Popination Putrification

a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: a guest post from somewhere in Florida.

A NOTE from Zuko: I don’t have a fresh personal Popination today for you (but don’t despair—I’m visiting a new-to-me tavern tonight before rehearsal), and so! Lucky for all of us, I’ve got another brilliant and entertaining guest essay lined up for our amusement. It was written by my partner, from way back on our old shared blog, Parallel Bars. I’ve put up a few of his pieces here on Zuko’s Musings before (one from France, one from the Sundowner, and one from the Robusto Room), and I thought it’d be a nice escape from this bitterly cold weather, to take a trip into a Florida bar past, to warm up.

Reminder: his pen name was Seamus, mine was Peony, on that erstwhile blog. This essay of his was written in the summer of 2017. Please to enjoy.

Of Daiquiris and Despair

by Seamus, August 2017

~

I don’t want to be here. It smells.

I travel, as you know, for work. Not all the time but enough. Tonight I’m in Florida. You can’t get to Florida from Colorado without a grueling four-hour flight that eats a business day, and I barely made it to the plane. The office was buzzing, we were all busy, and lately we’ve been picking up some interesting defense-oriented work so a personable killer from one of these companies you never hear about until some mercenary shoots up a village someplace demanded a good chunk of my morning. Whatever, their money’s green and I’m broke. But regardless, a mad dash out of the office, a high-speed haul to the airport which, if you’ve ever been to DIA, is about the size of Luxembourg and takes about as long to walk through.

Then the flight, for the duration of which I was blessedly busy, then the heat. Christ, the heat, and the mugginess. Look, if you live there, respect. Honestly, I don’t know how you do it. To me, it’s like trying to carry out your day while submerged in a pot of soup.

Now the hotel was nice enough. ‘70s vintage but recently redone (at least somewhat), and right on the bay. All I wanted in the world was some room service, a lot of air conditioning and private time to collapse. But that’s not my world. No, there was work to be done, and on Planet Startup, you drink while you work, so we headed for the hotel bar.

Nice enough – on the water, great, personable bartender, small but serviceable liquor selection, we would have been fine. Only my travelling partner insisted that we start with daiquiris. Now if you haven’t already guessed, that’s not my cup of tea. If he had suggested that we don ass-less leather chaps and perform a cappella versions of some Village People songs down by the water, I would have been substantially more comfortable. I probably would have done that, just to say I had. But the daiquiri? Jesus.

Somehow I let myself be talked into this, and was given a crimson Slurpee with a token amount of alcohol in it. Just as this happened, I hear a gentleman beginning to bray over a very loud PA system behind me. As he speaks, I realize that what I had taken for a reasonably populated hotel bar scene was actually a local church group’s weekly revival meeting. Other than ourselves and a few other shell-shocked patrons, the entire bar was some sort of evangelical community, having a few drinks and getting ready to make a joyful noise unto the lord. I stared at my daiquiri, and thought hard about the possibility that the plane had crashed, and that this was what eternity might look like if you’d fucked up bad enough.

Gripping my sixteen ounces of shriveled strawberry gender identity in my hand, we fled for the outside bar. A young waiter was happy to show us the way. In formal, Arabic-accented English, he apologized. “Sir, I too have only now walked into this. Please know that I am as surprised as you are, and I can offer no explanation. Please, please come outside and be comfortable. Please, I do not know what to say.”

I thanked him. It wasn’t his fault.

The outside bar had the advantage of not being filled with songs of praise, but that’s about where the upside ended. It was a dank, dark, hot, muggy, malodorous, concrete den of iniquity. A sodden pool table, some sodden chairs, a stained concrete bar with a few televisions mutely beaming baseball at us. The only upside was a physically beautiful, highly skilled young bartender who looked at me, looked at my melting daiquiri, and said, “Can I take that shit away for you sir? Maybe offer you a real drink?” Could have been the daiquiri, but I kind of loved him then.

So we ordered up some bourbons and talked and met our fellow patrons, all tired, moist, out-of-town businessmen like ourselves. The evening wind off the bay started to kick in and I contemplated, as I often have before, the ineffable mystery of why the fuck anyone likes the smell of the sea. Guys, it’s dead fish! Everybody gets that, right? Are we in disagreement here? It’s trillions and trillions of dead goddamn fish. And in this little corner of paradise, it was hauntingly paired with decomposing mangrove swamp essence and the not-inconsiderable body odor of a dozen or so middle-aged guys avoiding Jesus in the unaccustomed heat.

I’ll say this – we had just missed a tropical storm, and the towers of cloud receding out over the ocean as the sun went down behind the bay were truly something to see. I get that the place can be beautiful. It really can. And a dank bar four inches above sea level is probably not the best vantage point from which to appreciate Florida’s natural beauty. I’ll acknowledge all that. But none of that does anything about the smell.

Seriously, it’s dead fish. All I’m saying.