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A former bus driver for the city of Hayward, California, Robin stands about four feet eleven inches tall, and no one ever messes with her. “Out of respect,” Jeanie says. A few years ago Robin was involved in a serious accident when her car was slammed against the freeway wall. She was at work the next day, behind the bar, all black and blue. Then she started passing out. “She used to tell us to just leave her there if she ever went down, not to touch her.” For Jeanie, who was a geriatric nurse for years, this was difficult, but she complied. The last day Robin owned the place, she stayed behind the bar until her final shift ended at four that afternoon. Her friends say that Robin will hang up the phone if they mention they’ve been to Morelli’s—the bar’s new name. Robin has never been in.

If she did come in, she probably wouldn’t recognize the place. Mike Morelli, who bought it from her last year, owned four 7-11 stores and was “looking to diversify.” He had seen the place and knew the walls needed painting, and the bar needed scrubbing. But once he began to renovate, he just kept going. The bar was cut into pieces with a chainsaw. The booths were torn out, the old signs taken down, the island removed and the bathrooms gutted. In the end, there was nothing left of Robin’s old Nest. The walls are now fresh white. The weathered Free Beer Yesterday sign has been replaced with a glossy Samuel Adams: Take Pride in Your Beer. The floor is granite, and the counter looks like marble and is always polished. Above the pool tables (there are now two) hang thousand-dollar light fixtures. There are also televisions, three of them, and more expensive drinks, a better selection and a much younger crowd. “I want this to be a place where guys bring their wives,” says Morelli. He is a tall man, handsome with dark features, and is serious about pleasing his customers.

Some customers are delighted with these changes. They like the new look, the brightness, the pure hygiene of it all. Jeanie is one of these people. “Ach, filth,” she says, speaking of Robin’s in its last days, “total filth. It was coal black in here, like a dungeon. You had to feel your way in. Up here”—she points to a now bright, white wall where grubby shelves used to be—“were beer cans that had been sitting there for twenty-two years, just filthy rotten. And she had little robin’s nests hanging all over the place.” Another regular pipes up that “maybe the shittiness was part of the magic.” Jeanie lights a cigarette and feeds another dollar into the slot machine.

Patti, who tended bar at the Nest for two years, says the place wasn’t quite as bad as Jeanie makes it out to be. “We always wiped the booths off before parties and stuff. It wasn’t that dirty.” Patty is half Irish and half Native American with tidy white hair like cotton candy and a deliciously rumbling smoker’s laugh. She describes the years she worked at the Nest as “skinny years,” financially speaking. She stayed there because of Robin. “She was something,” Patty says. “You would try to tell her how to do something, like how to improve the place or whatever, and she’d point and say, ‘Whose name is on that sign? When your name is on that sign you can tell me what to do. Until then, shut the *blip* up!’”

In the Nest’s fading years, the regulars—a mere handful by then—gathered in the far right corner of the room, beneath the colorfully embroidered image of a bird returning to its chicks, above which cherry red cross-stitched letters pronounced Bless This Nest. It was in those last days that I first became acquainted with the place.

Albeit a bit of a dive, there was something exceptional about this large dark space full of people who weren’t planning on leaving anytime soon. They were members of a family, of sorts. Terry and Roy both fought in Vietnam. Katherine knew Terry since high school. Kenny claims he knew Robin when she lived in Hayward. Vicki, with her missing teeth and corner barstool, seemed to know everyone, and Jeanie, Jack and Jim were fixtures. And then there was Patti with her tattoo and Bob with his belly and Alan with his temper and Laverne with her weapons and Bill with his love of history and Willy with his oxygen machine and the tiny Yorkshire terrier he loves more than a calm deep breath.

Once, during those last days, my husband and I took our friend Lacey to Robin’s Nest to celebrate her divorce. Lacey is from Seattle, where hip people move in smooth, unruffled patterns. The night was wintry, and the wind was fierce as it raced down from the Sierras and whistled through Sparks, making us jittery and watchful and in need of a strong drink. We heard the thump of the bass from outside the bar, and as we entered its shadows it seemed everyone was singing: I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. When I hear that whistle blowin', I hang my head and cry.

Of course, not everyone was. Jim and Roy were shooting pool, Vicki was in her corner loudly complaining about social security, and Patti was arguing with Katherine over how to properly mix a drink. Katherine, behind the bar and drinking something stiff from an ornate coffee mug, dizzily waved us over. The singing, dancing bodies were acquaintances of the skeletal old man everyone called Baker Jerry, who was celebrating his birthday. Lacey took a seat at the bar and watched the night unfold with wide eyes. Soon, Patti had taken Katherine’s place behind the bar while Katherine stretched out on a bench dozing off whatever had been in her coffee mug. Baker Jerry wrapped us in a bear hug from behind and chafed our cheeks with his grisly lips, shouting, “I may be seventy, but Woody Woodpecker still needs a peck!” And Patti, now partaking liberally from the coffee mug herself, had bet me a beer that she had my name tattooed on her ass. She unbuckled swiftly, and there it was, hovering near our drinks: Your Name, in inky letters, stretched and droopy with age, like the rest of her buttocks. Her son Leroy cried, “For God’s sake, Mom!” and dropped his face on his forearms. Lacey, already feeling less alone with the chaos of her life, leaned over and said, “You just can’t make this stuff up.”

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