Oh, The Humanity!

Being a member of a Rock Band, you get to see a lot of shit that you would otherwise never see elsewhere -- especially if you play the bar circuit. Playing in the dives are always more entertaining than playing the "A-Clubs". On a slightly unrelated tangent, I find it amazing that people can be civil to one another, but the moment you pump six beers into them, they become unreasonable animals.

This weekend, I was playing in one of the worst joints I have been in. It was definitely not the worst bar I have been in, but there were some things I have seen this weekend that made me shake my head in disbelief.

There was this useless lush in the bar Thursday night. He was so drunk he could barely walk, barely talk, and I'm sure he forgot his name sometime in the afternoon. By the time we began playing at 9:00, he was quite unruly, and he kept trying to climb up on the stage and talk to us -- while we were playing. The barmaid walked up to him and warned him once to cool it, but it was obvious that the warning didn't sink in. So the barmaid threw him out.

Not five minutes later the idiot lush stumbled back into the bar. The barmaid promptly threw his drunk ass out, but that didn't stop him. A few minutes later, he was back in the bar, and he refused to leave.

This particular bar does not carry a staff of bouncers, though it is in dire need of some. In these riff-raff joints, bouncers are regarded only as expenses, so when things get aggressive, the best thing you can do is say a quick prayer and duck, or get the hell out of the bar.

The barmaid called the cops to get this uncooperative excuse for a human being out of the bar. The cops arrived, and hauled his drunk ass out. I was convinced that would be the last I would see of him that night.

Not twenty minutes later he re-entered the bar -- where he remained until the bar closed. He hadn't been served in over four hours, but there he stayed, consuming precious oxygen in a smoke-filled bar.

I gotta tell you, if I were managing that bar, I would have taken steps to ensure that he would not set foot in that bar for the rest of the night -- and maybe a few days after that. The doctors would have laboured to surgically remove a foot from his colon.

Then there was the old guy last night. When I entered the bar at 8:30, he was completely shit-faced. He was enthusiastic about our music, but I could not understand a single sentence he said, as he was slurring so bad, and his sentences had little content except for seemingly endless streams of profanity: "Shitgoddamnmotherfuckinkeepitrealyougoddamnmotherfuckersyoukickassyousonofabitchesrockthesefuckinwhores"

I had my bets that this drunk wouldn't make it until 10:00. If I was a gambling man, I would have lost dearly this weekend. I watched in disbelief as this old man continued to be served the entire evening. If I drank as much as these guys did, I would either be in a coffin, or dehydrated past the point of mummification.

After Friday's performance, a few of the guys in the band decided to go across town to a truck stop and get some greasy food. I did not join them, but the nest night I began hearing the stories. They were seated next to the same old guy who had watched us all night, who was still muttering incoherently: "Fuckintwobitwhoreswontsellmeagoddamnbeerfuckthisstupidassshit". I would usually laugh at the unsettling nature of such things, but what I saw this weekend was so depressing that I cannot believe how low some people will go.

Which reminds me of the Cougar that was in the bar tonight. She was likely fifty years old, with a face that only a mother could kiss, when she stared at the band we could tell she either took a trip down the stairs, walked into a cupboard, or her husband decided she needed a good ass-whooping. We had only played about three songs, and she jumped on the dance floor, and began dancing by herself to the music. She appeared like she drank a keg herself; she loved the music we were playing, and she was very, very horny. It was only a matter of seconds that she had her shirt off, wildly waving it in the air, and then succeeded to make sweet love to a load-bearing post on the dance floor. It took every ounce of strength I had to keep myself form either vomiting, or stopping our song altogether. By the time the barmaid made it from the bar to the dance floor to stop this nonesense, our drunken cougar was trying her hardest to get her pants unbuttoned. The barmaid wrestled with her, and managed to force her into the ladies' washroom where I assumed that the drunk would be allowed to get herself decent. The two of them emerged a minute later, and the cougar was escorted out of the bar. I think I was quite glad to not see her the rest of the night.

At the end of the set, I asked the other band members to wash my eyes out with Lysol.

I am quite happy that I will not have to perform in that dump in the foreseeable future.