Four Towns

Los Angeles, CA

Four weeks. Four cities. A little same, a whole lot different. I only spent a couple of days in SoCal in December, whereas I divided my time between New Orleans, Miami, and the bulk of the Christmas holidays in NYC. The constant movement is a good thing. It jogs the brain. The constant dissonance between new and old can be an ultimate mind fuck... if you let it. Or it can be a lazy afternoon basking in the soothing warmth of yesteryear.

Los Angeles. The ubiquitous sunshine makes the holidaze seems more fake than a relgiious holiday that got hijacked to sell shit we really don't need. Nothing says I love you more than a pair of socks, or a new sweater, or a piece of electronic equipment that will become obsolete in six months if it doesn't break first. I was never really into Christmas trees (i.e. utter waste of money) until I moved to LA because I need something to make it feel like Christmas. The constant sunshine doesn't mesh well with Christmas... and the weak ass attempt with palm trees and Christmas lights is more laughable than applaudable as the denizens of Southern California desperately try to get in the Christmas spirit. Nicky knows no other holiday season (SoCal Xmas) because she is one of the rare citizens of the City of Angels who actually grew up in LA and has no other childhood point of perspective of waking up to an actual White Christmas. Me? Wasn't jungle bells written about last minute holiday shopping in New York City? In the urban decay of Gotham in the 1970s, the only thing that didn't smell like urine and rotting garbage was the rare scent of Christmas trees that invaded almost every major street corner. It's a sense memory that has been imprinted on my brain along with a numb face. It's supposed to be cold as fuck at Christmas and your nose gets numb because you spend a lot of time wandering around the streets while shopping for gifts (in the pre-Amazonian era), or spending late evenings staggering around shitfaced drunk admiring the foggy gasps of breath that roar out of everyone's mouths while hopping from Christmas/holiday party to party to party either company parties (ranging from low-end to baller bankster) to friends' tiny apartments to the odd, random party you randomly crashed in a bar somewhere. In the modern era, the LA holiday party is drenched in artisan, gluten-free hipsterfied chow and ironic blinking lights and superficial guests that are silently judging you but more worried that they'll look "pasty" in their next batch of selfies because everyone is sweating their asses off in a rare public display of their winter wardrobe. No one walks anywhere unless it's to the valet, so any sensible party people are making a cameo before Ubering to the next party up in the hills before all the medium-passable quality of drugs are inhaled by dilettantes and all the hardened dope fiends are haggling over a couple of frail lines of shitty-ass baby laxative, which you paid dearly for in actual time and mental anguish by listening to the same douchenozzle with shitty blow prattle on about his latest script conference with someone you're supposed to be impressed with and all you keep wondering is if your Uber driver knows a better coke connection.

New Orleans. Shit got crazy. Either I'm getting old, or I forgot about the darkness that oozes underneath Bourbon Street. Maybe it's a little of both. Liquor is a a true pestilence upon this land. Too much of liquid anything makes everyone's eyes look mean. I felt a little safety being with my brother, who still resides in the Bronx, and hanging with two medical doctors, a lawyer, and Iraq War vet. Just in case shit got too crazy, we had a small, yet elite crew of professional party people. When you're running AlCantHang with the bulls down Bourbon Street, the last thing you want to have to do is pull someone out of a potential all-out street brawl. Testosterone and liquor can always be tempered with cool heads, but it only takes one idiot to incite an ass-whooping. Yeah, it sounds a lot worse than the reality that everyone was safe as long as we stuck together and didn't do anything too stupid like wander off solo in the wrong direction where the shadow people can jump your schwasted ass and snatch your valuables before they haul ass back into the shadowy side streets. Partying always comes at a cost, but without a high risk, you don't get that big payoff. It's sort of like going on an animal safari and praying you don't get trampled by a stampede of irate giraffes. But New Orleans was rough without the usually indulgences of food and liquor because I had some minor dental surgery a few days before the trip and I couldn't drink heavily with the prescribed meds (it felt strangely uncomfortable actually waiting in line to acquire pharmaceutical products for a real pharmacy) and could barely eat at all because my mouth hurt too much. The first bit of solid food I had in days occurred as soon as I arrived in the French Quarter and Otis handed me something wrapped up in a napkin. Fried chicken. Damn fine-ass fried chicken. I tore into it like a vulture picking apart the dead carcass of some unlucky roadkill. Maybe the abundant dark energy was so prevalent because I spent three nights  extremely sober, which was the most coherent trip I had ever taken to New Orleans in 20+ years.

