There I was, with a bunch of tourists, because really, you can’t go anywhere in New York without the bridge-and-tunnel crowd (If you aren’t hip enough to the lingo of Manhattan, which is the only place that matters, and by Manhattan, I mean Brooklyn, and by Brooklyn, I mean the right part of Brooklyn, and at any rate, if you don’t get the jive, “bridge and tunnel” people are those who want to enjoy the cosmopolitan delights of The Big Apple, but actually live in significantly less worldly parts of the world, like New Jersey, and need to access that island metropolis from other land masses, e.g., by one of the bridges, or one of the tunnels. I am from New Jersey, technically, but I access Manhattan via dirigible, of course.
I should orient you in four-dimensional space. I am currently in the hippest possible place and time, which would be to say the here and now which contains me, and I am impeccably emulating somewhere hipper, namely, the past. And I am perfect from top to bottom. I have a slouching fedora which would be the envy of The Continental Op, Lew Archer, and Sam Spade put together; in fact, you’d probably need to put them together, as it’s large enough to fit at least three heads. I’ve jammed my own skull into it with the simple assistance of a few pounds of rubber cement (suffer, suffer for fashion, or it isn’t fashion) – and I’m wearin’ cow shoes. Yes, cow shoes. They’re old-style patent leather footgear with ordinary soles, onto which have been grafted fake cow hooves so that clever detectives trying to track down my illicit alcohol trade will be confused by my footprints.
I am authentique.
(I am not actually in the illicit alcohol trade, as Prohibition took place a century in the past, but if that trade still existed, I’d passed the interview just by walking through the door and tipping my gigantic hat.)
The tourists, mostly, seem to be dressed as G-Men, assuming that the G-Man’s traditional uniform is badly-worn polyester men’s semi-casual. Technically, it’s a kind of suit, so you’ve got to give them a point for trying.
Maybe half a point.
The rabble are out ahead of me. I’m trailing behind them. I suppose I could duck into a cafe and wait until they’re gone, since our timing is semi-coincidental; we’re all trying to get to the Speakeasy at midnight. They’re doing so because they think that’s when it starts; I’m doing so because obviously I was invited to the pre-party, but I’m showing up to it three hours late, because who wants to be the poor sucker who gets there first, when nobody who’s anybody has arrived?
But there’s no need. Anyone who sees me with this group and thinks I’m part of this group isn’t anyone worth my notice.
They’ve got their phones out, because none of them have memorized the instructions, despite the fact that they were told to keep in the spirit of things and be discrete. It’s fine. We’ve arrived at the laundromat. It’s as seemingly-nondescript as we’d expect. The ‘security guard’ does an impressive job of ignoring us, even as one of the world-champion loudmouths near the front saunters up to him and ‘nonchalantly’ asks him where we go if we’ve got ‘very special laundry’. The guard keeps staring blandly off into the distance as a discrete finger—not a bad touch—motions us off to a collection of fairly ratty-looking fake fur coats on a rack in the far corner of the room.
We push our way through, to find ourselves in a vision of sequin-spurting opulence, Hawaii Five-O style. It’s like someone took a Tiki Bar and put it on top of a Tiki Bar. Most of the group detaches itself immediately and heads towards the center of the room, where some people in rental tuxedos are pouring drinks and listlessly tipping matches into them to set off the 151.
I need a drink. But I’d rather swallow sterno than this stuff.
I spend a little time assessing how many Tiki Gods are likely to smite anyone who stays here for more than about twenty minutes, and I am just concluding that the answer is “far too few” when a handful of the slightly-less-ignorant among the original party detach and heard towards the payphone booth in the corner.
Close-up, the booth is real, but the phone’s just drawn on. We push through, and as the not-terribly-secret door opens, I note that the foyer’s fairly dark, which is not a bad touch. The tiki bar was distracting; we weren’t exactly subtle going towards the phone booth, but nothing about the last place was subtle, and the drinks were heavy. We won’t be missed.
Actually, the room’s not fairly dark; it’s unfairly dark, in that I’d need to either pull out my phone to see what’s going on, or I’ll have to hang close to the ninnies. Or so I think, until a voice booms out,
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
Someone, rather melodramatically, flares up a torch.
The place has a reasonable approximation of stone walls, stalactites and stalagmites, primitivist paintings scrawled on various surfaces; it all looks natural. The suburbanites are impressed. I’m not. We really should’ve been greeted in the original Greek, and really: Plato’s Cave? That’s a one-note joke; a little clever, a little cutesy, and each and every member of the staff has their own, personal idea of how one ties a toga, and the most you can say for it is that any accidentally-bared flesh is obscured by the poor visibility.
There are statues of a number of Greek Gods (eight, by my count; apparently, the room’s designers couldn’t count to twelve. Also, one of them seems, unaccountably, to be P’tah, the Egyptian God of Miniature Gaming. I’d ask someone why, but I don’t care.)
The others have pretty much settled themselves on barstools on top of (what else?) some of the aforementioned stalagmites. It could be worse; someone might have thought it funny to have no seats at all. There were no further instructions, but clearly this isn’t the final destination. A few brave holdouts are studiously examining the statue of Bacchus (not everything worthwhile is obvious, kids), but I go straight to Mighty Aphrodite (because I love to drink.) Her mouth is slightly pouty, which some might associate with sex, but to me, it looks agape, which to me suggests agapē. I peer respectfully between her lips, and with a great rush of air, she pulls me into her mouth and transports me somewhere else and I find myself standing in a large corridor, with two doorways, one labelled “Hell” and the other labelled “Jersey City”. Without hesitation, I walk through the one marked “Hell”.
I can tell pretty much immediately by the prices above the bar that it was a trick. Damnation. But there are some positives to Jersey City. On the one hand, the beer will be terrible and the food will be vegan, and on the other hand, I can probably get a seat with a decent view of the Hudson. I will say that the joint is perfect; it looks like something right out of 1925, only cleaner and with better electricity, and less chance of getting into a fistfight with F. Scott Fitzgerald. I make my way to the bar.
“Who do I have to kill for a drink?” I ask the disinterested, muscular fellow whose main goal in life appears to be to see how long he can pretend to polish the same glass.
“Perhaps you’d like to see our starter menu, with a wide selection of amusing and cruelty-free specials created personally by our head chef, Frank.”
“No thanks,” I reply. “I’m just here to drink.”
“For eighteen bucks and seventeen cents, you can go on upstairs, where there’s going to be a live band. Their name is an unpronounceable series of Babylonian curses, which cannot be written down and which are spoken in tones too high for the human ear to detect.”
“No thanks, I hate music,” I assure him. “Got any artisanal whiskeys?”
“We do a very refreshing lemonade which uses soy lemons instead of actual lemons. It’s a specialty of the house. I recommend it.”
“You’ve got a liquor license, right? You serve alcohol here?”
“Of course. This is a bar,” he says, favoring me with the sort of look one normally reserves for those from Long Island.
“So what’ve you got to drink?”
“Not a damn thing,” he replies. “Every couple of hours, we get a new shipment of bootleg gin, which is immediately followed by a bunch of 1920s Prohibition Agents who smash up all the bottles and take half the patrons into custody. You’re going to be lucky to get out of here tonight with a broken nose and a stiff fine, compounded with a hundred years of interest.”
I lean back, putting my feet under the bar-rail and my arms behind my head, and I allow myself a faintly satisfied look.
This, I note, in the back of my head, this is is hip.
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My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
I put on a convention for Villains every February.
I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!
