Revenge of the Angry Drunken Dads!

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Lawrence, Kansas , the Angry Drunken Dads return! Some of you may recall my first dangerous sojourn to Lawrence last year for the Father's Day celebration with my brother and nieces to the University of Kansas, my alma mater (and if you don't remember it, go refresh your memory HERE. Go on... I'll wait). What's supposed to be a celebration of fathers and their kids at college has--and still is--a reason for dads to go wild, show extreme bad behavior, get stupid hammered, try to relive their glory days, and get in fights. It's AWESOME!

First of all, it never ceases to amaze me how my nieces aren't embarrassed by me and their dad; I couldn't even imagine my parents stepping foot into a bar without disturbing the living daylights out of me. But, hey, as long as the girls are good with it, I'm in!

We started our annual adventure by visiting my niece's sorority house. Well...that's not quite accurate; it was a fraternity that the sorority was now living in.

"What? Where're the frat boys?" I asked.

My niece replied, "They got kicked off of campus. So, while they rebuild our house, they put us in here. It's got mold everywhere."

Huh. The mind boggles about how bad the frat guys must've been to get kicked out of their house and off campus. Furthermore, I wondered what they did to accumulate their mold collection. Needless to say, I washed my hands frequently.

And while in the bathroom, there were a couple of girls in there.

I hollered, "Hey, don't worry about me, I'll just be over here at the urinals." 

Now one thing we hadn't considered on our excursion was that Drunken Angry Dads are generally solitary creatures, not prone to running in packs. Which is why my brother and I ended up looking like the girls' "two dads." In the spirit of angry drunkeness, we decided to embrace it and run with it, enjoying introducing ourselves as their two dads. And it STILL didn't embarrass the girls. Tough crowd, tough crowd.

Onward HO! Luckily, the ex-frat house was just a hop, skip and jump away from the girls' favorite bars. But on the way there, we ran into a couple of dads who were threatening everyone on the street with keg stands. (For the uninitiated, keg stands are where you do a handstand on top of a keg and drink as long as possible; I don't get it either, but those are just some of the rules of the Angry Drunken Dad Convention.)

These two little drunk dads were trying to coerce all of us into doing a keg stand.

They hoisted one of my nieces up and barely managed to keep her there. 

"C'mon," they said to me, "your turn."

I looked at these small men and scoffed. "Ah...you guys can't lift me."

"Oh, we'll get you up," said the runt of the litter.

I passed, unwilling to throw my back out for a keg stand. However, I was talked into drinking some nutty cocktail out of a community bucket that another drunken dad was passing around. Throwing caution--and germs and sickness!--to the wind, I sipped mightily. (And, lo, it came to pass that I fell sick the following week!)

First stop was Bullwinkles, the bar where a very drunk girl gave me a five minute head massage last year. Sure enough, she was there, getting her drink on. But this year she had forsaken me, having taken up with another old bald guy. She's got a type. Ah, such a fickle head massager.

In the crowd, drunk dads bopped about to the blaring rap music, twisting their feet, shaking the two-fingered pointy rap deal, and painfully trying to look young and cool. Among this year's celebrities was Steve Bannon, who obviously was on the run from Johnny Law, hiding out in a Kansas college bar. Here I am in front of Bannon.

Too loud to chat, the rap music blaring at ear-busting decibels, we pretty much drank in silence. Some idiot girls brought in two tiny "purse puppies" who were clearly terrified and shaking by the crowd and noise. Time to go!

On our way to the next bar, I asked, "Is rap the music of choice these days? I don't get it."

My brother says, "Yeah, I didn't get it at first either. But I've come to accept it." So if my brother accepts it, all is right in Lawrence, Kansas.

Next stop, Loogies! Now at this bar, the music of choice was '80's alt rock, one of my faves. So maybe it was the excessive amount of beer or maybe it was just my jam, but I turned into one of those be-bopping drunken dads (but not angry, mind you, not yet). 

My niece was saying how her hardest class was The History of Rock and Roll. To which I just expressed shock.

"C'mon, how hard can it be? You got the blues, Chuck Berry, Elvis, then the Beatles, and finally rap. Boom! History!"

I proceeded to quiz her on who the current singer blasting over the speakers was. I was absolutely appalled that she didn't know who David Bowie was. What are they teaching these guys in college anyway?

Earlier I said that everyone at KU listens to rap. Another thing they all do is vape. Every last student there. Smoking is so outre these days. In fact the only smoker I saw was Steve Bannon (natch). But every last damn student was toking away on their little boxes. Naturally, we had to make a pitstop at one of these vape shops.

