Nurse the Hate: The Mystery Drink

I was standing at a bar in Kent Ohio.  This was no regular bar friends.  No, this was the third floor of the legendary (infamous) Townhouse, a hillbilly version of a dance club where I was often forced to go by drunken friends.  As it was a dance club, this was the place where 19-22 year old college girls would dance and wobble around on heels like fawns.  My friends’ plans were all of the variation of 1) go to dance club 2) identify potential victim 3) somehow charm your way into this woman’s life between our 12:45 am arrival and 2:00 am closing time 4) leave with her like a door prize.  I would like to emphasize I do not EVER recall this plan coming to fruition.  Not once.  In fact, I don’t even recall any of those guys getting to step three.

The Townhouse was much more of a highbrow nightclub experience than the punch palace “Filthy McNasty’s” due to their “exclusivity”.  The Townhouse only allowed the much more mature selective 21+ crowd, where Filthy’s admitted 19+.  As you can imagine, the Townhouse was very swanky.  I do recall some flexibility in their admission policy though.  If your ID said you were 21, you were allowed in.  If the ID matched who you actually were, that was a real bonus.  I had a roommate that was 5-7 with thin brown hair that gained entry to the splendors of the Townhouse with the ID of one Lt. Col Anthony Davis, a 34-year-old 6-2 military man with dark curly hair.  The doorman said, “Anyone that has the balls to try and use an ID like this I have to let in.”  And just like that, unlimited plastic cups of Natural Light came within his grasp.

The Townhouse was located in a dilapidated downtown building on Main Street in Kent.  The basement housed the more intimate bar with the jukebox, which also played a never ending collage of the horrific Eighties dance music that was also being thudded into patron’s skulls upstairs via DJ.  The basement bar, always a good choice to grab a quick drink and enjoy the faint scent of urine from the moldy carpet, was where insiders gained entry to the entertainment complex.  Then, after procuring a bottle of domestic beer, one could walk up the metal fire stairs to enjoy the full Townhouse experience.

Every single time I was there I had the same scenario play out.  I would walk upstairs, lean against the bar with my beer, and try to talk to people over the din of the terrible music.  Think of Morris Day and The Time’s “Jungle Love” blaring at the volume of a 747 taking off.  Now picture a bunch of very drunk white young people dancing wedding reception dances to this song on a dance floor with colored lights like on Saturday Night Fever.  Most conversations would go like this.  “Don’t you live in Glen Morris Apartments?”  WHAT?  “Don’t you live in Glen Morris Apartments?”  WHAT?  DO I KNOW CLORIS?  WHO?

It was always a complete waste of time.  Except once.

This time I was standing against the bar with my “I’m too cool for this scene” posture.  Every patron in the place failed to notice my obvious happening scene with my longneck Bud, ripped jeans, and Chuck Taylors. People were shoving me aside whenever approaching the bar ordering primarily “value” priced light beer.  Then, suddenly and without warning, something interesting happened.  A dark haired guy leaned into the bar and yelled out to the bartender.  “Gimme Four Dogfuckers!”  What?  “Gimme Four Dogfuckers!”  My head snapped back to look at the bar.  A dogfucker?  What the hell is a dogfucker?  The bartender nodded in understanding and with a whirlwind of flashing liquor bottles produced four plastic cups filled with 3 ounces of an ominous dark shot of booze.  If a junkyard tire could bleed, this is what would come out of it.  It looked and smelled awful.  The customer threw money on the bar, nodded his head to the bartender, and picked up all four cups with one hand and fought his way out of the bar.

I leaned in to the bar and screamed out to the bartender.  “WHAT”S A DOGFUCKER?”  WHAT?  “WHAT”S A DOGFUCKER?”  YOU WANT A SHOT OF PUCKER?  “NO!  NO!” 

I gave up and turned back around, my head filled with potential recipes for a “dogfucker”.  It had to be some combination of whiskey, jager, sloe gin, amaretto, and bone marrow.  Something like that anyway…  I would never find out.  Through fate and good judgment, I never went back into the Townhouse.  I never regretted that decision until I thought about the crushing void in my education in not knowing exactly what is contained in a “dogfucker” recipe.

I looked it up on the Google Machine, but came up empty.  It’s probably pretty dangerous to look up things like “dogfucker” on the Internet.  I would think I set off some red flags and am now on some sort of “deviants list” in a data bank within the FBI somewhere.  I am probably just a few days away from a Goon Squad smashing my door down, seizing my computer, and being shoved in a cell downtown.  It will be very uncomfortable having to sit in a court room while a jury of my peers reviews some of my “artistic achievements” like “The Burro Show” single and the “Spine Snapper” 7 inch.  “Mr. Miller, when you first manufactured and sold these alleged musical pieces to the public at large without any consideration of the morality of The People, did you think your deviance would go unnoticed?”  Ummm…. 

There I will sit.  Cameras capturing every facial tick to be analyzed on cable TV legal talk shows.  Bleach blonde helmet coiffed women will argue about the degree of my depravity.  Mobile text polls sponsored by deodorant companies will allow the public to vote for “castration”, “death”, or “life imprisonment”.  News will relay my blank faced entry to court each day to the ravenous viewers.  Meanwhile the only thing I will be doing is what I am doing right now.  Wondering what the hell is in a “Dogfucker”…