Jockey full of Bourbon
“You’re not drinking too much now are you?”
I get this question about once a month when I get the ‘how’s everything going over there in Colorado’ call from my mother. I think it’s funny that she asks me this all the time. The way I see it; I’m not dead yet, not in the tank every other night, not beat up, or thrown out of anywhere, still employed obviously (she calls me at work every time) and I haven’t knocked up some bird who I met one night at the pub while sucking down my tenth shot of whiskey with a PBR on the side, so I guess I’m not drinking too much.
I usually hit the pubs about twice a week now, for a while there I was getting calls almost every night from various people I knew:
“Hey man, ya going to the pub tonight? You should come out.”
“Nah.”
“WELL WHY NOT MAN?” (I put this in caps because my callers get riled when you say no to anything they insist upon.)
“I’m taking it easy tonight, I was out the last night, got a little too stinko, gotta recoup.”
“AWWW, C’MON MAN!”
“Can’t do it buddy, you have fun though.”
Then I usually hang up and go back to whatever the hell I’m doing, which is usually having a beer and watching something on the TV. Yeah, taking it easy indeed.
It’s more comfortable for me to drink at home most of the time, saves me the trouble of talking to people I have nothing in common with, trying to scarf free drinks from the bartender who knows all of my scams and excuses, and flirting with the waitresses who’ve seen me at my best, but mostly at my worst.
I can also go past that 2am curfew, which after eight years of living here I still can’t get around. Everything goes down at 2:30, everybody knows that!
When I was living in Chicago the bars were open until 4am, some went to 5. We had a system then, it worked pretty well for a while. Pop a few uppers, drink and schmooze all night, find some 24 hour diner at 5, eat and drink coffee (take more pills) until 6:30am and drive (or hop the subway) to the 7am bar across town, start it all over again. That was the weekends; Sundays were left to dealing with the massive hangovers which would consist of falling out of bed (or waking up on the floor) around noon, and meeting up for bloody Mary’s, eggs, coffee and piecing together the events of the previous night.
I ran with a tight crew back then; Punk Rock Stan, Sandy, Conner the Mick, Pam and Dylan (the only couple), Stanko, and myself. We ran all over the Bucktown/Wicker Park area, looking for kicks, luck, love, and the all mighty drink.
Monday nights we spent at a dive joint called Sweet Amy. Chuck, the owner of the place had a thing for poetry, crap ass wanna be Beat poetry at that. He claimed to have drunk Kerouac under the table in San Francisco, shared a needle with Old Bill in Algiers, and bested Neal C. in a wrestling duel while hanging with the Merry Pranksters. None of us believed his crackpot stories but he was fun to listen to on quieter times (During the early hours of the bar before the crowd showed up). Monday was open mike night, all the cheap hoods in town showed up with notebooks full of their weekend forays into the night, Casanova swing tips and rumblings and grumblings about the sufferings and trails of the under of the poor and subnormal; swigging shots and buying rounds for the other fellow “poets”. These nights did have their entertainment value due to the buggers getting piss drunk before their time on stage and failing to handle the heckling that would come from the audience. Some of them would challenge their hecklers to fights out back, those were best of all; drinks and fights. What a pleasure. It made the beginning of the week more exciting that the weekends. The applause really blared when someone got into it in back. Punk Rock Stan and I would make bets on who was going to win; sometimes we lucked out, sometimes not. We came to realize though that some of those damn poets were some mean mothers. We began heckling some of the weaker willed ones, just to see what would happen. We get them to buy us drinks afterwards, pulling the ol’ line of:
“Hey man, I’m just fucking with you, no hard feelings right? It’s all a part of the game; ya gotta be a tough bastard if ya want to make it yeah? So, hows about that next round? You’re a good kid, don’t worry about it, next week is your week baby!”
And so on and so forth.
