Kronikle, Vol. 5, Issue 3: South Carolina Homies and the Inscrutable Bar
![Picture](/uploads/1/2/3/8/12382595/8098474.jpg)
I spend the largest share of my time pie with the crew dubbed (by me, obviously) the South Carolina Homies which, for the purposes of accuracy requires Georgia to be renamed South South Carolina and Florida, Deep South Carolina. I reunite with them on the evening of travel day. With grumblies in their bellies, they select the Hard Rock Café as their early dinner destination and I flash that, due to historian math*, I already owe everyone present money. I get a little green under the gills but make the resolution that I will do my best to pay my way but I am also not going to get so hung up on it that it limits my social engagements with these folks. I mean, they have yet to shove me into traffic or put a whoopie cushion in my chair in a crowded restaurant, so we are all good, right? The Hard Rock served well as a reunion venue, the service attentive and compliant, the food so unspectacular that it definitely did not compete with the conversation as the centerpiece of the experience. A blond woman that Roomie knew from the Dark Age of my absence stopped in and talked a whole lot.
We found a lot to do throughout the entire week. We watched a beautiful sunset as a three-block-long barge navigated the Ohio River and then gave our respects to the ambitious tagger that got his name on a pylon halfway between the water and bridge. Brick Wall fulfilled my wish to try bourbon. He made a “suffer fools gladly” face when I shared my plan to hit the CVS and head back to the room on my last night for my initiation. Instead, I soon found a small glass had moved into the same neighborhood as my Red Stripe. I later read the shape of the glass was designed to capture the warmth of the hand to bring out the full flavor profile of the bourbon so what I am describing here is a lot more classy than what I originally envisioned. When I tasted it, I finally understood what people are talking about when they use words like “notes” and “finish” to describe liquor consumption. The bourbon I drank started out buttery and smoky and finished like I was sucking on a wet stick. I kept thinking about eating a steak.
My South Carolina homies also customarily attend a Louisville Bats baseball game during their stay. I have never gone, unsure about the value of the experience when the thought of paying attention to anything for more than an hour sounds like purgatory. This year, as you know, I am changing things up—working on basic social niceties and placing my self in new environs so I commit to go. I hand them my ticket (which I somehow did not pay for...) walk past the children's inflatables and turn right...right into a bar with a respectable offering of beers even if they don't have any Red Stripe (I start to suspect I drank it all when I last visited and they have yet to recover; New Orleans had Katrina, Louisville had Carrie). I marvel at the bartender's skill at pouring two beers with one hand SIMULTANEOUSLY! I resist the urge to stand there and buy beers in twos so he can perfect his craft. It is $1 hot dog night; I buy three and eat two, keeping the other one for an idea I have.
I settle into my seat, ready to enjoy the community of sports. I grew up in a family that valued athletic contests but in the family I made, I am the only one that knows the difference between an umpire and a referee and can point out the business end of a pole vault pole. I slowly become aware that almost no one in the stands is paying attention to the game. The line drive gods must salivate when contemplating all the toddler targets created through proximity and parental inattentiveness. I have stumbled upon another one of the those holes in my cultural literacy—minor league baseball is background noise to consumption and companionship. Huh.
Throughout the week, we kept finding ourselves at this pizza joint on Main which my cohorts thought delightful because of the broad palette of 70s music and occasionally free Michelob Ultra. I, however, found it impossible to pull all the disparate details of the surroundings into a cohesive whole. The music was unabashedly 70s AOR rock and pop, with Blue Oyster Cult, Fleetwood Mac, and someone named Karen Carpenter held in obvious high esteem. While my companions sang along to the Top of the Pops for 1976, I quietly rode out several flashbacks to my aunt's house where the same tracks would spin on the turntables before turntables were repurposed to do what God intended. I don't know what I would have done if Dan Fogelburg's “The Innocent Age” made it onto the playlist—presumably, just quietly sob in the bathroom while the acoustic guitar and sensitive lyrics forced memories of laying in the dark and thinking about my untimely, undeserved demise as a casualty of the Cold War while dad listened to this album in the living room.
After I returned to the present, I also decided the visual décor inscrutable. The music and innumerable screens offering a world where only sports exists suggested this place was gunning for “#1 Pizza Joint for Baby Boomers” in the local weekly paper. The artifacts on the wall severely conflicted with this perfectly understandable goal: pizza peels decorated with the graffiti lettering that gets my students sent to the office, edgy skateboard decks, and impartial portraits of George W. and Bob Marley (on the same wall!).
The food was actually pretty good but getting it, or any other consumable, took Herculean effort. Not sure why but the entire staff approached us like they were not quite sure why we were there, the same expression of confusion and lack of trust that people who are raised by wolves have when they begin their odyssey of assimilation. One night, the LYINGEST LYING waiter made promises he could not keep (“Yes, we have Red Stripe...:”) and then took forever to unrepentantly set the record straight (“Would you like a Michelob Ultra instead?”). Another night we had a feet-dragging, inconceivably reluctant tag team of a 16 year old boy and forty year old woman who both were never seen in the room together (making me think I had just found myself in the middle of a light hearted Doctor Who episode) or, apparently, able to get it together. The clerks in those anti-smoking commercials that charge an actual pound of flesh before they deliver the goods are more polite and competent than the service in that inscrutable pizza joint.
