Honolulu Weekly

Two recliners are shoved into the front corner of the Irish Rose Saloon’s stage. They are overstuffed, brown and white, old and tattered at the corners. I have no doubt that after last call, when the final patron has stumbled off to home or a hotel or some assignation, the ghosts of a thousand beer farts rise from the seats to form a chorus of flatulent revenants. But at this moment, among the smell of alcohol, the heavy fog of cigarette smoke and the heat and sweat of a great crush of bodies, they are an oasis.

Everything within me—every cell, tissue and organ, every rational thought and moral compunction—wants nothing more than to sit in one of them. And I will, I tell myself, but first someone is asking me a question.

“What the fuck?!”

The woman standing in front of me is short and blonde, her hair is knotted up in dreads that run nearly to the backs of her knees. She’s got a trucker hat pulled down low over her eyes and her mouth hangs open in the universal symbol of “What the f**k?!” She flings her arms out in great sweeping arcs; they heave through the air with the grace of a heavy club. She is terrifying and she wants her question answered.

After several beers and a shot of a sweet, stinging liqueur of indeterminate provenance, explanations are not my strong suit. But I begin to fumble through a speech making vague signs, hoping the gestures will explain why I am kicking her and her friends out of these recliners, forcing them back into the overheated throng surrounding us.

“It’s not my fault,” I am stumbling, “these chairs are paid for. You see, these recliners are part of raffle, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The winning bid gets first crack at these seats and my editor, Dean, just fronted $20 to get me up here in exchange for a couple hundred words that no one will likely ever read. In a way, I’m here on assignment, but more importantly, I am obliged by the largesse of my editor, who also works as a bartender here by the way, to sit here, where you and your friends are right at this moment sitting.”

There is a moment of protracted silence finally broken when the Dreadlock Blonde flicks her wrist at her friends and says, “This guy’s retarded, let’s go.”

I sit heavily in the chair. The comfort that I had so recently imagined holds me for a moment and then is gone, replaced by a sticky, moist heat that I soon realize is the previous occupant’s sweat stain. I am sitting in a sweat stain, head back, trying not to breathe too deeply the sickly sweet odor from someone’s Djarum, wondering what I am doing here. What the f**k, indeed.

The southerner in me is slightly discomfited by being in a bar on a Sunday. Back in my native home of Fork, S.C., it is impossible to buy a beer from 6PM on Saturday through 8AM Monday morning. I left that place behind long ago, and the fundamentals of a Southern Baptist upbringing have dissipated for the most part in the intervening years. Still, as I walk up the Irish Rose’s stairs, there is a small part of me that worries that this will be the sin that finally consigns me to the flames.

Those worries are assuaged by the carnival atmosphere inside the bar. I am immediately confronted by a wall of people. People in green fright wigs. People wearing the Irish flag as capes. People in white jump suits. People in blue denim jumpsuits. People wearing peaked hats. People wearing hardly anything at all. Everyone is either holding a drink or a smoke and frequently both and every one of them, down to the last person, is having a good time.

I had expected chaos, a riot of drunken revelers terrorizing other patrons on three-wheeled mounts of hellfire. So I am more than a little surprised by how organized the race is. There are teams (decked out in the aforementioned costumes), made up of groups repping other bars and businesses, with designated riders and pit crews. The floor of the bar has been cleared of seating and obstacles. An infield area has even been roped off and is thronged with patrons waiting for the time trials to begin. An orderly row of tricycles fronts the low stage. There are even rules. There will be 10 laps. Two riders per team will compete, each taking five laps apiece. There will be no blocking, no Ben Hur-like attempts to wipe out another opponent. That kind of behavior will result in a disqualification. Barely a word of smack talk has been uttered among the contenders.

I meet up with Dean and he gives me some insight into the convivial orderliness of the event. The race today is not merely an excuse for folks to get drunk early on a Sunday afternoon and ride a tricycle (although, it is that, too), nor is it just an attempt by the bar to sell a lot of alcohol (although that’s happening as well). The race, Dean explains, is a fundraising event for a favorite Irish Rose patron named Jan Ford, a distinguished older gentleman among a group around the stage who is seated in one of those motorized scooters typically used by the very elderly or persons with limited mobility. I’m surprised to see him in one, as he seems very fit. But then I notice that one of his legs stops just below the knee. There’s negative space where his calf, ankle, and foot should be.

“They’re raising money to buy Jan a leg,” Dean tells me above the din.

It’s a bit of information that makes me start to love the press of people around me, their faces shining with heat and alcohol—and I haven’t even had a drink yet.

That changes. I manage to eke out a space for myself at the bar by wedging my laughably huge computer bag into the line of people standing there. It’s not long before I’m sipping the coldest Pabst I’ve ever had. No one drinks PBR for the taste—but when the first icy sip goes down I remember how easy it is to drink the stuff. One becomes two, two becomes three, and I am becoming grateful that Dean is buying the drinks.

