"I want a good steak once in a while, and a checkered cab to go once in style"
(On The Road, High Class in Borrowed Shoes, Max Webster Rel. 1977)
Way back in the day, I was gigging for a living in what could be only be described as a Heavy-Fucking-Metal cover band. We played every dive, dump, shithole, arsehole, armpit, orifice, and about every place that had signs over the entrance that read "Check your knives and colours at the door" in Western Canada. Inside that door, they all smelled the same; Stale cigarettes, beer, ass, & B.O., and looking back on it now? It was pure sadness. But, when I was in my twenties? It was like walking into a Cathedral every night.
Each bar table was one of those you have seen in all the taverns around the world; round, about 3 feet in circumference and were all adorned with those elastic rimmed terry cloth table covers (usually brown in color to hide the stains). The tables had those circular, inverted cone type bases which were for spinning it a good 3/4 turn away from you to avoid the most recent spillage. On the wall behind the bar were the usual broken drum skins, signed by some previous band that had been through there, saying "Rock On Stony Plain! / You're the best, Pincher Creek! / Party On, Estevan Sask! / The First Herpes-Free Week courtesy of Drayton Valley, AB! Signed (Insert any previous bands name here). Every tavern looked the same; pool tables, cigarette-burnt industrial carpets, there was the beefy bartender who would double as the doorman, the tired waitresses who had to fend off advances from the usuals losers who inhabited the place Monday - Wednesday. On the back 3 (Thurs-Sat) they would cake on makeup, wear something tighter, therefore upping their game and milking tips from the cash laden knuckleheads who came out of the bush and into town to party on the weekends. There was usually one hot, take no shit waitress who wouldn't date or party with any of the locals (for the obvious reasons), but who I with a surprisingly amount of regularity, was able to coax them into venturing into the dark side. (But thats another story for another time).
It didn't matter where we were because there was always the same lonely jukebox in the same corner in the morning playing something sad like Patsy Clines "I fall to pieces" to the alcoholics who would be shuffling in like zombies when the bar would finally open at 11:00 AM. By the afternoon, Mr. Jukebox would be would be primed and blasting out "Takin care of Business", at full volume while the rig-pigs & forestry workers drinking the first of their many beers while scarfing down their burgers with fries & gravy, all while waiting for the strippers who would be starting the first of many dances of a long day. By 4:00 PM the dancers would be making their second trip down the disgustingly titled "Gynecology Row" and be then looking for either their bus ticket out of town, or to latch on to a band member, a kindred spirit, someone who was on the road who knows the ups and downs of the dreadful bar circuit in western Canada. As is so often demonstrated in nature - there is safety in the herd, but when you get down to it - Any company is good company when you are surrounded by the wolves baying outside your door. Especially when your door is a flimsy one in some shitty hotel, and a long way from home and hearth.
Somewhere between noon - 6:00 PM, the band would be allowed to come down and do a quick sound check in between the dancers. Reason for doing so is (that if anyone on the road know's their salt), you never, EVER left anything onstage that could be unclipped / unplugged and walked off with. So at the end of each night, the guitars, microphones, effects pedals, cords, cymbals, tuners, and anything else easy enough to steal was taken upstairs to one of our rooms then repatriated the next day. Each time that happened, we had to get our levels right, recalibrate our instruments, make sure the electronics were working right from the night before. We were usually granted about 20-30 mins in between the dancing girls, so not to disrupt the paying customers from the beer and eye - candy in the middle of the afternoon do to a brief check. "Tap-tap-tap". "Check One, Check Two". "Thud-thud-thud". "Sibilance, Sibilance". If we were lucky enough, we'd get to do a quick rehearsal of a new song we had been working on, or in my case, a personal favorite was a sound-check jam. But they were few & far between.
