Picking Up Where John Lennon Left Off: Part Two

Flash-forward roughly twenty-four hours to 6PM the next evening. After making the same mistake twice and taking the wrong exit on the interstate, I found myself back at where it all started, and where it was about to start again. This time our course was set for downtown rather than around the corner, which meant that I got stuck with the bag and had to drive. I was all set to see my car keyed into a paint by number scheme the next morning.

(Actually, let me interject here. I couldn't think of a better place to put this since I was content with the flow of the opening paragraph. While slowing down to approach a toll booth, I was cut off by this small van that glided from three lanes over to get into the full service lane. How in the hell do you mistake an E-Z Pass for the full service lane? The Autobahn isn't where you ride a tricycle! Anyway, I got in the exact change lane and loaded up two quarters like dice and tossed them into the basket like a craps champion, and without missing a beat, sped through the toll before the light turned green to beat the van to the punch. Ultimately it was a stupid and childish move, as my conscience and probably the city of Richmond will later tell me.)

Though I've been there before and shouldn't be surprised, every trip to the Tobacco Company at Shockoe Bottom is like a time warp back to an earlier age. Girls walk around as vendors of tobacco products and kind gentlemen and ladies are always swooping down to pick up empty glasses and ask if you'd like another beverage, as if we are all high-rolling gangsters in the Prohibition era. Aside from the modern conveniences of a powerful soundsystem and dancefloor lighting, I expect flappers and tommygun-wielding wiseguys to regally enter the doorway and saunter up to the bar for some jazz chowder. Only there are two bars, and while one is more modern in appearance, the other seems to stretch on and on, with tiers and tiers of liquor bottles standing sentry between the bartender and the dirty and faded looking glass, as if it has witnessed the entirety of American history from its spot on the bar wall, from the birth of the nation, to the rise and fall of the Confederacy, to the Kennedy assassination, and finally to High School Musical 2.

The place also has a table set up for Blackjack, and the purpose of it is to donate to a charitable cause of which I did not get the name. In my humble, inexperienced, and ultimately worthless opinion, it is the best place to enjoy the establishment's Happy Hour as it gives you a prime view of the door and all of the denizens of the night that pass through the portal. In the middle of some good-natured ribbing I received from the dealer and some borderline harrassment from her sorority sisters demanding us to put more money in the tip jar, I was able to observe a hilarious phenomenon that I had not previously witnessed in college: the single man on the prowl. You see, while single men are on the prowl every waking moment of their lives, the quote-unquote real world single man is a new and most ferocious beast. With a pack of other single men, they travel, resplendent in exposed gold chains and well-styled with hair gel in animalistic fashion, strutting and fanning their feathers, hoping to attract young females with their elegant plumage. Since I lack the necessary feathers for the ladies to fawn over, I sat at the Blackjack table. Par for the course.

Of course, Tobacco's dollar drinks don't last all evening, so after as many as we could stomach, we asked not for whom the bell tolled because we jumped up before it did the tolling thing. Once again I found myself following the lead of dangerous rapscallions through seedy parts of town to another establishment I had yet to attend.

When we arrived at the place called Blackfinn, I thought I had stepped into a Gotham City haunt as high-end cars with halogen lights blazing pulled up to the front door, their owners passing keys off to the lead-footed valets who stormed off into the night. The bouncer at this establishment also suffered from the same brief spell of illiteracy as the gentleman from the Three Monkeys in part one of this blog entry, but thankfully their were no gutter-mouthed barflies hanging outside the door chastising patrons, so I made it inside without any threat of a developing brouhaha.

Unfortunately such a high-end establishment lacked the character and panache of the watering holes in the Fan, so I'm unable to relay much about this point in the evening. I'm also not sure about the presence of the overly active porter in the bathroom, discussing the possibilities of the newborn football season with inebriated customers. For one, he would squirt soap into my hand while brushing off my back, which I found astonishingly offensive, as if I had some sort of extreme dandruff problem that required medical attention. In one seamless motion he would wave his hands in front of the paper towel dispenser's motion sensor to appropriate towels for the damp digits of each man passing through, yet he would not rip off the towel. All of this occured while he discussed the finer points of LT or CBGB or VDOT. I quickly made haste without even letting the neurons in my brain begin to consider the possibility of a tip. It was not as though the man drove me somewhere or delivered me a pizza. His services were simultaneously superfluous and subpar, and didn't prevent me from being inconvenienced by the much more intoxicated gentlemen around me. We can all prevent muscle atrophy by pumping our own damn soap.

Quickly my comrades and I discovered that we would not be able to "ball" with those in attendance, plus we were getting bored of the Richmond skyline, which is to say some bank buildings. It was not an arduous task to locate a cab and promptly we were whisked uptown by a cabbie with a Redskins shirt and jorts that screamed to me, "I miss Doug Williams." He had the voice of a weedwhacker disregarded the cab company's emblazoned request to refrain from smoking with the cab's confines: hence the sound of plastic being whipped across blades of grass. We made it back to Quinn's and paid the man his due, only to slingshot back into the night and to more Fan hangouts.

Essentially this was more of the same. Running into alumni from years gone by or girls we had previously embarrassed ourselves in front of at one time or another. Those who had not seen me in some time clearly exhibited some form of excitement or contenment upon my arrival. I am free to make this assumption without any trace of modesty because there's honestly no way bottled domestic beer brings anyone any semblance of euphoria.

Luckily for us or not the places seemed to be less crowded that the previous evening, all of the scenester girls having grown weary of running into uneven sidewalks and the barflies not recovered from threatening unassuming people like myself the night before; a certain energy seemed to be sapped from us all. Perhaps it was the humidity, for it was very draining. In time we shuffled back home and fell into peaceful slumber, and so ended the lost weekend of a working class hero. 4 8 15 16 23 42.

Addendum: My thanks to you, if you soldiered through all of "Picking Up..." Expect the next post to be a bit less Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and a little more...iPhone.