Now, I've never been in one of these places before and doubt I ever will again. First of all, it smelled like Steve Bannon's socks being burned in a fireplace. Second, it's outrageously overwhelming. There was a massive wall just loaded with different flavors, types, scents, whatevers. Huge sensory overload. There was a ginormous section devoted to Mike Tyson flavors alone (and of course when I think of vaping, I think of Mike Tyson. Or whatever).

My brother asked the little hippy working there what good "ice" flavors he had.

I proffered, "Hey, what about Vanilla Ice?"

My brother giggled, the girls looked embarrassed, and the clerk sneered at me and yelled at me for leaning on the glass case.

Our next stop on the Angry Drunken Dad tour was a bar so crowded we couldn't even get to the bar, so we abandoned ship and went to Leroy's, a pool hall. We gathered into a recently abandoned booth and drank.

Soon, though, a couple guys in their late twenties or early thirties came up and stood before us, saying nothing.

"Oh," I said, not wanting to get in an Angry Drunken Dad brawl, "did we, um...ah...did we take your table?"

"Yeah," said one guy, "we just went to the bathroom." Which was kinda weird. I knew women went in pairs to "powder their noses," but I didn't know guys did. Oh, wait! Maybe they were "powdering INTO their noses."

Anyway, the guys settled down, one wandered off, and I thought the other guy would never leave. Turned out he played for KU back in the '90's so he had a LOT to say about the Jayhawks football team. We ended up on a friendly note, he wanting to shake hands. And I suddenly developed nervous not-knowing-what-to-do etiquette. First I offered a fist bump, then retracted, slid into a regular handshake, pulled away, and ridiculously ended up in an old-fashioned "soul hand shake" the kind that hasn't been a thing since the '70's. No idea why, chalk it up to beer and my desire to be cool. And like so many other Drunken Dads, I failed miserably.

Of course we had to end up at the Hawk. Now "The Hawk" was my college hang-out back in the day, a cheap place to drink (Thursday nights were quarter draws!) and go nuts. But, my oh my, how times have changed. I honestly don't understand how college kids can get their drink on at the crazy prices (and vaping ain't cheap). Having had a particularly grotesque experience at the Hawk last year, this year was pretty much the same, down to that ever-present odor. In fact, every bar we went to had that oh-so-familiar smell. The scent of higher education!

Here we met one of my niece's friends, the fourth starting quarterback for the Jayhawks. If only one more quarterback had been injured in that day's game, he might've gotten off the bench! Still, it didn't detract from his own set of groupies hanging all over him.

As day turned into night and more Drunken Dads staggered about, delusional in their beliefs that they were still the Kings of the World, another group became readily apparent, particularly in their despondency. This would be the Dejected Dormitory Dude pack.

Thin as rails, unable to afford (or pick out) stylish clothing, sporting haircuts that only a mother could love, they were easily identified by their round-shouldered dejection. When they'd leave the bar, it wasn't the boisterous Hey-Ho, Let's Go of the frat rats.

No, I could practically read their thoughts, having been one of the downtrodden myself many years ago: "Oh well...struck out again. May as well go back and play Grand Theft Auto."

As we wound down our exciting Angry Drunk Dad Day with a delicious (except not) dinner at Quik-Trip, a sudden epiphany struck me.

"Hey," I asked one niece, "do the moms act this way on Soused Mother's Day?"

"Oh, yeah," she answered with an eyeroll. Man. I, for one, am gonna move heaven and earth to crash that shindig next year!

Speaking of crashing events, you might want to stay away from the Dandy Drop Inn, a quaint little bed 'n breakfast located deep into the Midwest. There've been rumblings that some of the people visiting aren't the most...well, friendly of folks. Checking in is easy...checking out's killer. Read all about it in my helpful travelogue, Dread and Breakfast.

Drunk Angry Dad Convention

Or...back to school to my alma mater, The University of Kansas.

OR...better yet, "I went back to my old college for a day and all I have to show for it is an eight minute head massage from a drunk coed."

Well, THAT was interesting. Amazingly, my two nieces decided they wanted not only their dad to go to "Father's Day" at K.U., but they thought it'd be fun if I went along too. I jumped at the chance, having not been back in close to 40 years or so. (Oddly enough, my nieces thought it'd be funny to have us two old guys in tow. Back in the day, I would've been mortified to have my parents go to one of the campus bars with me. "Mercy, look at how she's dressed" or "I don't want to go into one of those stinky joints where they serve swill" or "Huh. Disgusting" would've been the conversation. Fun!)

Instead, the four of us set out for day drinking galore!

We started out in downtown Lawrence, where things had changed quite a bit. Back in the 1920's or whatever when I was a student, I don't think there was a single coffee shop in town. Now it was half coffee houses and half bars. The first bar we ended up at (can't recall the name, but it was a new{ish} one) was fairly unmemorable, except for the ages of the patrons.