I loved sound check jams. They were probably the thing I looked forward to most of all. To set up, feel & hear your guitar blasting out of the mains, all to an empty room, free of the constraints of playing another song over and over that had been played hundreds of times earlier, just being able to jam, and look at your compatriots in the eye - milking some creative goodness, making some eye contact and simply having FUN. Imagine jamming around to your hearts content, will full monitors, the front end blaring, the light guy playing with his set up, it was a casual mini-concert complete with sound & lights, with no-one invited. We were always working on a new song, and when you're on the road, there is NO rehearsal time. we'd have to learn a song in our hotel rooms, and sit around on the beds and play with practise amps, and singing with muted voices so not to get complaints from the guests in the neighboring rooms. But - when there came the opportunity to have a sound check jam? I quickly settled into my role as Executive Vice-President of Tomfoolery. The thing about sound check was other than the fact that something creative could fall out of the sky, is that I, being all foxy & sly, was listening to stuff all over the gamut: U2, REM, James Brown, Madonna, Wham! Be Bop Deluxe, The Alarm, the Clash, Rush, etc., and was an ardent believer in bringing some of this in. Sometimes it would start with a blues jam, or doing an extended outro to a song we all knew, but someone would grab hold of it, stretch out the end and turn it sideways. I think one of my biggest claims to fame was getting the guys to jam to "Celebrate" by Madonna. it went to funny, to "Hey - this is kind of cool", to playing it some nights as background music when we needed a timekiller due to some lead-singer-related extended technical malfunction. Sound check jams WERE the shit. On the few occasions where we had the luxury to be playing a nightclub (which were closed during the day), we had precious hours to screw around while Donny or Corey (the soundmen) would get a happening mix going, we would be able to rehearse new stuff onstage, and then have more than a little fun.
Looking back on it now,it reminds me of the hockey stories I read about. You have a team that is on the road all the time. They eat, sleep, play, work, fight and hang out with each other. Every so often there are squabbles, and with all things people run into the invetable ups & downs during the course of the season. Every so often, they can hang loose at practise, try some new moves, and inject some laughter and excitment back into their jobs which, really, to quote Glen Sather, was just a bunch of grown-ups playing like childrens game. It was the same with us; just a bunch of men dancing around on stage with an electric guitar making a VERY loud noise, and living their dreams. This is all to say that sound check jams brought to me everything that I had been dreaming since I was a 13 year old kid in my bedroom - hunched over a tape recorder endlessly hitting play, then rewind, then play trying to figure out a lick from "Detroit Rock City, or the entire side of "2112".
Iron McFist was the biggest heavy-metal headbanger in Edmonton, Alberta. He hung out at all the rock bars, but was particular to The Rex, and the Highway Motor Inn. He was about my height but very powerfully built, huge shoulders tapered into a slim waist, with curly brown hair & surprisingly friendly eyes & warm features, who always wore a black leather biker jacket, boots grubby jeans, and who an absolute propensity for crazy type shit. Backstage at the Rex, there were Iron-sized-fist, and Iron's-head-sized holes perforating the wall with "Iron" written with a black felt pen, and an arrow drawn to each hole as they happened. According to legend, Iron also took on a 4 guys in a parking lot once. I wasn't there to see it, but the word was that Iron kicked ALL of their asses, then calmly walked back inside, sat down, and resumed his vodka tonics and enthusiastic head banging from his table. Everyone knew Iron, or at least knew of him. The bouncers, doormen & Bartenders all gave him cautious respect, as did the bands. Iron was such a HUGE supporter of any band halfway decent that he quickly became their best friend / groupie / assassin for the 6 days they were in town. If you treated Iron well? then Iron would treat you well. Basically, if there was someone other than the bar manager that you needed on your side, it was Iron McFist. Dude was an crazy, intimidating, force of nature. I've often wondered what happened to him. I couldn't imagine him doing any sort of a day job other than some sort of crow de-populating project in urban centers or working for Blackwater in Iraq. The other thing about Iron, is that no-one ever knew where he lived, nor his real name.
Bart the Crazy Lightman was another story. Bart was always a little unhinged. He had a massive drinking problem (which really isn't that big of a deal, considering what we were all doing for a living), and he had this way of looking at you when you were talking to him that you got unnerved a little. He would just stare right through you, with heavy bags under his unblinking gaze - doing that Kaa the Snake hypnotizing-eyes-bit from the Jungle Book. Bart wouldn't ever blink. Ever. Long before I ever met him, the rumor about why Bart was Bart? went something like this: Bart and his Dad never got along. So there was a huge fight at the breakfast table one morning, and Bart said something along the lines of "Fuck You Dad! I hope you fucking die!" and stormed out of the house. Apparently within minutes of that exchange, Bart's Dad had a massive heart attack, and indeed fucking died. A few hours later, Bart returned to his house and found his Dad face down in the bowl of Corn Flakes. Bart was never quite normal after that.
He also was famous for driving down the highway with our guitar player in the car one night, in the middle of an Alberta blizzard, then suddenly quite irrationally deciding "I HAVE TO GET BACK HOME - RIGHT NOW!" thusly turning the wheel and pulling a picture-perfect Starsky & Hutch-like 180 degree change in direction at 60 miles an hour, and headed back to his point of origin. This is not to say that it was an admirable piece of driving, but as he was our lightman on the way to our gig, and he also was taking our guitar player hostage. You see, Bart had some issues.