Some Mondays we’d lose Sandy, and find her out back getting a tongue job from one of the younger-more drunk than he should be-poets. I mean younger by they were younger than twenty five and with Sandy being twenty seven they thought she was this queen of the scene, she knew her shit all right, and knew how to play those little chumps for a few drinks and a little on the side if she wanted. She never brought them home though, just out back and for her pleasure only. One night she came in though the back door with some young buck; he was wild eyed and sweaty. She sat at our table, pulled a smoke and told us that a round was coming. Sure enough, the wiled eyed, sweaty buck cam back with a round of shots and a pitcher of Guinness.
“He was pretty good.” She said.
“Fuck should we care?” Punk Rock Stan yelled, “We got his next round!”
Sandy reached into her jacket and pulled out a fresh pack of smokes.
“Got these too, they fell out of his pocket.”
Ah, Monday nights.
After a few months of patronizing, spilling my weight in scotch, breaking glasses, and picking fights with every so called poet with a goatee and a copy of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell in his back pocket, Chuck was foolish enough to offer me a job as a door guy.
“Goddamn kids man, I can’t find anybody to keep track of the intake at the door.”
“You should stop hiring youngsters’ man, they don’t know shit.”
(Just so ya know I was twenty five then and talking like I was a big shot)
“That’s right! That’s why I’m offering you the gig, ya want it?”
I was working part time at a frame shop and not making much bread, I did make a lot of cuts on my hands though, people must have thought that I was the dumbest suicide there was. I was never good at manual labor, so I took the job.
Four nights a week, decent pay, more if there was a jazz group on that night, and when the owner was out, which was three nights out of the four, all the free drinks I can hold.
I made it a point not to work on Mondays though, there was too much at stake to be stuck at the front. It was too far away from the real action in the back.
My first night on the job was that next Monday; I was called in because the usual guy got busted for driving drunk. I wasn’t too happy about this considering that Chuck and I had a deal that I wouldn’t work Mondays.
“I need you on this one, there’s no one else.” He said over the phone.
“Fine dammit, but I want a little extra since it’s supposed to be my day off.”
“No problem.”
So there I was at the front door, checking ID’s and making sure things were running smoothly. Every now and then when Chuck stepped out on one of his ‘errands’, Big Joe the bartender would slip me a shot, at least I was getting my free drinks.
The stage monkeys were doing their thing, reading wasted lines of the disenfranchised, sucking down watered drinks while hecklers did their thing. From time to time Punk Rock Stan or Sandy would come up to give me an update on things. Stan won twenty bucks on a couple of bets and Sandy found a live one who was buying rounds. And I was in the front, mostly sober and bored off my ass.
At about nine Chuck split for the night; he left Big Joe in charge. I got a beer and a shot as soon as Chuck was out the door. At that time one of the local big shot readers by the name of Rick walked in with his old lady. They’d obviously been out boozing before coming to the bar because his old lady was wasted; she fell over in the doorway, clinging to Ricks’ coat sleeve. He tried slipping her by me as I was standing at the bar, I stopped them both.
“She can’t come in here like that man, she’s gonna drop any minute.” I said to Rick.
“Fuck you man, she’s okay, and we’re in here all the damn time.”
“I know, and your poetry is shit, get her home and you can come back, I don’t care.”
“Screw you door guy!” Rick said and gave me a little push on the shoulder; I guessed he was still upset with the heckling I gave him the previous Monday.
“Is there a problem here Flynn?” It was Big Joe talking, I looked back and Joe was rubbing his hands together, when he does that he seems to grow, almost like the Hulk but a little slower and more menacing, no one wanted to be on the other side of Big Joes’ stare when he was rubbing his hands together. I explained the situation and Joe told Rick to get the girl home and that he could come back after. Rick was pissed, but he took her out and came back a half hour later. I let him pass; Joe had another beer waiting for me.
