Monday, September 20, 2004
Faux-Aussie Glamour
The night began with a harmless phone call...
Hey Matt, what’s up?…not much…you up to anything tonight?...I’ve got no plans. What are you thinking?...Well, how about hitting some of those ‘St. Louis Pubs’ on that back of that shirt we got at Llywelyn’s? There are still a few I’ve never been to, and we could go to O’Connell’s, at least, as it is just down the street from my place…okay, see you at your place around 9?...sounds good.
And so my compatriot of the pub, Matt, joined me at 9:00 and we made our way to O’Connell’s. It was a small, typical Irish pub, with quiet music and not too many people. The dull shine of wood was everywhere - floors, bars and walls. The place even had the signature gruff old barkeeper you always hope to find in a pub – in many minds, it tells you how true of a pub it is. And as this was a true pub, I could hardly order anything less than a Guinness.
Anyway, about midway through my third pint and after such intriguing conversations as religion, marriage, and idiots we know, Matt informed me that he would only be having three beverages that evening as he didn’t want to have to worry about a drunk driving check. I nodded and understood, but of course deep down I was a bit upset. It’s never that fun to go out with two people and one of them is not drinking. When you know you’re going to get steadily more obnoxious, it’s much better to have someone sitting next to you cheering your drunken exploits than the gaze of a sober person looking at his drunk idiotic friend with pity. But I understood that it was no slight; I understand the fear of the dreaded DWI.
After he downed his third and final beer, the night was still young, only 11:00 on my watch, so we decided to go check out another of the pubs on the shirt, Pat’s. It wasn’t too far away, and it had been another place on my list. A good friend of mine, whose culinary tastes are quite similar to mine yet whose culinary knowledge is much greater, told me Pat’s had the best fried chicken in town. Being that it was 11, I didn’t really expect them to have the kitchen open, but I was hoping that because they are apparently known for their friend chicken, maybe they had a large bucket for the entire night.
Alas, my date with Pat’s fried chicken was not to happen. The kitchen was quite obviously closed when we walked into this neighborhood pub. This place was not so typically Irish like the last. The walls were bare, the floors concrete, the table cheap. The music coming out as we walked in was Elton John’s version of Pinball Wizard, a travesty which should have been avoided, but shortly thereafter the music was changed to the typical pop of the day, being the likes of Hoobastank & Maroon 5, so it wasn’t long before I longed for terrible covers of great songs again.
I downed one more Guinness as Matt decided he would have just one more beer. Having now had 4 meals in a glass, I was too full for another stout, so I decided to move to liquor. Around midnight is always the best time to switch to the heavy stuff. The good and decent people of the world have already gone home, and the vagrants that are still left walking the streets always welcome the hard and quick inebriation that comes with hard liquor after several beers. So I ordered a Maker’s Mark, an excellent bourbon typically reserved for the best of occasions, and mixed it with a splash of coke. As I poured the first drink of the sweet cocktail down my throat, I noticed Matt was about to finish his beer. The tenuous moment in the night had arrived.
Not wanting my friend to have to sit and watch, I quickly offered up my couch for the evening. It’s more fun, I said, and he agreed quickly and had a drink in his hands even quicker. Then, as the decision had been made that he would get smashed at my side, we knew there was no use fucking around and ordered a shot of chilled Jagermeister.
The effects of that were not yet apparent to us when not fifteen minutes after shooting the liquid black licorice the improbable occurred. Matt & I had been sitting at the bar drinking relatively quietly for the evening up until that point, when a beautiful girl in a red tank top with “Elvis” in glittered letters across the bosom, approached us.
Quite inconsequentially, she asked what we were up to. Drinking, we said, nothing more. She asked if we lived around there, to which Matt responded no, but I said yes, I do. At this point, both Matt and I were still in shock. Or perhaps dumbstruck is a better way to put it. How the hell does this happen? There were only 4 people in the bar, and only one was a hot girl, and she approached us? We didn’t know what to do. Being that I’m already tied down, I wasn’t too worried about it, but being a young male, I wanted to see Matt fulfill this dream. Males don’t get jealous and petty when one of their comrades has an envious situation the way a woman will; rather, we pine and hope and cheer our friend so that at least we know one of us got to see a common dream come to fruit.
Now, as our shock is settling, the drink hit us, and her next comment hit us harder. “I live a couple blocks down the street, and I was just going to go back and drink some beer there.”
How do you respond to that? Matt couldn’t just jump and say, “Hey, can I come? Oh, and by the way, can we have wild sex, too?” Then again, in retrospect and given the girl’s own ability to be forward, maybe he should have. But he didn’t. Nor did I. We just sat there waiting for her to invite us. Alas, the invite didn’t come, so we had to go back to our world of getting stupid pissed.