Once a long time ago, we were opening up for Kickaxe (yes I know. And I also can't find a working website for them either, as their official homepage hasn't been updated since 2005). Anyway, we were at the totally scuzzy Park Hotel in Red Deer, AB, and we were opening for them on the back 3. As two of the guys in our band had to be back in Edmonton that night, Me, Stu, & Brian piled in the car and drive the 1.5 hours north to get home. Early the next morning, we did the drive back to Red Deer, only to find that Bart had invited half the bar, and Kickaxe to our rooms the night before, for an all night Alberta Style party. We arrived before noon just in time to see the last vestiges of people stumbling out of MY room. I walked in, and there was Bart. He was draining out the empty beer bottles in search of another drink, and he had drank so much that he actually drank himself sober. (Well, sober enough to take a swig of an empty beer bottle that had a couple of cigarette butts in it). So after getting a mouthful of tobacco beer, he went in the bathroom, puked a couple of times, then came back to the room looking for another unfinished beer to polish off.
A couple my favorite Bart Stories:
1) Got a quarter?
Bart never, EVER had any money. At all. We paid the road crew about as much as we paid ourselves, but Bart with all his alcohol and drug habits was really going for the gusto as far as non-cash management went. Bart, though, was nothing but resourceful. One of the things he would do was leave his light board (while we were onstage) and walk around the bar saying "I'm with the band, do you have a quarter?" He would literally hit every person in the place before the night was done, and would come out with enough cash for a couple of pitchers of beer, and as a bonus, enough for either breakfast the next morning, or a pack of smokes.
2) The Drinking Contest.
Here's the thing: Bart did a few things really, really well:
a) He was a kicker of a lightman.
b) In in a crunch, was pretty decent guitar & drum tech.
c) He always loaded up the truck very well (concious of the dangerous load-shift, our boy was).
d) He was actually not a bad singer. Every once in a while, we'd play "Soldier of Fortune" by Deep Purple, and have Bart leave the light board and join us on stage to sing it. He always knocked it out of the park too. He had a deep tenor, good pitch, and a warm, lazy vibrato that was very reminiscent of Burt Bacharach.
e) Bart's greatest skill though was that he could drink beer like no man in the Western Hemisphere. Bart was Superman when it came to drinking beer. Songs are still sung about him by the mountain people.
One night we were playing this place somewhere, and it was Saturday night after the last encore, and everyone was tearing down the gear in anticipation of the load-out. As Stuart & I were co-running the band we were going over the bills and had wait until the general manager had checked the stage, our rooms, rectified our tabs etc. We were always waiting for the pay-off, which was always in cash. So that night, a little after 2:00 AM, with me and Stu hunched over the ledger books, Bart came flying into the room:
Bart: "I need an advance on my pay! I need $50 right now".
Us: "Why"
Bart: "I've challenged the bar manager to a drinking contest, whoever can down a jug of beer first wins $50".
Us: "Uh... ok". (Stu & I looked at each other and seeing as how there was no room damage, the load-out was pretty much done, we hadn't kicked any holes in the walls, and that it was common knowledge that Bart was the Wayne Gretzky of beer-drinking, we figured "why not"?)
Bart: "Wicked!"
We followed Bart back downstairs to the bar, and the Bar manager, AND the Hotel manager were there waiting for the contest to begin. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure; in Northern Alberta, there is a rite of passage when it comes to beer drinking. You have to gun a pitcher down before the other guy can. Yes it's silly, but this was Bart; The Champion of the Universe of beer drinking. So Bart and the Bar Manager sat down at a little circular table (complete with a brown elastic-hemmed terry cloth table cover 'natch), and they squared off with a pitcher of beer in front of each of them. The Hotel Manager yelled GO, and they were off. Sure to his word, Bart gunned the entire pitcher down in about 7 seconds, thusly beating the Bar manager. $50 was had! The spoils of combat were ours! We were the champions!
What we didn't know was that Bart had been drinking all day. By the time he got to the beer drinking contest with our employers (who had yet to pay us), he was well and truly completely fucking annihilated.
So we watched Bart down the last glass of beer, triumphantly slam the glass down in victory, and before our horrified eyes - and like in some dark Jacobean tragedy - he tilted his head a few degrees, and puked all over the table, the carpet, and most unfortunately, the Bar Manager.
