Wives Fume, Hangovers Loom

It's Monday re-hash. I wrote this essay about trying to go to a Royals game back in 2002. Most of it is true, only the names of the waitresses have been changed.

The Royals game started at 6pm. Rob lived a couple of miles north of my place in Overland Park and he grabbed his umbrella as he walked out the door. It looked like rain. We picked up Steve at 4:30 and Burt five minutes later. We started early. We wanted to eat before the first pitch. The rain started sprinkling and the forecast was for a lot more before the end of the evening.

We drove to Ruthie's Key Hole in Mission to make plans. I had trouble parallel parking the minivan so Rob jumped out and directed me safely into the space like the guy with the snow-cone flashlights on the carrier deck. After borrowing a tape measure to reckon our distance to the curb we were satisfied with the results. Inside the tiny bar, a couple of regulars noted our arrival.

"I'm the designated driver," I dead-panned as they laughed about my parking job. The four of us sat down at the bar and nearly filled up the place. The Key Hole is tiny. It's so small they only have one bathroom. Their unisex facility predated the one on Ally McBeal by 35 years. It was now after 5 o'clock and our hopes of seeing the game diminished. I ordered a can of Miller High Life.

"You want a champagne glass with that," said Misty, the barmaid with the face that launched a thousand ship-wrecks. I declined. Two grizzled Key-Hole veterans walked in the back door. They stood around since we were hogging the bar. It was getting crowded with all nine of us in there. We decided to leave and eat at the Lucky Brew grille down the street.

"Lucky Bluegill? Sounds like a Burl Ives song," remarked Steve. That prompted my best Burl Ives impression as I piloted the Windstar past the Mission police station. It loses something in the retelling but trust me it was great. A quick check of the Delco AM radio revealed no Royals pre-game show despite the fact we were less than an hour away from the scheduled start of the game against the Red Sox. This was not a good sign.

At the Brew grille, we requested a table and got a booth instead. The conversation turned serious. We realized we hadn't been together since the world trade center towers fell. Rob told us about his recent trip to ground zero and the emotional impact of the visit that still lingered. That horrible day seemed so long ago. Were we too self-involved in our own day-to-day existence to comprehend the enormity of the events on 9-11? The answer would have to wait. The cheese dip had arrived.

It was really raining now. We gave up on going to the stadium. I passed out slips of paper and borrowed a pen from the waitress. We each wrote the name of a neighborhood bar that we'd never visited. The pub-crawl commenced.

Burt picked Geno's bar on Shawnee Mission parkway across from the old A & W root beer stand. He had a hard time thinking of a bar he'd never been to before. When we got to Geno's we discovered it was no longer named Geno's. For the remainder of this essay, it will be known as "the bar formerly known as Geno's" (TBFKAG). It seemed like old times when we spotted our favorite stool-holder from Ruthie's anchoring the corner seat. "Hey, are you guys stalking me," he said as he held a cigarette between his teeth. The smoke was going right in his eye, so he winked at us. What a kidder. He told his friends about my parking job at Ruthie's and we laughed and nearly bought him a beer. We quickly discovered TBFKAG also has a unisex bathroom and we wondered if this held some perverse appeal for our new bar buddy.

Heavy rain forced us to have two beers at this totally unremarkable establishment. I've been in church basement multi-purpose rooms on Indian reservations with more style than this place. The bar offered direct access to the deli next door. Steve, Burt, and Rob stepped through the swinging doors to check out the down-pour through the storefront windows next to the soup corner. The deli guy yelled at them for bringing their beers in. It was time to go.

The next stop was the El Torreon Mexican restaurant, home of the fishbowl margarita. Rob wanted to give it a try. The place was about twice the size of Ruthie's K-Hole. We sat down and ordered four of their signature cocktails. These drinks are unique. They're mostly tequila and glow like Prestone anti-freeze. They will mess you up if you're not careful. I recalled that a mutual friend used to be a waitress here in 1980. It hadn't changed much since then. They even had the same DeCloud studio portrait photo of a middle-aged woman on the wall. She had feathered hair and a white spaghetti-string western-style top with fringe. It's as though she was saying 'You could have seen me here if you had stopped by during Reagan's first term.' We suspected it was the owner's portrait but feathered hair and spaghetti-string western wear were in short supply among the staff.

It was Burt's round and before he paid the 23 dollars, he popped the question to the waitress. Burt likes to mess with the help at every place he visits. The waitress said no to the marriage proposal and took his money. He left her a generous tip that included one of those Sacagawea dollar coins. "That's not a quarter, you know."

