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Tuman's Alcohol Abuse Center Re Opens For Business

"Tuman's is the kind of place you take a Lincoln Park Trixie if you want to dump her. First off, she won't appreciate being taken to a no frills beer-drinkers bar with quite possibly the best jukebox second to Marie's Riptide Lounge. Secondly, the people there are 'real' which will immediately turn her off. And lastly, when you can get hammered on drinks that cheap, you have enough cash left to send her home via cab!"– Anonymous posting on Citysearch: Chicago

One of Chicagos legenadry drinking establishments has reopened it's doors for the first time ia a year. It was during the wee hours, on a cold January night in 2003 when Tuman's died a "loud, naked death". Now the alterna-dive known as Tuman's Alcohol Abuse Center at 2201 W. Chicago Ave. (800N, 2200W) is ready to soak the massses who haven't been able to live without it's fix.

From www.seanparnell.com

Passing through the ancient portal, you'd find a room, much like the a turn of many a century pub only darker, with the rest of the old wooden bar running along the east end of the room. Behind the bar hung a romance era nude from a large, Tiffany-style lamp, in front of a mirrored bar back that separated a set of cabinets. Bartenders, surprisingly attitude-free and expeditious, served Guinness, Rolling Rock and Bass on tap for $2.50 each every night, thank you very much. Actually, the price for a long time was an even more meager $2.00 but they had to hike prices 50¢ to pay for a new floor. A dozen more brewskies were available in bottles including Double Diamond, Killian's (50¢ on Mondays), Heineken, Harp, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Stella Artois (for $2.50 – take note bw-3), and dirt cheap bourbon, Scotch and whatever else you wanted. Ingredients to mixed drinks were never measured. Let's put it this way: you could get roaring drunk for $20. How many other places can say the same? (aside from Rich's First One Today of course) Across from the bar was a series of low-slung wooden tables with formations at the point where the legs met the surface of the table that looked like it was, if covered, where one might stash alcohol in a Prohibition-era, speakeasy bust (ala the Sidestreet Café in Toledo). Amongst the tables, and perched under an unlit neon "Alcohol Abuse Center" sign, mounted prominently on the ornate, cream-painted tin western wall, used to be a '97 Golden Tee machine that was actually turned off and serving as an ashtray rest.

If you could make your way past the earthy bottleneck formed by a throng of alcohol abusers, the red (clay) brick road led to a pool table surrounded by a hodgepodge of furniture, including a barber's chair with a footrest and built-in ashtray, intermingled with kegs with circular plywood "covers" that provided seating. Here, those playing billiards would fight for a shot amongst elbows, street vendors wandering in to sell tamales or pot brownies, and a plume of smoke hung eternally under a colorful table lamp when it wasn't being pushed around by a few fans hanging from a blackened ceiling. For the truly adventurous, a pair of frightening bathrooms with knotted rope for doorknobs could be found in the back, down a foul-smelling corridor and past the watchful gaze of Bela Lugosi as Dracula, illuminated in lighting the color of urine.

The most fascinating aspect of Tuman's was the people. The macabre saloon was a favorite to bike messengers, online diarists/blogs, musicians, urban yokels, writers, bartenders from the area, adventurous North Siders, art students, ruers of hygiene, cheapskates, scruffmeisters, poseurs, toadstools, Ralph Nader supporters, neighborhood "usuals," booze sponges, pedantists, foolish Suburbanites, trust fund slummers, munchy vendors, nuevo hippies, post-grunge flannelists, would-be poets, secretly homeless, High Fidelity worshipers, drummers, drug addicts, Polkaholics, Dead Kennedy admirers, Shaggy look-a-likes, experimenters in facial hair, Ragstock shoppers, roaches, and an old lady pool shark. All of the above subtly grooved to an eclectic jukebox under the digital Old Style clock set 30 minutes fast that featured Fugazi, Velvet Underground, Hank Williams, the Swans, ZZ Top, Gang of Four, Motorhead, the Melvins, the Clash, Nirvana, Burning Spear, Johnny Cash, Spacemen 3, and MC5. The juke at Tuman's was even ranked #4 in the city for Best Jukebox in Citysearch: Chicago's 2001 audience poll and was one of five bars nominated by the editors. To illustrate the scene at Tuman's, I submit the following to you for consideration: I overheard Nietzsche pronounced "Neetch-uh" by a pseudo-intellectual when talking to his friend wearing a t-shirt with Shakespeare quoted on it, while an exceedingly drunk regular paced up and down the bar, and outside, with a bottle of Miller Lite – all this while an inebriated alterna-couple tried to dance and failed in the antechamber. Tuman's was not only the antithesis to Alcoholics Anonymous and the Betty Ford Clinic, but also to other Chicago bars like Cherry Red, the Gramercy and the Northside, as you could get plowed wearing whatever you wanted and with your hair buggered in any which way. Not only would you be accepted, but you may also have been the rotten apple of someone's eye. In fact, Tuman's was the #1 Audience Winner for Best Pick-Up Bar in Citysearch: Chicago's annual poll in 2001.

Posted by MK Magazine at January 6, 2004 07:07 PM