While visiting on the phone with my son, Catfish, yesterday, he mentioned that he was going to Nashville pretty soon for a friend’s bachelor party. He was excited about it because while in Nashville, in addition to bar hopping and general fun, they planned to go to a concert by some currently fashionable country singer. It’s a ‘destination’ bachelor party, he told me. “We might get rowdy”, he said.
“Might get rowdy?”, I thought.
I remember my bachelor party. It was organized by a good friend of mine named Jeff and attended by two of our ‘associates’, Frank and Snoopy. The four of us were sort of an A-Team for a software package called Cimpro. Cimpro was the very best software package available for process manufacturers wanting to engage in ‘Just-in-time’ manufacturing. Everyone from CocaCola to 3M used Cimpro. It was a complex and difficult software to configure and operate. Many companies needed custom modifications to make it suit their needs. We were the guys that everyone called when they wanted to solve that problem.
Every company who used Cimpro came to understand that having us solve the problem had it’s up side and had it’s down side. On the up side, we always solved the problem and made it work. On the down side, you had to deal with four lunatics. We had King Chaos (Jeff), The Dude (Frank), the Psycho Twins (Snoopy and his alter ego, “Eeeorr”) and the Redneck (me). We were nuts. We were nuts for hire. We were the only nuts who could modify Cimpro and make it work.
So, this clown posse was my crowd, my friends. With my neputials pending, Jeff decided that a bachelor’s party was in order. Right off the bat I knew this was a bad idea. He’s got just the place, he says. It’s a biker’s bar. At this point in my life, I had made enough bad decisions to have learned that bad decisions lead to bad outcomes. I was not, I announced, going to a biker bar. No good can come from that, I added.
Despite my objections, on the appointed day Jeff, Frank, Snoopy and I wedged ourselves into Jeff’s Buick and set out for the biker bar. I don’t know why we had Jeff driving. He was the most inattentive driver I have ever ridden with. I had a bad feeling about this. I knew that four computer geeks were not going to fair well in a biker bar. Jeff weighed about 400 lbs and was shaped like a buoy. Frank was tall, lean, sported a porn star mustache and a threat to no one but girls with low self esteem. Snoopy was small, and had the appearance, presence and all of the maturity of a 12 year old boy. I was the only southerner and we were going into a New Jersey biker bar.. “We all will certainly die soon”, I thought.
We arrived at the biker bar. The poorly lit parking lot was mostly gravel and, except for a couple of random cars, seemed to be empty. We walked in. It was a split level kind of place that had a crappy restaurant on the first floor. It appeared to have been someone’s home at some point. We went down stairs to the basement. I didn’t like the look of this. It was dark, but my eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light. I surveyed the room. There were two pool tables and a smattering of tables scattered around the room. There was a bar at the far end of the room, near a sliding glass door to seemed to open up out to a patio of sorts. It was at the bar where I spotted them, the bikers.
Where I grew up, bikers were a tough crowd who rode motorcycles. The bikes they road were usually big and loud. “Ricegrinders”, that is Jap bikes, were not allowed. The guys usually wore Levi jackets with a leather vest over the top. The jackets were called ‘the colors’ and indicated what ‘club’ a rider was affiliated with. Bikers came in all sizes and all shapes and if you were going to fight with one, you were going to fight with all of them. Those are bikers.
In the darkness at the far end of the bar, I saw the bikers standing,. The eyed us suspiciously us as we searched for a table. Their posture and expressions betrayed dripping disdain as they looked at us. We could not be mistaken for one of them. We were four geek programmers wearing jeans, sneakers and Grateful Dead t-shirts. These bikers weren’t huge, hairy, knuckle dragging apes wearing colors, biker boots and proudly sporting bug spatter on their foreheads. No, these bikers were scrawny, anemic looking little guys with shitty little mustaches, wearing stretchy black shorts, sporting hairless legs and wearing funny looking little caps featuring the names of European beer brands. I was shocked. I looked out the sliding glass door. I saw their bikes. Their bikes were not Harleys. Their bikes were 10 speeds, and they were all neatly parked in a bicycle rack. We weren’t in a biker bar, we were in a bicyclist’s bar.
Big difference.
To say I was relieved is a massive understatement. We were the roughest people in the bar, and none of the bicyclists wanted to associate with us. We were the unwashed masses invading their turf. They were clearly intimidated. We claimed a table, and began drinking, playing pool and talking about programming techniques.
To non-programmers, the fact that a person can be passionate about how to best manipulate memory segments so as to attain the best performance during calculations against a multidimensional numeric array may seem odd. However, once you have met Jeff and Snoopy and poured several shots of rum into them, you will see that not only is that conversation destined to be passionate, it is also doomed to be loud and possibly violent. On the occasion of my bachelor’s party it became incendiary.
Snoopy, as usual, was smugly dismissive of Jeff’s finely crafted and very logical and practical approach to the solving the problem. Snoopy attempted to persuade Jeff of the folly of his ways by not only insulting his intellect but belittling his approach’s overall strategy. After having lit his Salem cigarette, Snoopy punctuated his closing statement by ceremoniously tossing his lit match toward the ash tray in the center of the table. He did this just as Jeff slammed his fist down on the table and shouted ‘Bullshit’ which got the attention of everyone in the bar and splashed 151% Rum all over the table. This happened just in time for the arrival of Snoopy’s lit match. Much to Frank’s amusement and to the horror of the bicyclists, a full blown conflagration ensued.
The bartender rushed over. Using a CO2 fire extinguisher, he quickly extinguished the fire. He looked me dead in the eye and said “Set the table on fire again and you will be out of here”.
That was my bachelor’s party.
Catfish thinks his crowd may get ‘rowdy’.
Want to get rowdy? Click the button.
Leave a Reply