NYC. Can you ever really go home again? My favorite time of the year is also the most stressful. I equally love/loathe Christmas in NYC because... well... you know... family shit. It's never easy, but we all have to deal with it somehow. I've lost my patience the last few years. It's the product of a near-death-experience when you come out the other side not giving a fuck anymore and you come to a moment of clarity like, "Why am I wasting my time with people who will never change?" But it's the city that really brings me back. The ghosts. The memories. The forgotten memories are the best presents... just taking a wrong turn and walking down a street you had not walked down in two decades is enough to trigger an avalanche of memories. The mind is a masterful magical kingdom... and you can truly bend time and space by accessing your memory banks, but sometimes you lose too much time like I do, wandering streets that I had not wandered down in years... both physically and mentally. An old friend once said our childhood rooms are like museums to our own self, usually curated by whatever parent or family member still lives there. My childhood room is barely recognizable, but there's plenty of memories in boxes and cluttered inside a gigantic closet. I could spent a month in that room getting lost in forty years of living. But too much navel gazing is a bad thing, but too little insight into your past is also a dangerous thing. You need a healthy balance, which is the key to self-awareness. Never forget where you came from, but never forget it will never truly define where you're going because you're the one driving the bus. Or something like that.

Miami. A whole other country/city/nation state. Miami will someday sink into the ocean. Might take 500 years or 5,000 but someday most of Florida will be all underwater and delegated to a series of island chains off the coast of the US of A. Call the city water you want... New Cuba, or North Cuba, or Los Miami, or whatever... it's definitely not America anymore. I spent a lot of time covering the Latin America Poker Tour, so my time in Miami felt more like being on the road in a foreign country than visiting the southern most city in America. Miami has always been driven by its own unique rhythm, but the confluence of international travelers, ubiquitous sunshine and cheap drugs makes Miami one of the rowdiest destinations on the planet. But like any of those party-centric small cities whose magical reputation turned its legacy into a much larger city than actually exists. Miami is not so much a city as it is a state of mind. Miami... the constant flow... it's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. If anything, I got to end the year by spending a semi-romantic week in a tropical paradise with my girlfriend, who desperately needed a real vacation after a rigorous work schedule. Plus I got the added bonus of seeing old friends from college... the coolest type of friends who don't guilt trip you or make it awkward to reconnect. Oh, and one of my favorite bands played four concerts so life ain't too bad when you have all the elements for a guaranteed fun time.

Four towns. Four weeks. Last year ended like most years... on the road and hopeful for a new year.

Dive Bar Sanctuary

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Sanctuary. That's the best way to describe a comforting dive bar.

I'm not talking about a local neighborhood bar, like Cheers, in which everyone knows your name. I like the kind of dive bar in which no one knows my name and I can walk in off the street and disappear for a few hours, as the bar provides a sanctuary for me and my thoughts.

Then again, I walked into a New Orleans dive bar with AlCantHang, and the barkeep shrieked, "Al!" as soon as she saw him.

I spent my fair share of time in dive bars all across America. Dive bars are my favorite kind of bars. I never liked those cool, hip bars. In college, everyone went to the same fucking meat-market bar on Thursday nights, but I opted for a quieter and more laid back dive. That was twenty years ago, when I was in peak drinking shape and could polish off a 24-pack of Schaefer in a few hours. Nowadays, it would take me a week to drink that much beer.

