About 40,000 years ago, I was working as a bartender in an Italian restaurant-bar. OK, this was around 2000. This place was staffed with young, enthusiastic college or recently-post-college kids. They were optimistic and happy, having not yet been bludgeoned down by the real life waiting around the corner for them.
I had worked in dive bars before this and found this experience to be wholly more enjoyable. For one thing, I very rarely had to battle vagrants over a sixpack of malt liquor. I didn’t reach for a billy club at all in this job. And 911 was not on speed dial. This was one of those pubs that just felt nice to be in. It put off a good energy. The staff liked working there and had fun doing so. Many of the employees had formed fast friendships and, like many bar staff, they hung out with each other – oftentimes at the bar itself. Regulars fed off of these good vibes and gravitated towards the place. It was a great bar.
One day, someone – and I won’t say who – conceived of a Drink Off. A good old fashioned drinking contest. See, we had these 3-liter bottles of wine meant for large parties. However, somehow the idea that matriculated down through discussion that we make teams and each team would drink one of these bottles. Five teams of two (2) were created, made up mostly of waitresses and waiters, one bartender (not me), and one manager. We laughed about the potential shenanigans of this contest. We had visions of trash-talking waitresses and lighthearted rivalry slurred by wine.
As luck would have it, I was the bartender working this drink off. The teams took up their spots around the bar. Ten people. Some had dressed in football jerseys and had applied eye black. The mood was light and the teams jibed each other in a friendly competitive manner. At 5 pm sharp I blew the proverbial whistle and they were off to the races. And then everyone started chugging wine – aka cry juice.
It was soon after this (let’s say 5:08 pm) that the on-duty manager and I realized the flaw in the plan. We had made a drinking contest based on how quickly everyone could drink one of these bottles, not on how much they could drink or not a series of drinking challenges. No. How fast can all young twentysomethings and one fortysomething drink a 3-liter bottle of wine. Huh.
The friendly jibes stopped because people were too busy bringing wine glasses to their mouths and chugging its contents. For the next forty minutes or so, these young, enthusiastic kids devolved into slouching, cross-eyed protohumans whose linguistic skills dissipated along with their ability to monitor volume, and, it should be mentioned, bladder control. About an hour later all hell broke loose. And I was in an island among ten of the drunkest people I had ever laid eyes on while sober. Never have I felt more like a character on The Walking Dead.
Trouble? Yes.
Unprecedented? No.
Many times throughout history has alcohol made large groups of people go simply bonkers. Sure, sometimes the problem was the booze itself. In the Munich beer riots in 1844, people lost their collective Teutonic heads over a rise in the price of beer. The Irish joined the Germans during the Lager beer riots in Chicago 1855, when new temperance laws and bar closures on Sundays didn’t quite sit right. In the late 18th century, Americans showed their early irrational aversion to taxes when they started lynching tax collectors during what would become known as the Whiskey Rebellion.
Sometimes the problem was giving a large group of people a lot of alcohol. Ten Cent Beer Night is a famous example of the equation of mob + booze x 1000 = uh oh. Ten cent beer night was a promotion held for the Texas Rangers-Cleveland Indians (baseball) game at Cleveland Stadium on June 4 1974. The beer was discounted down from 64 cents. Orders were limited to 6 beers per order, but no limit was placed on how many orders. Besides the uncannily dumb idea to give sports fans in a stadium cheap unlimited booze, this situation was set up by a perfect storm of bad luck, bad accidents, and more stupidity.
First of all, there was no love lost between the Rangers and the Indians. The two teams had had a bench clearing brawl a week before this. In this game, tensions were stoked by a few incidents of early violence – a line drive hit the pitcher in the stomach and a hard slide into second base. Adding to this, the Stroh’s beer served at the game was supposed to be lower alcohol content at 3.2%. However, the beer served was normal strength – between 5–6%. When the concession stands could no longer be adequately supplied to handle the enormous number of drinkers, someone (with a PhD in brainiology) thought the most reasonable course of action would be to allow fans to line up behind the outfield fences and get beers directly from Stroh’s company trucks. This is where the drinking portion of the evening hits its Kairos moment, as a throbbing, heaving mass of wasted people got their cups filled straight from the industrial tap. In this they stopped being individuals and came together to become one massive beast of drunkenness, a wasted Voltron.
Well, you’ve been drunk before, what do you think happened next? Right. Drunk fans began doing drunk fan things. A father-son duo ran out onto the field and mooned the stands. A woman ran topless onto the field and tried to kiss the umpire, Nestor Chylak, who probably hadn’t been so scared since being wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. Another man ran onto the field naked and slid into second base. You’d have to be drunk to want to do that.
In the bottom of the ninth inning, the Rangers tied it up and a stadium full of shitfaced angry fans finally let loose. Violence started. People began throwing things at the players – empty bottles of alcohol, chairs, rocks. A pitcher was hit by a chair. A man ran onto the field and tried to steal the cap of the Ranger left fielder, who kicked him. The Rangers’ manager Billy Martin thought he was being attacked and ordered his team out to help him. Other fans stormed the field and the Rangers were soon surrounded by 200 fans in left field. For his part, the Indians’ manager, Ken Aspromonte, realized the potential tragedy looming and ordered his players to go protect the Rangers players. As the riot ensued, both teams had to fight their way off the field with bats.
Things never took that turn in my little Italian restaurant-bar. But I was soon surrounded by the drunkest people in Pittsburgh. Some flashed each other, others vomited, most fell to the ground and couldn’t get back up. A manager put an orange road cone on his head and got stuck when it slid onto his face and he couldn’t get it off. There were loud accusations and tears, unpaid checks and notes written in the office log. And then it was over. The drunks were escorted home – or anywhere else – by their more sober friends and colleagues. Soon I was in a wasteland of empty glasses, broken glass, and giant empty bottles of wine that I had to refill at the end of the night.
But man, I miss that place.
