Imagine being an
American serviceman on leave in, say, Kuwait. You wander into a local watering
hole (bar, that is), that you assume is friendly toward Americans (it’s openly
serving alcohol, after all). The locals are respectful, if largely indifferent,
to your presence, and you soon settle in, standing at the bar, drinking weak
Kuwaiti beer, casually reconnoitering the scene.
Then you
notice — to your profound shock, if not awe — a framed portrait of Osama
bin Laden hanging in a place of honor behind the bar. The bearded, airbrushed
holy man is depicted in a reverent light, like a swarthy Jesus with a big nose,
smiling the vague smile of the enlightened.
Clearly,
the owner of this place and everyone in it are sympathetic to the terrorist’s
cause, if not devoted to and involved in its realization.
So, what do you do? Open fire? Go
back to Camp Jersey and report it to the sweaty CIA liaison, that chubby guy who keeps eyeing you in the shower?
I’ll bet
this much: You’re not going to give that evil barkeep another one of your
precious American greenbacks. He might funnel it.
Now you can understand why I, a
lifelong devotee of our Buffalo
Bills, didn’t hang out long at Tipsy McStaggers, a Dolphin bar on West
Henrietta Road.
Tipsy McStaggers. The name makes you
laugh.
But why?
Sure, it’s silly. But as Freud would
point out, it also embodies the stereotype of the drunken Irishman, and
laughing at the Irish is an acceptable way to release repressed, ethnic-based
tensions. Assuming, that is, you’re not in the company of a full-blooded
Irishman, especially if he’s hammered (kidding, kidding).
But seriously, why hasn’t a group
like the Ancient Order of Hibernians laid siege to Tipsy’s yet? The Hibernians.
I picture a rag-tag mob of Irish warriors, clad in animal skins, throwing rocks
and jabbing spears through the windows. Now, that’s really silly.
Tipsy’s may as well be a bar in
Kuwait City. Rather than being surrounded by a hellish wasteland of flaming oil
fields, it sits in the midst of acres of cars, row upon perfectly parked row of
factory-direct vehicles, each one expertly engineered to burn as much of the
planet’s exhaustible supply of precious dinosaur gunk as possible — with
decadent, flagrant inefficiency. What’s the difference?
Granted, I was depressed when I
walked into the place. It brought back bad memories of a night I spent up the
road at The Klassy Cat two summers ago.
Stumbling out of the strip club at
closing time, our bachelor party realized the limo driver we’d hired had
ditched us. It soon also dawned on us that he’d taken off with the beers we’d
left chilling in the vehicle just for this moment, not to mention several
Stones CDs.
While my friends howled threats and curses
into their cell phones — a barrage of violent (and illegal) harassment that
wouldn’t be heard on the limo service’s voice mail system for many hours — I
surveyed the paved carscape in despair. We were stranded in the middle of an
American marketplace with rides home all around us. But we didn’t have the
right keys, and the girls who’d just sat on our laps with their bras off were
all leaving with their defensive boyfriends.
Girls take their bras off at
Tipsy’s, too. The management hangs ’em from the paneled ceiling.
Tipsy’s is a sports bar — beer
pong, video games, NFL Ticket — but like I said, the owners love the wrong
team. There’s a picture of them mugging around a distracted, tanned Dan Marino,
probably at some boring charity function, displayed in a place of honor above
the bar.
After seeing that, the bras may as
well have been burkas to me. I’d no sooner subsidize a Finnish bar than General
Franks would toke on a hookah with Osama.
God bless America. God bless the
Bills.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2003.
