The ho-hum-itude of the ride through the hazy desert scenery of I-8 is broken only by a guard from whatever the Border Patrol is called nowadays who, when stopping the van at a checkpoint for the normal Q&A, waves our boys right on through with the question, “You guys don’t have any weapons of mass destruction in there, do you?”
After checking out the venue, the first stop on our pasty boys’ itinerary is Ocean Beach, where they frolic in the sand with a Frisbee. Brown is heard commenting, “Wow, this here ocean thing sure is bigger than Lake Minnetonka!”
This is Lake Minnetonka:
A dinner-stop in San Diego’s Little Italy and then it’s back to Chasers, the bar that Miles’ mom, after reading its write-up on Yelp, refused to come to to see the show. And though he initially scoffed at what he took to be her over-caution, our hometown heroes soon see that Mother Miles might have been right.
And now, a diversion from the story, in the form of some choice excerpts of Yelp reviews of a scary little dive bar called Chasers.
The optimistic: “The clientele used to be a lot of skinheads but it's been better with that lately.”
The anecdotal: “A co-worker of mine loved this place and dragged me there a few times on the premise that this was a great dive bar. He even brought one of the bartender gals over to my apartment after one night of drinking. Only to have her use my bathroom to shoot up drugs and get blood all over my sink.”
The hypothetical: “…this is the kind of place you go if you're looking to load up on rotgut well liquor and get smashed in the head with a beer bottle.”
The puzzled: “Yeah, this place is a class act. How this place hasn't been raided and shut down escapes me.”
The succinct: “Derelict central. You are warned.”
And the best: “One of the few bars in town I'm frightened to go to. And I like to consider myself a pretty foolish and crazy individual. The few experiences I have had here included near-altercations with homeless individuals, talk of knife play, propositioning of meth and lots of flies.”
In the experience of His Mischief, Chasers is pretty tame, in both a good and a bad way: good in that no overt displays of violence and/or drug use occur, bad in that there aren’t too many people there. (At one point, the only person who appears to be paying attention to the set is an old man who, on further inspection, has actually passed out while seated upright in his chair.)
Fox quickly gets the crowd’s attention, though, with a little story about the prison TV he saw in Yuma that afternoon (see above). He explains that the plastic casing is clear so that it is impossible to hide a shiv inside.
Here are a few pictures of shivs:
Fox then goes on to elaborate with a definition of what a shiv is, but Brown suggests that perhaps he’s talking about a shank. Fox is puzzled. Luckily, a woman with experience with these sorts of matters pipes up and yells out the difference between a shiv and a shank. A number of heads in the bar nod in agreement.
Here is the Wikipedia definition of a shank, for those without a (criminal) record:
“…shank can specifically refer to a weapon fashioned from the metal shank of a prison-issued boot or shoe. Since inmates were able to fashion effective shivs out of metal shanks, many prisons no longer issue footwear with metal shanks.”
With Santa’s little helpers done with their set and the other two bands who were scheduled to play having broken up and changed venues last minute, respectively, the winged van of glory is on the road to LA by 1 a.m., bound for a night with some friends from the Twin Cities…
-Miles
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