(On The Road, High Class in Borrowed Shoes, Max Webster Rel. 1977)
Way back in the day, I was gigging for a living in what could be only be described as a Heavy-Fucking-Metal cover band. We played every dive, dump, shithole, arsehole, armpit, orifice, and about every place that had signs over the entrance that read "Check your knives and colours at the door" in Western Canada. Inside that door, they all smelled the same; Stale cigarettes, beer, ass, & B.O., and looking back on it now? It was pure sadness. But, when I was in my twenties? It was like walking into a Cathedral every night.
Each bar table was one of those you have seen in all the taverns around the world; round, about 3 feet in circumference and were all adorned with those elastic rimmed terry cloth table covers (usually brown in color to hide the stains). The tables had those circular, inverted cone type bases which were for spinning it a good 3/4 turn away from you to avoid the most recent spillage. On the wall behind the bar were the usual broken drum skins, signed by some previous band that had been through there, saying "Rock On Stony Plain! / You're the best, Pincher Creek! / Party On, Estevan Sask! / The First Herpes-Free Week courtesy of Drayton Valley, AB! Signed (Insert any previous bands name here). Every tavern looked the same; pool tables, cigarette-burnt industrial carpets, there was the beefy bartender who would double as the doorman, the tired waitresses who had to fend off advances from the usuals losers who inhabited the place Monday - Wednesday. On the back 3 (Thurs-Sat) they would cake on makeup, wear something tighter, therefore upping their game and milking tips from the cash laden knuckleheads who came out of the bush and into town to party on the weekends. There was usually one hot, take no shit waitress who wouldn't date or party with any of the locals (for the obvious reasons), but who I with a surprisingly amount of regularity, was able to coax them into venturing into the dark side. (But thats another story for another time).
It didn't matter where we were because there was always the same lonely jukebox in the same corner in the morning playing something sad like Patsy Clines "I fall to pieces" to the alcoholics who would be shuffling in like zombies when the bar would finally open at 11:00 AM. By the afternoon, Mr. Jukebox would be would be primed and blasting out "Takin care of Business", at full volume while the rig-pigs & forestry workers drinking the first of their many beers while scarfing down their burgers with fries & gravy, all while waiting for the strippers who would be starting the first of many dances of a long day. By 4:00 PM the dancers would be making their second trip down the disgustingly titled "Gynecology Row" and be then looking for either their bus ticket out of town, or to latch on to a band member, a kindred spirit, someone who was on the road who knows the ups and downs of the dreadful bar circuit in western Canada. As is so often demonstrated in nature - there is safety in the herd, but when you get down to it - Any company is good company when you are surrounded by the wolves baying outside your door. Especially when your door is a flimsy one in some shitty hotel, and a long way from home and hearth.
Somewhere between noon - 6:00 PM, the band would be allowed to come down and do a quick sound check in between the dancers. Reason for doing so is (that if anyone on the road know's their salt), you never, EVER left anything onstage that could be unclipped / unplugged and walked off with. So at the end of each night, the guitars, microphones, effects pedals, cords, cymbals, tuners, and anything else easy enough to steal was taken upstairs to one of our rooms then repatriated the next day. Each time that happened, we had to get our levels right, recalibrate our instruments, make sure the electronics were working right from the night before. We were usually granted about 20-30 mins in between the dancing girls, so not to disrupt the paying customers from the beer and eye - candy in the middle of the afternoon do to a brief check. "Tap-tap-tap". "Check One, Check Two". "Thud-thud-thud". "Sibilance, Sibilance". If we were lucky enough, we'd get to do a quick rehearsal of a new song we had been working on, or in my case, a personal favorite was a sound-check jam. But they were few & far between.