I'm a dive bar guy. I'm now in my 40s and I don't wait in lines with velvet ropes in order to get a drink. Worst thing I hated about Las Vegas. The fucking club scene. It might have been more my speed in my early 20s if I was jacked up on ecstasy, but I don't imbibe much these days, so when I do choose to get liquored up the last thing I'm going to do is wait in line to get in the bar, then wait another fifteen minutes at the bar to get a drink. Or worse, they fall prey to the biggest sucker bet in Vegas outside of blackjack insurance... bottle service... in which schmucks pay an redonkulously overcharged price for a bottle of vodka, just so they can feel like they're somebody. Yeah, you're somebody all right... a fucking moronic mook who is pathetically trying to buy coolness, so they're willing to dish out mega bucks on inflated liquor prices. Hey, but that's why club owners in Vegas are rolling in dough. There's no shortage of brainwashed, desperate wannabes in search of "cool." Unfortunately the only validation they get is a fat SUCKER label stamped on their forehead and a juicy credit card bill.

I hate clubs because of all the anxiety involved. The guy with the clipboard is a judgmental asswipe. The waitresses are snooty. The bouncers are itching to pound someone's head in. Clubs and hip bars are crowded with annoying vapid wankers and chicks more interested in posting selfies than carrying on a semi-legitimate conversation. Plus the DJ is too cool for your tastes and thinks he's Skillrex.

But let's face it... I'm at the right age in which it is socially acceptable to be drinking in old man's bars. It's a little pathetic if I'm hopelessly trying to get into swanky clubs with ropes, or worse, being that middle-aged guy trying to bribe a thick-necked bouncer in hopes he'll let me cut the line for a Benjamin.

I had a bartending stint at an old man's bar. Didn't work there very long. Tips were terrible. Stories were better than average. But these were grizzled alkies with perpetually bloodshot eyes that waited outside for the bar to open every morning. The atmosphere in old man bars was sullen and pathetic. Petty arguments about sports and politics that went no where. But that's what those guys wanted. They were drowning in their own melancholy and afflicted with the disease. They were all waiting to die, so all they wanted was to nurse their drinks and be shielded from the slings and arrows of the outside world. The same world that was happy to keep those sad fuckers hidden away from productive members of society.

Don't get an old man's bar confused with a dive bar. Sometimes they are one in the same. In most urban settings, the old guys drink there during the day and then stagger off when happy hour ends, when the bar becomes a haven for average working folks looking for a low key place to drink. But the problem with some dive bars is that they often get filled hipsters looking to be hip, or party people purposefully slumming. Old guys have a very low tolerance for hipsters. Then again, so does everyone.

A good dive bar attracts the wide spectrum of people, so on any given night you'll have that silent old drunk slumped in the corner, and a couple of sorority chicks doing shots, a poet trying to read a book, banksters in pinstripes (rushing off to the john to do rails), a potential Rhodes scholar or the junkie with the leather jacket that played in that so-called legendary punk band.

A good dive bar is the kind of place you can do blow in the bathroom and its totally cool. An awesome dive bar will let you do it on the bar. My favorite dives are the places where you can fire up a joint in the alley, so long as you invite the bartender.

The bartender at a good dive bar is sort of a cross between a rock star and a prison guard. They are grossly outnumbers by the inmates, but they hold the extreme authority so you never want to fuck with a bartender otherwise you'll never get a drink. The most power I ever felt as an adult happened when I was tending bar and I got to shun a potential customer by making them wait forever before I took their order. It's even a bigger fuck you if there's three people in the bar.

We spent the majority of last weekend in the same dive bar on Toulouse Street in the French Quarter. AlCantHang picked it out. It was in his DNA. It was nestled next to something called The Dungeon, which is exactly what you think it is. Cross between an S&M club and the type of bar that blasts heavy metal so loud that your ears will bleed after five minutes.

