That Time I got kicked out of a bar in Kansas City

                If you’ve never been to Kansas City, I’m talking about the one in Missouri, then I can tell you two things: it is a city of fountains and it’s hot in late summer. These are probably the sorts of things you could have figured out yourself after a brief Google search of the weather and a picture or two of the city.

                It was hot that particular evening down in the Power and Light District, and we were drinking. Most of my friends had been drinking all day, slow, rapturous, post-apocalyptic type drinking, not focused on the plebian act of getting drunk but on the hedonistic pleasure of drinking alcohol itself. These two are distinct in my mind, though perhaps they run on parallel tracks in history. However, there is a difference in kind in waking up early to drink oneself into oblivion and waking up early for the pleasure of the drink, even if the terminus is occasionally identical.

                Everyone around the house was drinking beer. I don’t drink beer. We’d spent the evening at a Royals game, complaining about how shitt- the Royals were and how terrible Scott Shield was that night. He was throwing moon balls, and he took ten to fifteen seconds between pitches. It was one of those warm nights when you knew you should be somewhere else and that baseball, unlike many team sports, was possibly invented for the sole subject of boring you to death.

                It was one dollar hot dog night, and I purchased three. It was the sort of hot dog where the first bite lets you know that you’ve overpaid by at least 90 cents, hot dogs that have been sitting under a heat lamp for days. Hot dogs that have told one another the hot dog joke,

                Two hot dogs are going around on one of those twirling oven type things that you see in gas stations and 7 eleven’s when suddenly one hot dog says to the other:

Hot Dog A: We’ve got to get out of here! We’re spinning around in circles here getting roasted alive.

Hot Dog B: thinks to himself, what the heck! A talking hot dog?.

If you’re not bent over in peals of laughter right now, I assure you that the problem is not with the joke, but with the teller. There are so many problems with the teller. The basis of most good jokes is in breaking them down, for instance, isn't a thinking hot dog just as strange? I'll desist. 

                I finished two hot dogs before chucking the last one out. We were all sitting in the outfield waiting for Scott Shields to stop kicking around the rosin and throw the damn ball, so someone could smack something else into the alley, your typical All-American type evening.

                (I want to confess here that I write better when I am most awake and therefore mentally acute. I should also confess that I am always tired. There are rare exceptions, like tonight, when I feel awake, though I always end those sessions as quickly as possible with a pill or two to help me sleep, or I know I’ll be in for hell tomorrow morning. I’m at my best for roughly twenty to thirty minutes a week, sometimes even up to an hour though I don’t like to push it).

                After a while people started to peel off from their seats, wander around the stadium to take the place in, comment on the relative beauty of the place or pick up some ice cream to wash out the taste of the hot dogs. We all proclaimed the stadium as being possessed of its own kind of beauty, a piece of land virtually out in the middle of nowhere, some perverse replica of A Field of Dreams where the players were all millionaires and corporate sponsorships were ubiquitous. But still, there we were just watching a ball game in middle America.

                We marveled over a replica of the Royals stadium where a bunch of little kids were playing a game of whiffle ball. They didn’t have that sort of thing when I was a child. Not that it would have mattered.  We used to live games in the bottom of the sixth to beat traffic. I didn’t even know baseball games went nine innings. Watching those kids bound around the field like a bunch of extremely happy bunny rabbits made me nostalgic for my own childhood, when I’d use a whiffle bat or a crude board to smash at a tennis ball and send it skying over the trees.

It was evening, and the bugs were congregating around the lights like bits of rain. By the time we’d reached the sixth the game was nearly three hours in. The replica field where before children had been playing, being their own favorite Royals as I’d once been David Cone or Frank Viola was nearly empty and sad. A lone child was running the bases while his father texted someone just behind home plate.

By the time we’d hit the seventh inning it started to feel like it was closing time at the bar. But at some point during the evening it had been discovered that there was a radar gun. And though I’m often loathe to ascribe typically masculine traits of competition and advancement among friends; there was a radar gun, a measurement, a strict way of defining yourself in relation to your peers.

                The story is a bit more complex as we’d spent the better part of two summers playing an elaborate game of whiffle ball called water baseball. We spent countless hours in our friend’s back yard shirtless, keeping stats, leaving early from odd jobs or making time in the middle of the day to grouse at one another and fire whiffle balls in the seventies in low eighties. I supply that piece of information because we once procured a radar gun, which wasn’t even the strangest thing. We also wrote and published a magazine with statistics and profiles.

                And on this fine evening, years later, it was hard not to think back on those summers when we’d all been 18 or 19, before anyone was drinking in earnest or working at a career of any use. It was time once again to prove to each other that we could bring it. The problem with my elbow is that it doesn’t work anymore. I blew it out a number of years ago through some combination of firing dodge balls at annoying kids at a summer camp and proving myself by trying to throw people out at home from left field on a particularly crappy slow pitch softball team. I’ve never quite recovered from the injury, despite an exploratory surgery, and I can really only throw a ball a few times before it starts to ache.

