Riverside Revisited - Chapter 2, A Typical Friday Night
The social life at school was unusually bearable near the end of that last year. More than anything, this was due to the fact that soon we would be free and had no illusions about ever seeing each other again. There was not much love in that senior year of Riverside High. However, as the year wound down to the point where there was a point to start counting off the days, a spirit of camaraderie came lumbering out of the rank walls of locker rooms - throwing arms around the shoulders of football players you previously couldn't stand and fixing smiles (if only condescending ones,) onto the faces of all those girls who for the past five years would walk past you and give you the same acknowledgement they would to the locker you were leaning against. It was an atmosphere of superficial impermanence where the underlying sentiment was akin to 'Sure, I'll be nice and pleasent. Why not? In a matter of days, I'll never see you again.'
For me, it was a great relief. Despite its jocular tone and blatantly phoney air of geniality, it was very clear to me that this was the same behaviour I had noticed in all the adult situations I was ever privy to witness. The same condecension, the same excessive politeness that covered a repressed 'fuck you.' In awe I watched my classmates pretend to be grownups and in horror realized that this behavior had been going on since the May 24th weekend up in the Pinery where, not only did they play at being grownups - drinking too much and welcoming like long lost friends the same familiar faces they had ignored only two days earlier in Biology. But more absurd yet, they were playing house - the girls cooking and fetching beers and then later, in tents, holding in their arms the men who could hold no more beer, like brides on their wedding nights.
There was no better place to observe this behavior than at Yaybars which quickly became 'the' place to be on a Friday night. It was an era when the word 'partying' became synomonous with Friday night and increased in popularity at a rate which rendererd the word truly moronic.
Friday nights in Yaybars were conducted with all the empty-headed enthusiasm that went into the fall of Rome. The evening shared a sense of abandonment which seemed straight out of the Roaring Twenties - nothing but mindless, impersonal fun. No one was exempt from ridicule and everyone was everyone else's good friend.
It was at this circus that I would later find myself after leaving The Hill. Sometimes Coates would come along and if it was a good night in Yaybars, he would stay. In the spring of that year, Yaybars was packed as early as seven-thirty and it was the first bar I've ever had to stand in a line-up to get into - something which made it a local phenomenon. And stand we did. But never for long, for there were three other bars within a five-minute walk.
But to the pleasant surprise of its owners, Yaybars was everyone's first choice. With the roll-back of the drinking age to eighteen, business was booming and its success rested solely on the fact that of all the local bars, it was easily the largest. If you tired of the company at one table, you simply moved to another. An amazing number of people would wander around, lean against a wall, be asked to sit down or leave and end up sitting at the end of a half-deserted long row of tables. Girls came in with their boyfriends, spot their girlfriends as pre-arranged and the boys would push tables together so that after a while the table would be the length of the room. Conversation at these tables was almost impossible except for for whoever was sitting on either side of you. But with the mobile population of Yaybars, you were never sitting next to the same person for long anyway. People were always moving - flitting from one chair to the next, one table to another, from the ladies & escorts room to the back room. This was Yaybars most redeeming quality, you never had to spend an entire evening in only one person's company. You could have fifty conversations with fifty different people and they were all bombed enough that it made no difference that hours earlier in school you felt that you each thought "asshole" as you passed in the hall.
Although it never held much appeal to me, I went there because everyone else did. If I wanted to find a few people I liked, that was where they would be. Packed with so many people, you were bound to come across a friendly face or two. Not only that, there were a number of people who until then, you never had the chance to get familiar with. There was such a large number of good-looking Grade 11 or 12 girls there that you were astounded at how they even got to stay up that late, let alone get past the front door of a bar. Part of the reason for the Roaring 20s speakeasy atmosphere could be attributed to the fact that at least half the clientele were underage.
Most of the others had recently turned eighteen and there was a small group of graduates a year or two older who had become regulars. To all the impressionable Grade 11 girls, or for that matter all the girls who had once had hallway crushes on them, these were 'men' compared to us schoolboys who still had to carry books, could not talk of sharing classes with older sisters and and were not yet old enough to wear fading football jackets on off-hours from selling insurance or working on the line at Chryslers.
