I get to Malarkey's a little before midnight on Friday the 13th, thinking this will be the ideal time to sift through the crowd and get some good people-watching done. Unfortunately, attendance is sparse in the rather huge space Malarkey's boasts. I'm greeted mainly by the deep green walls and long noirish shadows that fill this fairly unassuming pool hall. I take a brief walk around and note several pool players with cue carriers. The long and short: they're really serious about pool here. The odds of hooking up seem remote.

I ask the bartender if there were any specials running.

"No," he says.

Well, I asked, what would you recommend?

"Beer," he says.

Sensing I was perhaps looking for something that might put me in the Meat Market mood, another patron leans over and suggests I order a shot called a "Bob Marley," which I do.

The concoction put before me is absolutely terrifying: a layered shot, with neon green Midori on the bottom, Goldschläger in the middle, and a top-off of Jägermeister. I wonder, briefly, if this is some sort of newbie hazing ritual, this ode to the Jamaican flag, this thumb of the nose to the drinking gods. My companions look on in frozen horror as I tilt back my head and throw the shot down my throat. It tastes like Goldschläger, which it turns out, is a pretty tough taste to mask.

Having been socially lubricated by a poorly thought-out choice of shot, I ask the bartender if Friday nights were usually this quiet. He tells me, in what is the very embodiment of a night out on the town, that I "should have been here half an hour ago." The place was jam-packed for a pool tournament, I'm told.

"You would have had a pretty tough time getting a drink with that crowd," the bartenders says.

But then Bob Marley and I wouldn't have gotten so intimately acquainted.

Malarkey's Pool & Brew

Open until 2 a.m.
445 Tacoma Ave. S., Tacoma
253.383.3301