Groovier Than the Diner

Our sleepy little hamlet turned just a little more hedonistic when a cabernet lounge opened up on Park Avenue a couple of weeks ago. Fanwood and Scotch Plains were never blue law temperance strongholds; being a small, suburban New Jersey community, of course we already had four liquor stores in town and a depressing dive that reeked of cigarette smoke, sports pennants, and tubby, unshaven, withered middle-class dreams. I hoped we'd be getting a coffeehouse, but, on paper at least, my town feels a little more complete anyway with a place that will probably serve alcohol to high-school students and provide a midnite stage for their shitty poetry. In your face, New Providence!

I checked out "Peace Music Bar Love Vienna Go" (that's its real name, as far as I can determine) a few days ago, on a lonely Friday night, hoping to re-write the narrative of my boring town: bank, bank, copper fitting factory, Chinese restaurant, Chinese restaurant, bank. The front door is solid and there are heavy scrim curtains obscuring the curtains, but the back door was ajar, letting heat trickle out and cold trickle in. I had a hunch from its incomprehensible name, and I was right: Peace Music Bar Love Vienna Go is a 60's themed speakeasy, really really striving for that acid-tainted orgiastic Factory salon of post-modern critique: lava lamps and Buddha statues, copies of Life magazine dated April 12, 1963 or June 8, 1965 on a petrified wood table for your perusal because even your indolent lounging has to be sophisticated.... Except the crowd was New Jersey suburbanites, between the party hat-shaped glass my rum and coke came in (just standing within ten feet of the thing made me look super-fey) and the football game on TV, with oversized hairy ladies cheering periodically, the net vibe adds up to Austin Powers being served with papers for alimony and child support.

Not that I have anything new against Peace Music Bar Love Vienna Go; I just think that ten years ago, it would have fit nicely as a grand character in my small town narrative, instead of a footnote, just the only other place in town with mood lighting. Maybe — I hope, cause this place is totally stifling — the lounge functions better as a salon. The people necking seemed to enjoy the place, its funky chairs, and its mood lighting.

I tested the waters at around 10, probably before the busy season, and immediately stumbled into some dude with a guitar and then into two kids who kindly took a break from feeling each other up to stare at me. I, in turn, stared at the dopey Lee West egg chair they were simultaneously crammed into and splaying out of. "Where the hell did all these people come from?" I wanted to know, like they're carpenter ants. Fanwood's population is 7,174, and of that, 7,160 are second-grader moms with second-grader mom hairdos and second-grader mom jeans, and the lounge has maybe fifty people in there, none of whom are second-grader moms. I walked past some blue-collar professionals, people who still think they're attractive, sipping beer out of cosmo glasses. The owner... it's a 60's bar, he's wearing an 80's power suit, the kind of shiny metallic tie in vogue in the late 90's, and a Tony Little ponytail I can't really place in a particular decade, it's so timeless. Somehow I feel you could chop up the individual facets of his soul into maybe fifty pieces and you'd wind up with the whole crowd.

Now that I'm looking at these pictures of Tony Little (for the link, asshole — even if I was into hyperactive informercial man-whores I wouldn't scour the internet for Tony Little pictures. Billy Blanks, duh!) I'd like to recommend that our Peace Music Bar Love Vienna Go owner do something about his dry, split ends. Holy shit, will you look at this guy's hair? The freaking Girls Next Door don't have hair that sleek.

I stood around, drank my cuba libre, read Time magazine and got all the latest news from 1961. Gawked at the bartenders, who I swear are still in high school, and therefore can't be blamed for not knowing how to mix a cuba libre (or for not carding me, and I'm always carded). Hummed along to "I'm a Believer." Fascinated by a lava lamp. Went home and watched "House," not even a little drunk.

I'd go back, though. I'm a sucker for that mood lighting.

Why Are People Always Trying to Get Me Drunk?

Like at speed friending last night, where we were standing around a bar table and the topic turned to drinking, as it's wont to do. So there's me, Insouciant Dude, Insouciant Woman #1, and Insouciant Woman #2 — and I got in trouble the last time I used the word "insouciant" in my blog, so I'm gonna tell you right now, it's not an insult so don't email me — and I think Insouciant Woman #1 (or maybe it was Insouciant Woman #2) asked Insouciant Dude what he was drinking. "What do you want me to be drinking?" Insouciant Dude replied insouciantly.

"Gin and tonic," she guessed. Insouciantly.

"I am drinking a gin and tonic."

"No, really?" And thus I watched an insouciant conversation begin.

Insouciant Dude talked about his hardcore drinking fun in Budapest. Insouciant Woman #1 refused to drink in Hoboken — lucky for the denizens of Hoboken — because she'd get lost trying to drive along the clusters of Hudson county bridges while intoxicated. "I love how that's your reason for not driving drunk," I said, guzzling Sprite, cause I'd be driving home soon myself. Insouciant Woman #2 told us a I-guess-you-had-to-be-there story about getting drunk, unable to find her way home, and stranded in the middle of nowhere, hitching rides to South Orange.

So then we came around to my turn to tell a drunk story. I should've just made something up. I have my pretty decent first drink story, but my sober mind couldn't put it all together quickly enough: beginning, middle, end; schoolhouse lies about the power of the spirits; neuroscience experts-to-be reassuring me that only the inhibited brain cells would be killed off; that "blue stuff they use to disinfect combs." It was a mish-mosh of half-finished sentences, half-remembered experiences, and none of the eight paragraphs of context I included in my post about it. Instead I just said that I only started drinking in my senior year of college and I didn't do it enough to have any good drunk stories.

I might as well have said I was from Mars. I get this response a lot, and it's gotten old very quickly. "You don't know how to swim? Well, we gotta teach you!" Or "You've never gone out dancing? This weekend, you and me, I'm taking you to a club." For some reason, it's never anything I know how to do, like, "Are you telling me you really don't know how to do differential calculus? Well, sit yourself down, cause I'm here to make you smart!" Writing this down, I might point out that it would get less old if anyone actually followed through on their promise to turn me conformist, but anyway....

"You have a lot of catching up to do." I think it was Insouciant Dude who said that, but suddenly all three of them were offering to take me out. Tonight. "We've gotta get you drunk!" Like they really need an excuse to hit the bars till last call.

Here's the thing: I fucking love drinking. I love everything about it. Beer is a pussy frat-boy drink for me; I'm a hard liquor person. Gets you drunk faster. Vodka, rum, tequila... anything this side of Everclear really. (Grappa and rocket fuel excepted.) And none of that mixing liquor with fruit juice wussy crap. That's fuzzy navel-ly girly and a perfect opportunity for the bartender to stiff me on that sweet, sweet ethanol. Point is, you can partake in something for years and years and years and still be a dilettante, and you can be relatively new to something and be totally into it. I don't need that pity encouragement, let's just go out.