Not long after Rick walked in he was on stage. His poetry was worse than anything that I’d ever heard, but the women seemed to dig it, the guys didn’t pay much attention. Stan and Sandy I could here back there laughing, clinking glasses. I felt alone up front, sitting on a barstool sipping my beer, every now and then checking the random ID of some young thing with a dope wearing khakis on her arm. It was a strange solitary existence up there. I needed the fire and all I had was bent cigarettes and cheap scotch.
“FUCK THE DOOR GUY!” I heard from the stage, it was Rick, he was drunk.
“FUCK HIM AND HIS STUPID TIES!” He was yelling into the microphone, I couldn’t tell if it was a poem or not, but I looked on anyway.
“If that guy thinks he so damn special, that he came come in here every Monday and try to fuck around with the rest of us POETS, why doesn’t he get up here and prove that he’s better huh? Why doesn’t he put up or shut up? Cause he’s a sissy that’s why! He’s nothing but a cheap bastard with nothing better to do! I wanna see him up here and see if he’s got the moxi to do what we’re all brave enough to do!”
And this chump got cheers from the crowd. Unbelievable. Stan ran up to the front, asked me what I was gonna do, if I was gonna take him out back. I thought about this for some time, I could feel all eyes on me; the joint was quiet except for the clinking of glasses, the sucking of nicotine from Kents, Marlboros’, Camels and Kools.
Rick grabbed the mic and brought it close to his face this time. “If you think you can write better than me Flynn, if you think you can read better than me, then come up here next Monday and prove it!” He stepped off the stage and got a round of applause. I had no idea that I’d pissed off so many people. It felt good and bad at the same time. I hadn’t written poetry since college, and had no interest in doing so again. But I was being called out by a punk with a bad hairdo and worse poetry.
I went to the bar and got another shot from Big Joe, everybody was staring at me. I raised my glass and then took the shot. I tried to think of something cool to say.
“You’re on asshole!” I yelled. The crowd cheered and clapped. Punk Rock Stan ordered two drinks; I took mine and sat at my solitary barstool. I was going to become what I hated, a drunken stage poet. It could’ve been worse I thought, but not likely.
I get this question about once a month when I get the ‘how’s everything going over there in Colorado’ call from my mother. I think it’s funny that she asks me this all the time. The way I see it; I’m not dead yet, not in the tank every other night, not beat up, or thrown out of anywhere, still employed obviously (she calls me at work every time) and I haven’t knocked up some bird who I met one night at the pub while sucking down my tenth shot of whiskey with a PBR on the side, so I guess I’m not drinking too much.
I usually hit the pubs about twice a week now, for a while there I was getting calls almost every night from various people I knew:
“Hey man, ya going to the pub tonight? You should come out.”
“Nah.”
“WELL WHY NOT MAN?” (I put this in caps because my callers get riled when you say no to anything they insist upon.)
“I’m taking it easy tonight, I was out the last night, got a little too stinko, gotta recoup.”
“AWWW, C’MON MAN!”
“Can’t do it buddy, you have fun though.”
Then I usually hang up and go back to whatever the hell I’m doing, which is usually having a beer and watching something on the TV. Yeah, taking it easy indeed.
It’s more comfortable for me to drink at home most of the time, saves me the trouble of talking to people I have nothing in common with, trying to scarf free drinks from the bartender who knows all of my scams and excuses, and flirting with the waitresses who’ve seen me at my best, but mostly at my worst.
I can also go past that 2am curfew, which after eight years of living here I still can’t get around. Everything goes down at 2:30, everybody knows that!
When I was living in Chicago the bars were open until 4am, some went to 5. We had a system then, it worked pretty well for a while. Pop a few uppers, drink and schmooze all night, find some 24 hour diner at 5, eat and drink coffee (take more pills) until 6:30am and drive (or hop the subway) to the 7am bar across town, start it all over again. That was the weekends; Sundays were left to dealing with the massive hangovers which would consist of falling out of bed (or waking up on the floor) around noon, and meeting up for bloody Mary’s, eggs, coffee and piecing together the events of the previous night.
