As we progress through Catfish’s final semester, I sometimes reminisce some about my final semester before graduation at Ole Miss some 39 years ago. Catfish seems to be approaching graduation in a much more controlled and reasoned manner than I did. He goes out to pubs with friends. They drink beer and talk about job prospects and then they Uber safely home.
Some thirty-nine years ago at Ole Miss, we didn’t have Uber. We had Matt. Not my brother, Matt, but an entirely different Matt. Matt somehow became our designated driver. He usually drove when we went to ‘Abby’s Irish Rose’. Abby’s was a bar located beneath an old building in Oxford. It’s only access was located in an alley way. Halfway down the alley, there was a lot that once held a building, but the building was long gone and the lot was now a tiny parking lot.
Back in the day, we would all gather at Dave’s apartment for late afternoon or early evening libations before climbing into Matt’s Mercury Comet for the trip to Abby’s. For those who don’t know, a Mercury Comet was Lincoln Mercury’s take on a Ford Maverick. It was a large, ugly, slow, and cumbersome two door ‘swept back, sporty’ car. It was built to accomodate four people, two in front and two in back. This car was a sluggish, unbalanced monster to drive. It’s only redeeming characteristics were that it was built like a tank and we could stuff six people in that car.
Off we would go to ‘Abby’s Irish Rose’. We usually tried to leave early enough to guarantee a parking spot in the tiny ally parking lot. Matt would carefully maneuver the beastly car into a tiny spot in the cramped lot, sometimes having to back up, and pull forward several time to get squarely in the parking space. We’d all trot into the pub for several hours of debauchery. Abby’s had pool tables and darts in the sub-basement room, and some of us would play for a while. It had a general bar room that opened up to an outdoor patio. After several hours of beer fueled socializing, we’d all stagger back to Matt’s sporty Comet for the return ride to Dave’s apartment.
One night, we were all crammed in the mighty Comet and ready to repeat the ‘backing up a foot, pulling forward a foot’ maneuver to extract the car and go home. Matt started the car, and twisted around to see out the back of the car as he turned the steering wheel sharply. He began to gingerly ease out of his parking space. Just as he was applying pressure to the gas pedal, he hiccuped. His foot went down on the gas just a little too hard. The car lurched backward a couple of feet until we heard a solid crunch. We had impacted the Impala parked behind us. We had hit it right smack dab on the door. Being the assholes we were, we found this incredibly funny. We all laughed like hell. Well, everyone except Matt.
“Shit!”, Matt muttered, which made us laugh even louder. Apparently, there is nothing funnier than a friend denting cars in a parking lot. He was a bit pissed as he grabbed the shifter and put the car in drive. He cut the steering wheel back some, and, still muttering, he began to ease forward just a bit. Just then, he hiccuped again. The car lurched forward, again ending with a crunch and producing howls of laughter. The car beside us was a Volkswagen. It was now sporting a slightly dented side. We, the assholes, were laughing so hard we were turning blue.
“Oh shit!” he said somewhat excitedly. He quickly jerked the shifter into reverse. Again, twisting about to look out the rear window and just as he began to press the accelerator to begin backing up, he hiccuped again. We were laughing even before we heard and felt the crunch which sent us deeper into shrieking hysterics. Matt, who was now experiencing a significant emotional event and was lost in the grips of blind panic, quickly put the car in drive again.
“Oh shit Oh shit Oh shit”, Matt quietly chanted.
The impala now had a second dent in the door, about a foot away from the first one. Once more he maneuvered to extract the Comet from the parking place and once more a hiccup produced a crunch as we again hit the VW in front of us, adding a dented fender to the dented side. All of us in the car were about to lose bladder control.
This continued three or four more times with Matt becoming more vocal and more panicked and more agitated with each impact. Finally, Matt successfully extracted the Comet from the tiny parking lot and we returned to Dave’s apartment without further incident.
As I think of this incident, I am grateful my son is much more mature than I was, and I thank God for Uber.
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We used to go to Abbey’s all the time between 79 and 83. I always wondered what happened to that place, do you have an address I can search it out on Google Maps, for nostalgia sake? Thanks, Todd
The darts. You forgot about the darts.
In the late 70’s the Abby had rooms for rent upstairs.
“The Abbey” was my favorite Oxford bar.. One of the bartenders at the Abbey, an undergraduate student who worked there (I don’t recall her name), was shot and killed by another student during the late 1970s. Shortly thereafter, it was reported in The Daily Mississippian” that he was caught by police following a high-speed chase, resulting in the single-vehicle accident in which he was severely injured.
Loved playing Music There in the late 70s and early 80s. I was the original drummer of the White Animals at the time then started my own band Joe Loftis & The Pinks in the 80s. Great memories. Awesome place to play. Great people. Long Live the Rock Club memories!