Around me the bar has become somehow fuller and hotter. More people walk up the stairs toting burgers and hotdogs from the grill outside. We are all of us waiting for the race or at least the time trials to begin. Every so often a patron will ask Patrick, the manager of the Irish Rose, when the show is going to begin. “Soon,” he answers. But that “soon” is measured not in real time but rather in bar time—a languid unit of timekeeping where seconds and minutes bleed into one another at a glacial pace and the promise of “soon” amounts to something indefinite. Bar time means waiting, but at the Irish Rose, this is not a bad option.

I am eventually joined again by Dean who asks about the possibility of me riding a tricycle. There is great comedic potential in this proposition, but the physics of it are impossible to reconcile. I am 6’7” and my weight is somewhere in the northern 200s (like way north, like man-boobs in the arctic north), there is no way that a child’s tricycle would support me. Besides, what little dignity I’ve left, I would like to keep, and me on a tricycle would look something like an ape riding an eggbeater.

Soon Dean is making a proposition: he’ll bid on one of the aforementioned recliners on stage provided that I sit in it and write up the race afterwards. My buzzing head makes the decision for me and I agree, little knowing that Dean has set me on the path of the Dreadlock Blonde.

Once that unpleasantness has passed and I am ensconced in my sweaty seat, the time trials unofficially begin. The racers are almost uniformly petite and female (with the exception of fellow Honolulu Weekly contributor Jamie Winpenny, leader of the Pork Chop Express, the team fielded by O’Toole’s. When Winpenny is not racing he is standing on the straightaway beside the final turn, shouting encouragement to other racers and sloshing a bit of whatever is in his glass on the track; at first I think he is merely being enthusiastic, but soon I notice that there is so much liquid surrounding him that I begin to suspect sabotage). They take the corners, legs, lifted nearly to their ears, pumping the tiny pedals as they race for poll position.

I am somewhat chagrined to see the Dreadlock Blonde rounding the corner. Turns out she’s a member of a team called “Dykes on Trikes.” When the trial is finished, she rejoins her pit crew at the bar, all of whom wear some bit of clothing that references Bob Marley. The actual race begins roughly an hour or so later. I say roughly because, even though I’ve checked my watch repeatedly, I’ve stopped trusting it. It tells the time of a world that exists somewhere else.

The poll positions are established, Ford has taken his place at the lead as the pace car, and the national anthem has been ripped forcibly from the neck of an electrical guitar. The race begins. From my seat I can see the racers take the first turn and continue along the straightaway. The first riders take the turn with great care, leaning gingerly to the inside of the track and pouring on the speed on the straightway. The second group is less successful. The first lap brings the first pile up. As the racers begin picking themselves up, elbows start jutting out as the riders attempt to prevent others from passing.

Everyone is sticking to the inside of the track, but one team, clad in twinkly Irish signifiers like shamrock antennae and Kelly green wigs and literally draped in the Irish Flag, has utilized a novel strategy of sticking to the outside of the track. It shouldn’t work, they should lose time on every turn, but it is working. Each time an Irish Caped Crusader (not their team name, but I can’t remember it, so for now it will do) rounds the turn, they avoid the cluster of racers jostling on the inside, leaving them behind. To my mind they are the odds-on favorite.
By the midpoint there’s a great crush of middle-of-the-pack teams trying to get an edge. I can see more elbows and at least one foot comes off a pedal to push a trike along, but no one is really noticing.

One team, however, has been squarely in the back for the entire race: the Goddamn Independents, who are apparently so goddamned independent that they left their competitive spirit at home.

The final laps are taking their toll. Racers turn the corner with less speed (except the Irish Caped Crusaders’ rider who is indefatigable; she seems to gain speed) and they puff down the straightaway. Dykes on Trikes fade to the back of the pack. The Heiney Busters continue to elbow their way to the front. Winpenny’s Pork Chop Express is waylaid by a broken wheel. At last there is a great cheer from the opposite side of the track and I assume the race is over and that the Irish Caped Crusaders have won.

But, no! Controversy! The Heiney Busters are proclaimed the winners only to be stripped of the title for their obvious cheating (and even though this is a charity race, the Heiney Busters are pissed). I expect that the Irish will win, but the prize is instead handed over to the team fielded by Better Brands Hawaii—who, it turns out, lost via disqualification last year. I smell a fix but when the Better Brands team takes the stage and announces that they will be donating the cash prize to Jan’s leg fund. Hell, I’m not going to boo any bit of chicanery that gets the man closer to a prosthetic.

Things are winding down and I leave my corner. Strangers slap me on the shoulder as I pass and ask what I thought of the race. I’m strangely affected by the collegial atmosphere. I’m having fun. There’s something inherently good about standing in a bar, drinking, talking and watching everyone smoke in violation of state law. Whatever is dire and hateful in the outside world—even the dirtiness of the Dreadlock Blonde’s looks have receded somewhat as I pass her—cannot touch me here, I think.

Is this true of all bars, or just this one? What kind of power does it exert to turn an ordinary Sunday into a good memory? I’m not sure, but once all of my goodbyes have been said and I am heading toward the bus that will take me home to ‘Ewa Beach, all I want is turn around and go back.