Fortunately, however, my South Carolina homies provided some protection and a lot of distraction from the harsh dissonance of the place with the type of conversations that can only be had in that place, at that time, with the people I am with. Political opinions are expressed with equanimity and reasons why while discussions of culture expand knowledge instead of draw barriers and make assumptions. And a whole bunch of talk about sports.
Until next time, I remain...
Carrie the Red (stripe)
*Whenever there are more than two historians present at the presentation of a check for goods or services rendered, the division of the bill is unevenly distributed and does not reflect actual financial culpability. I do not know if it is because we forget to carry our ones or, more likely, these folks are overly generous.
We found a lot to do throughout the entire week. We watched a beautiful sunset as a three-block-long barge navigated the Ohio River and then gave our respects to the ambitious tagger that got his name on a pylon halfway between the water and bridge. Brick Wall fulfilled my wish to try bourbon. He made a “suffer fools gladly” face when I shared my plan to hit the CVS and head back to the room on my last night for my initiation. Instead, I soon found a small glass had moved into the same neighborhood as my Red Stripe. I later read the shape of the glass was designed to capture the warmth of the hand to bring out the full flavor profile of the bourbon so what I am describing here is a lot more classy than what I originally envisioned. When I tasted it, I finally understood what people are talking about when they use words like “notes” and “finish” to describe liquor consumption. The bourbon I drank started out buttery and smoky and finished like I was sucking on a wet stick. I kept thinking about eating a steak.
My South Carolina homies also customarily attend a Louisville Bats baseball game during their stay. I have never gone, unsure about the value of the experience when the thought of paying attention to anything for more than an hour sounds like purgatory. This year, as you know, I am changing things up—working on basic social niceties and placing my self in new environs so I commit to go. I hand them my ticket (which I somehow did not pay for...) walk past the children's inflatables and turn right...right into a bar with a respectable offering of beers even if they don't have any Red Stripe (I start to suspect I drank it all when I last visited and they have yet to recover; New Orleans had Katrina, Louisville had Carrie). I marvel at the bartender's skill at pouring two beers with one hand SIMULTANEOUSLY! I resist the urge to stand there and buy beers in twos so he can perfect his craft. It is $1 hot dog night; I buy three and eat two, keeping the other one for an idea I have.
I settle into my seat, ready to enjoy the community of sports. I grew up in a family that valued athletic contests but in the family I made, I am the only one that knows the difference between an umpire and a referee and can point out the business end of a pole vault pole. I slowly become aware that almost no one in the stands is paying attention to the game. The line drive gods must salivate when contemplating all the toddler targets created through proximity and parental inattentiveness. I have stumbled upon another one of the those holes in my cultural literacy—minor league baseball is background noise to consumption and companionship. Huh.
Throughout the week, we kept finding ourselves at this pizza joint on Main which my cohorts thought delightful because of the broad palette of 70s music and occasionally free Michelob Ultra. I, however, found it impossible to pull all the disparate details of the surroundings into a cohesive whole. The music was unabashedly 70s AOR rock and pop, with Blue Oyster Cult, Fleetwood Mac, and someone named Karen Carpenter held in obvious high esteem. While my companions sang along to the Top of the Pops for 1976, I quietly rode out several flashbacks to my aunt's house where the same tracks would spin on the turntables before turntables were repurposed to do what God intended. I don't know what I would have done if Dan Fogelburg's “The Innocent Age” made it onto the playlist—presumably, just quietly sob in the bathroom while the acoustic guitar and sensitive lyrics forced memories of laying in the dark and thinking about my untimely, undeserved demise as a casualty of the Cold War while dad listened to this album in the living room.
After I returned to the present, I also decided the visual décor inscrutable. The music and innumerable screens offering a world where only sports exists suggested this place was gunning for “#1 Pizza Joint for Baby Boomers” in the local weekly paper. The artifacts on the wall severely conflicted with this perfectly understandable goal: pizza peels decorated with the graffiti lettering that gets my students sent to the office, edgy skateboard decks, and impartial portraits of George W. and Bob Marley (on the same wall!).
The food was actually pretty good but getting it, or any other consumable, took Herculean effort. Not sure why but the entire staff approached us like they were not quite sure why we were there, the same expression of confusion and lack of trust that people who are raised by wolves have when they begin their odyssey of assimilation. One night, the LYINGEST LYING waiter made promises he could not keep (“Yes, we have Red Stripe...:”) and then took forever to unrepentantly set the record straight (“Would you like a Michelob Ultra instead?”). Another night we had a feet-dragging, inconceivably reluctant tag team of a 16 year old boy and forty year old woman who both were never seen in the room together (making me think I had just found myself in the middle of a light hearted Doctor Who episode) or, apparently, able to get it together. The clerks in those anti-smoking commercials that charge an actual pound of flesh before they deliver the goods are more polite and competent than the service in that inscrutable pizza joint.
Fortunately, however, my South Carolina homies provided some protection and a lot of distraction from the harsh dissonance of the place with the type of conversations that can only be had in that place, at that time, with the people I am with. Political opinions are expressed with equanimity and reasons why while discussions of culture expand knowledge instead of draw barriers and make assumptions. And a whole bunch of talk about sports.
Until next time, I remain...
Carrie the Red (stripe)
*Whenever there are more than two historians present at the presentation of a check for goods or services rendered, the division of the bill is unevenly distributed and does not reflect actual financial culpability. I do not know if it is because we forget to carry our ones or, more likely, these folks are overly generous.