The Surly Bartender – On The Chicken Bus

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The Surly Bartender Eating a Six Pack Holder

Ever since my days teaching history in Brooklyn I’ve had certain passions.    Three are relevant today.   First, I passionately love bars.  Real bars.  Dive bars.  Old man bars.  Gin joints.  Roadhouses.  Bars.  Second, I passionately love railing against idiot hippies who wander into my bar; and third, I passionately love slinging a bit of historical perspective as I toss a few shots of tequila across the hardwood.  It is a rare night when I can enjoy all those passions at once.

Before I start on this rant, let’s get one thing clear; when I rail against hippies, I’m not railing against the long haired rocker, old 60s radical, Weatherman kind of Hippie.  Those guys have balls.  Rather, I’m talking about the hippie in its current and most common incarnation – the 20 something trustafarian bum floating around the globe like a lazy turd in a plugged bowl.

No one with the ability to discern shit from cupcakes thinks the dreadlocked kid playing didgeridoo has more talent than time on his hands.  White boys playing Redemption Song are, almost to a one, fully ignorant of the mental slavery they labor under day in and night out.  Succinctly put, nearly all hippies are irredeemably boring, even the ones with amazing racks and the ability to give you a hard on at 15 paces in their tie-dyed summer skirts.

Occasionally you do meet the slam-poet with something meaningful to say, or the latter day Motorcycle Diarist with a story worth telling.  But, by and large hippies are the court jesters and gumball jugglers of Empire.

Recently a group of them showed up at Café No Sé and, after a short while, got a fist full of me, the Surly Bartender.

It was a Monday night when Che-Cee and the Sunshine Band wafted in, picked up one of the house guitars and proceeded to play tunes from the itinerant idiot’s songbook – Ben Harper and Jack Johnson were both attempted and hooted down by our regulars.  One of our normally quieter clients actually took the banned song list from the wall and slapped it onto the table in front of them.

There was a brief, pro forma, protest over this – but after a few declarations that this scene was “harshing their mellow” they stopped singing and kept drinking.

For the moment, I held my tongue.

One of the hippie girls did have the heavenly rack, and with the hope that her sexual standards were on par with her concern for hygiene, a few of the lads that habituate the Café decided to chance the arm.  They pulled up chairs and commenced flirting.

The standard introductory travel babble ensued.  The hippies were from Seattle, Berlin, Darwin, London, and Boston.  They were traveling for 1 year, 5 weeks, 6 months, “who knows dude,” and “until the money runs out.”  They liked Dali, Escher, Dali, Escher and Dali.  And, no, they really shouldn’t ask me again to turn down the Social Distortion, Rancid, Johnny Cash mix I’m playing to help drown out their conversation.

But, blaring Johnny Cash aside, I was able to hear enough of their banter to make out that they had just come down from Mexico, by way of the highlands, and as they recounted their latest adventure on a Chicken Bus from Xela my brains began to boil.

According to Alpha-Hippie – identifiable by his odor – the five of them were piled in the back of the bus, high as kites, and “really digging the journey.”  From the sounds of it, it was standard camioneta fare – with the driver careening dangerously down the highway, taking curves at wheel skittering speeds, and a 14 year old kid hanging out the front door hooting him on to greater and greater velocities like he were the harpooner on Ahab’s whaling skiff.

King Hippie laughed as he said that towards the front of the bus were some mid 40s American volunteer types, scared out of their wits, who started to curse the driver and demand that he slow down.

Pathetically and predictably, the hippies in the back took the opportunity to flaunt both their arrogance and their ignorance by shouting the oldies down, arguing, I guess, that driving like a fucking sociopath is part of the “cultural heritage of Guatemala.”  The Hippies said that to ask the driver to slow down was “cultural imperialism” of the worst kind.  How dare they!  Fascists.

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