I ran with a tight crew back then; Punk Rock Stan, Sandy, Conner the Mick, Pam and Dylan (the only couple), Stanko, and myself. We ran all over the Bucktown/Wicker Park area, looking for kicks, luck, love, and the all mighty drink.
Monday nights we spent at a dive joint called Sweet Amy. Chuck, the owner of the place had a thing for poetry, crap ass wanna be Beat poetry at that. He claimed to have drunk Kerouac under the table in San Francisco, shared a needle with Old Bill in Algiers, and bested Neal C. in a wrestling duel while hanging with the Merry Pranksters. None of us believed his crackpot stories but he was fun to listen to on quieter times (During the early hours of the bar before the crowd showed up). Monday was open mike night, all the cheap hoods in town showed up with notebooks full of their weekend forays into the night, Casanova swing tips and rumblings and grumblings about the sufferings and trails of the under of the poor and subnormal; swigging shots and buying rounds for the other fellow “poets”. These nights did have their entertainment value due to the buggers getting piss drunk before their time on stage and failing to handle the heckling that would come from the audience. Some of them would challenge their hecklers to fights out back, those were best of all; drinks and fights. What a pleasure. It made the beginning of the week more exciting that the weekends. The applause really blared when someone got into it in back. Punk Rock Stan and I would make bets on who was going to win; sometimes we lucked out, sometimes not. We came to realize though that some of those damn poets were some mean mothers. We began heckling some of the weaker willed ones, just to see what would happen. We get them to buy us drinks afterwards, pulling the ol’ line of:
“Hey man, I’m just fucking with you, no hard feelings right? It’s all a part of the game; ya gotta be a tough bastard if ya want to make it yeah? So, hows about that next round? You’re a good kid, don’t worry about it, next week is your week baby!”
And so on and so forth.
Some Mondays we’d lose Sandy, and find her out back getting a tongue job from one of the younger-more drunk than he should be-poets. I mean younger by they were younger than twenty five and with Sandy being twenty seven they thought she was this queen of the scene, she knew her shit all right, and knew how to play those little chumps for a few drinks and a little on the side if she wanted. She never brought them home though, just out back and for her pleasure only. One night she came in though the back door with some young buck; he was wild eyed and sweaty. She sat at our table, pulled a smoke and told us that a round was coming. Sure enough, the wiled eyed, sweaty buck cam back with a round of shots and a pitcher of Guinness.
“He was pretty good.” She said.
“Fuck should we care?” Punk Rock Stan yelled, “We got his next round!”
Sandy reached into her jacket and pulled out a fresh pack of smokes.
“Got these too, they fell out of his pocket.”
Ah, Monday nights.
After a few months of patronizing, spilling my weight in scotch, breaking glasses, and picking fights with every so called poet with a goatee and a copy of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell in his back pocket, Chuck was foolish enough to offer me a job as a door guy.
“Goddamn kids man, I can’t find anybody to keep track of the intake at the door.”
“You should stop hiring youngsters’ man, they don’t know shit.”
(Just so ya know I was twenty five then and talking like I was a big shot)
“That’s right! That’s why I’m offering you the gig, ya want it?”
I was working part time at a frame shop and not making much bread, I did make a lot of cuts on my hands though, people must have thought that I was the dumbest suicide there was. I was never good at manual labor, so I took the job.
Four nights a week, decent pay, more if there was a jazz group on that night, and when the owner was out, which was three nights out of the four, all the free drinks I can hold.
I made it a point not to work on Mondays though, there was too much at stake to be stuck at the front. It was too far away from the real action in the back.
My first night on the job was that next Monday; I was called in because the usual guy got busted for driving drunk. I wasn’t too happy about this considering that Chuck and I had a deal that I wouldn’t work Mondays.
“I need you on this one, there’s no one else.” He said over the phone.
“Fine dammit, but I want a little extra since it’s supposed to be my day off.”
“No problem.”
