From: ookookook@yahoo.com (Ook!)
Subject: ASSC: Rant & Review #57, Darkness on the Edge of Town

Club: The Hideaway Pub

Highpoints: Pool, Pinball
Lowpoints: Contractors, Parking, Sound
Cover Charge: Your Libido.
Average Drink: $3.00
Specialty Dance: None.

Location: 4229 S.E. 82nd, Portland.

Synopsis: A shabby strip bar in a shabby neighborhood, crammed cheek to
jowl with related vice emporiums in a shabby strip mall that would do
Eddie`s daddy proud.

Rant:  Sometimes you walk into a business and wonder what the proprietors
had in mind, wonder if they`ve bothered looking at what their competitors
were doing, wonder if they even care about making a go their stated
business interests, wonder who was foolish enough to lend them capital for
startup costs.  There`s nothing like celebrating the demise of yet another
day drowned in the numbing waters of cold rain by visiting a new strip
bar, nothing like surrounding yourself in the numbing despair of dead
flesh to make you feel like putting on Billie Holliday, slipping into a
warm tub of bath water, slitting your wrists, and quietly walking into
oblivion through the end of an emptied cuvee of hemlock extract.

Trip Report: I kept checking street numbers through Kumqaut`s fogged up
windshield as I headed into the unlit streets of the 82nd street strip in
a gale driven downpour. My destination finally came into view, across the
street from the only light in the area, provided by a spanking new
Walmart, in the only neighborhood in Portland that would have one, as
there was a collection of eyesores that looked propitious.

All half dozen or so spots in front of the petite mall were already
occupied with seventies vintage rustbuckets, so I drove back a half block
into a ramshackle row of saltboxes temporarily erected fifty years ago for
the sake of the Liberty Ship workers. I parked in front of one of the
abandoned houses and walked back to the tavern in the rain, past the
barred up smoke shop, past the video jack shack, and into a small dive. A
bathtub man, reminiscent of the skinhead version of Sydney Greenstreet,
delayed my entrance into paradise as he beckoned the next dancer onstage
with a Mr. Microphone. Five minutes later, he finally coaxed one of the
strippers into her cage, and I was out of the weather at last.

I sat away from the bar in the hopes of collecting a scene, on a cheap
padded wooden stool, surrounded in Tiki splendor. There were two strippers
seated near the tap, one a shaky looking brunette speckled with curious
blotches, and the other a massive bale of gelatin held by the constraints
of her thong and bra, her rolls of flesh quivering in wavelets with every
wasted breath sucked through the glowing fag growing out of her lip.

The spotted one was coaxed off her seat by the clarion call of Mr.
Microphone (tm) she put on a mesh babydoll, leaned over the rail, and plugged
the jukebox for a few cuts off Hotel California. After waiting out some
serious interference in the sound system, she parked her distended abdomen
on the corner of the rail, ached back, and twisted her nipples at the end
of her teat flaps, until they began to protrude through her sheer top. She
stared into the void above her, her eyes emoting the lifeless gaze of a
porcelain doll half buried in the filth of a garbage dump as she gazed
upward and away from her only customer, who busied himself while leering
vacantly at her genitals.

This display of beguilement went on for what seemed like a lifetime. I`d
had enough sensory punishment after the third refrain of "but you can
never leave".

Fortunately, no one ever bothered to ask if I wanted anything to drink,
making a quick exit easy. Or so I thought. On my way out, I had to wait
for my path to clear, as an old hag, a hideous chainsmoking drunk of a
barfly, decided to show the woman on stage how it was done, humping her
pool cue as she fellated a coffin nail. There was no getting around her,
and frankly, I didn`t want to risk picking up a skin disease by
interacting with her. So, I sat out another endless Joe Walsh riff, until
I could once again embrace the safety of home, hot water, and soap.

Copyright 1998, The Rant & Review. All rights reserved. First Draft:
12/02/98. An annotated version of this rant is available on the web at:
http://members.tripod.com/~RantNReview/

-- 
"Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escrire
 Pour ce que rire est le propre de l'homme."
   - Alcofribas Nasier