At the dive, we befriended one of the locals that we dubbed Will the Thrill. I couldn't tell if he was a pool hustler who was having an off night, or just an average player who thought he was a hustler. One thing is for certain, you never want to play pool against a guy who brought his own stick. A serious hustler doesn't want anyone to know they're good so they play with house sticks, which Will the Thrill was doing.

At one point he tapped me as his partner to play a match against two locals. One kid looked like a meth dealer and the other looked like he lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. They all knew each other, which made me a little leery. I spotted myself as the sucker. But Will the Thrill wanted to use me as bait. I was clearly off my game. I haven't played bar pool in a very long time. For one, I never hang out in bars anymore, and haven't been inside a pool hall in years. In our 20s, Senor and I used to go out and shoot pool all the time in NYC. We'd hit up the dive bar circuit in the East Village, and when he wanted to cruise for hot Korean girls, we'd migrate to midtown. NYC pool halls gave non-drinkers a chance to socialize without having to be inside a bar.

In New Orleans, I played the roll as the bad pool player perfectly. It was a performance worthy of an Oscar nod. I didn't even have to try to be bad. I was bad. I think they call that method acting, right?

The dive bar had a pool table with two crooked sticks and a piece of chalk on its last licks. The worn table only cost 50 cents which was a throw back to my college days. Shit there was one hipster bar in San Francisco where pool cost $2 a game, so you better win your games otherwise it was going to be an expensive night out.

But I wasn't that bad all weekend. At one point Iggy and I held the table for over ninety minutes before we lost to Otis and his brother in a rematch game. Then again, we weren't really paying attention much so the games dragged on and on. It was one of those types of games when no one was shooting for a few minutes and you had to walk across the bar and say, "I think you're up.... but I forget if we're low or high."

No wonder Will the Thrill wanted to use one of us as bait to hustle the other locals.

Besides a pool table, the most important element to any bar is the jukebox. The pool table lures in the degenerate gamblers, but the jukebox is how you woo women. Well, that and some roofies and tequila.

At one point, an incredulous Iggy lectured the tandem of AlCantHang and Bad Blood on their affinity for heavy metal. I had a heavy metal phase when I was a kid, but these days it's nowhere close to my favorite genre. I could tolerate a few songs, especially because I dug the one Tool song that they played, but the bartender turned it down a few notches. You could also sense the few other customers in the bar weren't keen on the thrashing. Iggy lost his cool after one song.

"What up with this crap?" snarled Iggy. "If you want to listen to death metal, go next door!"

The Dungeon next door had a jukebox filled with heavy metal. When I walked in the previous night with Al and Dave, I was bombarded with Iron Maiden. It felt like 7th grade all over again. The Dungeon's jukebox also had Steel Panther, a heavy metal cover band that played weekly gigs in Vegas and LA. They had an original tune called Asian Hooker. Al and Dave put it on, but we had to wait an hour before their songs came up in the queue. By then I was nearly deaf. After seeing almost a thousand loud concerts since I was a teenager, my hearing is not the best anymore. After the Dungeon, I felt like I had blown out my ear drums.

Back at the dive bar, while Iggy was lecturing Al and Bad Blood, I jokingly rallied the troops and told everyone to throw a few bucks into the Jukebox to make sure we didn't have to suffer another wave of heavy metal from the headbangers in the bar. But I offered up my own expertise on selecting the proper Jukebox songs.

"You're essentially taking on the roll as DJ for a few minutes, which means you have a responsibility to entertain the bar, keep the ladies swaying, but most importantly, you have to keep the bartender happy. You can't shove your music down people's throats. In most bars, the bartender has the volume controls. In some bars, the bartender has supreme veto power. Nothing sucks more than dumping a few bucks into a jukebox and then getting cockblocked because the bartender has an issue with whatever song you picked."

