Accumulated Wisdom

Last night was the Detroit auto show charity preview black tie event; apparently this is the big annual event in Detroit and there were certainly a lot of people in tuxedos and long dresses in evidence (the latter mostly women). Essentially you buy a ticket which entitles you to walk around the auto show and sit in the cars ahead of the general opening of the show. They serve complimentary champagne and other drinks, in case the drinking before and after the event leaves you wondering what to do with your hands as you walk the floor.

We had bought a batch of tickets for the show and invited customers for pre-event drinks and post-event dinner, and the whole thing was done well. At the end of the evening, when all the customers had departed, I was prevailed upon by a colleague to visit a local bar ("only a short walk") for a small scotch. Or two. So the two of us headed out of the Ren Center in downtown Detroit for the allegedly short walk to a bar the name of which I cannot recall, but which had a very nice redheaded bar-wench called Kim.

It's not as though I didn't know that it was cold last night - after all, we'd been over to the Cobo Center and back by shuttle - but I had failed to appreciate the vital difference between a short trot to a shuttle bus and a walk down the block with a biting Canadian wind whistling across the Detroit River and cutting through the cheap fabric of my rental tuxedo like a thousand icy razor blades. Yes, it was cold; so cold that about all I could say as we cut across the grass and waited to cross a six lane highway was "Fuck. Fucking cold. Fuck me. Where's this fucking bar? Fucking hell. Fuck." and so on. The bar turned out to be about two blocks away which meant that by the time we arrived my testicles had ascended in frozen terror to somewhere in the region of my spleen.

I was not disappointed, however. This was a crowded, noisy, smoky neighborhood bar and we were instantly and fabulously out of place by virtue of both our age (versus a twenty-something clientele) and our tuxes. People swiftly made way for us at the bar, perhaps because they reasoned that two large solid-looking blokes in tuxedos walking into that bar at that time of night were not fucking about. Or maybe they were just being friendly - it was certainly a hospitable bar. The aforementioned Kim knew my colleague well from previous late night visits (and lock-ins) and we were offered cakes to help some adjacent twenty five year-old birthday celebrant mourn the passing of his youth (although we were at pains to point out that at twenty five the best was almost certainly yet to come for him). We were inclined to sample peaty scotch from the Islay region but one of the disadvantages of small neighborhood bars is that they tend to cater to people whose idea of sophistication is a beer and a shot, so the selection of single malt was limited to Glenfiddich. Nevertheless Kim was attentive to our glasses and we soon had the remains of the bottle dispatched.

Once we had put the world to rights and agreed that it would definitely be better to shag a fat lass than a bony one, even the big fat one at the end of the bar, I decided that it was time to brave the cold and return to the hotel. I'd booked an early flight back to St.Louis in the hope of salvaging some weekend, little thinking that I'd be offered a lock-in. I toyed with the idea of just drinking through, and showing up for my flight still in tuxedo but I've done that before and it always seems more attractive when you're in the warm bar surrounded by fun people with a drink in one hand and a pretty bar-girl in front of you. The miserable reality is sobering up just enough to start your hangover in a check-in line, feeling like a monkey shat in your mouth, too tired to sleep and dehydrated to buggery, surrounded by irritating airline employees and dumbass passengers just itching for you to smack them.

So we left the bar and immediately realized that we were not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Not only were we the only two white faces anywhere but the tuxes were more than a little out of place. We might as well have been wearing a sign saying "Rob me please. And kill me too, if you want." Detroit is a bad city; this was not a particularly bad area (if it was I wouldn't be writing this without the assistance of a medium) but it was also not an area to hang around in so we ignored the nice non-reflective people asking for money and walked back in the "not so freezing now we've diluted our blood with scotch" wind.

I'd agreed to meet another colleague in the foyer at 6:30am to head out to the airport and set the alarm in my room accordingly, not trusting the hotel employees to program a wake-up call for me. It was only going to be three hours anyway. In due course I was awakened by a noise that I realized, as I turned on the light, was not the soft, gentle tones of the radio alarm but the harsh jangling of the telephone. I looked at my clock. It said 6:40am. I looked again. Oh shit. With no desire to spend a bonus day in Detroit (or a bonus morning, come to that) I leapt out of bed. Time for a piss and on with the deodorant. In my semi-conscious stupor as I applied the deodorant it flew out of my hand and fell into the toilet. I left it there. Climbing into my clothes I stuffed the tux and all its accoutrements into my bag and staggered down to the lobby.

We retrieved the rental car from the spectacularly inanimate valet people at the hotel and were soon enjoying the emptiness of I-94 on the way to the airport. In the end we had sufficient time to spare that I could purchase a nutritious breakfast of a Milky Way and Gatorade before the flight. Which just goes to show - if in doubt, drink through the night. It reduces the risk that you'll fail to notice that the clock in your room is actually exactly twelve hours out; so my 6am alarm would, I discovered, have gone off at 6pm today. About fifteen minutes ago, in fact. And I still ended up feeling like a monkey crapped in my mouth so I might as well have had some more scotch and walked out in the relative safety of near-dawn. Oh well, you live and learn, which is exactly the point I was making to that birthday boy. But I think he was too drunk to notice.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison