Originally posted: October 14, 2005
I hope I don’t sound like I’m bragging when I say that I truly believe Aye Aye and myself have become true masters in the art of Bar Comedy. Bar Comedy, for the uninitiated, is the ancient technique of performing random acts in a bar that are so incredibly stupid, immature, and purposely embarrassing that they can’t even be blamed on the booze alone, but rather on a deep-seated need by the performers to annoy every single soul within the bar. A successful act of Bar Comedy is judged by two results – the loud laughter of very few in the bar other than the performers, and the performers exiting the bar with un-kicked asses.
This weekend in St. Petersburg, Florida, Aye Aye and I engaged in so many of these acts that we discovered we had actually transcended the base levels of this ancient technique, and moved into a whole new realm. This new realm Aye Aye termed Jazz Comedy. Jazz Comedy requires that the performers be so skilled in the art of debaucherous ridiculousness that their performances take on the characteristics of a good jazz song – one man begins the act, and the other follows along. There’s no need for communication or pre-planning, just a comfort in the knowledge that in whatever direction one desires to take the song, the other will be right there with him, never losing a beat. This weekend St. Petersburg became the birthplace of Jazz Comedy, and the following is the tale of its birth.
Oh, and before I go on with our tales that should probably be left untold, I must note that this is all based on my personal recollections. Meaning that the concept of time and space may be a little skewed – particular orders of events should not be considered accurate. This sad fact, unlike good Bar Comedy, can be blamed on the booze.
Thursday
I arrived to Aye Aye’s place in St. Petes a little after 11 pm on a Thursday night, and after a brief couple beers soundtracked by loud punk rock, we wandered over to a local bar. Somehow, with only an hour and a half between our entrance into the bar and our exit at closing time, a passive observer could have mistakenly concluded that we’d been holed up at the bar for the past 6 hours. As we stepped off the front porch of the place, I noticed a children’s playground over in the sand just a few feet away. Excited, I turned to Aye Aye who was chatting with the owner of the place, and exictedly asked if I could go have some fun on the playground. The owner complied, so I yanked off my shirt (the first time of many this weekend), ran over to the playground, and began crawling all over the thing. Some drunken girl who had been sitting on the front porch decided to join in the fun. While I stood up on the top of slide, deliberating whether to do a flying diveroll from the top into the sand below, the drunk girl begin to whip down the slide on her back, head first. I decided against diverolling from the top of the slide, instead choosing to do so from the middle, and effectively prevented myself from breaking a shoulder. Aye Aye then hopped over to the playground, pulled himself up onto the monkey bars, and stood atop them, balancing, hands out-stretched, illuminated by the moon behind.
We then began our walk back to his place, and soon Aye Aye snatched the free Budweiser shirt that I had been carrying under my arm and began lighting it with his Bic. He kneeled there in the street for a while, holding the flame to the shirt, ignoring my protests to not destroy my gift. Soon, the thing was nothing but a flaming rag, and my protests were replaced by a new chant: “Dude, throw it at my back!” “No, man,” he replied. “Come on! Seriously!” “Ok.” He grabbed the flaming ball and tossed it at my bare back. “Dude, let me throw it at your back!” I yelled. “No, man,” he replied. “Come on! Seriously!” “Ok.” I grabbed the flaming ball and tossed it at his back. We then stomped out the fire-shirt and wandered back to his place, responsibly, as if we weren’t just throwing fire balls at backs.
Friday
The next afternoon consisted of a few hours of severly hungover fishing, and then we headed back out to the bars. Our brains were still hurting from the night before, and it took us about three bar visits, a good number of beers, and a half hour of pushing buttons on a bar trivia machine (where Aye Aye scored 58,000,000 in music trivia) before we could get up the motivation to be idiots again. But when the mood struck, it struck hard.
We were exiting some random outdoor night festival we’d stumpled upon, when we spotted three girls doing what appeared to be drunken cheerleader moves. One girl was standing in the middle of the two others while they held tightly onto her elbows. They all counted to three, the middle girl jumped, the two girls on the side threw up their arms, and the middle girl launched into a perfect back flip, landing squarely on her feet behind them. Yeah! It was impressive! And it looked like fun! I ran over to the group. “Hey girls, can I try?” Uhhh… Ok… I stood in between two of them and they grabbed onto my elbows. I could hear a group of three dudes over to the side mocking me – “Hurry up, loser!” I bent my knees, prepared for my circus act, and we counted.
