The Old Fogeys Hit the Town

One spring evening I went with a bunch of friends to the “new” (but not improved) Hammerjacks, a large dance club / bar in Baltimore. Several of us used to frequent the old Hammerjacks a decade and a half earlier, so we decided to check out the new location in order to 1) satisfy our curiosity, and 2) see just how much we had aged.

We started out with pizza and homebrew: the pizza in order to lay down a base for the booze that would eventually follow, and the homebrew because it would be the only good-tasting beer available all night.

We pulled up to the new Hammerjacks location in three vehicles, one of which was a minivan, accentuating how much we had all aged since being at the old location. Most of us were in a 1969 Volkswagen bus, which might as well have been the Partridge Family bus.

Arriving at 8:00 PM - another sign of our chronological enhancement - our group constituted about 30 percent of the clientele; most of the other 1100 people were still sleeping off the previous night’s chemicals and wouldn’t arrive until we were ready to leave. Even so, it was surprising that so few people got there for the booze, which was free until 9:00. Well, it was sort of free. Our unfriendly bartender, whose arms were bigger than my skull, got so bold as to actually demand tips (“Hey, gimme a %@#*& tip or I’ll rip your @#*%$ head off and #&^% down your neck!”) Apparently he had gone to the Mike Tyson School of Etiquette.

There was a wide selection of spirits, including whiskey, gin, vodka, tequila, shooters, and Dog Piss Ale. Some company gave away free samples of their ethyl product and even let us keep the cute little parrot shot glasses. They also took people’s pictures and made postcards out of them, although the caption under our picture said “Before” and everyone else’s caption said “After”.

The music was ... well, you couldn’t really call it music. You know that old saying, that if you had an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters, they’d eventually type all the great books? Well, apparently someone got hold of those monkeys and gave them drums and synthesizers and microphones, and we got to listen to their first attempts. We had no idea that so much bad “music” existed. If you’re lucky you can find the compilation CD entitled, “You Drunken, Drugged Morons Will Dance to Anything”, produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s so bad that even Yoko Ono refused to do a commercial for it. As if that weren’t bad enough, the noise was played at approximately 3175 decibels, necessitating our screaming at each other in order to be heard and causing some of us to become so hoarse that Marlon Brando is now suing us for copyright infringement.

At one point I wiped the blood out of my ears and went to request anything good. “How about Highway to Hell?” I asked, thinking that any male with a gram of testosterone or rhythm or taste would play it. The DJ - a fat, bald man of about 45 – looked disdainfully at my ACDC T-shirt, then smirked at me as though I were the world’s largest booger and smugly proclaimed, “Check your calendar, dude. We don’t play that stuff anymore. If it don’t go ‘boom boom’, we don’t play it.” For a brief second I thought about knocking him out and taking over the controls, but it occurred to me that probably none of his CDs even had Highway to Hell on it. That’s okay, I didn’t need to hear it – it was the theme song at my wedding. As for the DJ, the best thing for me to do was to simply let him go on living his pathetic excuse for a life: spinning discs for people half his age having twice as much fun as he was, then going back to his rent-controlled apartment to spank it while talking to a phone sex girl at 3 a.m.

Despite the dearth of good music, we managed to dance quite a bit, stopping frequently to rest. Hell, even climbing the stairs to visit Cue Ball the Wonder DJ got me out of breath. But getting so easily tired out enabled us to purge our excess energy and have a satisfying evening. On another good note, for the first time in my life I did not get rejected a single time at a bar! That’s right - due to being with several women whom I already knew, I had a number of potential dance partners, and not one of them told me that she’d rather have Jesse Jackson’s baby than dance with me.

There were plenty of young lovelies there, turning my head and causing my eyes to bulge almost as much as my pants. It didn’t bother me that they probably had a combined total of three brain cells; they were eye candy and that’s all that mattered. I asked myself, “Where were they when the old Hammerjacks was around?” Then I thought, “Oh, right - they were six.”

Several of us capped off the evening at a local diner, where we threw grease and salt at our alcohol-soaked livers. A few locals at a nearby table had apparently just come from their prom, bringing back memories of my own prom, which I never went to because I was about as desirable to women then as I am now. It was a sobering thought that when I was in high school, these folks hadn’t even been born. It made me squirm in my Depends.

I think we should have this kind of outing again, say, after the next election - we’ll need that long to recover. We held up pretty well considering that some of us have underwear that’s older than many of the Hammerjacks regulars. It’s nice to know that we’ve still got it.

Just not as often.