“B-ten, B-ten,” a darkly dressed man says slowly into a lounge microphone.
“Beeeeee-ten,” responds another darkly dressed man next to him. He drawls in a low voice behind dark glasses and mustache. Those in attendance stifle laughs, waiting for a punchline.
“I think that’s the vitamin that improves your foreskin,” the first man says. The bar, peppered with evening bingo players, bursts into laughter. A few bartenders, tending to glasses and bar-riding players, yell obscenities at the two men on stage sarcastically.
Such has been the scene for years on Monday nights at Diablo’s Downtown Lounge. Owner Troy Slavkovsky, 46, has carved out a living for 14 years ribbing people with a sour sense of humor. But the bar and its basement night club, which are next to the Eugene bus station on 10th Avenue and Pearl Street, will serve their last drinks to the public on Nov. 15.
Everybody wins at least once this game and the winners proceed to the stage to collect a trinket or a memento from the bar. One man, in the course of the night, asks for a miniature Harley Davidson posted behind the bar and offers to buy it. The evening looks something like the wake of a funny friend and, in place of divvying up the lost friend’s stuff with an executor, they’re auctioning everything off through Bingo.
“I’m giving away keepsakes,” Slavkovsky said. “I’m trying not to but, hey, it’s their living room.”
The bar has been through a few makeovers. It was first The Montage, when the owners of the popular Portland restaurant wanted to open up a Eugene location. Slavkovsky, who was at the time running a bar called The Tonic Lounge, decided to help run the place, and open up an after-hours club in the basement.
However, it wasn’t long until the downstairs club was drawing more people than the middling restaurant. Slavkovsky’s partner wanted out, so Diablo’s became a two-story establishment.
“I don’t think he thought I was going to make it,” said Slavkovsky of the time. That was 1999. Fourteen years later, grappling with an aging building that racked up repair costs, the building’s owners announced that they intended to sell it.
Diablo’s is set to become a restaurant after it closes. The new place probably won’t be dimly lit with red lights and daunt customers like a happy hell. For now, smiling, paper maché devil masks and Mexican sugar skulls loom above liquor bottles and a Fireball whiskey tap in a stained red armoire.
Like a wake, customers have been coming around to pay their respects to a bar that’s often been associated with oddball interests manifested in underwear parties and events like The Fetish Ball, which showcases bondage, fire acts and more.
“(Some say) it’s a fetish bar, or that it’s a gay bar,” said Qameron Crooks, a sound technician for the bar who helps throw concerts. “For the most part, we’re an everything bar. I’ve met people who don’t want to come here because they think it’s dirty or all fetished out or whatever, and it’s just not true.”
The lounge’s shuttering is the latest in a string of downtown closures that will be replaced by upscale restaurants or sports bars. John Henry’s, the dive bar infamous for raucous parties and concerts, served its last drink in the spring and has since been made-over into the sports bar Sidelines.
One byproduct of these bars’ closures is the gay community having to reshuffle. Weekly events cherished by the community, such as the popular drag show G.L.A.M. Night, are left to scour for new homes like Luckey’s. Jake King, Diablo’s kitchen manager, has been performing at drag shows at the lounge and around Eugene since moving here from Roseburg two years ago.
“It sucks,” King said of the closing. “I’m a performer and this is where we have almost all of our shows. And now we have to find another venue.”
Slavkovsky plans to open another bar down the road, but he says it won’t be called Diablo’s. Plus, he says, he intends to take a break from the bar scene for a while.