If you pay for three songs (it was three songs for a buck), the rule I adhere to is this: one for the bar, one for you, and one deep cut to make the bar go "Wow! Haven't heard this in a while!" The softball pick is the easiest. The one for you is touchy because you want to pick something that you love, but you also want something that you think everyone else will dig. And the deep cut is problematic if the jukebox has a limited selection. But if you can find the right combination, then there's nothing like  jubilant bar patrons singing along to something you put on. I even put on some Sublime to keep my brother interested.

The dive bar's jukebox was filled with standard classic rock, lots of grunge, and more heavy metal than the average bar should have. They also had some bizarre and weird stuff like industrial music from Germany and the Hinterlands. But it lacked contemporary music (I don't think I saw anything older than Pearl Jam) and didn't have anything that the ladies would love like Motown, disco, and other dance-inducing songs.

Old man bars are rarely happy, but dive bars are different. Depends on the ebbs and flows of the clientele and what gets played on the jukebox. A cozy dive might emit good vibes, but it's really a place to hide out for a few hours.

Most bars are depressing because of its clientele or what they are trying to achieve.You can drink at home and its much cheaper. You can drink on the street if you do not have a home, which is also cheaper than a bar. But you go to a bar to be social, but if you go to an old man's bar or a dive bar, you are passive-aggressively looking to be social. We're all lonely. Some of us life-long addicts would rather succumb to addiction in the privacy of your own home, which is why there's millions of Americans every night hopped up on pills and getting sloshed on their couches. For the adventurous lonely souls, dive bars gives them a chance to potentially interact with other lonely souls, who want to hide out but not banish themselves into complete seclusion.

Some bars are technicolor. Most dive bars are black and white. Like stepping back into an old photograph leaping back into the past. Bending time. Sometimes its sepia. Sometimes its blue. Or green-tinged. A proper dive bar has no proper distinction. Perspective is "as is" while living precisely in the moment.

Dive bars are supposed to be a place where kindred spirits gather. Sort of the opposite of a family gathering. Because family holidays have a certain amount of animosity and hatred involved. You usually do not go to places where you're not wanted. You tend to avoid people who hate your guts. Which is why high school is so painful and why holiday gatherings are so stressful because you're forced to interact with people who hate your guts and they do a bad job trying to shine it on for the holidays.

Balance is the key. If a dive becomes too popular then it gets gentrified with hipsters and then it loses its laid back appeal. If it gets too dismal and dark, then it becomes an utter shit hole of misery. The entire point of a dive bar is to find momentary solace from the rigors of life and escape the other shit holes you're stuck in whether its home, work, or school. You don't trade one shit hole for another. You just want a place where you can be yourself and truly relax.

As I started drinking less and less (and more and more at home), I discovered that I missed out on dive bars, which were an oasis from the barren grind of everyday life. Amsterdam had a heady alternative with hash bars and coffeeshops, which certainly appealed to me much more than a regular bar. San Francisco had a few dives in my hood in LoPac, but it was always crowded with hipsters slumming it.

But in New Orleans, Al found the right dive. Which is why we spend more time there than any other place. It was centrally located. A few blocks from where we were all staying. It had a pizza join half a block away and a Lucky Dog cart in front. It was right off Bourbon Street so we could see the lewd behavior of shitfaced tourists like the one 20-something guy who was fingering a cougar right in front of the bar, or the barbacks from a popular bar across the street who wandered over to roll joints in front of the dive bar.

The dive even had bathrooms behind hidden bookcases, so if you went in for the first time, you'd have no idea where you should do your business. Even those secret doors did not have locks, which provided some sense of security of you were dropping a deuce or trying to do a few lines.
 
The only thing the dive did not have was its own breathalyzer. Luckily one was located across the street inside the Tropical Isle. I somehow got the task of setting the lines of our friends BAC. It was not an exact science. I'd quiz them on what they had drank that day, but more importantly, what did they consume in the previous hour. It was a simple over/under. You'd be shocked to see what some of the crew blew. AlCantHang's BAC was so high one time I had no idea how he was standing, let alone breathing. Then again, that's why he's AlCantHang.

