I reel in my dog, cast my line—a knotted rope—back and forth across the space of my living room, slapping his chops so that he winces, until he bites and takes hold like a perch. What a gratifying feeling to be drawn together, a union, two bodies grappling in terrible embrace.

Joe waves when I walk past. I see him: dragging his air hose across the sidewalk, cracking jokes with customers, tending to the grill that’s sizzling sausages in the snow. He always waves.

His shop employs no lifts, only a loading zone, a stretch of LeMoyne guarded by a pair of city signs. Customers drive up in all kinds of cars—Mercedes, Caddies, old pickups crammed with scrap—and lean against the wall as Joe and his men wheel out their dented steel jacks and crank up their cars right there on the street. There is no waiting room. This is not Good Year. But Joe is fast. He has to be. There's only so much street and so many jacks.

Three floors on Western Avenue crammed with radial rubber, and when the storage-room garage grows bare they toss their replacements from the upper windows. Smack! And thud. And as my dog and I doze on our saliva-stained couch with a book on my belly and the door gaping open we dream to the zip of lug nuts unclenching their steely grip.

I wake to a hydraulic hiss and step on my deck to see the artist’s airbrush spitting black paint on a pancake stack of old, dusty Coopers and Goodriches as a makeshift potter’s wheel spins slowly around. The pink-nosed pit bull flips circles behind his bars and toots his bugle bark in protest at the spayed babes trotting past, peeing hello, too far for a snort.

Joe charges me ten bucks a leak. I kid: you’re dropping nails. He pauses, almost takes offense, then laughs.

The sun setting, he locks up the shop and crosses the alley, sits in his garage, flips on baseball or boxing. Courtiers come with tribute—a cooler of Coronas, reefer—a little empire, squatter rich, living off the land, happy to watch it turn each season richer and richer, like good soil.

They came from the coasts—Ireland, Spain, San Francisco—to visit our unsalted shore and strike their hipster poses: a hand in one pocket, another wrapped around a plastic cup, their heads lobbing uncaught deep thoughts with the steady thunk-thump from head-to-toe speakers holding throne on the cracked asphalt parking lot.

We hide out on the picnic table near the VIP tent, happy and distant, watching the blurry crowd, the crowded blur, mix and mash. They stand beyond a chain-link fence where the garbage trucks have taken leave from their usual harbor. Everyone prepares for a Friday night. Everyone’s beautiful in the dark. We touch and we go.

The bar sits behind us, quiet, tucked in our armpit like a newspaper, like an afterthought. There’s a line to get in, so we scoop up beers and balance out the table with our weighty weeklong thoughts, letting them unravel into a net we cast out upon the occasional friends swimming through reeds of strangers like fat, aimless catfish.

But I miss this bar behind me, this rickety house with cutout snowflakes dangling from the ceiling. It's been good to me. Restless nights, alone, I’d amble up, self-conscious, impatient for the Jameson to crawl up my neck and drown the worries. And others, after work, with friends, our backs arched and calves bouncing on the brass rung and our forearms locked into the glazed wooden bar. Through words and beers and the rhythmic dance of dollar bills we'd regain ourselves from the day, remember who we were when we were kids, when we hoped out loud.

We toasted Waylon's final trip to Luckenbach. Robyn Hitchcock served us doughnuts from a Krispy Kreme pyramid. Soul and country blend indistinguishable. Siblings know no rivalries. Friends turn into family, grow young listening to three kids on a bench back seat singing popcorn on a long highway drive around the back room. Stanley licks Pabst off the linoleum floor while my friend tells me he's getting divorced. We navigate the buildup to war, melancholy settling over the room like the aftermath of a fight. Work wears us down, paychecks dissolve into cash, hangovers stagger to our desks the next day.

Then the chatter cracks and an unamplified voice conquers the room. Such a silence you've never heard. It's a Monday night and you have no business being there. It's too late, but when heaven casts its rays out of the slate-gray sky you'd best stick around.

This September party has grown too big, but we take comfort from the ash tree, the twenty-foot weed rooted under asphalt, dangling leafy tendrils from its unpruned arms. In Chicago it's not the night sky that twinkles but the glittering glassy ground. Broken bottles carpet stone. And on the other side of the fence, on the other side of the world, cop cruisers sip gasoline and roll away for another night of violence.