"I can't believe all of these students are 21," I said.

"They're not," said my younger niece. "They've all got fake I.D.'s" Then she whipped hers out and explained how she got it. You send your picture to a Chinese outfit, then they create one for you that's scannable and the whole nine yards. I couldn't believe how simple it was. Back in the days of dinosaurs, when driver's licenses were nothing but paper, I remember sloppily doctoring one by whiting out a birth year and painstakingly typing in an earlier birth year. The results were pretty bad, but managed to fool the vision impaired, cranky old woman at "The Ice House," a Grandma and Grandpa convenience store that served beer, fish bait, and guns. (Note: The Surgeon General has recommended to never, ever indulge in all three things at once.)

Onto the next bar for brew and burgers, The Free State Brewing Company, which had actually just opened by the time I had graduated back before we had moving vehicles. The beers were great, although it took about an hour and a half to get food, probably because I appeared to go "Dahmer" on the waitress when I couldn't articulate that I wanted my bill to be separate, jibber-jabbering nothing but gibberish. I chalk it up to potent beers.

It was then I began to notice the various dads. Most of them were well-behaved, but behind the jolly facade, I detected some trouble brewing, with vacant stares giving away to sneers at the youth surrounding them. We'll get back to these guys in a minute.

The next bar I was excited about, Louise's. I kinda, sorta, vaguely remember the weeknights I haunted the skeevy dive with the sticky floor, one of the few bars in town to serve the Native-American populace (there was a Native-American college in town as well), most of the time found passed out on the bar counter and left alone to sleep it off. My youngest niece was afraid to enter because apparently Louise's had the worst reputation in town for confiscating fake I.D.'s. (She decided not to risk it and not drink.) 

Nostalgia can only take you so far. It was crashingly dull and dark, the only highlight being this spooky old guy who offered us his table.

We bolted and headed straight for The Hawk, the one bar I spent most of my college education in. (A little background: The Hawk was a haven for G.D.I.'s {"Goddamn Individuals"} and felt like home to my buddies. Thursday's Dime Draw Night probably helped. It was never glamorous, but tons of fun, cheap, and usually great fun. OUR place. Except for the unfortunate night when my brother joined us from rival K-State, and ran into some seething, red-faced, drunk short guy {It's ALWAYS the short guys} who accused him of knocking over his girlfriend. I entered the fray and said he did no such thing. Then Shorty McShortShort turned his ire on me and started shoving me. "Then YOU knocked her over!" he spat. The next thing I knew the bouncers pounced on me and physically threw me out onto the sidewalk. I landed on my chin and had to go get late night stitches. Ahhh, memories. When my mom had to take me up over the Summer to pay the ER bill, some nurse wrote that I'd been fighting. Fun ensued with Mom, but I'm getting digression all over the joint.)

Anyway, with great excitement we entered the den of G.D.I.'s. Only to discover the tide had turned and most of the students in there were of the Greek persuasion. Blasphemy! Then they charged a cover charge. Strike two! They'd never done that before. The place was absolutely packed, shoulder to shoulder, nothing new there. They'd even taken out the middle row of booths to cram more underage students inside, surely already breaking all kinds of fire codes. When I finally got up to the bar, I ordered a beer based on the taps on the wall.

"A draft of Space Camper, please," I ordered.

The guy smirks and says, "Yeah, nothing's on draft. The taps are just for show."

"What? That's crazy! Back in my day--"

The bartender moved on to someone less brain-addled.

We lucked out (I guess) and snagged one of the few tables. Here's where all of the Drunk Angry Dads collectively met, most of them without their offspring. We had overweight dads stuffed into too tight K.U. Jayhawk sweatshirts like sausages. One looked like Colonel Sanders (minus the chicken, hold the teenager). 

He was cagey, but my niece finally captured Colonel Sanders on film (hiding behind Paul Shaeffer), proof positive he's not dead.

 

Another guy stalked back and forth in a long leather duster and sporting an equally long, coiffed mane of hair, appearing like a deranged Fabio. (We suspected this guy didn't have a teen in school, but was taking his lunch break from the car wash to check out the coeds.) A group of short (uh-oh!) middle aged men with steel-colored hair gathered at the center of the bar, nostrils inflared while gulping their expensive drinks. 

What did they have in common, I hear you asking (but not really, but it gives me a chance to segue into my answer anyway)? They were all very, very drunk and very, very angry, sneering at everyone within drinking distance. I kept trying to avoid eye contact (my two goals for the day were to A) not to get into a fight or get thrown out of a bar, because bouncers love to do that to me for some reason and B) not to get Covid. The possibilities of failing in both goals were growing more likely as the bar filled to impossibly crowded, drunken mob standards.). I also failed in avoiding eye contact with all of the drunken, angry dads, because they were kinda fascinating.

