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only for the ladies
Friday, June 25 1999
Today my afternoon was interrupted by a long engineering meeting. In this meeting, the middle-aged "Navy Seals" who have been sequestered in a back room designing the new web site n-tier architecture emerged into the light and presented it to those of us who will be working with it. Somehow this presentation left me with an odd combination of depression and exhilaration. It was depressing in that it was changing the basis of everything I've done up until now. But it was energizing to discover that to do any programming under the new system, I'll be making extremely powerful compiled .dll files with Visual Basic instead of the multi-thousand-line ASP scripts I've been writing with Homesite 4.0.
Gordon Biersch: Friday Night
Though in the aftermath of his firing from our workplace, Aaron Birnbaum has moved to New York City, the institution he created, the Friday night sudsfest at Gordon Biersch, lives on. Kevin and I snuck out of work after the engineering meeting (avoiding the weekly motivational ritual called "Energy") and headed over to nearby Gordon Biersch. By some circumstance, I was terribly stoned on marijuana as I tried to fetch a beer for Kevin and myself. I was so busy analyzing the subsconscious-level social dynamics behind getting beers from a bartender that I feared I was losing track of both time and Kevin. I tried for seemingly forever to establish eye contact with the extremely busy bartenders, but they all ignored me. When I finally got the attention of one of the older male bartenders, he wanted to see two IDs before he'd get me two beers. What choice did I have? So I had to go wade through the crowd on a wild goose chase trying to find Kevin and feeling ridiculous. With bartenders like this, how was it possible for anyone to get drinks for his friends? I guess it was mostly an age thing. I looked like the kind of guy who would be fetching drinks for a seventeen year old girlfriend. But it left me handicapped socially. It meant, at least with this bartender, that Kevin (who looks decidedly older than me) would have to go get our drinks. When I finally found him, he had already gotten us both beers. It was embarrassing to have to admit that I'd been turned down for lack of necessary IDs.
In a bar situation, Kevin doesn't talk much. He's mostly scoping out the ladies, only saying something when an especially cute one appears on radar. He's standing there at attention, scanning the room like he's waiting for someone he knows. As fucked up as I was, I realized something about humans and their faces. A face accumulates a little more than its share of the body's insults and injuries over a lifetime. It's the one part of our body continuously naked to the world. At the same time, it's also charged with conveying emotional expressions and subterfuge, to help in putting the HTML tags around the things we say and don't say with our mouths. All this work and exposure leaves faces pockmarked, wrinkled, stretched, wounded, used. Of course, a young face shows less of this than an old face. But even young faces have their accumulated entropy. The closer you get to face, the more wear and tear you'll notice. So, for example, when Kevin spied a gorgeous solitary girl marching determined across the parking lot into Gordon Biersch, he pointed her out to me. She was a distant heavenly body shimmering in the full ruddy light of the setting sun, a bit of promise framed in the ugliness of nearby faces and Mission Valley commercial sprawl. But some time later as she walked past me, this heavenly body demonstrated all kinds of small imperfections. Like our own Earth, her surface had battled against unchecked sprawling civilizations. She'd won those battle long ago, but her own healing processes and her mascara couldn't completely hide the foxholes, bomb craters and trenches of those ancient battlefields.
The thing that has always stuck me as odd about the Gordon Biersch brewpub is the relatively high female-to-male ratio of its clientele. It seems that a lot of professional single women frequent the place, often arriving in groups of three or four specifically to scope out the men. One would think that the large number of women would simply result in more men coming, thus yielding the standard San Diego demographic mix of three or four men for every two women. But, for whatever reason, Gordon Biersch has deliberately created a bar environment not especially attractive to men. It may have the women (which is the main draw for guys like Kevin), but it lacks other things important to the majority of men who frequent bars. There are no pool tables, there are no dart boards, there are no video game machines, and there are relatively few televisions carrying "the big game." The men who need those things at a bar are not to be found at Gordon Biersch. The men at Gordon Biersch are there only for the ladies.
But, in another twist of irony, the ladies who hang out at Gordon Biersch strike me as somewhat less attractive by and large than the average woman in San Diego. Gordon Biersch ladies are the ones who have not been taken in a city overrun with well-paid, lonely men. There's got to be something wrong with these women. Either they have miserable personalities or they're not especially attractive except to a guy wearing several sets of beer goggles simultaneously. That's where the strong Gordon Biersch beer comes in. You can taste the alcohol in it; some of it rather reminds me of the mead my mother used to make.
Eventually I returned to the bar to get a round of beers for my friends (which now included Eric the web developer). I was nervous, wondering if I'd really have to come up with three IDs to get a round for my friends. I was even a little resentful that I had to deal with the social liability of looking so young in darkly-lit bar. I decided to form a relationship with whatever bartender would serve me. This was actually going to be necessary for both of us, since I was going to be paying for my beers with a plastic card. The bartender would, or course, want to be there at the end when I closed out. And indeed, as I handed him the plastic he said, "Remember me, my name is Chris." Carrying three pint glasses through a packed throng of drunken white collar professionals is a tricky procedure even for the sober, so as messed up as I was, I clenched the glasses between my fingers and kept repeating to myself the prayer, "Remember Him, His name is Chris," hoping no one would poke me in the ribs. I'm terribly ticklish.
Every time I'd go take a piss, I'd stare down at that little red plastic urinal splash-suppressor, blasting it with my stream of post-processed beer. That red plastic urinal splash suppressor is manufactured by a company named Swisher, and on all their plastic urinal splash suppressors they've included the line, "Say No To Drugs." The drunker I get, the more of a fuss I make out of that little cynical line of do-goodmanship. Sometimes I announce to the entire men's room, "Say No To Drugs!" and since they're all reading the same little slogan at the same time, often I'll get a bunch of them chuckling or even shouting things too. The more beers I've had, the more I feel like I could actually lead these anonymous men in battle against the forces of stupidity.
I'd told Kim of my whereabouts, and eventually she showed up. But by this point I was completely wasted and thought nothing of flirting with a couple of random girls Kevin and Sherms (who had arrived kind of late) were getting to know. Not unexpectedly, of course, Kim felt the need to march up and announce my unavailability to all involved, but I just sort of acted like none of that really mattered, self-deprecatingly claiming to work as the janitor at the place where Kevin is DBA.
Eventually in a fit of rage, Kim dragged me out of there. "Oh, there's that drunk guy again!" commented one of the Gordon Biersch employees as Kim led me past. As we waited for the valet to fetch her Volvo, she was telling me that our relationship was completely finished and that she'd find someone else to go with her to Sedona, Arizona for what was to have been our one year anniversary vacation on July 11th.
"Why were you so interested in those fat girls?" Kim asked me at one point. "Because they weren't you," I replied.
Back at our apartment complex, Kim sought to escape me and went across the courtyard to hang out with Jason ("the redneck surfer from Malibu"), his hard-partying mother, Patty, yet another Kevin (Patty's boyfriend), and our next door neighbors Lisa and Andy. Behaving as though nothing was amiss, I grabbed a Corona and joined them. Periodically Kim and Patty would disappear into the back bedroom to engage in "girl talk."
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