Underage Drinking: A Requiem

Is this going to work?  Can you tell it’s chalked?  I can see it – barely, but will the bouncer notice it, the bartender?  Oh man, those girls in front of me look even younger than me, and I look really young.  Yeah, of course – bouncer lets them in, figures…  Shit, I’m up, look cool, look cool, like you do this all the time, alright, he’s looking at it now – back at me, down, back, down… Aaaaand my wrist is stamped!  Neon lights frame haggard-looking bartenders slinging two-dollar-fifty-cent pitchers and I can smell it, that stale, pissy smell of old beer and young libido emanating from the walls and the floors, and this must be the best place on earth, and right now, I’m sure it is.

Who cares what the bar was called?  I remember the name well, but it could have been and was anywhere and everywhere, these fantastic shitholes that catered to the underage drinker.  Every college town has these bars, they of the random week-night, the impossible-to-beat drink specials, the fire code-defying crowds packed wall-to-wall.  Ourswas called “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and our night was Thursday night, that of the two-dollar-fifty-cent pitchers.  The fact that the bar shared a name with one of my favorite movies at the time only added to the panache of what I thought at 19 must have been the coolest bar around.

The place was so ridiculously crowded, like all of these places that brazenly catered to people who were not supposed to be drinking, that actually reaching the bar, and then getting the bartender’s attention was a skill and an art form.  Then, there was the careful tip-toe back through the throngs, 11 bucks lighter and carrying two pitchers of Bud Light like the fucking St. Pauli girl, and praying to the god of surface tension that these crazily filled-to-the-brim pitchers would somehow make it back to your friends more-or-less intact.

This is a paean to underage drinking, sung to the tune of the non-descript fuck-music of the time, throbbing out of giant speakers and stomping on all reasonable conversation to leave its calculated but clumsy sonic footprint indelibly imprinted on the memories of our youths.  I know that when I think of those times, more pervasive than the olfactory rush of rotting beer is the near-pleading refrain that “it’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes” and the faded and forgotten footsteps of dancing gracelessly with girls interested in someone or something else.

But there was something romantic about those nights, wasn’t there?  There was something wonderful about the packed, sweaty herd of hormonal man- and women-children, all still young enough and still stupid enough to believe that all of this mattered.  To have unquestioned faith in the unspoken instinct that with enough intoxication and enough abandonment of inhibition, that something could happen.  What was it?  For me, I suppose it was sex, it was the nerdy talk of movies and music and the trashing of the people who weren’t audacious enough to come out that night and the circling of the bar, hoping to catch some girl’s eye – a kid who looked too young looking for girls who were looking for someone older.

I went back there several years ago, some time after I had already turned 21 with one of my best friends, another ex-Thursday night regular.   We were looking for a place to watch the Monday night game, and they had an impossible-to-beat wing special.  No bouncer greeted us to ask for my genuine article proof-of-age, no, we were greeted only by the nearly-visible smell of piss and stale beer hovering off the floor, carrying none of the promise it once did, and the disinterested stares of the regular assholes at the bar.   The place was empty and we sat down to the alien accompaniment of fucking menus and I looked up at the walls and I saw they were covered with fat, lazy flies, like a rotting corpse.  Leaving was an easy decision to make.  I have not been back since.