I loved sound check jams. They were probably the thing I looked forward to most of all. To set up, feel & hear your guitar blasting out of the mains, all to an empty room, free of the constraints of playing another song over and over that had been played hundreds of times earlier, just being able to jam, and look at your compatriots in the eye - milking some creative goodness, making some eye contact and simply having FUN. Imagine jamming around to your hearts content, will full monitors, the front end blaring, the light guy playing with his set up, it was a casual mini-concert complete with sound & lights, with no-one invited. We were always working on a new song, and when you're on the road, there is NO rehearsal time. we'd have to learn a song in our hotel rooms, and sit around on the beds and play with practise amps, and singing with muted voices so not to get complaints from the guests in the neighboring rooms. But - when there came the opportunity to have a sound check jam? I quickly settled into my role as Executive Vice-President of Tomfoolery. The thing about sound check was other than the fact that something creative could fall out of the sky, is that I, being all foxy & sly, was listening to stuff all over the gamut: U2, REM, James Brown, Madonna, Wham! Be Bop Deluxe, The Alarm, the Clash, Rush, etc., and was an ardent believer in bringing some of this in. Sometimes it would start with a blues jam, or doing an extended outro to a song we all knew, but someone would grab hold of it, stretch out the end and turn it sideways. I think one of my biggest claims to fame was getting the guys to jam to "Celebrate" by Madonna. it went to funny, to "Hey - this is kind of cool", to playing it some nights as background music when we needed a timekiller due to some lead-singer-related extended technical malfunction. Sound check jams WERE the shit. On the few occasions where we had the luxury to be playing a nightclub (which were closed during the day), we had precious hours to screw around while Donny or Corey (the soundmen) would get a happening mix going, we would be able to rehearse new stuff onstage, and then have more than a little fun.
Looking back on it now,it reminds me of the hockey stories I read about. You have a team that is on the road all the time. They eat, sleep, play, work, fight and hang out with each other. Every so often there are squabbles, and with all things people run into the invetable ups & downs during the course of the season. Every so often, they can hang loose at practise, try some new moves, and inject some laughter and excitment back into their jobs which, really, to quote Glen Sather, was just a bunch of grown-ups playing like childrens game. It was the same with us; just a bunch of men dancing around on stage with an electric guitar making a VERY loud noise, and living their dreams. This is all to say that sound check jams brought to me everything that I had been dreaming since I was a 13 year old kid in my bedroom - hunched over a tape recorder endlessly hitting play, then rewind, then play trying to figure out a lick from "Detroit Rock City, or the entire side of "2112".
Iron McFist was the biggest heavy-metal headbanger in Edmonton, Alberta. He hung out at all the rock bars, but was particular to The Rex, and the Highway Motor Inn. He was about my height but very powerfully built, huge shoulders tapered into a slim waist, with curly brown hair & surprisingly friendly eyes & warm features, who always wore a black leather biker jacket, boots grubby jeans, and who an absolute propensity for crazy type shit. Backstage at the Rex, there were Iron-sized-fist, and Iron's-head-sized holes perforating the wall with "Iron" written with a black felt pen, and an arrow drawn to each hole as they happened. According to legend, Iron also took on a 4 guys in a parking lot once. I wasn't there to see it, but the word was that Iron kicked ALL of their asses, then calmly walked back inside, sat down, and resumed his vodka tonics and enthusiastic head banging from his table. Everyone knew Iron, or at least knew of him. The bouncers, doormen & Bartenders all gave him cautious respect, as did the bands. Iron was such a HUGE supporter of any band halfway decent that he quickly became their best friend / groupie / assassin for the 6 days they were in town. If you treated Iron well? then Iron would treat you well. Basically, if there was someone other than the bar manager that you needed on your side, it was Iron McFist. Dude was an crazy, intimidating, force of nature. I've often wondered what happened to him. I couldn't imagine him doing any sort of a day job other than some sort of crow de-populating project in urban centers or working for Blackwater in Iraq. The other thing about Iron, is that no-one ever knew where he lived, nor his real name.
Bart the Crazy Lightman was another story. Bart was always a little unhinged. He had a massive drinking problem (which really isn't that big of a deal, considering what we were all doing for a living), and he had this way of looking at you when you were talking to him that you got unnerved a little. He would just stare right through you, with heavy bags under his unblinking gaze - doing that Kaa the Snake hypnotizing-eyes-bit from the Jungle Book. Bart wouldn't ever blink. Ever. Long before I ever met him, the rumor about why Bart was Bart? went something like this: Bart and his Dad never got along. So there was a huge fight at the breakfast table one morning, and Bart said something along the lines of "Fuck You Dad! I hope you fucking die!" and stormed out of the house. Apparently within minutes of that exchange, Bart's Dad had a massive heart attack, and indeed fucking died. A few hours later, Bart returned to his house and found his Dad face down in the bowl of Corn Flakes. Bart was never quite normal after that.
He also was famous for driving down the highway with our guitar player in the car one night, in the middle of an Alberta blizzard, then suddenly quite irrationally deciding "I HAVE TO GET BACK HOME - RIGHT NOW!" thusly turning the wheel and pulling a picture-perfect Starsky & Hutch-like 180 degree change in direction at 60 miles an hour, and headed back to his point of origin. This is not to say that it was an admirable piece of driving, but as he was our lightman on the way to our gig, and he also was taking our guitar player hostage. You see, Bart had some issues.
