Boom, Boom and the Connection is Made

In every town there are one or two of them. Well actually there are quite a number of their kind in the broadest sense of the concept, but there are a key few that people remember and that matter. I am talking about a bar with character that is perfectly of its time and place

You will know the kind of place that I am talking about. In Sommer’s Point, NJ in the mid 1970s it was Gregory’s where you could buy 7 beers for a buck surrounded by a décor that was positively beach house fifties. Reddish wood was everywhere and a smooth well worn bar was set at just the right height to comfortably lean into, both elbows resting on it, as you lifted one of those seven pony beers whilst you entered into a discourse on the status of the good ol’ Grateful Dead. Who knew that in 30 years you would be an administrative law judge and your conversational partner would be a Ph.D. in physics working at an Ivy League college.

Fast forward to the early 1980s and In Detroit there was the Post Bar. The Post was at the corner of Cass Avenue. Dimly lit the Post was populated by lawyers and accountants and other power suits of the day. It was where, if you were a professional and you still lived in the city, you just had to drink from time to time. Packed on a Friday night the joint had a certain air about it. There was a jukebox that had 45s from Buddy Holly and Jimi Hendrix and whoever else might need to be on it to be your perfect jukebox. And someone had scrawled on the wall in four inch high letters the phrase “You can only give it away for free so many times”. Each and every person in that bar understood the import of that Sharpie permanent ink inscribed philosophy.

In early 1990s Toronto there was Rodney’s Oyster Bar. It is well an oyster bar run by a Newfie and that should sum it up. Rodney’s is the kind of place where you can find an pearl in you slap jack on the same night one of the CBC’s big name on air folks is getting downright toasty two stools down. It is a place where Rodney comes out and with an enameled coffee pot in hand and pours you ice tea on a November night all the while grumbling, well shouting actually to anyone who will listen, about the idiot who wanted an iced beverage on a night like this. Or where a tender at the bar where beers and PEI mollusk’s are being sucked down answers a duo of well coifed trendi bimbi’s question about “Why don’t you have cappuccino” with the retort “So that dilettantes like yourselves don’t waste good bar space for hours when there are good people who want to drink beer and eat oysters looking for a seat”.

These are the places where Jung’s concept of synchronicity seems to have been formulated to describe. You know that concept, simply stated is when two or so things or events occur which have no godly reason to be tied together and they seem to be related in an uncanny and meaningful way. You know a bar in this catagory is the place that in your fifties when you are sitting and talking with your closest friends you find out that everyone you still like was hanging out at the same time you were (in your twenties) but you never met them, not then at least and not there. These bars are the places where seminal events in your thread of life happened and as you are talking to someone in an airport seven hundred miles from home you find the woman in the next seat was there at that bar but it was on the next night and she remembers people were still talking about it, whatever that event was.

In Lansing in the late 1970s it was the Boom Boom Room. This link is dicey and you may have to cut and paste it into your browser but it shows the dugout canoe that was the BBR’s bar. http://l.yimg.com/g/images/spaceball.gif

Despite the importance of these bars I have learned that alcohol consumption is in many cases bad. More alcohol means more bad choices. When I was young there were places my feet took me places where I should not have let me go. The Boom Boom Room is one of those places, a relic of the way hip late 50s. When drinks were drinks and men were Neanderthal.

Tripping down memory lane I came upon this photo. The place doesn’t exist anymore. However the hangover I got there still does. Boom Boom Room denizens always had the option of an Orgy. The Orgy was a drink served in a common bowl shaped like a lake surrounding a volcano. Inside the center of the volcano was a shot of 151 rum set afire. In the lagoon were 14 shots of various liquors. The drink was served with three foot long pliable straws. A minimum of four people had to be present for the Orgy to be delivered to a table. They didn’t all have to drink but they had to be at the table.

On one occasion I sat there sucking on a straw at the Boom Boom Room and I am pretty sure two of the other people were just blowing bubbles. The 151 wasn’t the only thing that got lit up that night. In this forum I apologize to my wife for anything that happened that night. I also apologize to those two young women at the next table for any untoward comments that may have been made. I apologize to the gardener whose tomatoes suffered at my hands in my post midnight journey on foot home from the bar. And finally I apologize to the person whose car I woke up atop the late enough in the night to be called next day when I was found by my now spouse.

These were bars of their time. Their time was a long time ago. Or maybe it would be better said that their time was a long time ago for me. Ah the memories a photo can awaken.