The rain let up and we went to Schooners on the frontage road near 79th street. You can't go wrong with a joint on Frontage road. Either 'Frontage road' or 'Airport road' is usually a good bet if you're looking for more waitresses to marry. I married a waitress who worked on Frontage (Sue from The Longbranch at 87th and I-35). See, it's true.

When we got there we discovered they changed the name to Geno's. Actually, that's not true. They changed the name to Mulvaney's Beef and Brew. I liked Geno's better and it was available, but I guess beef and brew is good too. We ordered drinks and the waitress carded us after she gave us the drinks. Burt immediately started slurping his vodka and 7up and refused to show his driver's license. Our server looked like the Michelin Man's country cousin. Her name was Renee or Raisin, we weren't really sure. The hand-tooled calligraphy on her name tag obscured her true identity. A cell phone rang. It was our friend Angie on the line from the Grand Street Café. She and some girl friends were having dinner and they wanted to know where to go for fun after their chicken sandwiches arrived. Just then, Raisin stole Burt's wallet and commandeered his Sam's club card in lieu of an I.D. She figured anybody with a Sam's club card was probably over 21. She also stole his coupon for a free "Save the Tiger" poster, good at any participating Orlando area Exxon station. This part of the story is actually a secret reference to Seinfeld for you George Costanza fans.

Mulvaney's featured some crappy décor. It was that rusty Coca-Cola sign, tattered Hollywood poster, vaguely-local sports team motif. On the way to the men's room I spied a headshot of Marilyn Monroe. It was signed, "To Mulvaney's, you have great quesadillas, Love Marilyn". I wonder how much Mulvaney's paid Marilyn for the plug. I'm no marketing wizard but I think Lupe Velez would have been better. She wasn't as over-exposed and they didn't call her the Mexican spitfire for nothing.

Like Lupe and Marilyn, this place was dead. Raisin begged us to stay for Karaoke but the D.J. was late. He was supposed to be there at 9pm but it was already 9:15pm and we walked out. We pretended like it was because the guy was late. We actually always planned on leaving because the real hot spot for Karaoke was our next stop.

The Red Balloon used to be a biker bar. Now it's been totally retooled and refurbished as a biker-Karaoke bar. Some crusty dude with Willie Nelson pig-tails was signing "Turn the Page" by Bob Seger when we walked into the restaurant, strung out from the road. We could feel the eyes upon us as we were shakin' off the cold. We pretend it doesn't bother us, but we just want to explode. Not really.

The Karaoke DJ must have been deaf. He had the speaker volume cranked to the max. We actually took some Karaoke request sheets and stuffed them in our ears to dull the pain that came from listening to a drunk college kid sing Lionel Ritchie's "Three Times a Lady". Steve put a Sacagawea dollar in his ear. About thirty minutes later, Angie and her friends joined us. Unfortunately, our table was right under the speaker and we could only converse in semaphore flag signals. This worked well for those of us who remembered to bring our semaphore flags but somebody always forgets. So we hung out with the bikers and the frat boys and the Japanese tourists and waited for our turn to take the Karaoke stage. Burt and Rob chose "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" under the stage name of "Cletus and friend". Burt took the lead and Rob chimed in with some of the dialog in the first verse where Johnny is negotiating his bet with the devil, but he dropped the ball on the "Chicken in the bedpan" verse. It's a good thing they weren't on American Idol.

We were all going deaf and we stunk like Winstons so we decided to go to Angie's house for the official "Red Balloon after-party" and de-reeking. It was after 11pm and Kansas liquor stores were closed. So we crossed the state line and bootlegged some booze! Cue the banjo music. Yankee-Bravo, Yankee-Bravo, break-break. That's semaphore flag code for "outa beer, outa here".

Later at Angie's, I drank one more beer and chatted with the girls. I even smoked a cigarette and impressed myself with some French inhaling. Don't tell my wife. She doesn't know I'm French. We stayed for an hour or so before I decided it was a good time to pilot the Windstar homeward. In the car, Steve said we should do this every month. When we got to his house, I told him I would be a good guy and wait for him to get inside before I drove away. He fumbled with his keys too long so I rolled down the window and yelled, "Screw it, you're on your own!" This good guy thing only goes so far. Let him climb in a window for chrissake.

Rob forgot his keys and had to wake up his wife to get in his house. That's the least preferred method of returning home after a nine-hour ball game rainout pub-crawl. He has an agreement with his wife about that. He wakes her up all drunk and stinking of smoke and she lets him in and washes his feet. I won't tell you what my wife called me when I got home. She confiscated my semaphore flags but she'll get over it. My only real regret was that I didn't get to sing "Brandy" by Looking Glass at the Red Balloon. We'll have to go back.