Eventually, we moved to the back of the bar, where my youngest niece knew the employee (it's amazing how many bartenders she knew throughout town). He gave us some "hot Hawk scoop." The Hawk doesn't even pay their employees in cash, just discounted and free drinks. And if you want to pay an extra twenty-five bucks you can avoid standing in the long line (like it's a hot New York nightclub or something). Add to this, the five dollar beers and my beloved Hawk had turned into a racket.

"You're paying for The Hawk experience,"  the brain-washed employee explained.

WHAT experience? Then I began to put it together what the "experience" we were paying for was: the wonderful aroma of vinegar that the employees poured over the frequent vomit; the grotesque bathrooms that hadn't been cleaned since I was a student; the too crowded, can't move, claustrophobic experience. 

Then my niece's friend explained that the worst behaved people that weekend were the dads, confirming my theory. He said they had to throw out a lot of them for being drunk and belligerent and looking for fights. Absolutely pissed off that their youthful, glory days were behind them and despising the youth around them.

It was time to move on. My nieces were hyped to get to "Bullwinkle's," a bar one block down the 'hood. Now, honestly, I couldn't see why the excitement, because when I was a student, it was considered a gay bar, but I'd never had that confirmed. But what the hey, I was game for anything, especially since I was loaded up with beer, and I imagine the drunken, angry dads wouldn't be caught dead in a place like that.

Boy, was I wrong. Bullwinkle's had turned into another redone, outdoor and indoor bar, packed to the rafters with all of the missing, drunken offspring students (the old guys were stalking The Hawk after they dropped the kiddies off at Bullwinkle's, I guess). Again, my niece knew the huge twin "Throwin' Samoan" bouncers, who gave me the stink-eye when I squeezed past them (is it just my face, maybe my breath, something else that makes bouncers target me?).

We finally pushed our way outside, where we had a slight bit more breathing room. Suddenly this fast-talking, bespectacled, hyped up hotshot came up to us yelling, "Did we win? Did we win? Did we win?" (K.U. was playing Oklahoma at football several streets over). He starts insinuating himself into our lives in a sinister manner, exchanging names, fist bumps, and his life story. Turns out he's not even a student, considered himself very old (must've actually been 21! Imagine!), was there on a work break, and wanted to meet us out later that night. All this time, I see his partner-in-crime (a quiet, grinning, ginger-haired elf wearing a ridiculous beanie) lurking in the background, just waiting for...something. He never said a word, but he really didn't have to since his partner talked enough for five people. My brother and I later figured out they were a serial killer duo: the gregarious guy lured the victim in with his fast-talking ways, while the elf would jump out and bludgeon the victim, undoubtedly with one of Santa's toys. Mercifully they moved on.

Suddenly--most unexpectedly--the K.U. Jayhawks beat the formidable Oklahoma State. Which just riled up the drunken underage students and dads even more. Over the loudspeakers, Queen's "We Are the Champions" blared. I'm just people-watching when suddenly this very young, very drunk, and very short (it's always the short ones) coed grabs my hand and starts swinging my hand, and belting out the lyrics up into my face.

Now. I've always felt uncomfortable for people who are being sung to in movie musicals. I mean, how are they supposed to react? In the films, they usually just smile and stare at the singer. I couldn't do that. Uncomfortable doesn't quite capture it. That's how I felt then. But bolstered by beer, I sang along with her. Finally, FINALLY, the power ballad ends and I reclaim my hand.

And then things got even worse. She asked if I shaved my head or if was naturally like that. I said I shaved it.

"Can I touch your head?" she asks.

"Um...well...I guess...or whatever..."

The next thing I know, she's not only touching it, but she's massaging it while moaning and continually saying, "it's soooooo smooth." Meanwhile my brother and his daughters (and their friends who we'd stumbled onto) are enjoying the show, laughing, and taking photos.

At long last (dear Gawd, at long last after a very long eight minutes) she tires of my head and says, "Okay, go back to whatever it was you were doing" or something like that and I presume goes off to find another dad.

I'd had enough. After five bars, numerous over-priced beers, and a plethora of drunk, angry dads, it was time to call my return to college done and pretty. But, man, did my scalp feel good!

Speaking of peculiar happenings and a peculiar young woman, come visit scenic Peculiar County, a place so peculiar, the inhabitants include twin sister witch librarians, a dead hanging judge, a one-armed phone operator, a gargoyle guardian, a mysterious killer, and ghosts, both of the dog and human variety. That's Peculiar County, a really cool place to visit, but don't set up residency there. The fine travel brochure can be procured here.