Moodswing - An idiot in a bar

Giant Michael is implementing a no-idiot policy at the Vortex, and I seriously don’t know how he gets away with it. For one, the Vortex is a goddam bar. I myself have been an idiot in there many a time, the most recent being last year when he introduced me to Red Bull and vodka, which is like liquid crack if you ask me. Why would a friend do that to you? I actually ended up at fetish nightclub the Chamber that night. Here I’d been living in Atlanta for almost the entire life of an Olsen twin, and I had managed to avoid the Chamber all that time. Then that night after being an idiot at the Vortex, I end up at the Chamber in my white work blouse watching burlesque and so wired on Red Bull I could probably set off car alarms across the street if I was concentrating (which I wasn’t). “If you discriminate against idiots,” I tell Giant Michael, “you’d hardly have any business.”

“On behalf of my customers, I’m offended by that,” he says, which makes me laugh, because Giant Michael isn’t offended by anything. Believe me, I’ve tried. Lary and I used to hang out at the original Vortex on West Peachtree a hundred years ago, and we would make it our mission to offend everyone around us, and since the place was so small and Michael is so giant, he was always around us. “Juice me up, booze jockey,” I’d demand, thrusting my empty glass at him. He’s totally like emotional Teflon. He’s one of my oldest friends and the closest I’ve ever seen him get to actual angry was today with this whole anti-idiot campaign. He was damn near riled up, blaming everything on the yuppie onslaught of Midtown due to the recent outbreak of condo complexes all around. And to Michael’s credit, Midtown really does look like a beehive lately, but that’s something any normal restaurant owner would be ecstatic about. Not Giant Michael. When I walked in, he was perusing a list of new T-shirt slogans he recently approved for his wait staff. Among them are: “Your Village Called. Their Idiot is Missing” and “Don’t Make Me Throw You Outta Here.”

“We just got a letter from a guy who brought his kids in here and told us he was outraged by the porn we have pinned to the walls,” he exclaims with a sweep of his arm. “Porn? Do you see any porn in here?”

Well, I personally wouldn’t classify it as porn, but among the immense clutter of vintage signage, toys, motorcycle parts, skeletons and other oddities attached to the ceiling and walls, there is an autographed picture or two of strippers with pasties on their tits. “That’s not porn,” he insists, almost riling up again. In the foyer he has just, that day, mounted a collection of framed commandments for customers to follow, basically banning “tight asses, moochers, whiners, oblivious parents, idiots and drunken idiots” from the premises.

“Aren’t you afraid of pissing people off?” I ask.

“What are they gonna do? Come up to me and tell me they’re an idiot and they resent the discrimination?” he says, and I have to think about that, because, though I wouldn’t want to represent all of idiot-kind, I am nonetheless sensitive to my idiot side. I must like to take it out for walks occasionally, because I have done some pretty stupid things, believe me, many of them in bars. I tell them all to Michael, like how, in college during my fake I.D. stage, I was kinda famous for getting drunk and passing out in restaurant bathroom stalls.

“That’s nothing,” Giant Michael assures me. Then I tell him about the time years ago when I flashed my boobs at a bar in Key West, and he rolls his eyes like I could not possibly be more boring. He approves another T-shirt slogan. This one reads, “I’ll Hurt You if I Have To.”

Then I tell him about the time, back in my longhaired, silver-ring-on-every-finger stage when I, just for the fun of it, stole my friend’s boyfriend just as easily as plucking a berry from a bush. All it took was two cocktails and about 10 seconds of eye contact and I had him in my hand like lotion. My friend’s name was Mary, and I remember she had brown Dorothy Hammill hair and liked to wear boyish shirts with turned up Oxford collars. They were new in their relationship, and in the weeks since they’d met, Mary had been incandescent with a glee that I guess I couldn’t bare. She had come into the bar clinging to him like sea kelp, all aglow and proud with moon-shaped eyes looking up at him like he was a wonder to behold. I just remember her face that night, her smiling face, and how it fell like a Malibu mudslide when she realized what was happening. I don’t know why I had to hurt her.

I confess all this to Michael, and I look up at him like he should throw me out right then, because here I am a self-confessed idiot in his bar, but instead he puts his arm around me. “You’re not an idiot,” he comforts me, “you’re a goddam fool,” and kisses the top of my head.

hollis.gillespie@creativeloafing.com


Hollis Gillespie is the author of Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood, published by Harper Collins. Her commentaries can be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” To hear the latest, go to Moodswing at www.atlanta.creativeloafing.com.