We bemoaned our strange luck whilst closing the bar down. But since liquor has the unique ability to drown your cares, we didn’t think about it all that long, and since the bar was closing down, we had to make our plans for our next conquest. At 1:30 in St. Louis, there are only a few options. The Cheshire Inn was one such option and very close to the present location, but it was full of superficial people, a see-and-be-seen sort of place. But it was close, and we were drunk, so we decided that we would go to see-and-be-seen. We would step outside of ourselves (and our own selves had disappeared about 30 minutes after the Jagermeister shot) and hobnob with the cool kids.
We got there right at 1:30, and the place was just beginning to fill up. We ordered a few beverages and began to wander, looking for someone to chat with, or a girl to chat up. Luckily, I found our first target, a coworker of my girlfriend – Elaine.
I had only met Elaine once before, after a concert I attended with my girlfriend and a friend, Aaron. Elaine was beautiful, with the look of someone half-Korean (although I truly have no idea) and a good body. She was smart too, which I learned after having an intense discussion over the ancient Egyptians. However, she had a terrible propensity to use the word, ‘like.’ In fact, she puts every Valley Girl I’ve ever seen or heard to shame. Like, we were having this, like, conversation, when, like, she talked about Egypt and like the pyramids and such, and I was like, dear god, like this girl appears to have some, like, intelligence, but can there be, like, any more annoying person to, like, talk to?
Anyway, she had expressed an attraction to Aaron after meeting us, but when the message was relayed to my buddy, he laughed that same laugh one gives at bemusement, as if to say, “Are you serious?” Matt soon learned the story of the cute, smart girl who used the word like an unbelievable amount of times, so seeing the opportunity to hear it firsthand and at the same time meet our goal of mingling, we hit her up.
I soon was shown to be honest, as Elaine used ‘like’ three times in the first sentence. The conversation was pretty dull, and I was pretty damn drunk at that point, so I can’t really recount it right now. I can say that we realized quickly we needed to get out of that conversation rapidly, so I gave Matt a signal to excuse himself, and I soon left for the bathroom.
I came back downstairs to discover Matt mingling with a slightly brutish young woman. Not very pretty, but not ugly either, and a perfect target for our exploits. I walked up, and she asked who I was, to which Matt responded, this is my friend John. He’s from Queensland.
At this point, I should pause to explain this situation. I had recounted to Matt earlier in the evening that when I lived in Prague, an Aussie buddy of mine, Gotchy used to go around telling people I was from Queensland. I would give people a statement or two in my faux-Aussie accent and then move on – my accent is pretty bad, and tends to go from Aussie to Irish to English to Scottish and back again. I was always too nervous of being caught and having someone scream ‘Fraud!’ at the top of their lungs in a subway or some such public place, and no one likes to be called a fraud.
Nonetheless, Gotchy and I had always discussed how easy it is for stateside Aussies to find girls. American girls, I’d been told, just eat up the accent. Matt and I now being drunk, combined with the fact that I was inexplicably wearing purple shoes (always a sign in this country of a foreigner) this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it out.
“Aye, that’s roight,” I said. “Ah’m from Quanesland. Do you know where that is?” I asked her. She said yes. She then asked what was doing in St. Louis, to which I made up some story of having lived with Matt in Prague for awhile. Trying to sound like a true Aussie and at the same time make fun of my superficial friends here, I always made a point of asking if they knew where Prague, or Brisbane, or wherever, was. They always told me yes, but they were lying. Not a damn one of them knew what I was saying, just that I had a wonderfully beautiful accent.
This girl, however, had already been taken with Matt, who was just lying out of his ass the entire time, and which I confirmed in my accent by saying that he was a bloody liar. Nonetheless, she was spending most of her time talking with him, and as she was more Picasso than Monet, I didn’t care too much.
So I left and wandered around, looking for somewhere to break in, when the money moment for me came. A girl asked for something from me, but I couldn’t hear her. So I responded in my lovely accent, “What’s that, love?” If it were possible to actually see a heart melt, I saw it in her eyes. I also noticed that she was with another guy, but she was smitten with me and talked to me for a good long while. When she left, I smiled smugly, safe in the knowledge that should my relationship with my own love falter, I could always rely on my fake accent to see me through cold lonely nights in St. Louis.
Finally, I looked over and saw that Matt was dying in his conversation, so we downed our drinks and made our way to the door, bloody wasted and stronger than ever in our camaraderie, made the way to the car for a drunken drive home.
The night began easily enough and ended in a manner neither of us could have predicted. A kurva’s life is this way, I suppose. And that, like the proof in the pudding, is what makes it all fun.
