“Pussy rot,” triggered a look of reverie on Katy’s face, as if some stank snatch from her past oozed pleasant memories. Jill was blathering about alcohol. That girl is always blathering about alcohol, and knowing what little I do about her home life, it’s possible she’s self-medicating. Isn’t that what we’re all doing? Self-medicating?
We’d ended up at Bennigan’s because, allegedly, Katy and Jill could both drink there without being caught. Of course the manager bid the waiter to take their drinks away. “I only had one sip,” said Jill. “I only had two,” said Katy. Common ground tactics for underage drinkers involves hastily consuming any alcohol you’ve been given. They should know this. Bennigan’s was where we’d ended up, but not where we started.
I picked Katy up from work after another long week at work. Work’s not so bad. It’s the going home and working some more that’s so bad, and really, that’s not so bad either. I enjoy my job, or I wouldn’t go home and work so much.
I’ve been growing selfish and curmudgeonly, never hesitant to say “no”. I say “no” at work all the time now, and look at them real smug-like. That’s the way to show how much you despise them, real smug-like. Say “no” and then go home and work some more.
So, after a long week of working at home after long days of working at work, it’s Friday and I don’t want to do anything. Katy convinces me to sneak out of the den with the promise of maybe we’ll go see a movie, and Lord knows I love watching movies.
But when I pull up in front of the steak house where she works, my movie had been nixed in favor of going to Woodrow’s to drink. Not that I’m against drinking, I was just looking forward to the movie. Besides, Katy said I’d “feel young”.
“You’ll feel young.” This the day after I’d been told I looked old while dancing to Alien Sex Fiend, and maybe, just maybe, I’ve been thinking about growing old with grace and exactly what that means. Seriously. Does that mean you stop dying your hair, or does that mean you start, or maybe only the colors change? Do you stop making stupid jokes in bed? Or maybe that’s what defines elder congress. I don’t know, but when told I’d feel younger if I wandered to Woodrow’s to drink with a bunch of younger twenty-somethings (I’m sooo old, an upper twenty-something), I took a couple of minutes to ask myself if the graceful ager would go drinking with all this… this… this Youth. Is that respectable?
Of course the answer is I don’t know, and it didn’t really matter because: one, Katy’s female, and I’m notoriously unable to tell someone with a vagina “no”; and two, because Katy is young, and I’m notoriously unable to tell someone young, with a vagina, “no”. So we went to Woodrow’s.
Woodrow’s sounded familiar. I told Cindy that I’d been there, back in my younger days. And sure enough, after we pile into a caravan of cars and ride to Woodrow’s (on Bellaire near Academy), remember a wildly debaucherous night I had many, many years ago. Not that I’m old, mind you.
Many years ago, I used to patronize this bar called Dickhead’s. It was a great place. I’d just moved to Houston, knew no one, and my dad had seen fit to introduce me to all his drinking buddies, skeezes, assholes, whores and alcoholics that drank at the bar just down the street from where we lived. This is also where I learned the absolute importance of knowing the bartender.
Knowing all the skeezes, assholes, whores, alcoholics, and a few drinking buddies of my own, I drank there a lot. In fact, with a $12 dollar an hour job and guaranteed 10 hours of overtime every week, and only car insurance to pay, I was consistently amazed at how much money I did not have. And it’s not like I could’ve spent it at the bar. The majority of my drinks were free.
This is how it goes when you know the bartenders really well and have become a professional barfly. The bar starts kicking idiots out around 1:30. At 2:00 the bartender locks the doors. You can probably get them to refill your drink at this point, but you have to catch them as they scurry back and forth wiping down the bar, mopping the floor and generally spiffing things up. Usually they’re done a little after 2:30 and you do a shot or so of the good stuff. For the road, you see. Then you hop in the car and drive to some other bar.
Bartenders are like faeries. Every once in a while, they’ll meet in secret in some secluded grove to dance and cast fae magics, except usually they just meet at some bar, drink, play pool, and compare how much they made that night in tips.
And that’s how I first ran across Woodrow’s.
I’d been drinking at Dickhead’s. My protestant upbringing chafes against the phrase “drinking”, but there was drink being had, and as was typical, drink was being had with a fellow the name of Big Mike (and this was not the Big Mike many of us now know). As one might guess, Mike was Big, and being as it was typical to be drinking up at Dickhead’s with Big Mike, you could assume he as there all the time. He was there before I got there, unless he was drinking somewhere else, and on nights I didn’t close down the bar, he was there after.
So we were drinking, and Big Mike liked to live life Big, so obviously the party had better never stop. The bar closed. Charae, the bartender began wiping down the counters, cleaning the bathrooms, counting her tips, etc. I’m pretty sure Big Mike and I were finishing off just one more drink. For the road, you see. And then Charae invites us to go hang out at Woodrow’s.
I’m still amazed at the gall. We pull up to Woodrow’s, it’s 2:30, maybe 3:00 in the morning, and the parking lot’s packed. But the door is locked. You can hear the jukebox and chattering and glasses and the general sounds a bar generally makes when it’s been invaded by a small guerilla squadron of professional drinkers and drink servers. This was Special Forces bar-hopping: alcoholic black ops.
Like most nights at most bars, interchangeable at most and indistinguishable otherwise, the night came and went in an unmemorable collection of what must have been drinks and boasts, the bartenders chittering about girl bartender things, and maybe some games of pool. Big Mike related a story about this girl he met at some fancy shindig at a country club. Most stories guys tell, in bars, about girls, end up in the dirty on some end, and his ended with him eating her out — “real good,” he said — and I couldn’t help but wonder, despite Big Mike’s disarming charm and honest-to-god cherubic disposition, why some hot young thing would leave a swinging party to wander a golf course in the dead of night to let some large, sweaty man eat her out on the edge of a sand trap, “real good”. It’s possible she was self-medicating. Isn’t that what we’re all doing, self medicating?
So finally, Big Mike and I leave. I’ve got to get home ‘cause I’ve got work in the morning, or by that time, in a couple of hours. Don’t think the party was over, ‘cause it wasn’t. By the time 6:00 am rolled around, a few folks had shambled home, but several stalwarts were determined to open the place back up. That’s what responsible drinkers do. They don’t just close the place down; they open it back up, too.
As I pull up next to Big Mike’s car, he’s trying to convince me that we should grab a cooler of beer, borrow someone’s boat, and go fishing. I’m always up for craziness, but if I’m squinting at a rising sun after drinking all night, you’ll be hard pressed to get me to do much. My excuse was I had to go to work. Of course, I got home, felt like shit and had them worse and called in sick.