So there I was at the front door, checking ID’s and making sure things were running smoothly. Every now and then when Chuck stepped out on one of his ‘errands’, Big Joe the bartender would slip me a shot, at least I was getting my free drinks.
The stage monkeys were doing their thing, reading wasted lines of the disenfranchised, sucking down watered drinks while hecklers did their thing. From time to time Punk Rock Stan or Sandy would come up to give me an update on things. Stan won twenty bucks on a couple of bets and Sandy found a live one who was buying rounds. And I was in the front, mostly sober and bored off my ass.
At about nine Chuck split for the night; he left Big Joe in charge. I got a beer and a shot as soon as Chuck was out the door. At that time one of the local big shot readers by the name of Rick walked in with his old lady. They’d obviously been out boozing before coming to the bar because his old lady was wasted; she fell over in the doorway, clinging to Ricks’ coat sleeve. He tried slipping her by me as I was standing at the bar, I stopped them both.
“She can’t come in here like that man, she’s gonna drop any minute.” I said to Rick.
“Fuck you man, she’s okay, and we’re in here all the damn time.”
“I know, and your poetry is shit, get her home and you can come back, I don’t care.”
“Screw you door guy!” Rick said and gave me a little push on the shoulder; I guessed he was still upset with the heckling I gave him the previous Monday.
“Is there a problem here Flynn?” It was Big Joe talking, I looked back and Joe was rubbing his hands together, when he does that he seems to grow, almost like the Hulk but a little slower and more menacing, no one wanted to be on the other side of Big Joes’ stare when he was rubbing his hands together. I explained the situation and Joe told Rick to get the girl home and that he could come back after. Rick was pissed, but he took her out and came back a half hour later. I let him pass; Joe had another beer waiting for me.
Not long after Rick walked in he was on stage. His poetry was worse than anything that I’d ever heard, but the women seemed to dig it, the guys didn’t pay much attention. Stan and Sandy I could here back there laughing, clinking glasses. I felt alone up front, sitting on a barstool sipping my beer, every now and then checking the random ID of some young thing with a dope wearing khakis on her arm. It was a strange solitary existence up there. I needed the fire and all I had was bent cigarettes and cheap scotch.
“FUCK THE DOOR GUY!” I heard from the stage, it was Rick, he was drunk.
“FUCK HIM AND HIS STUPID TIES!” He was yelling into the microphone, I couldn’t tell if it was a poem or not, but I looked on anyway.
“If that guy thinks he so damn special, that he came come in here every Monday and try to fuck around with the rest of us POETS, why doesn’t he get up here and prove that he’s better huh? Why doesn’t he put up or shut up? Cause he’s a sissy that’s why! He’s nothing but a cheap bastard with nothing better to do! I wanna see him up here and see if he’s got the moxi to do what we’re all brave enough to do!”
And this chump got cheers from the crowd. Unbelievable. Stan ran up to the front, asked me what I was gonna do, if I was gonna take him out back. I thought about this for some time, I could feel all eyes on me; the joint was quiet except for the clinking of glasses, the sucking of nicotine from Kents, Marlboros’, Camels and Kools.
Rick grabbed the mic and brought it close to his face this time. “If you think you can write better than me Flynn, if you think you can read better than me, then come up here next Monday and prove it!” He stepped off the stage and got a round of applause. I had no idea that I’d pissed off so many people. It felt good and bad at the same time. I hadn’t written poetry since college, and had no interest in doing so again. But I was being called out by a punk with a bad hairdo and worse poetry.
I went to the bar and got another shot from Big Joe, everybody was staring at me. I raised my glass and then took the shot. I tried to think of something cool to say.
“You’re on asshole!” I yelled. The crowd cheered and clapped. Punk Rock Stan ordered two drinks; I took mine and sat at my solitary barstool. I was going to become what I hated, a drunken stage poet. It could’ve been worse I thought, but not likely.
posted by Shoun at 9:54 PM
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