Monday, May 18, 2009

My First Beer Stand

I was pretty sure I had thought of (and usually done) almost every silly thing on Earth... until Saturday night. I'm as suprised as you will be that it took me until almost age 32 to take part in this caper:An an impromptu and illegal roadside beerstand!Let's back this thang up, and explain how it started, then we'll get to how it ended. Me and Pokey Pants and my roommate "Juan Valdez" were staying in drinking beer and watching metal videos on VH1 Classic at about 1:30 a.m. when our bright idea started to form.Pokes said, "It's about time for all the drunk people to start stumbling back from the bars and right by the house."Usually, we are those people, but when we're not them, we love to watch them. People are always fucking, fighting and fraternizing on the sidewalk in front of my house here in the historic neighborhood after the bars boot them out at two. It's always great fun, you never see the same dumb shit twice.Right after Pokey said this, we all kind of looked over at Juan's marker board that was sitting out in the living room for no apparent reason. Apparently, one bolt of mind-lightning hit all three of us at once and we were all laughing about how it would be fun and funny to set up a beerstand on my porch and sell the drunk people booze as they walked home. Then we stopped laughing. Uh-oh. Our dumbasses were suddenly serious. This was not good. But this was, in fact, very awesome.Juan, was the first to act by writing "BEERS: $3" on the marker board. At my suggestion, he made the "R" backwards. Pokey, who is a nurse and almost thirty and a girl and should know better, was suddenly decorating the sign up with pictures of beer bottles and little squiggly lines that somehow convey "buying roadside beer is fun!" I love her for not knowing better. Nothing is more annoying than girls that try to stop me from my antics. None have ever succeeded, none ever will. This one often out-me's me. Next thing we all know, the three of us were out in my yard scoping out the street. We knew the cops would be driving up and down the street, so we did a hilarious mafia style speed set-up. Whenever drunk groups of people would get within 30 feet of my raised front lawn steps, we would rush out, drop a table down put the sign in front, set up a box of Miller Lights and Coors Lights, put on our baseball caps all goofy like Dennis the Menace and then we'd start hocking our product like 1920's newspaper boys: "Bee-yahs! Get'chey Bee-yahs! Fresh and cold! Only Three Doll-ahs! Only beers in town at this hour!"The first few groups of people were too drunk or too horny with each other to buy a beer or even laugh at us. Then this pair of brown-haired girls came walking by and we thought we had a sale, then the big one almost fell down from an irregular bump on the old-ass sidewalk, and she said, "That's why we don't need to be buying anymore beer!" Touche.Then, two guys in a truck waved at us from the other side of 5th avenue, did a u-turn, parked in front of my house, turned their lights off, and got out. It was a white South African and a Southern guy. Africa said, "We were looking for drugs, but couldn't find'em, and we figured a fucking 2 a.m. beerstand had to be even more fun than drugs. How often do you see this shit! Put us down for two Miller Lites."While these guys turned out to be very cool, we suddenly realized how a roadside beerstand can quickly become just like a regular bar. First, these guys had to piss. My yard is too public to be pissing in (even if maybe some guy, I don't know who, may have accidentally done it on the front porch in the daylight once last year. I didn't say who, and I never said it happened,) so suddenly me and Juan felt obligated to let these two strangers in our house to wiz. At least these guys were, cool, But what if they weren't?Then we got a third customer. It was some cute, but very talkative, Irish girl. She was barefoot and in her pajamas and talking about how she was wandering the streets because minutes earlier, she had walked in on her live-in boyfriend shagging down with a girl that was not her. Just like real bartenders, we had to pretend we cared while she rambled on. This was getting too real.Then a fourth customer came up. He was a bartender from some high class bar I've heard of but never been to. He was the other roommate of Ireland Chick. Now we had four drunks, nice, but still drunks, on our front steps buying beers from us and making a mess. Shit, we forgot that if you have a bar, you gotta clean up a mess left by your drinkers. Me and Juan were now bartenders, bathroom attendandants, and janitors. This was becoming a job... and we had only been doing it for 25 minutes. And Pokey wasn't getting off easy, either. I said, "You're the sex-appeal in this operation. When the men order beers, you should serve them, that'll make'em keep drinking more. You're legs are prettier than mine or Juan's." She laughed and obliged.After 2 or 3 rounds, our drunks started getting louder. I said, "Guys, we gotta keep it down just a little. I have one neighbor, Mr. Wilson, who hates me and all people on Earth. He is always out to get me for having a good time."They laughed and said, "You guys are dressed up like Dennsi the Menace and you really have a Mr. Wilson that's out to ruin you? That's crazy!" I said, "That irony has never been lost on us. He even looks like he could play Mr.Wilson. He's always trying to stamp out my fun." So now we were, as bartenders, having to monitor noise-levels and the occupancy level of my yard. This was a job for sure. And then we realized that if Ireland's cheating boyfriend was to show up, we'd have to hire a bouncer as well. Between all of these things and having to flip our sign around every time the cops drove by, we decided our improvistionial beerstand had been a success. So we closed up the bar, sent our new friends/customers on their way, and watched two of the guys leave in a vehicle with beers we had sold, and decided we had just escaped trouble once and should never do this again. Then again, we're dumb, so we probably will.



(P.S. I finally got my PC fixed, but I can't use it until Juan returns from PA, so I can use his spyware copy. Then I can bother you guys back more.)

3 comments:

  1. That sounds like something I would totally do. Only I live in a very sedate subdivision and most of our neighbors are of the age where they have one foot on a banana peel and the other in a coffin. We've lost 3 in the 5 years we've lived here....

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  2. OMG LMFAO! Only YOU would do something like this. Brilliant idea though!

    Hugs - Tiff

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