#7 – 1860’s Saloon (Soulard) – 11/26
For a handful of years in the earlier part of this decade, there was an annual tradition shared with my circle of friends. It was always scheduled for the night before Thanksgiving. I’d be lying if I said I could remember every reason we chose this specific date. I actually don’t think I had anything to do with it. It’s weird; I have no specific memory of when it began. Just one year, it simply was. I think there were some friends and acquaintances with birthdays near the end of November. And it was a night when nearly everyone we knew was guaranteed to be off work the next day, so it was an evenind perfect for drunkeness and debauchery. We called it D-Day, and I’m pretty sure that name was strictly for dramatic effect. The D stood for nothing that I am aware of. For a couple of peak years, D-Day would begin at dinner time at some local eating establishment – say Fast Eddie’s – and then move to a bar. Other bars would follow and eventually we would end up at a strip club, and then another, and likely another. We’d get home at 5am and spend the next day fighting hangovers while eating turkey with our respective families.
Then we grew up. Most of us got steady girlfriends and jobs we were a little less careless about. Plus, let’s face it, you just don’t bounce back from a night of excessive drinking and blue balls at 30 like you did at 22. So D-Day peaked, then slowly died after a couple of half-hearted attempts. Gone with a whimper.
This year I was working on Thanksgiving eve. During the evening, I got a text message from Tre’s fiancee Pam, requesting my presence at a bar in Soulard later that night. After a long, slow, very low paying night I met up with my girlfriend and we headed over to the 1860’s Saloon.
It was loud. We were next to a table of 40-50 year old men in khakis and blue shirts, drinking beer and getting really into the blues band that was playing. And we couldn’t afford to drink much. But it’s so rare that any of my oldest friends and I get together anymore, I couldn’t help but have a good time. Still, there were a lot of things about that night that left me fighting a creeping feeling of melancholy. Tre is getting married, it looks as though I am getting married. It was announced that Desiree, a friend with whom I have a very rocky intimate and personal history, will be moving to Chicago in a few months. And even though I thought I knew, I asked Pam what we were celebrating that particular evening. Sure enough, Tre had asked her to put something together in the tradition of years past.
At first I was disappointed by that answer. This was nothing like D-Day! Not that staying up all night drinking and getting sweaty tits mashed in your face is necessarily a romantic notion. I guess it just was another reminder of how our youth has finally passed us all by.
Then I woke the fuck up. I haven’t been to a strip club in a few years and am not really eager to go back to one. Maybe if I was ballin’ and could make it rain like Pacman Jones, maybe then I’d go back. But when you’re just a regular guy with a low-paying job and a girlfriend and an aversion to sexual fristration, it seems like an incredible waste of time and money. Not to mention how much more I cherish the times I have with my friends now. We grew up together, and all of those semi-wild hijinks helped lay the foundation, but I feel such a strong sense of comraderie with my friends now. I’m fucking proud of us, all of us still being as tight as we are, everyone making it through all our own little personal trials to get where we are today.
So perhaps that is the spirit of the new D-Day. We should probably come up with a new nickname for it though.
