In the late '90s, the Frontier Room was one of many Seattle joints where college-educated white boys like myself could experience the tail end of the Seattle dive bar renaissance. Right now the Fro Room is an upscale restaurant which serves the best pulled pork sandwich in town, but in 1997 a colorful mix of hipsters, druggies, alkies and fishermen congregated there to buy strong drinks from brutally violent bartenders while experiencing the decline of the old, uncivilized downtown Seattle bar culture.

My strong sense of self-preservation kept me from spending too much time in these Belltown hellholes (including but not limited to Gibson House, Gay Nineties, My Suzie's Oriental Pacific and, of course, the Rendezvous), but there was a time when I actually worked as the door guy at the Frontier Room.

The Frontier Room was owned by a woman we'll call Jackie, who inherited it from her father - a man who spent his last days drinking himself into oblivion behind the bar. Jackie never did a damn thing to improve the place, but she would hang out smoking (you could legally smoke in bars back then) and watching TV some afternoons. Her greatest accomplishment was selling out to the current owners.

Let me make this clear-neighborhoods change, and to me gentrification is not always a bad thing. The new Frontier Room, with its delicious barbeque and clean, cockroach-free atmosphere, is a thousand-percent improvement over the old place. I always wondered what Jackie actually sold (the building is owned by the Plymouth Housing Group) - maybe the rights to the name and the neon sign?

The true management of the place in those days was in the hands of a woman we'll call "Tina." Tina was not nice to people, which might have decreased her tips but certainly preserved her self-respect.

There was a strict no-camera rule at the Frontier Room, a leftover from the days when men carousing in floozie-filled downtown bars didn't want any evidence of their indiscretions to get back to their wives. Tina enforced this rule with a vengeance - she had a strong sense of tradition - and more than once I saw her leap from behind the bar and destroy someone's camera or maybe forcibly evict some idiot-with extreme violent prejudice.

Tina counted the cash at the end of the night with a loaded .38 in front of her on the desk. Then she would invite her girlfriends in for after-hours drinks. As door guy I was entitled to a drink, so I poured myself a nightly quadruple Tanqueray and tonic and shot pool, alone, in the back room, wondering why I was such a loser. Today, of course, I look back upon those times as some of the happiest early mornings of my life.

So why was I slumming it? Bars are not exactly the place to meet sober, intelligent people, but they do provide inexpensive life experience unavailable in the suburbs. My cousin from New York City visited Seattle during the grunge days, and was amazed to see that the people serving drinks, coffee and doing other menial jobs were not immigrants of color, but white kids. Well, in the old days one could get by in Seattle doing part-time work, allowing more time for artistic endeavors. Other notorious honkies who slummed it at the Frontier Room included Mia Zapata, murdered frontwoman for the rock band the Gits, and a former girlfriend of mine, a strategic dater who traded me in for a Microsoft millionaire, a wise upgrade.

My job was to check IDs at the door and make fried food for the drunks in a filthy kitchen so large it would make Tom Douglas blush. The Frontier Room, in keeping with the fascistic liquor regulations of Washington State, had the strictest ID policy in town. On the night of my 27th birthday, I showed up there after midnight, and the guy at the door needed serious convincing (and a referral from Tina) to let me in - because my ID had expired earlier that evening!

To get revenge on this longstanding stupidity, I never looked at people's licenses too carefully while working the door. And for this I was fired, or maybe it was for cooking food (in a fryer with oil that had not been changed in at least six months) for the other drunk slummers and pocketing the money. Or for making free milk shakes for my friends, or smoking pot on the job and blowing it into the powerful range hood.

People who spend any amount of time in bars know boredom all too well; but sometimes things did get exciting. One hot summer night a short, skinny drunk began insulting an African American gentleman sitting at the other end of the bar. Tina eventually told them to take it outside; once there, the gentlemen punched the poor fool so hard that he was floored for a good five minutes. Before the ambulance arrived the guy got up and began staggering down the street, his face a mass of blood and missing teeth. The gentlemen's fist was broken open almost down to the bone.

Another time I rolled a drunk in the back room, and to this day this deed does not offend my sense of honor or social justice. Some people are mean drunks, and this poor rude bastard passed out in a chair after a night of idiocy, long abandoned by his drinking buddies. The Jackson that fell to the floor was fair game.

So how did I get drawn in to this madness? My friend Kate and I lived down the street, and we used the Frontier Room as our own personal pool hall. We'd go after work, before the crowds arrived, and shoot pool and feed the jukebox. Eventually Tina asked me to work the door one night, and an adventure was born.

Another neighbor of ours was also a regular: Steve "One Eye" Mittenberg. Sadly, he died of a heroin overdose. I went into his apartment after he passed on to that great dive bar in the sky and found a mound of refuse two feet high - typical of a junkie who has abandoned all pretense toward hygiene or civilized behavior. Steve was a smart, sassy guy, born in 1956, which would make him a baby boomer. I had no idea that he was a smackhead, and thus had been friendly with him for years. People who live in Seattle long enough know to stay away from junkie types at all costs, and I wouldn't have given him the time of day had I known about his demonic habit - but I'm sometimes naive in that way. For example, many a time during my Frontier Room sabbatical a blind drunk insulted me and I took it personally, not realizing what was actually happening (or not happening) in that poor soul's brain.

With the help of the apartment manager, I confiscated some of Steve's papers and photos, and learned that he was a college-educated, upper-class guy from Long Island with a promising future. In most of the pictures he is holding a drink. I found a ticket he got for "urinating in the subway" in New York in 1978, and pictures of his large, loving family. I guess some people do better than others when "slumming it." I heard that towards the end, soulless drug dealers made him give up his glass eye, and he was found, literally, with a hole in his head.