One! Two! Three!
Nothing. I chickened out. We tried again. I chickened out again. I thanked the girls and walked away, head down, to the sounds of the dudes laughing at me.
Sometime in the last 10 years I’ve forgotten how to do a damn front-flip off a diving board. I don’t know what made me think I could do a damn back flip.
We left the festival and stepped onto the sidewalk, where I spotted a group of three young girls, probably early twenties, standing there by the street light. I stopped straight in my tracks, stared stonely at the girls, and yelled “Whoaaaa!” The girls looked over at me and asked, “What?” I began mimicing like my eyes were bugging out of their sockets. Aye Aye noticed my act in progress and jumped right in, professionally. We stood there in front of these girls, our eyes bugging out, our tongues hanging from our mouths down past our chins, making sounds such as “boggita boogita boogita” and “hubba hubba!” like a couple of cartoon characters who just watched Jessica Rabbit walk by.
The girls were not as creeped out as we’d expected, so we walked over to put the moves on them. I told them that I drove a blimp for a living, and we invited them back to the blimp to hang out. They declined. As the five of us chatted (or Aye Aye and I talked and the girls just stared at us, confused) a couple of skinheads walked by. Shirtless. “Holy crap, it’s cool to go shirtless???” we yelled. “Cool!” Aye Aye and I yanked off our shirts, and continued our conversation with the girls bare-back. Eventually they must have grown tired of our nonsense and they left to go “find a bathroom.”
We turned around and spotted a little old lady and her young son walking out of a bar carrying a bucketful of roses with teddy bears hanging from the side. A little mother-and-son entreprenuership out to guilt random drunk dudes into forking over a wad of cash to impress their ladies. We ran over to these two like they were carrying a pot of gold. “Oh my!” we yelled. “Flowers and a bear! We want one!” They handed us a rose and a bear and we tossed them a handful of dollars, and they walked away, confused and possibly a little scared.
“He bought me a bear!!!” Aye Aye yelled. “He bought me a bear!!!”
And then we tore down the street as fast as we could, Aye Aye holding the bear, me holding the rose, yelling at the top of our lungs about our newfound treasures. Soon we passed by the three girls we had just been talking to. They watched us race by, mouths agape. Moments earlier they had just spoken to two shirtless nutjobs trying to convince them that they drove a blimp, and now they were watching them running down the street holding a rose and a stuffed bear yelling “He bought me a bear! He bought me a bear!.”
We continued to run, all the while yelling at the top of our lungs. Someone from across the street screamed, “SHUT UP!” I yelled back, “NOOOOO!!!” in my most wimpy sad howl.”NOOOO! NO I WON’T SHUT UP!!!”
Finally we arrived at our next destination. It was a bar that Aye Aye had been telling me about for the last year. It was a mother-daughter operation. A Russian middle-aged woman and her beautiful early-twenties daughter tending the bar of a place that had a similar decor of a strip club. I’m not really sure what I mean by that description, but that’s the impression I got from the place.
We were going to put the moves on this beautiful Russkie, for sure. And how to impress her, I wonder? Well, let’s try creeping her out!
So, outside the bar Aye Aye crouched down and I jumped on his back, piggy-back style. He held the bear with his teeth, and I held the rose with mine, and we entered the bar that way. As soon as we walked in, we were greeted by a bar-full of tough-looking sonsabitches staring at us. Uhhh. We stopped. I hopped off Aye Aye’s back, and we walked over to the bar and grabbed a seat.
Aye Aye pointed out the young hot Russian barkeep to me. Wow! This girl WAS beautiful! We were smitten. Aye Aye told me with full sincerity that he was going to give her the stuffed bear before we left. Good move, dude. Wish I’d thought of it. She came up to serve us our beers and told us that no, she wasn’t Russian, but Polish. Ahh, Poland! I tried to impress her with my knowledge of Poland. “Lech Walsea!” I announced. She corrected my pronounciation of the name, which I had totally skewed. She stepped away and I called her back over to try again. “Roman Polanski!” She smiled and turned away again. I imagine that at this point Aye Aye was basking in the comfort of knowing his bear gift was going to impress her far more than my attempts at Polish name-dropping.
