, most of the Ironing Board set cleared out. I looked at my watch: 7:25 p.m. I still had two full glasses in front of me.

How could I know at the time? That the next seventeen years of my life would be spent in and out of treatment centres, high-end facilities full of hope, and publicly-funded shitholes fuelled by fighting and loneliness. How could I predict vicissitudes defined by shelters, sober houses and lost jobs? How was I to count how many times I’d say the Serenity Prayer, too often rote and routine, but sometimes bursting bright with new meaning? I could not know the loss I would eventually face. The loss of time. The loss of seeing a daughter grow up. I could not foresee that my body would forever carry a wistful weight and a homesickness for a home I could never return to.

I walked home woozy, with a bag of beef chuck that no longer excited me. Somehow, it was dark and close to bedtime now. I moved slowly, drinking an off-sale bottle of apple cider. I peed in a well-lit parking lot. I looked in the closed shop windows, their cash registers open to reveal emptiness. And a peculiar feeling rose up in me, that somehow I didn’t really belong anywhere. And what a strange sensation that was.   

When I arrived at our house, a bag of meat swinging from my arm, I gripped the cold railing that led up the stairs. Cathy opened the front door before I reached the first step. Even from a distance, I could see something different, something almost blurred and broken in her eyes.

Image: Tereza Allen, Pencil Head, 2023, oil on Gessobord

‍