HAPPY HOUR AT THE ABBRACCIO [3/31/2006]

I arrived punctually at 5:30, looked around for Cassidy, and, upon not immediately spying him, sat down at the bar to drown my sorrows in a large diet Pepsi. To tell the truth, I was somewhat the worse for wear, having just spent the last 48 hours in the air enroute from Amman, Jordan, bringing in a shipment of hash and making a quick stop up in Kamloops to check on my BC bud plantation at Shuswap Lake. My operation up there is tended to by a band of Coquihalla Indians, or should I say First Canadians, but I had heard that the Colombian families were making inroads and I wanted to make sure that everything was hunky-dory. Anyhow, I was plumb tuckered, and to make it worse that song kept going through my head -- 'Flying into Los Angeles, bringing in a couple of keys, don't touch my bags if you please, Mister Customs Man' -- and naturally my nerves were worn to a frazzle. At any rate I was looking forward to a nice quiet happy hour at Big Hugs, just a few close friends and a barfing chicken, unwinding a bit from my rigorous tour of duty. First sign of something wrong was when Cassidy strode in in a tuxedo.

'Dude,' I greeted him.

'Dude,' he replied.

'Why are you all dressed up, man? The light hurts my eyes.'

'Didn't you hear? We're having a formal night for a change.'

'Oh shit,' I said, discomfited because I was wearing my usual frazzled old jeans and my tie-dyed tee and a worn smoking jacket. 'Dude, look at me; I haven't got a thing to wear.'

'No problemo,' he informed me.'Rogerio keeps a supply in the back room and will rent you appropriate evening wear for fifty bucks.'

'Oh, man,' I sighed. 'And I was looking forward to a quiet evening.'

'Chin up!' said Cassidy. 'We got special company tonight.'

'Oh, you mean Da Fonz is gonna make it after all?'

'No,' he laughed.'Melani and Liz are gonna make the scene. It'll be loads of fun.'

'Yeah, right,' I sneered, but toddled off to the men's room to be fitted in my tuxedo and cummerbund. It actually only cost me 39 bucks and change -- Rogerio said he was giving me a special discount, but I bet he says that to all the customers -- and with the Benjamin that Cassidy normally pays me to show up at these 'events'of his, I was still coming out ahead. I've often wondered about the economics of this whole operation, like how much of a kickback Cassidy gets from the management to drag customers in, but I suppose somehow the joint manages to turn a profit.

So Cassidy sits in his usual place at the head of the table and the guests start to drift in. Have to admit that the folks looked fancier than the usual Friday night crowd, the men in black tie and Melani in this slinky black velvet sheath, Liz in a colorful tent-like caftan.

So after cocktails everybody sits down at the long banquette and the first course is served, and I start to perk up, because the soup is a chilled cucumber and yogurt with dill and a soupcon of garlic. Actually a pretty damn fine soup, as soups go, with chopped walnuts and parsley sprinkled artfully on the top, and as I slurp spoonful after spoonful I finally start to relax.

In fact I start to relax a whole lot. They light up the candles and slowly the room starts swaying -- they're piping in Vivaldi or Scarlatti or something classy on the sound system, and everybody starts giggling for no particular reason I can see. I mean the conversation is not what you'd call sparkling. Melani is going on at some length into the gory details of her latest hobby, sumo wrestling. Pete the artist is bragging up his latest film, a documentary in the Philly Film Festival called 'Hard Coal'-- it’s about these gay coal-miners out in the mountains of western Pennsylvania.

But people are laughing and guffawing and Liz laughs so hard she starts choking on the soup, and I begin to have my suspicions.

'Cassidy,' I hiss. 'You didn't!'

'Chill, bro,' he replies with an enormous grin splitting his face.

'Oh shit, here we go again,' I say, because my well-trained nervous system has detected a soupcon of mescaline in the soup, and I realize it's going to be one of those nights again. I mean, it was funny enough back in the 60s when the Beatles got a little help from their friends and somebody dosed their martinis with LSD and all of a sudden these rhinoceros hoofs came out of the walls and the roof was on fire, but hell, this is 2006 and I'm pretty damn sure Melani has never done anything any stronger than a little low-grade hemp and I'm not sure I wanna see how she reacts to the stronger stuff.

But I don't have to wait very long because suddenly Dan Morton is stripped down to his loincloth and he and Melani are demonstrating sumo grips up on the bar. I don't wanna wait to see what's going to happen next, so I furtively pay my bill, excuse myself on the pretext of going to the men's room, change back into my duds and get the hell out of there.

I mean, fun is fun, but sometimes Cassidy just takes it too far.

--Ross Bender

HAPPY (yawn) HOUR AT ABBRACCIO (8/2/2005)

The Monday night Happy Hour at Abbraccio draws a whole different clientele from its rowdier Wednesday night crowd. I've been to Mennonite Sewing Circle meetups that were livelier. Dull isn't quite the right word for it -- maybe the mot juste would be: earnest, grave, no-nonsense, sober, sobersided, solemn, somber, staid, weighty, calm, placid, serene, tranquil, collected, composed, dispassionate, imperturbable, unruffled, decorous, dignified, proper, seemly -- take your pick. I mean, after the last Abbraccio meetup I was expecting something more on the order of head-banging, moshpits, naked dancing on the tables, etc, but this crowd, fuggedaboutit. That old Ramones song kept going through my head -- 'Twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go, I wanna be sedated.'

I sensed it would be a, how shall I say it? -- 'boring' -- evening when I walked into the room and was asked to write my name with magic marker on a 'Name Tag' sticker -- you know, one of those pleasant little decals with a smiley face that say 'Hi! My name is so-and-so, and I'm absolutely THRILLED to meet you!' Of course I used a false name -- Cyril Slothrop. First person I met was this tattooed weirdo (skulls and crossbones all down his forearm) whose name tag said 'Bob'. So I introduced myself, saying 'Hi! My name is Cyril and I'm really glad to meet you' and the dude said 'Actually, my real name is Brendan, but I just put 'Bob' for a joke.' Brendan then proceeded to give me a half-hour nonstop disquistion on the Mill Creek sewerways -- fascinating enough stuff, in its way, and of course it made a splendid opening for me to tell him all about the ancient Indus civilization and their absolutely stunning irrigation and waste disposal systems. I could have gone on for several hours, but then our host, the debonair Rogerio d'Escalante, called the meeting to order, told us how glad he was to see us all, led us in a short invocation, and handed out the table games.

There were Scrabble, Twenty Questions, Taboo, Parchesi, and Dominoes, which of course were breathtaking enough, but the real highlight of the evening was Animal Bingo. We all got these fancy multicolored cards with pictures of different animals -- domestic and exotic -- and Rogerio called out the names until somebody got five in a row. My luck was out, and even though I played seven rounds I always got the card with the ferret, the pitbull, the water rat, and Scrunch the cat, which was kind of a downer.

The quality of the hors d'oeuvres, however, was excellent, and the free food more or less made up for the tedium of the evening as a whole. To give you some idea of the atmosphere, Melani had actually brought along her crotcheting -- or maybe it was her 'tatting' , and was showing the other old ladies, of whom there were plenty, some fancy knitting moves and strategies.

I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up with a start the room was empty and Cassidy was just sweeping out the door with his entourage, saying 'Let's blow this popsicle stand, kiddies.' There was something else I didn't quite catch about 'bhong hits in the old hot tub' but I was so groggy at that point that I just staggered home and washed up the dinner dishes.

--Ross Bender