I turned over to Aye Aye and said, “Dude, I’ve got some killer comedy. Man, this is going to rule. But I need you to promise that you’ll back me on it, no matter what. Do you promise?” He promised. It was on. I called the Polish beauty over one more time.
“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m from out of town and will probably never see you again. But I think you’re very pretty and…” I grabbed the stuffed bear off the bar and handed it over to her. “…and I wanted to give you this bear.” Aye Aye, knowing that he had just promised to back me and had thus given up any right to protest, just sat there, nodding his head, cliching his teeth. “Aaaahhh,” she fawned. “That’s so nice. I’m going to put it right here behind the bar.” She put it on the shelf behind her. Her mother turned to us and smiled. They then turned away to serve some other customers.
Aye Aye leered over at me with wide eyes that clearly said, “You mother fucker!!!”
Holy crap, was I proud of myself for that one. I rolled back my head and laughed maliciously.
And with that, there was no more reason to stay. We got up off our stools and walked to the front door. Aye Aye crouched down, I hopped up onto his back, and we excited the bar.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot another good part… Earlier in the night, we were walking down the sidewalk to another bar when some scrawny redneck-looking dude stopped us. “Hey guys, you got any change?” We said no. He began to follow us as we tried to walk away, and he said, “I’m from the Gulf Coast, man, and we got completely wiped out.” I asked, “From what?” He looked at me with a look of incredulity. “From Katrina, man!” Aye Aye and I peered back at him with looks of pure confusion. “Eh? Who’s that?” He couldn’t believe it. “You guys haven’t heard of Katrina? Don’t you watch the news?” Aye Aye responsed, “No, I don’t have a TV.” The dude didn’t know what to say…
…Now, a quick disclaimer is in order: Neither of us find anything remotely funny about what happened down in the Gulf Coast. And yes, of course, we know all about Hurricane Katrina. But clearly, this guy was a bullshitter and was from nowhere near the Gulf Coast. So, if he’s going to take advantage of a tragedy to score money for a drink, we’re going to take full advantage of him for laughs…
“You guys really don’t know about the hurricane???” Aye Aye and I looked at each other and shook our heads. At this point, it was almost impossible to hold back a burst of roaring laughter. I had to turn away from Aye Aye for fear of exploding in lunatic guffaws and ruining the gag. “Katrina?” he asked again. “Louisina? FEMA???” Aye Aye asked, “What’s FEMA?” The redneck responded, “Federal Emergency…uh…Disaster…Shit.” Aye Aye asked, “Wouldn’t that be FEDS?” The dude was losing it at this point. He started grabbing anyone nearby that he could, asking them, “Hey, do you know about Katrina? These guys don’t even know about Katrina!”
And we walked away…
As we stood around the next bar sucking down Budweisers I was still laughing about how I’d burned Aye Aye with the Russian bartendar and the stuffed bear. I wanted to burn him again. I accosted a couple of pretty girls and a dude and said, “Excuse me, but my friend over here is a Street Magician, and he would like to do a magic trick for you.” They walked over to Aye Aye to watch his trick. I stood back, a satisfied smirk on my face, waiting to see how Aye Aye was going to get out of this one without looking like a jackass. Without a moment of hesitation, he pulled a dollar out of his wallet, handed it to one of the girls, and told her to rip it in half.
No too shabby, old friend. The old Destroy-Hard-Earned-Money trick. So far, so good. But now what are you going to do?
He asked the girl to roll up the ripped dollar into a ball and show it to him. She did. He took it from her for a moment, showed it to the others, and handed it back to her.
“Now, unwrap it,” he said.
Oh yes! I couldn’t wait. She was going to unwrap the dollar bill to see it still completely destroyed. The trick would be over, and my friend would be revealed for the hack that he was. I watched with glee.
