Honey, snap out of it!
One regular at the neighborhood dive gripped David Fravala's shoulders; Another held his chin, and forced him to look into the beer mirror on the wall.
Through the Red Wolf Ale logo, Fravala, a former DJ down on his luck, could see his face. He had been complaining about it ever since he became a regular at The Station, a bar a mile from his apartment. He had been attacked at a Led Zeppelin tribute concert a few years earlier, and doctors had propped up his right cheek with a steel plate. Fravala swore one eye sagged, that his face was lopsided. To him, the blotch near his eyebrow was a stain that everyone noticed first. His bar mates had had enough.
Look at your face! Look at it!
You're adorable! Don't you see that? Nobody notices that mark.
We don't see it and you shouldn't be able to see it either.
"And you know what," Fravala says now, "I never mentioned it again."
So this was his cure, honesty in a corner bar.
He had stepped out for cigarettes when The Station burned down.
And later when people asked him how many friends he lost, he said eight -- regulars like himself -- and then he would correct himself and say nine.
"The Station was the ninth friend," he says. It was the one place where he all he had to do to fit in was to show up.
DAVID FRAVALA
grew up in Cranston, where his father was a firefighter and his mother was a crossing guard. He had never moved out of Rhode Island, and had two sets of friends; one set called him "Frickle;" the other called him "Frave."
At The Station, he was just Dave.
He walked in two years ago, and the rest was simple.
"I started talking to the regulars, and I became one, like that."
The reliable customers were in their usual spot, "K.B.'s corner," so named because the bartender and another patron shared those initials.
They sucked Fravala, 34 at the time, into a conversation, and he pulled out his easy laugh and his radio wit. They roared, not caring that he worked as a mortgage consultant, that his job as a rock DJ had disappeared when the radio station he worked for did -- the best job he had ever had.
The Station, next to a car lot on a charmless strip in West Warwick, wasn't the cleanest bar or the coolest bar. Its facade resembled a train depot, and had been everything else before. People were always coming in saying something like, "I was here when this was Crackerjacks, or Papa Brillo's."
It was a nightclub on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, but the rest of the time, it was a corner bar.
"It was another world," says Kevin Beese, who was the club manager.
A former military man and prison guard, Beese would greet the regulars with a raspy yell -- "Hey Cupcake! Psycho!"
Beese could expect to see Robin Petrarca, who grew up down the street and now, at 44, cooked for the dart league. With her long straight, dark hair, and a voice sultry from smoking Virginia Slims, she did a great Cher impersonation.
Petrarca would come after her days at a property-management company, where she kept a radio on her desk and listened to rock music with the volume set low. She would start at one end of the bar and work her way down, kissing cheeks. Finally, she would flop her pocketbook on the bar: "OK, where's my beer?"
Brian Loftus would get his chops busted, it was said, because he never remembered to take off his waiter's pouch after his shift at the Cowesset Inn, across the street. "Kid!" someone would yell, "You're not working anymore!"
Everyone knew when to expect Tom Barnett, a construction worker, and Jason Morton, a drywall mixer. They walked in at 10:30 p.m., in the same order, Jason, then Tommy, then Tommy's girlfriend. The two men had been best friends since kindergarten.
Kerri didn't use one stool, she used two. Her feet were always up. "I'm comfy, you can move," she would say. Roberta allowed herself one cocktail a week and made it something snappy, like a Dirty Banana.
JUST ABOUT
everyone who hung out at The Station loved music -- as long as it was real. When the bar held a techno night to bring in the younger crowd, a few regulars refused to go.
But day after day, it was fierce competition in the bar games that excited the loyal comers.
Charlene Prudhomme, a hairdresser down the street, was known as a big player on the video touch games. If you moved into first place, she would sit and play until she knocked you out.
A line technician for Verizon was there five nights a week to play on the dart team, which last year took second place in the West Warwick/Coventry pub league. Everyone still talked about the time the team went to the state tournament.
Everyone had a story: Steve Mancini, a bouncer, guitarist, and seafood clerk at Stop & Shop, had almost died once in a car accident and would lift his muscle shirt to show his scars. Tracy King, a 6-foot-2 employee in Warwick's public works department, had once been on David Letterman for balancing a canoe on his chin. Anything movable in the bar, he would balance -- including the hat of "Cowboy Dan," a regular who grew up in a house behind The Station, and lived there still.
Beese, the club manager, says, "You get people who would drop out for a little while, then come back."
Mike Bourgoin moved to Phoenix, Ariz., to learn how to fix Harleys, and then returned to West Warwick to repair motorcycles in a local shop. At The Station, he was "Yogi." "Eventually, I'll get up and move again and come back," says Bourgoin, who is 27.
Stephen Paolilli, a middle-aged crane operator on disability, returned from Key West to take care of his mother. Back at The Station, the bartender still knew his drink: Absolut and soda; the patrons still called him Stuffie.
"I had my own little spot in the corner, right at the far end of the bar," he recalls. "I could sit there and see everything. That was my home."
"You knew everyone and everyone knew your name."
Fravala, the former DJ, rose to be the grand champion of the Addams Family pinball machine with 176 million points.
For no reason at all, he would walk into the bar in his Green Bay Packers cheesehead hat, his cheese-shaped beer holder, and the green-and-white sneakers he bought to match the rest of his ensemble.
"It sounds bad," he says of his visits to The Station, "but it turned into seven nights a week."
The regulars taught him "not to take any crap from anyone." They "straightened me out," he says, about his insecurities over the steel plate in his face.
When he said he couldn't sing karaoke, they put his name in the lineup anyway. When he belted out a ballad, Lone Star's "Amazed," they gave him a standing ovation.
