Boozing In England, Part 2 - The Oldening

I didn't take my camera with me (thankfully), but this is what Flickr says Champers looks like.

The term ‘pub crawl’ has never made much sense to me, because it (quite rightly) conjures in my mind the image of a bunch of people getting piss drunk and literally crawling from one pub to the next. And of course, binge drinking is sort of a mainstay of English culture and there’s not a thing wrong with that – it’s just that, in my experience, when you give something a name, the name is intended to dress the thing up and obscure its faults. A shitty house is a ‘fixer-upper’, a wad of paper to fill with snot is a ‘Kleenex’, and a writer who makes a mockery of grammatical conventions by stitching together unnecessarily long sentences with dashes, semicolons, commas, and parenthetical statements is either ‘Faulkneresque’ or ‘Almost as shitty a writer as that Truman Capps guy, whose sentences sometimes get so long you have to take notes just to keep track of what the hell he’s saying.’

Saying “I’m going on a pub crawl,” though, lays it all out on the table: “I am going to go to bars and get shitfaced to the point that I might have to crawl from one to the next. I do this of my own free will.”

I had never been on a pub crawl before coming to England, as back in Eugene I only really went to one bar with any regularity in spite of the shitty booze, cranky bartenders, and decided lack of appropriate taco supplies on Taco Tuesdays. When I drank at home (something I only did once I was over 21, Brothers and Sisters writers assistants and 44 Blue Productions internship selection staff), it was usually White Russians with the roommates and friends. We never really had any reason to go anywhere, so crawling never came into it (although getting up and down the stairs would get difficult after a while).

So when several girls from the semester program invited my roommate Tom and I to go on a pub crawl with them in nearby Eastcote, I thought, “Great! Yet another chance to do everything!”

The girls had four pubs lined up down Eastcote’s main strip, which is probably what Salem’s Lancaster Drive would look like if everything was more charming and English. When we reached the first pub, though, I realized that something was wrong.

Firstly, there was a ‘MEMBERS ONLY’ sign in the window.

Secondly, everyone inside was over the age of 40.

The girls, dissuaded by the members only sign, began to drift away from the open door, but the bar’s crusty proprietor burst out, all yellow-toothed smiles.

“Where’re y’goin’, now? Y’just got here!”

The girls all giggled diplomatically.

“Well, we saw it was a members only place.” I said, pointing to the sign. “And we’re not members.”

“Y’are now!” He said, beckoning toward the door. “C’mon in! Make yerselves at home!”

I would have found this charming and friendly were it not for the fact that his charm and friendliness was completely motivated by the fact that he wanted five girls thirty years his junior to be closer to him.

But we went in, and for our entire time in the pub I could sense eyes on the girls – both the hungry, “God, I wish I wasn’t going back to my 47 year old wife tonight” eyes of the men and the “Where the hell do those young bitches get off upstaging us?” eyes of the resident pride of cougars. The bartender yelled at us to get out of the way when a new pack of people came in, and a bunch of drunken bald guys at the bar made more and more desperate attempts to strike up a conversation as the night wore on.

The hostile vibe, and the fact that the bar closed at 11, forced us out within an hour, and we moved on to the next site on the crawl: Champers, which billed itself as an honest to God disco and wine bar. This was a bad sign. Strobe lights and music thumped from within. This was a worse sign. The thumping music was Lady Gaga’s ‘Caught in a Bad Romance.’ That was the worst sign of all time.

So the girls lead us in there and it quickly becomes apparent that we are the youngest people here by a good 20 years. The room is full of drunk, horny, middle aged British people bumping and grinding to songs that people my age bump and grind to.

As I stood in the doorway, regarding the scene with outright horror, the bouncer pulled me aside.

“We don’ normally allow trainers in ‘ere,” he said, pointing to the sneakers I was wearing. “But because you came in wiv a bunch of girls, we’ll make an exception.”

And I smiled and gave him the thumbs up in a thankful way, but what I actually wanted to say was,

That’s pretty big talk coming from the guy working at a nightclub full of people who only came out because their kids are in college and NCIS is a rerun tonight. Maybe you didn’t get the memo, but nightclubs were invented for people our age! You see, I come from a place called America, and in America they would be paying a bunch of sexy twentysomethings to come party it up with people older than our parents, regardless of what the fuck kind of shoe we were wearing!

And so I went into the dark, oppressively hot room full of loud music, flashing lights, and dancing drunk people, which, to be honest, I would’ve outright hated even if the room wasn’t full of cockney baby boomers.

A catastrophically drunk, balding 43 year old in a douchebag buttondown black shirt quickly spotted us in the corner where we had formed a tight circle, the girls enthusiastically dancing and me bobbing my head and wanting to slit my throat. He moseyed up behind one of the girls and began grinding against her, which was all fun and games for the first four seconds, until she realized that somebody her Dad’s age was rubbing his dick against her ass.

She moved into the circle and motioned for me to fill the gap before Baldie could, and I did, like a straight up hero.

Then, he started to grind on me.

11:30 in a senior citizens’ nightclub in suburban London with some drunk systems administrator in a midlife crisis rubbing his junk all over me. Truman Capps, this is your life!

I wanted to stand on a chair and shout,

You should all be ashamed of yourselves! You’re doing the stuff that we’re supposed to be ashamed of! You guys had your time to do this kind of shit – it was called the 1980s! And you had it way better than we do now, because the music was better and it was socially acceptable to do cocaine! So go home! Be adults! It’s after 11:30, and if you’re anything like my parents, you probably wanted to go to bed two hours ago anyway!

In my quest to do everything, I was bound to do some things I didn’t like, because as we all know, I dislike probably 30% of things. You win this round, London.

Truman Capps has every intention of getting way drunk when he’s in his 50s, but he will follow his mother’s example and only do it with friends in private, and feel very ashamed about it in the morning.