No Confession Will Erase This Sin

[I apologize for this back dated post. I started it the same weekend it happened, and have been working on the draft for over a week.]

I called Joey on Friday night to see what she was up to. It turned out that Chrissy Chrisdon was have a birthday celebration at Bailey's in Crystal City, so I decided to join them after work.

Once I found parking, I met up with everybody. We stayed there a little over an hour and had a nice time.


Walking to our cars in the parking garage, Joey says to me, "I'm going to Jay's now, you need to join me." I hesitated for a moment when she cast irresistible bait, "Jay's has a DJ named Pee Wee who uses two tape decks to play his oldies."

How could I possibly say no?

In a place like Clarendon, with a Whole Foods on every corner, you can't imagine how a place like Jay's hasn't been turned into 300 condos yet. Nay, it's the kind of bar that (speaking from personal experience) you don't mind urinating in the parking lot before you get in your car and leave.

As you walk in, Jay (the owner) is there to shake your hand. Just beyond his in the live-action Fred Flintstone (6'4, 350lbs, blond, white dress shirt half unbuttoned, red tie loosened around his collar, and chugging his bud light straight from the pitcher), and just to your left is Pee Wee:


My mind went to Tony Wilson's voice over in 24 Hour Party People:

"And tonight something equally epoch-making is taking place. See? They're applauding the DJ. Not the music, not the musician, not the creator, but the medium. This is it. The birth of rave culture. The beatification of the beat. The dance age. This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing. Welcome to Manchester."

Well folks, this was no Manchester.

In the space of an hour: I watched a 60 year old woman dance with grind on guys 1/3 her age, I met Fred Flintstone's monstrous girlfriend/sister/sidekick, and I convinced a 37 year old woman who'd lost her voice to go back to college.

After the horror of Jay's, we went to Bob & Edith's where Joey made friends with our waiter, "20" (a very nice white kid who happened to be 20 years old, so Joey named him thus). On the floor under the booth across from us:



someone finished up their "for the road" Bud Dry before they got them some scrapple.

On the way home, I fucked up a turn in Arlington and got pulled over. The cop was cool and wrote me a warning, but the next day I saw that my GPS was also traumatized by Pee Wee and Fred Flintstone and watching me pee in a parking lot:



It had automagically added Jay's as a "Point of Interest", so I automagically performed a factory reset on it.