She unwrapped it. Stretched it out. Held it up for the others to see. It was completely solid. Untarnished. I almost pooped my pants.
Holy shit! My friend is magic! He truly is magic! My attempt to burn Aye Aye had gone full-circle and completely burned me.
The burner becomes the burned.
The girls and the dude walked away, impressed by the magic they’d just observed. I stood there speechless as Aye Aye turned to me, a wide grin crossing his lips. He’d gotten me good, and he knew it. It just so happens that Aye Aye had knowledge of this one particular magic trick that he’d been been keeping in his back pocket for the right occasion. And my “Hey strangers, my friend is a street magician” was the perfect occasion. Touche, pal. Touche.
From that point on we remained in the bar engaging in good old-fashioned partying. Aye Aye was bouncing from group of folks to group of folks, taking pictures and flirting with pretty girls. All the while I was talking to this hippie couple that kept getting progressively creepier and creepier. I can’t remember exactly what they were doing, although I know the guy made a couple really nasty references to threesomes. Finally they said something that creeped me out so bad that I just lost it on them. “You guys are fucking crazy!” I yelled. And then I yelled it again.
Earlier in the night I had told Aye Aye that we needed a code-word for the hopefully slim chance that the alcohol would get a little too heavy and I’d need a friendly reminder to take a break. Grab some water. Cool the brain down a bit. The code-word was “Slot.”
“You’re fucking crazy!” I yelled at these hippies. They realized that they’d crossed the line and got up to leave. “You’re fucking crazy!” I yelled again! And there was Aye Aye standing next to me, waving his arms back and forth in front of him like an umpire, yelling, “SLOT! BONES, SLOT!” It was hilarious.
Man, I hope those weirdos got arrested that night. I only wish I could remember why I thought they deserved to be arrested. Damn!
Finally the bar closed and we flooded outside of the bar with the rest of the partyers. And right into the middle of a torrential downpour. It was raining like hell, and within seconds we were soaked. At this point we had separated from all our new friends and Aye Aye wandered away in search of a cab.
And then suddenly, I found myself standing in the middle of the sidewalk, face to face with some beautiful girl that I’d never seen before. And the two of us were in love.
What?
Yep. Love.
Not kissing. Not weirding out. Just standing there in the middle of the sidewalk looking into each others’ eyes, talking, arms clenched around each other tightly. It was immediate. Two soulmates standing in the rain holding each other… well, maybe holding each other up might be the better description. But it was love, man. We were Romeo and Juliet, and fate was going to be cruel to us, cause within moments our respective parties would be pulling us away other from each other, forcing us in our opposite directions, never to see each other again.
Ahh love. It’s fleeting, isn’t it?
Upon discussing with Aye Aye my brief fling with fate, I continually referred to it as love. He asked me what me and this girl were actually talking about. “Oh, I don’t know, man. I can’t remember. I can’t remember what she looks like either. But it was love.”
And so the night was over. We’d laughed ourselves sick and drank ourselves stupid and we still had Saturday to look forward to.
Saturday
Saturday morning was nothing but a big mean hangover. Or wait, actually, Saturday might have been the morning where we both didn’t feel too bad. I can’t remember. We either felt good or bad. One of the two. I’m sure about that. Anyway, there were still some bars in St. Petersburg that Aye Aye hadn’t showed me yet, so we called a cab and headed back out.
We arrived at an open air beach bar on the other side of town. We grabbed a stool at the bar and ordered a couple of Coors Lights. There was a live band playing classic rock. Aye and I sat there for hours discussing such important aspects of life as RUSH and Frank Zappa. Sitting next to us where a couple of attractive ladies in their late-thirties sucking down beers and the occassional Jager shot. It wasn’t even dark yet, and these ladies were doing some damn good drinking. Aye Aye and I whispered to each other in frustration how these girls would be fun to talk to, but we couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to them. Our brains were mush. We had hit on and/or annoyed probably 20 girls the previous night, and now, with the opportunity sitting right next to us, we were frozen. Damn, I hate when that happens. At one point, the woman sitting to my left actually turned over to me and said, “Hello.” I replied, “Hello.” And then turned away! I had nothing. Absolutely nothing.
