Get Me High Lounge

The Get Me High Lounge is a Chicago bar where Henry goes on Christmas to escape an evening shaped by grief and the prospect of being alone. He finds a crowded-sounding world in miniature: falling snow outside, hot jazz inside, musicians crowded onto a tiny stage, and a bartender who meets him with blunt familiarity. The refuge is real but temporary. Henry drinks until Mia cuts him off, and he collapses; when he wakes much later at Mercy Hospital, she is beside his bed, wiping his mouth as he retches. The lounge’s warmth and noise do not erase his sorrow so much as give it a place to surface.

Setting and Arrival

After leaving a festive restaurant, Henry stands on the street unwilling to go home. He wants people around him and a distraction from the sadness of Christmas. The Get Me High Lounge occurs to him as a place where anything might happen and eccentricity is welcome. His route there is deliberately ordinary: from Water Tower Place he takes the number 66 Chicago Avenue bus to Damen, then the number 50 north, getting off at Wabansia. The bus smells of vomit and has no other passenger; its driver sings "Silent Night," and Henry wishes him a Merry Christmas as he leaves.

Snow begins as Henry walks past the Fix-It shop. He catches the large wet flakes on his fingertips and hears music escaping from the bar. Above the street, an abandoned ghost-train track looms in the sodium-vapor glare. As he opens the door, a trumpet starts and hot jazz hits him with physical force. Henry describes entering as though he were a drowning man, an image that turns the bar’s promised distraction into something more desperate: he has come not simply to enjoy himself, but to surrender to an experience strong enough to overwhelm him.

Music and Barroom Life

The lounge holds about ten people, including Mia, the bartender. Three musicians—a trumpet player, a standing-bass player, and a clarinetist—occupy the tiny stage, while the customers sit at the bar. Their playing is furious and loud, and Henry gradually recognizes the melody of "White Christmas." The seasonal song recurs in altered surroundings: first sung by the solitary bus driver, then taken up by the jazz ensemble in a bar Henry has chosen to escape the sadness of Christmas.

The performance is interrupted by a telephone call. Mia answers with the bar’s drawn-out greeting, then responds angrily to the caller and slams the receiver down. The musicians come to the bar for beers during the break; because the restroom door is on the stage, Henry takes advantage of the pause to use it. These brief, sharply particular incidents establish the lounge as a working, informal place rather than an abstract sanctuary. Its hospitality coexists with interruption, irritation, smoke, drinking, and the routines of a small bar.

Henry and Mia

Henry orders whiskey and water by shouting over the music. Mia asks whether he wants the house pour, and he agrees; after he leaves a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, she serves the drink. When he returns from the restroom, she has set another one in front of his stool. Henry calls her psychic, and she replies that he is easy to read. Their exchange gives the encounter a flash of comic ease, but Mia is not merely a cheerful bartender: she notices how much he is drinking and eventually takes responsibility for stopping him.

As the night continues, Mia asks what Henry is doing later. The exchange does not lead to a lasting change in his situation. When she tells him she is cutting him off, he tries to nod his agreement but cannot manage the effort. Instead, he slides slowly to the floor. The bar’s apparent openness—to music, strangers, conversation, and whatever the night may bring—has a limit when Henry’s drinking becomes dangerous.

Collapse and Aftermath

Henry wakes much later at Mercy Hospital. He is hooked up to an IV, feels profoundly ill, and retches into a basin. Mia sits beside his bed with mascara run down her face. She reaches over and wipes his mouth, a gesture that carries the evening beyond the bar’s banter: she has stayed with him through the transition from a customer who wants to be distracted to a hospitalized man who needs care. Henry’s first response is to ask what happened, but the scene’s physical details already show the consequence of the night.

The lounge therefore marks both an attempted escape and the failure of escape to protect Henry from himself. He arrives wanting company rather than solitude, and the bar supplies music, conversation, and Mia’s attention. Yet his collapse leads directly from the noisy Christmas refuge to a hospital bed, where Mia’s practical care replaces the barroom’s noise. The repeated Christmas carol binds the journey together: the season follows Henry from an empty bus to the jazz stage, while grief remains present in both places.