The night began with a harmless phone call...
Hey Matt, what’s up?…not much…you up to anything tonight?...I’ve got no plans. What are you thinking?...Well, how about hitting some of those ‘St. Louis Pubs’ on that back of that shirt we got at Llywelyn’s? There are still a few I’ve never been to, and we could go to O’Connell’s, at least, as it is just down the street from my place…okay, see you at your place around 9?...sounds good.
And so my compatriot of the pub, Matt, joined me at 9:00 and we made our way to O’Connell’s. It was a small, typical Irish pub, with quiet music and not too many people. The dull shine of wood was everywhere - floors, bars and walls. The place even had the signature gruff old barkeeper you always hope to find in a pub – in many minds, it tells you how true of a pub it is. And as this was a true pub, I could hardly order anything less than a Guinness.
Anyway, about midway through my third pint and after such intriguing conversations as religion, marriage, and idiots we know, Matt informed me that he would only be having three beverages that evening as he didn’t want to have to worry about a drunk driving check. I nodded and understood, but of course deep down I was a bit upset. It’s never that fun to go out with two people and one of them is not drinking. When you know you’re going to get steadily more obnoxious, it’s much better to have someone sitting next to you cheering your drunken exploits than the gaze of a sober person looking at his drunk idiotic friend with pity. But I understood that it was no slight; I understand the fear of the dreaded DWI.
After he downed his third and final beer, the night was still young, only 11:00 on my watch, so we decided to go check out another of the pubs on the shirt, Pat’s. It wasn’t too far away, and it had been another place on my list. A good friend of mine, whose culinary tastes are quite similar to mine yet whose culinary knowledge is much greater, told me Pat’s had the best fried chicken in town. Being that it was 11, I didn’t really expect them to have the kitchen open, but I was hoping that because they are apparently known for their friend chicken, maybe they had a large bucket for the entire night.
Alas, my date with Pat’s fried chicken was not to happen. The kitchen was quite obviously closed when we walked into this neighborhood pub. This place was not so typically Irish like the last. The walls were bare, the floors concrete, the table cheap. The music coming out as we walked in was Elton John’s version of Pinball Wizard, a travesty which should have been avoided, but shortly thereafter the music was changed to the typical pop of the day, being the likes of Hoobastank & Maroon 5, so it wasn’t long before I longed for terrible covers of great songs again.
I downed one more Guinness as Matt decided he would have just one more beer. Having now had 4 meals in a glass, I was too full for another stout, so I decided to move to liquor. Around midnight is always the best time to switch to the heavy stuff. The good and decent people of the world have already gone home, and the vagrants that are still left walking the streets always welcome the hard and quick inebriation that comes with hard liquor after several beers. So I ordered a Maker’s Mark, an excellent bourbon typically reserved for the best of occasions, and mixed it with a splash of coke. As I poured the first drink of the sweet cocktail down my throat, I noticed Matt was about to finish his beer. The tenuous moment in the night had arrived.
Not wanting my friend to have to sit and watch, I quickly offered up my couch for the evening. It’s more fun, I said, and he agreed quickly and had a drink in his hands even quicker. Then, as the decision had been made that he would get smashed at my side, we knew there was no use fucking around and ordered a shot of chilled Jagermeister.
The effects of that were not yet apparent to us when not fifteen minutes after shooting the liquid black licorice the improbable occurred. Matt & I had been sitting at the bar drinking relatively quietly for the evening up until that point, when a beautiful girl in a red tank top with “Elvis” in glittered letters across the bosom, approached us.
Quite inconsequentially, she asked what we were up to. Drinking, we said, nothing more. She asked if we lived around there, to which Matt responded no, but I said yes, I do. At this point, both Matt and I were still in shock. Or perhaps dumbstruck is a better way to put it. How the hell does this happen? There were only 4 people in the bar, and only one was a hot girl, and she approached us? We didn’t know what to do. Being that I’m already tied down, I wasn’t too worried about it, but being a young male, I wanted to see Matt fulfill this dream. Males don’t get jealous and petty when one of their comrades has an envious situation the way a woman will; rather, we pine and hope and cheer our friend so that at least we know one of us got to see a common dream come to fruit.
Now, as our shock is settling, the drink hit us, and her next comment hit us harder. “I live a couple blocks down the street, and I was just going to go back and drink some beer there.”
How do you respond to that? Matt couldn’t just jump and say, “Hey, can I come? Oh, and by the way, can we have wild sex, too?” Then again, in retrospect and given the girl’s own ability to be forward, maybe he should have. But he didn’t. Nor did I. We just sat there waiting for her to invite us. Alas, the invite didn’t come, so we had to go back to our world of getting stupid pissed.
