This is an old piece that is now another…

Excerpt from the book ‘How Not To Buy A Volkswagen Bus’

By Nick Vatterott

A guy pulled up to the urinal next to me and proudly proclaimed that he had to pee like a racehorse. First of all, I don’t care how bad anybody, let alone a complete stranger, has to pee. Second, why is ‘peeing like a racehorse’ the only metaphor we have to inform those around us how dire our need is to urinate? What does that even mean? I would be a lot more okay with it if after saying that, the person got down on all fours and started running circles around the bathroom while a small man on his back whipped his ass and people started placing bets on him. That’s the only case where I would walk out of the bathroom saying, “Wow, that guy really had to pee.”

I left the peeing racehorse and ponied up to the bar. I looked over a drink list of some of the local beers in the area, before asking the bartender to get me a pint of whatever his favorite was. He served me some dark brew and I settled in. I took a sip and then thought the same thing that I always think after ordering whatever the bartender’s favorite beer is, “Not bad. I wouldn’t order it again. But it’s not bad.” I then took advantage of being able to watch muted sports highlights in a bar that I had never before watched muted sports highlights in. At this point I realized that this wasn’t so great. I mean, I was enjoying myself. I get a kick out of downing alcohol and staring at a different wall or sports highlights on a TV that I’ve never stared at before. But I realized that this is pretty much it as far as the bar world goes. It used to excite me to go to bars in cities that I had never been to before. But with the exception of a small minority, all the bars are pretty much the same thing.

Irish Bars

All Irish bars have that green tint with wood and brass over the entire interior. Nostalgic Guinness signs mixed with zingers towards people who don’t drink Jameson line the walls in between pictures of Ireland that were probably purchased from some irish bar start up kit. If you order a Guinness, a shit head stranger sitting at the bar may begin talking your ear off about how Guinness is actually suppose to be poured. He’s usually wearing some douche bag hat, like the kind an old man would wear fifty years ago. He’s usually by himself. There are two types of people in this world; those who purposely go to an Irish bar, and those who wind up at an Irish bar. If you wind up at an irish bar, you’re probably a descent human being. Conversely; if you’re someone who earlier in the day said, ”Let’s go to an irish bar tonight,” then you’re the reason I don’t like going to Irish bars. If another patron at an Irish bar asks you if you’ve ever been to Ireland, that’s their way of telling you that they’ve been to Ireland and that you’re about to spend the next three U2 songs hearing about it.

Sports Bars

Every sports bar has a stench that is a combination of old miller lite, stale french fries and shattered dreams of athletic achievement lived vicariously through one of seventy seven televisions scattered all over the establishment. The size of the T.V.’s range from tiny plasmas located over the urinal, all the way to jumbo screens as big as the void in the regulars’ lives that they are trying to fill with sports. The inside is wallpapered with any type of sports memorabilia from banners to jerseys. They’re the same banners and jerseys any typical sports fan possesses with the exception that these have frames. Photographs consist of a local sports celeb, posing next to some random dude that nobody knows, wearing a hawaiian shirt. Autographs often consist of people that the average person has never heard of. If it is someone famous, the legitimacy is often in question. For instance; the glass case that holds an old football that looks more like a half deflated basketball with shoe strings glued to it, signed by Secretariat. Forget any variety in your drink selection. Your choices are beer, beer in a bottle or beer bottles in a bucket. Your waitress is either the girl who asks how you are doing nine times before you’ve even sat down. Or the girl you see once and that’s about it for the rest of the night. Once you give up on her ever coming back, you go to the bar to find some cheese ball bartender who either looks like, or actually is, Styles from Teen Wolf. He also takes his sweet time cause he’s too busy talking to another waitress at the cherries and olives part of the bar that your not allowed to go to. (It’s the part of the bar where instead of a bar stool there are two swimming pool rails like someone’s getting out of the deep end.) When he eventually turns around it’s either to fix the pen behind his ear or it’s his turn on the megatouch machine. You see that the girl he’s talking to is your waitress that never came back. She gives you that look like she knows you from some where but can’t put her finger on it. Above the bar is a huge banner that proudly states that wings are obnoxiously cheap on some day that is never the day you are there. Most important of any sports bar, the Golden Tee machine. Three to four guys spinning a ball, slapping their hands against a screen. Every once in a while a loud scream because some guy was “too aggressive” and hurt himself on the machine. He’s the guy who yells “You bum” at the seventy seven T.V.’s every five minutes, and brings up on a daily basis how he would be in the majors if he didn’t tear his ACL in high school. Tomorrow ACL boy will have to explain to his coworkers how he didn’t just hurt himself playing golf; he hurt himself playing video game golf.