To give you an idea at what an overnight sensation that bar was, you would even get the odd teacher in there who would be greeted by shouts of their first name and even applause by the same people they were flunking. The whole thing was like a high-school reunion gone wild, only for the majority of people, they had only last seen each other a few hours before. And when I think about it now, it must have been that reunion aspect which appealeld to Coates - although he took a night in Yaybars about as seriously as I did.
... next installment - 'The Last Day of School.'
For me, it was a great relief. Despite its jocular tone and blatantly phoney air of geniality, it was very clear to me that this was the same behaviour I had noticed in all the adult situations I was ever privy to witness. The same condecension, the same excessive politeness that covered a repressed 'fuck you.' In awe I watched my classmates pretend to be grownups and in horror realized that this behavior had been going on since the May 24th weekend up in the Pinery where, not only did they play at being grownups - drinking too much and welcoming like long lost friends the same familiar faces they had ignored only two days earlier in Biology. But more absurd yet, they were playing house - the girls cooking and fetching beers and then later, in tents, holding in their arms the men who could hold no more beer, like brides on their wedding nights.
There was no better place to observe this behavior than at Yaybars which quickly became 'the' place to be on a Friday night. It was an era when the word 'partying' became synomonous with Friday night and increased in popularity at a rate which rendererd the word truly moronic.
Friday nights in Yaybars were conducted with all the empty-headed enthusiasm that went into the fall of Rome. The evening shared a sense of abandonment which seemed straight out of the Roaring Twenties - nothing but mindless, impersonal fun. No one was exempt from ridicule and everyone was everyone else's good friend.
It was at this circus that I would later find myself after leaving The Hill. Sometimes Coates would come along and if it was a good night in Yaybars, he would stay. In the spring of that year, Yaybars was packed as early as seven-thirty and it was the first bar I've ever had to stand in a line-up to get into - something which made it a local phenomenon. And stand we did. But never for long, for there were three other bars within a five-minute walk.
But to the pleasant surprise of its owners, Yaybars was everyone's first choice. With the roll-back of the drinking age to eighteen, business was booming and its success rested solely on the fact that of all the local bars, it was easily the largest. If you tired of the company at one table, you simply moved to another. An amazing number of people would wander around, lean against a wall, be asked to sit down or leave and end up sitting at the end of a half-deserted long row of tables. Girls came in with their boyfriends, spot their girlfriends as pre-arranged and the boys would push tables together so that after a while the table would be the length of the room. Conversation at these tables was almost impossible except for for whoever was sitting on either side of you. But with the mobile population of Yaybars, you were never sitting next to the same person for long anyway. People were always moving - flitting from one chair to the next, one table to another, from the ladies & escorts room to the back room. This was Yaybars most redeeming quality, you never had to spend an entire evening in only one person's company. You could have fifty conversations with fifty different people and they were all bombed enough that it made no difference that hours earlier in school you felt that you each thought "asshole" as you passed in the hall.
Although it never held much appeal to me, I went there because everyone else did. If I wanted to find a few people I liked, that was where they would be. Packed with so many people, you were bound to come across a friendly face or two. Not only that, there were a number of people who until then, you never had the chance to get familiar with. There was such a large number of good-looking Grade 11 or 12 girls there that you were astounded at how they even got to stay up that late, let alone get past the front door of a bar. Part of the reason for the Roaring 20s speakeasy atmosphere could be attributed to the fact that at least half the clientele were underage.
Most of the others had recently turned eighteen and there was a small group of graduates a year or two older who had become regulars. To all the impressionable Grade 11 girls, or for that matter all the girls who had once had hallway crushes on them, these were 'men' compared to us schoolboys who still had to carry books, could not talk of sharing classes with older sisters and and were not yet old enough to wear fading football jackets on off-hours from selling insurance or working on the line at Chryslers.
To give you an idea at what an overnight sensation that bar was, you would even get the odd teacher in there who would be greeted by shouts of their first name and even applause by the same people they were flunking. The whole thing was like a high-school reunion gone wild, only for the majority of people, they had only last seen each other a few hours before. And when I think about it now, it must have been that reunion aspect which appealeld to Coates - although he took a night in Yaybars about as seriously as I did.
... next installment - 'The Last Day of School.'
posted by Sonny Drysdale at 10:09 AM
2 Comments:
Fantastic... Excellent writing style! Just loved this!
Much obligeded, Vic. See you round school.
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