We bemoaned our strange luck whilst closing the bar down. But since liquor has the unique ability to drown your cares, we didn’t think about it all that long, and since the bar was closing down, we had to make our plans for our next conquest. At 1:30 in St. Louis, there are only a few options. The Cheshire Inn was one such option and very close to the present location, but it was full of superficial people, a see-and-be-seen sort of place. But it was close, and we were drunk, so we decided that we would go to see-and-be-seen. We would step outside of ourselves (and our own selves had disappeared about 30 minutes after the Jagermeister shot) and hobnob with the cool kids.
We got there right at 1:30, and the place was just beginning to fill up. We ordered a few beverages and began to wander, looking for someone to chat with, or a girl to chat up. Luckily, I found our first target, a coworker of my girlfriend – Elaine.
I had only met Elaine once before, after a concert I attended with my girlfriend and a friend, Aaron. Elaine was beautiful, with the look of someone half-Korean (although I truly have no idea) and a good body. She was smart too, which I learned after having an intense discussion over the ancient Egyptians. However, she had a terrible propensity to use the word, ‘like.’ In fact, she puts every Valley Girl I’ve ever seen or heard to shame. Like, we were having this, like, conversation, when, like, she talked about Egypt and like the pyramids and such, and I was like, dear god, like this girl appears to have some, like, intelligence, but can there be, like, any more annoying person to, like, talk to?
Anyway, she had expressed an attraction to Aaron after meeting us, but when the message was relayed to my buddy, he laughed that same laugh one gives at bemusement, as if to say, “Are you serious?” Matt soon learned the story of the cute, smart girl who used the word like an unbelievable amount of times, so seeing the opportunity to hear it firsthand and at the same time meet our goal of mingling, we hit her up.
I soon was shown to be honest, as Elaine used ‘like’ three times in the first sentence. The conversation was pretty dull, and I was pretty damn drunk at that point, so I can’t really recount it right now. I can say that we realized quickly we needed to get out of that conversation rapidly, so I gave Matt a signal to excuse himself, and I soon left for the bathroom.
I came back downstairs to discover Matt mingling with a slightly brutish young woman. Not very pretty, but not ugly either, and a perfect target for our exploits. I walked up, and she asked who I was, to which Matt responded, this is my friend John. He’s from Queensland.
At this point, I should pause to explain this situation. I had recounted to Matt earlier in the evening that when I lived in Prague, an Aussie buddy of mine, Gotchy used to go around telling people I was from Queensland. I would give people a statement or two in my faux-Aussie accent and then move on – my accent is pretty bad, and tends to go from Aussie to Irish to English to Scottish and back again. I was always too nervous of being caught and having someone scream ‘Fraud!’ at the top of their lungs in a subway or some such public place, and no one likes to be called a fraud.
Nonetheless, Gotchy and I had always discussed how easy it is for stateside Aussies to find girls. American girls, I’d been told, just eat up the accent. Matt and I now being drunk, combined with the fact that I was inexplicably wearing purple shoes (always a sign in this country of a foreigner) this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it out.
“Aye, that’s roight,” I said. “Ah’m from Quanesland. Do you know where that is?” I asked her. She said yes. She then asked what was doing in St. Louis, to which I made up some story of having lived with Matt in Prague for awhile. Trying to sound like a true Aussie and at the same time make fun of my superficial friends here, I always made a point of asking if they knew where Prague, or Brisbane, or wherever, was. They always told me yes, but they were lying. Not a damn one of them knew what I was saying, just that I had a wonderfully beautiful accent.
This girl, however, had already been taken with Matt, who was just lying out of his ass the entire time, and which I confirmed in my accent by saying that he was a bloody liar. Nonetheless, she was spending most of her time talking with him, and as she was more Picasso than Monet, I didn’t care too much.
So I left and wandered around, looking for somewhere to break in, when the money moment for me came. A girl asked for something from me, but I couldn’t hear her. So I responded in my lovely accent, “What’s that, love?” If it were possible to actually see a heart melt, I saw it in her eyes. I also noticed that she was with another guy, but she was smitten with me and talked to me for a good long while. When she left, I smiled smugly, safe in the knowledge that should my relationship with my own love falter, I could always rely on my fake accent to see me through cold lonely nights in St. Louis.
Finally, I looked over and saw that Matt was dying in his conversation, so we downed our drinks and made our way to the door, bloody wasted and stronger than ever in our camaraderie, made the way to the car for a drunken drive home.
The night began easily enough and ended in a manner neither of us could have predicted. A kurva’s life is this way, I suppose. And that, like the proof in the pudding, is what makes it all fun.