He says he went off his antidepressant medication when he became a regular.
"I think I found the people I needed to be around," he says. "Something about this group of people brought out things in me that I didn't know I had."
FEBRUARY 20
was one of those nights that Fravala's neighborhood bar turned into a nightclub. Great White, big in the '80s, had pulled into town on its tour bus; lead singer Jack Russell had been seen all over, from Denny's to the local tattoo parlor.
Fravala bought tickets, $15 each, and invited his 24-year-old nephew. When they arrived at 10:30 p.m., the parking lot was full. Fravala couldn't get to his usual spot by the front door.
A few of his friends were already in KB's corner, griping that every time there was a big act, the bar moved their tables to make room for all the patrons.
Near 11 p.m., about five minutes before the show began, Tommy Barnett, a regular, asked Fravala if he would walk his girlfriend out to her car to grab her Marlboros. Barnett was busy. Fravala didn't hesitate: "You don't let a friend's girl go outside alone," he says.
They were 10 feet from the front door when the fire broke out.
Fravala's nephew was the last person pulled alive from patrons who were crammed at the front door, stuck in their rush to escape after Great White's pyrotechnics display ignited the wall. It took Fravala hours of walking through the police lights and the horror of the dead and injured on stretchers, and tailgates of pickups, to find out what happened to the rest of his family -- the regulars.
Petrarca had fled out the exit by the bar, and fallen into the snow. Prudhomme and her husband, Al, were OK. Kerri, who always kept her feet propped up, made it out.
Cowboy Dan was safe, as was Roberta, "Stuffie," and the Verizon line technician who loved his darts. "Yogi" had stayed home, as had several other regulars.
Beese, the manager, had crawled along the floor with a flashlight, trying to save people. When the heat became too much, he ran out.
The list of those who died was painful. Tommy and Jason, the best friends since kindergarten, didn't make it. Steve Mancini, the bouncer who had once escaped death, was killed in the fire, as was his wife Andrea Mancini, who took tickets at the door, and his cousin Keith Mancini. Dina DeMaio, a waitress at The Station, died. Tracy King, the man who could balance a canoe, didn't make it out either.
AFTER THE
fire, the regulars with no regular bar retreated, away from the media, and the questions. Fravala found a half-full cup on his porch, a Smirnoff with rasberry liquor, and realized it was the drink he had served Morton a few days earlier, when Morton stopped over to Fravala's apartment. Fravala liked to call his place, so close to the bar, "Station Central."
Petrarca made a collage, of all the good times, and the friends carried it from one funeral home to the next. Beese, who had been working nights so he could take care of his daughter by day, was now out of a job and a car, he had parked by the front door. But he tried to make everyone laugh.
Beese still called people names like "Cupcake" when the regulars gathered for dinner in West Warwick. "Yogeeeeee," he shouted one night when Mike "Yogi" Bourgoin walked in to the Cowesset Inn, which was becoming a regular meeting spot. Yet, a mellowness had settled in, and a division; some of the regulars had been at the fire, some had not.
"The people who were there," Bourgoin said. "they're not the same."
And away from The Station, their differences were more stark. Stephen Paolilli, "Stuffie," for one, had always been a hang-back guy at The Station, quiet but still part of the conversation. At the Cowesset Inn, as he sipped his beer at the far end of the chatter, he just seemed left out.
"We're still all together," he said, "but I see it starting to fade away a little."
Determined to find a new hangout, the friends met at J.R.'s, at Tomacelli's, at On The Roch's, at Mulberry's.
It didn't feel right.
"Too many people missing, too many voices not heard, and not just their voices but their smiles," said Petrarca.
She was smoking a Virginia Slims in the lounge of the Cowesset Inn, across the street from the ruins of The Station, where yellow earth movers had been digging up charred wood, kegs, a plastic cup now and then. "It was a dive," Petrarca said, "but it was our dive."
The others were arriving, ordering beers, chicken cutlets, and Keno slips.
Cowboy Dan said the dart team needed a place to play. Maybe the Pitcher's Mound.
"Never any cars there," he said. "We could take that over easy."
Petrarca nodded. "We'll take over the Mound."
PROMISES WERE
made to keep what they had.
After one memorial, the friends went to Coventry, to the finished basement in the home of two regulars.
They signed a drum, and then someone picked up a guitar and began singing "My Sacrifice" by Creed.
We've seen our share of ups and downs. Oh, how quickly life can turn around.
"From that moment on," Fravala says, "we all knew that was it, that was our song."
They also tried to think of a name for themselves. The Stationites, maybe, or The Stationers.
"But none of those fit," says Fravala. "There is no name for us. We are The Station. We are The Station."
For him, a roadside bar had been as much a place to go as a state of mind. He didn't so much need a place called KB's corner as the simple salve of acceptance -- and that he still had.
A few of the onetime regulars at The Station had stopped by his apartment. They had not been sleeping well since the fire, but in his apartment, they plopped down in his living room and had dozed off. And as Fravala described it, he pumped his fist: "They're comfortable in my house. I was like, yes!"
It was several weeks after the fire, and he was in Mark's Grille, in the Exit 6 Plaza in West Greenwich, smiling, and waving to a man in a yellow hat. A Mark's regular.
"The cool thing about this place was that we didn't have to take it over," he said. "They welcomed us."
He was with a few of The Station regulars, not a big group, but enough to fill a table in the middle of the room, which was bright, and thick with cigarette smoke. The hanging lights over the pool tables were in the shape of Coors racing cars.
There was no stage for fading national acts, but there was karaoke music by "Jean, Jean, the singing machine," Captain Dick, and of course, a confident soloist named Dave Fravala.