The Dive

Every dive is filled with the most important aspect of the dive; people who don’t think it’s a dive. Every song on the juke box starts out with a holler, a fiddle (the poor drunk man’s violin) or a gunshot. No specials. Don’t even ask. There’s probably not a door to the bathroom, or a seat for the toilet, let alone specials. Your choices to drink are beer in a can, and some lableless bottle of whisky. Half of the regulars are sleeping on the bar. The other half work at the bar. Sometimes you can’t order a drink until the bartender’s turn at the lopsided pool table is over. Mismatched chairs. Mismatched tables. Mismatched faces. There is nothing in the establishment that doesn’t have a sign of the attempted carving of initials or misspelled profanity. The kitchen consists of a microwave and a chip rack. If it’s a really good dive there will be a dog running around that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. The bartender could be any number of types of people, but 9 out of 10 times it’s an old lady who thinks a poorly angled black and white television adds to the atmosphere. Behind the bar there’s always something weird, like decorated plates you would buy at a small town gas station or dolls. After looking at each ID, intensely, for a good minute each as if it was the most bizarre thing they’ve ever seen, the bartender reluctantly asks what everyone wants, with a disappointed tone that says, “This place will never run out of business if you all keep spending money here.”

The Club

From the minute one enters the club, all conversations are held at the volume level of discourse held inside a helicopter landing at a jack hammer convention. It’s pitch black with the exception of purple and aqua blue lights on the outskirts of the bar area. That’s how you can tell how cool a club is. The more purple and aqua blue lights and things made out of metal, the bigger the headset on the big bald guy in the black t-shirt carding people behind the unnecessary velvet rope at the door. The same guy who puts needless blue paper wrist bands on everyone as if he’s tagging canadian geese that are migrating south for warming climate and stickier floors. The ten dollar cover will ensure that your watered down, over iced drinks are served in the flimsiest of ‘Solo’ plastic cups. Specials consist of a bottle of budweiser for six dollars, or a vodka tonic that was the recipient of a wrongly dropped roofie. The main party area has a light show that’s the equivalent to if someone ate a police car, the mall store Spencer’s, and every piece of entertainment technology from the 1970’s and puked them up from the ceiling, to the dance floor continuously till three in the morning. “Music” consists of a twelve track rotation of hip hop hits sprinkled in with ambulance sirens, strung together by a d.j. who mixes and samples together songs that by themselves were already the result of other songs being mix and sampled together. Every guy in the club is trying to get laid. How a guy dances, dictates his chances on getting laid or not. There are those who can’t dance. They won’t get laid. The only reason they’re at the club is because they couldn’t find that Irish bar that they wanted to go to. There are those who can dance. They got a shot at getting laid; if their spiky hair and unbuttoned shiny shirt have anything to say about it. Then there are those who dance, as if they’re getting laid at that moment. This is the guy who thinks everyone’s staring at him because he’s practically knocking up a girl on the dance floor. When in reality if anyone is looking at him, it’s only because they’re trying to figure out what a grown man is doing wearing a shell necklace. The girls dance in a big crowd with other girls to make it harder for the gyrating guys to hit on them. Even though meeting a guy is why the girls came to the bar, and whyat the end of the night they’ll complain the whole way home that no guys hit on them. The guys who dance in a big crowd with other guys do it to hit on the other guys dancing in the big crowd with other guys. At the end of the evening, all the lights in this warehouse of a bar go on at the same time, revealing just how ugly the person you’ve dancing with all night really is. Once the club goers spill out into the street you’ll find that one in four girls are crying, one in three dudes are ready to fight, one in two girls are calling Kelly a bitch, and one out of every one group of guys is explaining to the bouncer that the reason the bouncer shouldn’t beat the shit out of their buddy who threw up all over the bar because “Dude, it’s my buddies birthday”.