 Of course, I say all this because the radar kept claiming that I was only hitting the high sixties, though I threw the last pitch left-handed after my right elbow and upper arm had started to throb. My friend T who won could always throw the ball hard, though never with any accuracy. We’d bet five bucks a piece on the endeavor, and he came out with thirty five bucks, though I swear his pitch would have hit an actual batter in the head, which was what you always had to watch out for when he was pitching. My elbow was throbbing for the next few days, though it was briefly alleviated with the application of rum and whiskey later that evening. (I should confess that even writing about my elbow has awakened pain receptors, and it’s currently aching dully as it probably always does when I’m using it in the slightest though I often forget).

                We headed downtown from the Royals stadium after the pitching displays that clearly left the audience members in awe. A father and son were up right after us, laughing at our left handed throws and refusing to get in on the betting action. We had a brief argument about where we should go, with some people saying that we’d been to the Power and Light District the evening before, and that it was kind of meh, while others of us, myself included, thought that it must have been just that particular evening, and that even if it was meh, at least it was better than the unknown.

                Here’s the thing about the unknown: it’s usually better than meh. However, we could not have known that, (okay, we could have) as we sped off into the Kansas City night. It was a bachelor party, and we were ready to set the city on fire.

                The problem with the Power and Light District is that it’s not a real place. It’s an urban planner’s dream of what fun might look like: an outdoor concert venue, the ability to have open containers outside, a court yard wreathed in bars, karaoke joints, pizza places and all populated by the best and brightest in Kansas City. The problem, as we later learned, is that almost no one from Kansas City goes there. It’s the place that everyone goes to when they are in Kansas City, which means you wind up spending the evening with a bunch of other people who are just in town for a night of fun, but have no meaningful connection to the place. I understand, despite never having been there, that this is largely the appeal of Vegas and thus the ad campaign, but something about it feels strangely empty in Kansas City, though the term we heard most often associated with it by locals the following day was “douchey.”

                But still, we were out that night, listening to an eighties cover band, enjoying drinks, the warmth, the lights, and the brief span of three days that we share together that have to cover the other 362. One of my friends was buying me a drink and explaining to me how much we’d meant to him when he was a teenager, how we’d been the people that had helped him hold it together, and if it meant buying a few extra rounds once a year, he’d always be fine. I’m cheap by nature and nurture, but am willing to accept drinks, though I usually begin by saying no.

                After a while the crowd in the court yard starts to thin out as the people who have come down for this spectacle of lights choose their favorite or the most appealing bar. We settle on a pizza place that has a decent DJ and settle into a corner with a few beers, watching a baseball game on an overhead television where a guy is going for a perfect game. The rest of his athletic career will probably be a let down after this moment. It’s probably best that it only lasted 8 1/3.

                The floor is slippery but sticky in spots where people have spilled beers. It’s a nice floor for dancing as pizza parlors go, and the DJ is playing a lot of nineties rap, which makes everyone shake just a little more. The parlor has an island, about three feet across and twenty feet long, that runs the length of the side of the bar that we’re on dividing two rows of booths. The island is populated by girls who’ve come to the bar to dance, and presumably couldn’t resist the impulse to get up on stage to do it. This is different than the sort of place where it’s the bar tenders doing the dancing, which I’ve seen in nearly every Southern city that I’ve been in, which is more problematic and relationally strange and winds up in some people, not us, buying eleven dollar drinks.

                We were dancing below the island and watching the game when one of my friends got pulled up onto the island to dance. Within seconds, as I cheer him on, I hear the DJ say, “No dudes on the bar.” My friend doesn’t hear and the DJ muffles the music to yell, “Hey. No dicks on the bar.” The DJ is a muscle bound guy wearing a black t-shirt and a wrist band, and though he’s kicking out some good music, he has all the appearance of a classic douche.

                In general, I’m a pretty law abiding sort of guy. I’ve feared authority since I was very young. My kindergarten teacher scared me so much that I think she thought I might have been handicapped, so paralyzed was I with fear. When I see a cop, I always slow down, even if I’m already five miles an hour under the speed limit. My immediate reaction to confrontation is to wish that I was a turtle that could hide under a shell.

However, as my friend got down from the bar, a chord of injustice had been struck that made the evening feel off kilter. We danced for a while longer, but everything was different. The people seemed way more annoying, and it struck me how unfair it was that only women were allowed to dance on the bar. Yes, I’ll grant you that, by and large throughout the course of human history, mostly do to misogyny and patriarchy women have been the ones doing the dancing on bars. However, the years was 2013. We had Barak Obama as president and Hilary Clinton on the way. What was wrong with dudes dancing on the bar, besides the fact that no one would stare up at us and want to stay? Economically, a lot, I suppose.

M: Are you ready to leave?
  G: Sure.

M: Do you know how we’re going to leave?

G: How?

M: We’re going to go dance on the bar.

It was a good idea. And as we moved across the floor and the music swelled I was the first one to jump up on the seat and start dancing, followed by four of my friends. We were precariously close to the island, but not quite breaking the rules of the bar. But somewhere out there was my kindergarten teacher, breathing down at me, wondering why I couldn’t cut straight with scissors, and I knew it was time to strike back. And so six of us jumped up on the island, and I danced my way down to the end, hopped off on the floor and quickly walked, with the help of a security guard, out into the warm, warm night. From there my friend and I danced to “Get Lucky” in the courtyard with a bunch of cops watching, but the mood of the evening had already been struck. I’d been kicked out of a bar for the first, and I’m sure last time in my life.