You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Downtown Nashville on a Saturday night.
Saturday Night in Music City looks like a human milk shake blended without the top secured.
People are swarming 2nd avenue like vomit covered ants. It’s a mardi gras of short skirts and nasty attitudes.
I find myself on Lower Broad almost by accident.
Blue lights swirl. Metro Police are heavily represented on most corners. As I proceed down Broadway toward the river, there are horse drawn carriages and street performers.
People are standing in open air balconies. Music is washing out of the windows, spilling over the street.
I see tourists and miscreants and everything in between.
The sidewalks are packed with people meandering 5 and 6 deep. It looks like the Talledega infield with less carbueration.
We pay ten dollars to park. We maneuver into a subterranean parking garage. The lights flicker and the smell of exhaust is thick.
We find an elevator and rise to the surface. The night is humid and the air energized with intrigue. The sound of the city is a thunder clap of chaos as it echoes down this canyon of concrete along 3rd avenue.
We head to Broadway.
Outside the Hard Rock Cafe, 7 women are on cell phones.
My friend runs up and hugs one of the girls. There are introductions and names fired at me in rapid succession.
I smile politely.
I am suddenly part of a traveling posse of good looking women in boots, tight pants and halter tops.
Men line the gauntlet of 2nd avenue. They are leering hungry crows licking their lips as the women saunter by. The men try and entice the women with a look, a quick comment, a gesture that in most settings would get you cited by the authorities.
The women are immune. They are a well oiled machine, easily handling all salacious entreaties from the panting idiots along the route.
As we pass a beer stained honky tonk, I see a girl and guy fighting.
“What are you gonna hit me?” she screams, the alcohol oozing out of her skin
The couple’s drama opens before me like a real life magazine. It is full of anger and histrionics. I look at them, wondering if their interaction will become violent.
I take a few more steps and cross the street. Suddenly the drunk couple is a no longer relevant.
As I walk by another bar, I am bathed in a blanket of country music. The band is playing ferociously, displaying its hill billy talents to the congregants in this church of amplified twang.
We turn the corner and head up 2nd avenue. The street is a sausage grinder of humanity. I bump into a man, a woman, a something dressed in leather.
“Excuse me,” I say to nobody in particular.
It’s a warm summer night and the street is a lit fuse. Bikers on Harleys slowly chug up the famous street. The rolling thunder reverberates off the 2 story buildings drowning out everything else.
It’s a kaleidoscope of images. Hot chicks saunter by in clothes spray painted on skin. There are dudes in t shirts and hats turned sideways and tattoos down the side of every neck. The night is a sweaty jail house mug shot.
We enter an Irish themed bar. The bouncer checks ID’s with a purple light. I watch as an 18 year old girl in line walks right in.
Nice catch purple light dude.
The bar is long and narrow. It is loud and pulsing like a submarine galley with a grease fire.
I push through a sea of patrons getting to the bar. I suddenly encounter legs and boots and thighs. I look up and see 5 girls on top of the bar dancing, suggestively, irreverently. The women are young, drunk, insouciant. They are wearing beads and bright pink sunglasses. One girl is riding a blow up balloon penis that is 3 feet long.
I smile at the absurdity of the visual.
I am amused, but also thirsty. I try and get the bartenders attention. She is sweating, running back and forth furiously popping beers, pouring shots, collecting money.
For an Irish bar the thumpa thump thump of the urban DJ is overwhelming.
“Baby’s got back,” fires up from somewhere deep in the recesses of the narrow brick confines.
The chorus line of women is now dancing directly on top of me. Their cowboy boots are crashing on the bar top. I move my fingers to avoid being smashed. I look up at the girls literally hovering over me, blotting out the ceiling. They are wearing short skirts and little else. My low angle view is interesting to say the least. It starts about mid thigh and enters up a dark colored mini dress and then dissolves into a pulsing dancing darkness of forbidden desire.
Outside this bar, I would be cited for this moment. Inside this bar, the show is on.
I try and pretend this is a normal moment and look for the bartender to make my order. I can see the tiny bartender on the other side of the bar, but she is a fleeting image. Trying to find her through the boots and gyrating thighs inches from my face is like trying to find a leaf clad pygmy hiding in a forest of dancing flesh.
I am literally jostling back and forth, trying to peer through the girls legs as they line dance inches from my face.
I have no luck getting the bartender’s attention. I look up at these drunken wenches who are now pissing me off. I wish they would fall off the bar like a bloody front end collision on the boulevard of bachelorette party gone crazy.
The girl with the balloon penis is now grinding the plastic party prize like she’s the star of her own adult film.
I look to my right. A young man is staring straight up a girl’s skirt as she undulates across the bar.
The man looks to me and smiles. I bust out laughing.
Crazy I shout.
I don’t think he hears me as he looks back to the ceiling.
I decide I will dehydrate if I remain here so I move to another section of the bar where there are less dancing penises.
I finally flag down a couple of beers.
My friend drags me out to the crowded dance floor. Music is thumping and the sweat is flying off the bodies grinding and bouncing back and forth.
I find myself in a group of 8 women all dancing with one another.
The mug shot idiots outside would die for this moment.
And here I am, in the middle of a circle of women dancing on some imaginary pole in a pulsing pressure cooker of sound and light.
“Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care,” the DJ screams.
My group of women raise their arms and begin hopping up and down.
The DJ screams into a microphone raising the sound level to jet engine deafness.
The dance floor pulses in a singular explosion of raw intensity.
Sweat is exchanged and bodies grind.
After a few hours, the night is over. The women are exhausted and ready to head home.
We exit the bar onto streets that reek like sweat
They say nothing good happens on Lower Broad after midnight. They are right. I’ve covered drive bys and fights and general debauchery.
It’s midnight and the streets are still oozing with bags of drunken flesh. Our group disperses as suddenly as it came together. We enter the parking garage find our car and take a right turn away from the insanity.
Suddenly the streets are quiet, dark, normal.
The air conditioning blowing out of the vent is refreshing.
We enter onto the interstate and see the signs for I 40 West.
We made it I think to myself.
I look up and see the Bat Building, glowing blue against an orange haze.
I was just in that broiling mess of crazy. Now it seems like a thousand miles away.
I ease the seat back, amazed to have seen a plastic penis and not be gunned down in the same night.
And that is crazy.™