But of course, as the day wore on and the sun began to go down, as did a good number of beers, a conversation with the ladies began to foment. I found myself talking to the blond woman sitting next to me, and Aye Aye was chatting it up with the brunnette who continued to wear sunglasses even when it turned dark out – a kick-ass fashion, by the way, and one that I’m not afraid to indulge in at times.
The night wore on, and the beers continued to flow, and so we decided to ask the girls the age-old question: “So, which one of us do you think is better looking?” The blond paused for a moment, tried to formulate the least offensive way to put it, and then pointed to me and said, “Well, he’s kinda weird…”
Weird? Me?
The funny thing is, I had spent a good hour or more talking to this lady and I never once thought I was being weird. I thought I was being a first-class gent. Ah, but then again, in hind sight, I DID, on multiple occasions, attempt to convince this lady to encourage her 11 year old son to play Dungeons & Dragons. Considering that I wasn’t joking, I guess that is kind of weird. Oh well. Easy come, easy go, I guess.
Finally around 9ish or so, the ladies got up to leave and told us to meet them at some beach dance club later. Ok, fine, twist our arms. We sat there for a little while longer finishing our beers, and then got up to go track down the ladies at the bar. We were walking down the beach when I spotted a small group of guys and girls walking in our direction. A brief flash of the previous night came to mind, when Aye Aye had pulled off that kick-ass magic trick. I wanted to pull off some killer magic myself, maybe even the score a bit. The fact that I didn’t know any magic tricks wasn’t really an issue at the time. I hailed the group and called them over and said, “Hey ya’ll, I’ve got a magic trick I’d like to show you.” They nodded. I said, “Ok, I need you to count down from ten.”
They began to do so. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.
I realized that I had absolutely nothing magical to show them.
Six. Five. Four.
This was going very poorly.
Three. Two.
I turned around and walked away, leaving Aye Aye alone to handle the situation.
Screw magic. Screw David Blaine. And screw Aye Aye.
We got to the bar, grabbed a beer, and spotted the blond that I had spent the last couple hours talking to. Aye Aye immediately raced up to her and asked her to dance. And before I could even comprehend the situation, they had disappeared into the crowd and down into the dance floor at the far end of the bar. I stood there alone on the steps, shaking my head. A lonely defeated drunk.
Tousche again, old friend.
Eventually Last Call came and went, and me and Aye Aye found ourselves wandering into a Waffle House. Sitting at one of the tables was a group of guys and girls who looked to be about college-age or so. There was some slow country song playing on the jukebox. I walked up to the table and asked one of the girls if she’d like to dance with me. Amazingly, she said yes.
And so I slow danced with some random redhead college girl in the middle of that Waffle House.
And then I took my shirt off.
Finally we cabbed it back home and I crashed down onto the couch listening to my iPod and dreading the 7 hour drive home tommorow.
Sunday
I woke up that morning, packed my bags, said so long to my old pal, and hit the road. The drive home was hell. Hell, man. 7 hours of staring at a highway in a body that completely and totally hated me.
But damn it, it was worth it. That was one of the most hilarious weekends in memory. Just pure, drunken, unapologetic, partying. And yeah, I said “partying.” I may be 30 years old, but I’m still referring to it as partying. And I ain’t sorry about saying it, either.
At this age, when someone says “do you party?” they’re usually referring to something creepy. But not us, man. We brought it back to old-school. Hell, we had so much fun “partying”, that I think, if someone asks us where we’re from, we should be allowed to answer “Party Town, USA.”
Is that cool thing to say?
Holy shit, not at all.
But more important than the partying, my old friend Aye Aye and I discovered a new art form – Jazz Comedy. The free-flowing, come-as-you-are, you-lead-and-I’ll-be-right-behind-you, bar theatrics that are fueled by a love of the Drink and a need for the Laugh.
One day you might stumble upon a bar and notice a crowd of shocked strangers staring at a couple of shirtless drunks making complete asses of themselves. You would be well within your right to immediately label them as a couple of village idiots. But don’t be so quick to judge, for you might find that these drunks, these idiots, are actually… performers…
-Bones
October 13, 2005
Party Town, U.S.A.