Once a long time ago, we were opening up for Kickaxe (yes I know. And I also can't find a working website for them either, as their official homepage hasn't been updated since 2005). Anyway, we were at the totally scuzzy Park Hotel in Red Deer, AB, and we were opening for them on the back 3. As two of the guys in our band had to be back in Edmonton that night, Me, Stu, & Brian piled in the car and drive the 1.5 hours north to get home. Early the next morning, we did the drive back to Red Deer, only to find that Bart had invited half the bar, and Kickaxe to our rooms the night before, for an all night Alberta Style party. We arrived before noon just in time to see the last vestiges of people stumbling out of MY room. I walked in, and there was Bart. He was draining out the empty beer bottles in search of another drink, and he had drank so much that he actually drank himself sober. (Well, sober enough to take a swig of an empty beer bottle that had a couple of cigarette butts in it). So after getting a mouthful of tobacco beer, he went in the bathroom, puked a couple of times, then came back to the room looking for another unfinished beer to polish off.
A couple my favorite Bart Stories:
1) Got a quarter?
Bart never, EVER had any money. At all. We paid the road crew about as much as we paid ourselves, but Bart with all his alcohol and drug habits was really going for the gusto as far as non-cash management went. Bart, though, was nothing but resourceful. One of the things he would do was leave his light board (while we were onstage) and walk around the bar saying "I'm with the band, do you have a quarter?" He would literally hit every person in the place before the night was done, and would come out with enough cash for a couple of pitchers of beer, and as a bonus, enough for either breakfast the next morning, or a pack of smokes.
2) The Drinking Contest.
Here's the thing: Bart did a few things really, really well:
a) He was a kicker of a lightman.
b) In in a crunch, was pretty decent guitar & drum tech.
c) He always loaded up the truck very well (concious of the dangerous load-shift, our boy was).
d) He was actually not a bad singer. Every once in a while, we'd play "Soldier of Fortune" by Deep Purple, and have Bart leave the light board and join us on stage to sing it. He always knocked it out of the park too. He had a deep tenor, good pitch, and a warm, lazy vibrato that was very reminiscent of Burt Bacharach.
e) Bart's greatest skill though was that he could drink beer like no man in the Western Hemisphere. Bart was Superman when it came to drinking beer. Songs are still sung about him by the mountain people.
One night we were playing this place somewhere, and it was Saturday night after the last encore, and everyone was tearing down the gear in anticipation of the load-out. As Stuart & I were co-running the band we were going over the bills and had wait until the general manager had checked the stage, our rooms, rectified our tabs etc. We were always waiting for the pay-off, which was always in cash. So that night, a little after 2:00 AM, with me and Stu hunched over the ledger books, Bart came flying into the room:
Bart: "I need an advance on my pay! I need $50 right now".
Us: "Why"
Bart: "I've challenged the bar manager to a drinking contest, whoever can down a jug of beer first wins $50".
Us: "Uh... ok". (Stu & I looked at each other and seeing as how there was no room damage, the load-out was pretty much done, we hadn't kicked any holes in the walls, and that it was common knowledge that Bart was the Wayne Gretzky of beer-drinking, we figured "why not"?)
Bart: "Wicked!"
We followed Bart back downstairs to the bar, and the Bar manager, AND the Hotel manager were there waiting for the contest to begin. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure; in Northern Alberta, there is a rite of passage when it comes to beer drinking. You have to gun a pitcher down before the other guy can. Yes it's silly, but this was Bart; The Champion of the Universe of beer drinking. So Bart and the Bar Manager sat down at a little circular table (complete with a brown elastic-hemmed terry cloth table cover 'natch), and they squared off with a pitcher of beer in front of each of them. The Hotel Manager yelled GO, and they were off. Sure to his word, Bart gunned the entire pitcher down in about 7 seconds, thusly beating the Bar manager. $50 was had! The spoils of combat were ours! We were the champions!
What we didn't know was that Bart had been drinking all day. By the time he got to the beer drinking contest with our employers (who had yet to pay us), he was well and truly completely fucking annihilated.
So we watched Bart down the last glass of beer, triumphantly slam the glass down in victory, and before our horrified eyes - and like in some dark Jacobean tragedy - he tilted his head a few degrees, and puked all over the table, the carpet, and most unfortunately, the Bar Manager.
