You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!™
The bar scene is crazy.
Picture a Saturday night with the NFL playoffs blaring on every flat screen. The room is filled with neon beer signs and non descript music wafting down from the ceiling. There is a hum of energy in the room that is accompanied by the fragrance of searing beef.
Wait staff and bar personnel are flying back and forth making an honest night’s wage. The bar is long and there are 3 dozen keg taps with names like Killian’s and Heineken and Blue Moon to choose from. The staff looks tired, sweat dancing on their brows. There are 50 people staring at them, hoping to make eye contact. Somehow the bar staff delivers a drink, rings up a check, and starts a new tab with a smile. I am watching a concert of drunken efficiency.
On the other side of the bar are the customers. They are an assorted, kaleidoscope of humanity. White and black and fat and tall. Dumpy and well dressed and brooding problems simmering under the surface.
At the bar a group of men lean forward. They are animated and drinking Budweiser. They demand to have one of the flat screens changed from the NFL to watch the hockey game. They cheer randomly in between plays. The rest of the establishment glances over to see why they are cavorting and climbing on each other and wrestling like frat boys almost on top of their drinks.
At the other end of the bar, there are two women who are portly and dressed in black. They order domestic beers and punch buttons on their smart phones hoping Mr. Right is lurking inside the illuminated screen. The women neither watch the TV monitors nor do they look at the bevy of men circling like sharks.
At a long table just beyond the bar are the cute girls. Perky and sassy and full of pepsodent teeth. They are so shimmering and stunning you are waiting for one of them to stand up and star in their own shampoo commercial. They talk close and laugh incessantly as if their stories are the most important stories ever told. These young women have the world at their fingertips and they know that their sultry physical God given talents afford them the luxury to dictate terms to all suitors.
Beyond the bar are clumps of families eating ribs and burgers and enjoying a night out. The parents talk about phone bills unpaid and how the Nelsons down the block are getting divorced. The couple whisper to one another without emotion. They avoid eye contact like Medusa is lurking nearby with a bucket of cement.
Occasionally the couple reprimands their children who are furtively throwing french fries at one another. The mother implores the father to help discipline, but the man is not interested, his frozen gaze locked on the game beyond and just over his life partner’s head.
There is the lone coyote who walks slowly by the bar, one hand in pocket, the other clutching a Coors Light. He is a serial killer of determination as he stares into the masses, past the families, into the table of shampoo commercial girls. His mind is tick tock ticking with a dark plan to hook up, to pick up, to meet up. So far he is a nefarious ghost man who walks the gang plank of solitude in a sea of women. He eyes the opposite sex, quietly licking his chops like a coyote sizing up the herd. Who is plump? Who is petite? Who is stuck up and who might put out? Which girl is drunkest and might be pried away from the pack to be divided, conquered, devoured? The Coyote man walks coolly, slowly, eyeing the room with impure thoughts that only a coyote man knows.
One trip to the restroom provides an interesting shot gun blast of chatter. It comes between football announcers and music and shouts of “Order Up”
At one table older divorcees are comparing tales of woe and finalized settlement agreements.
Over there, frat boys are arguing about some random play that neither matters nor anyone cares about.
Over by Shampoo Island, the “It” girls are still talking
“La-La stupid” It’s a language of young women who have done nothing, experienced nothing, have lived nothing. They speak in a fatuous Pig Latin of limited concepts that will seem archaic in ten years to them. Their concept of life is a series of non-sensical banter that only 26 year old girls understand. Words like House Wives and Orange County float above the din. Words like Mercedes and new home float out of their gleaming pepsodent smile pile holes. The lexicon is giddy and full of life possibilities.
In the corner there is a doctor. His face is ruddish and he has had one too many. His hair has gone Albert Einstein and I wouldn’t trust him with a soup spoon, no less a scalpel. He is loaded with money which he hopes will make up for his lack of good looks. The shampoo girls don’t even know he’s alive as his laser beam stare targets them from across the bar. He wants them to look at his check book and see his Mercedes in the parking lot, but he cannot communicate his needs from the other side of the jungle. It’s good to be a doctor in the day, but here, at the watering hole of desire, his frenzied, maniacal look only serves to keep him on the outside looking in.
Over there is the drunkest guy in the establishment. He is bouncing off bar stools. His drink is swaying in his mug, which is rocking like a pirate ship in a storm. His eyes are glassy and he has that vacuous look like a house on Halloween with all the lights off. He stops to talk to girls. Words exit his face, but the girls look at each other perplexed, scared, quick to dismiss this walking cocktail. The man’s brain is a sieve with sand harmlessly falling back onto the beach. He is barely conscious and he meanders slowly ahead in search of, I know not what.
The families are all gone now. It is a waste land of prowlers and meat merchants searching for something; physical, sexual, emotional.
This is a room full of needs and desires. This bar is a test tube for social scientists to put under their microscopes to analyze.
Somewhere Darwin is peering into this lab experiment and taking it all in. He is wondering who will survive? Who is the fittest. Is young and attractive the quality that will emerge? Is older and mature the character traits that are most desirable? Is money the grand equalizer that changes the game completely?
Suddenly it’s last call for alcohol and the bar lights grow bright.
The Shampoo girls get up and wobble out, joined by the lone wolf and Albert Einstein.
Suddenly the cold January night inhales the lot of them as the Mexican bar backs begin sweeping away another night of dreams gone unfulfilled.
And that is crazy.