Thursday, January 01, 2004
The Odeon: Mom Wouldn’t Have Been Comfortable
Our celebration was the night before new year’s. Tanja was in town, which is always a reason to party, and we had already resolved that our New Year’s would be a quiet, homey affair, not a sweaty throbbing rave or even a convivial beerbust with twenty handpicked drinking buddies. We were going to take it easy on the 31st, so on the 30th I was ready to blow off a little energy. Tanja sent us to meet her at a curious little joint down in the Outer Mission - a ‘hood to which we’d had almost no exposure in the 13 years we’ve lived in this tidy little town. We arrived a bit later than I usually go to bed on a schoolnight (which this was) and settled in. The bar was not large and had numerous curious decorations and a decent little knot of old-fashioned neighborhood drunks hanging around the sturdy leatherette stools. Over the course of the next few hours most of those old dudes cleared out and were replaced with quite a larger number of mostly young, mostly attractive, mostly interestingly-dressed people who drank a wide variety of beverages and laughed together a lot. Here’s what we encountered:
When we arrived a guy at the bar shuffled his barstool a bit to make room for us. He cradled an empty shot glass and greeted us like old friends. I couldn’t tell, during the course of our brief conversation, if he was totally drunk or actually psychologically “unusual,” but it was great to get to know him. He likes christmas. He got thirty dollars for christmas. He did not get a christmas tree, but he was happy we had a couple little ones. He wanted to know if we got money for christmas. We didn’t get into the details.
On the wall opposite the bar (behind which had been mounted the obligatory bar-back mirror), was a big papier-mache tush. It wasn’t sexy enough to be an ass, and it wasn’t tawdry enough to be a butt - it was nothing more nor less than a huge fake tush. Just below it were letters painted on the wall reading “REHTONA EVAH.” (When you saw it in the mirror it made a lot more sense.) In a similar vein, the standard blue-n-red neon “OPEN” sign in the front window had been rearranged to broadcast the message “NOPE” to the streets. A number of hand-painted day-glo signs on the wall advertised various unique offerings of the establishment, such as a Richard Collins Martini - Pabst Blue Ribbon with an olive. I tell you, this place had class.
The barkeep was a Billy Connolly type with a bushy white goatee and wild white hair that fell in ringlets to his shoulders. His white formal shirt sported black-tipped ruffles, but it hung untucked and unbuttoned to reveal a Venice Beach Lifeguard t-shirt underneath. He was red in the face from hollering and drinking and he seemed to be having the time of his life. I had chatted him up a little when we ordered our first pints - I’d asked for an unusual one that had just come into the bar that day and he got a big kick out of that. Turns out it was pretty good and once Tanja showed up I ordered her a cider and two more pints of the Red Horse for Kel and me. When I was ready for the third pint (I am a growing boy, after all) the place had gotten crowded and I had to wait several minutes for service at the bar, but Billy was hooting with joy once his bleary eyes focused on me again and he asked me if I liked Frenet. I’d never heard of it so I replied, “why not?” He poured me a shot. Now I know the answer to my question - it tastes like a Jaeger-Tussin cocktail. But it was free and it was fun to drink it with a man who was so frantically enthusiastic about everything.
At one point when I was back with my friends I felt a hand gently fall on my shoulder and a quiet voice breathed into my ear - “I don’t have any insurance of any kind.” (If you see that as a link, ignore it. It’s coming up automatically and it’s pissing me off.) Quite a come-on. It was a hipster in a porkpie hat with some kind of heavy-duty hauling equipment; I got out of his way and he wheeled the handtruck forklift to the stage, where over the course of about half an hour, he and four or five others of his ilk jacked it up and used it to lower a huge old heating unit out of the ceiling. It was a lot of fun to watch, but then we learned that this bar has even more exotic forms of entertainment - they were getting ready to start playing “Drink Bingo,” but I knew I had to get back home if I was going to get up at the asscrack the next day and put in my full four hours of work. Barkeep Billy ran out from behind the bar when he saw us getting into our coats to invite us all to come back the next night for New Year’s Porn-e-oki, when they would show skin flicks and have people sing along to instrumental tracks of songs like “Feelings.” It sounded like more fun than I’d be able to handle.
As a final anecdote, here’s what kind of a friend Tanja is: she arrived and gave us a present, an xmas ornament - all black, painted with explosives and made to look like one of those anarchist’s bombs from the cartoons. A look of deep seriousness came over her face when she explained that she’d repainted the ornament herself, starting with one that had been blue. “You have no idea,” she told us, “how hard it was to make my blue balls black.” I’m sure I don’t, Tanja. There are some things a fellow doesn’t even want to think about. Even when he’s drinking.