A perfect dive bar never changes. It's a sanctuary for your battered soul.

The Return to the Big Easy

By Pauly
New Orleans, LA

Feels weird to be back. But a good weird.

I had not been back to New Orleans since Katrina. Has it really been 10 years since I last roamed the streets of NOLA? I think Jazzfest 2003 was the last time I partied here.

For most of my 20s, New Orleans was my favorite city in America before it was overtaken by Las Vegas. But I've been burnt out on Vegas for a few years now, and San Francisco or Denver have been vying for my favorite city. But walking through New Orleans brought back a flood of memories.

I got hooked on New Orleans during my first visit in college, back when the drinking age was actually 18 and I didn't need a fake ID to get sloshed in bars for Mardi Gras. New Orleans was a quick 6-hour trip from Atlanta. Actually it is seven hours, but you get an extra hour due to the time change. I don't know how many times we made the sojourn.

When you're a young aspiring writer, you think about what will be your first attempt at writing the Great American Novel. For a few years, I thought I was going to write a manuscript about heading to New Orleans for Mardi Gras during my senior year in college. Seven of my friends chipped in and we rented an RV. Drove it from Atlanta to New Orleans, and then back to Atlanta with a sidetrip to Biloxi, MS for a little blackjack and poker. Much like the characters in Easy Rider, we were headed to New Orleans but really searching for a short cut to the American Dream.

The ride down was a little hectic. We had dropped liquid sunshine and a friend of a friend invited himself along at the last second. We only let him tag along because he offered to drive half of the way to NOLA. He drove fast, very fast, especially for an RV. My bud Dutch, who was in the middle of his Jim Morrison phase, was concerned about our lead-foot driver.

A RV blazing down an interstate in the deep south, filled with frat boys, weed, acid, and who knows what, was definite probable cause.

Dutch was concerned and rightfully so. We had a few extra doses on us and we made a pact that if we happened to get pulled over, then we'd take one for the team and eat the remainder of the doses, which were on sugarcubes.

At one point somewhere in Southern Alabama, we noticed flashing red and blue lights. Then the RV abruptly pulled over to the side of the road. Dutch freaked out. He thought we were about to get pinched. "We gotta do it," he said with his hands shaking as he pulled out the last of the sugarcubes. I ate two, which brought my intake to three since we had left Atlanta a few hours earlier.

It turned out that our driver had to take a leak, so he pulled over the side of the road to relieve himself. The flashing lights? Not for us. We ate the extra cubes for no reason other than sheer paranoia. We were tripping balls the rest of the ride to New Orleans. We must;e got in around 2am or 3am. I wandered around the French Quarter until sunrise before I was finally somewhat right. We ended up parking the RV in front of a church for the duration of Mardi Gras. I barely slept. Drank my weight in booze. And somehow won enough money in Biloxi to pay for the trip.

But that was almost 20 years ago. Memories run deep.

I always wanted to visit New Orleans with AlCantHang. For some reason, we've known each other for almost a decade but we never pulled off a trip.... until now. Life and work had gotten into the way and we could never find the proper time. Luckily, Otis gave us a great excuse to fulfill one of those bucket list items (17. Go to New Orleans with AlCantHang.).

Al found us a quaint local's house to rent. It's in the heart of the Quarter and hidden so much so that it's easy to miss. Feel kind of cool not being in a hotel. No intrusive maids. No industrial soap smell. We can pretend to be locals. There's a corner bar on the corner, a few steps away. One of the oldest in New Orleans, one of the oldest in America. I have not drank much the last few months, but I have a feeling I'll make up for all that missed time over the next few days. At least rum is in my wheelhouse. I'm ready for a hurricane of Hurricanes.

But more importantly, I have all those memories and all those ghosts to keep me company. Anything that can jog and jilt my memory is a good thing. Especially considering how fried my brain was during previous trips. I wish I could write more, but it's time to lose time.