Within five minutes of walking into the 5-Point, Soundgarden or Alice in Chains will play loudly on the jukebox. The female cocktail waitress will be angsty, pale, and pierced, and the male bartender burly, stoic, and tattooed. Whiskey and sodas will be mixed as though whoever took your order developed temporary hearing loss when you uttered the words “and soda.” The patron-to-black-leather-jacket ratio will be roughly 2-to-1, and it’ll be gray, cold, and rainy outside, even if it isn’t. There will be a ripped corner booth occupied by a pair of transient drunks, who will be permitted to drink until they pass out or break something. In the men’s bathroom, the toilet seat will be caked with dried-up piss, puke, or granola (hard to tell sometimes among the three), there may or may not be tissue or soap, and wall scribbling is not only tolerated—it’s encouraged. If you like hash browns, well, order them once, and you’ll never have to stop eating. And if you like to stay past last call, that’s fine, because the 5-Point is part 24-hour diner. It’s also 100 percent grunge time machine; the only difference between the 5-Point circa 1989 and the 5-Point now is that you can’t smoke indoors anymore—which is a shame, because time machines should really be exempted from laws that don’t suit their era.