A late-night Old Port adventure
By Sean Wilkinson
Photos and accompaniment by The Fuge (a.k.a. Mich Ouellette)
When I was assigned to embark on a journalistic trip through the heart of the Old Port, with fellow Bollard art director and photographer Mich Ouellette, I was not enthusiastic. This idea would have sounded pretty entertaining over several drinks, but I was sober at the time. That is, sober enough to consider memories of what a night in the Old Port entails: smelly bathrooms; bad service; trashy girls who get angry at you for noticing their nipples are poking out of the nipple-holes they cut in their shirts; and drunk, sweaty meatheads high-fiving over their most recent date rape. Were it not for my dedication to investigative journalism, I might never have stepped across the cobblestone threshold of Portland’s Old Port again – and thus not have had the chance to prove those memories all too true.
No night in the Old Port can be properly undertaken without a little pre-game action. Our pre-game choice this night was Amigo’s, a faithful standby on the outskirts of the Old Port’s most notorious blocks. Amigo’s has the most spacious, smoke-friendly patio west of the Breakaway. They don’t put up with pink, popped-collar bullshit, and they sell PBR by the pitcher. Just beware: You might run into every person you’ve ever dated in Portland over the course of one night at Amigo’s. We downed a few pitchers and walked west along Fore Street to Digger’s Pub.
“Digger’s.” Let’s not even get into the poor choice of nomenclature, because as soon as you overanalyze the inane, Neanderthal-brow-inspiring name, you realize the twin bar, which shares a partial wall and entryway, is called “Liquid Blue.”
We were greeted at Digger’s door with an offer of $3 melon shots in test tubes. Given the nature of our assignment, we could hardly turn them down. The shots were sugary, small, and weak.
Mich and I had both been to this place before, when it was known as The Bitter End, and later, The Better End. Respectable bands used to play in this bar, and the two-sided set-up was ideal: loud music and dancing in one room and a relaxed, pub-like atmosphere next door. We now found ourselves in Digger’s “pub,” looking for a beer. Crappy classic rock was blaring from unseen speakers, with no jukebox in sight. We surveyed the row of taps behind the bar, noting that half had plastic cups over them – the universal symbol for “no beer in this here tap.” Mich asked for a Molson, and the bartender advised him: “All the taps are kind of shitty and foamy…. Just get a domestic bottle; they’re three bucks.”
So we got two domestic bottles. Unimpressed, we decided to mingle and feel out the crowd, but soon realized that other than three nonplussed characters at the bar, we were the crowd. This place sucked. Perhaps it was the sweaty beer smell, or the overly loud “Me and Bobby McGee” that persuaded us to wander next door and check out Liquid Blue.
Overplayed Janis Joplin melded with, and then morphed into, bad hip-hop techno music as we crossed into the darker half of the bar complex, lit almost entirely by black lights. A strange mix of overconfident yokels (reared on too much MTV) and shifty dudes in giant t-shirts danced with a few smug, chubby white girls. Everyone was dressed in white, as if they’d been expecting to be bathed in black light and had planned their wardrobe accordingly. Actually, I’m sure this was the case.
About the same time that we realized the “DJ” was mostly playing radio edits of Lil Jon songs, we encountered our first bachelorette party of the night. Apparently bachelorette parties are a staple of the Old Port nightlife scene. We talked to two girls who were more than happy to show off their penis straws – an accessory we would not see the last of this night. Interestingly enough, when we ordered a second round of drinks, this time on the black-light side, the same beers were $2 instead of $3.
I was expecting the bathroom to be putrid at Liquid Blue, having once stood in a puddle of urine in that very establishment. However, to the club’s credit, perhaps the only credit I can give here, the bathroom is now almost entirely clad in diamond-plate steel – not the warmest ambience, but this steel-plated room can now be hosed down after drunken customers puke in the stalls.
We left the yokels, chubbies and bachelorette girls and moved on to the next stop: The Iguana. The Iguana is the low-water mark for crappy bars in the Old Port. It had a very unpleasant, industrial smell reminiscent of high school locker rooms and vomit, but the stench didn’t seem to be deterring a decidedly less-than-capacity crowd from drinking. In the short time we were there, I saw the bartender make six or seven giant bowls of cheap liquor (the bottles one finds on the dusty bottom shelves of liquor stores; booze so cheap even the most down-and-out drunks shun it in favor of huffing gasoline) mixed with ice and mixers. Some of these bowls were hoisted up to the attention-starved girls dancing on the bar – a trademark activity at The Iguana. One out of every three girls who walk into The Iguana ends up dancing on the bar eventually, either pretending to enjoy themselves or pretending to be mad at the fraternity brothers pawing at the skin showing between their fashionable separates.
Looking to further my own drinking, I approached the bar and parted a sea of ill-fitting high heels. Every single tap handle was wearing a plastic Solo-cup hat. Sorry, no draft beer here. I ordered a $3 piña colada. Tasty, but very weak. We ran into some familiar girls at the bar who were (not surprisingly) on the defensive about being there. Things began to go downhill. Three more bachelorette parties came in, all brandishing the requisite penis straws. Some had giant, stuffed penises for signing; others wore penis medallions. Looking through my scrawled notes from that night, this is the part when I wrote, in unbelieving all-caps: “PENISES EVERYWHERE!”
Mich and I were determined to get out of this bar, all the more so after discovering the men’s room was out of order. How can you run a busy establishment full of horny assholes and slutty girls with one bathroom? Isn’t that blatantly illegal?
We headed a few doors down Portland’s “Walk of Shame,” Wharf Street, to The Oasis. The Oasis takes the urinal cake for having the worst crowd, worst bathroom, worst smell, and worst overall drinking and dancing experience. Congratulations, Oasis! And don’t worry about this distinction’s effect on business. There’s never a shortage of pricks to patronize places like this.
The downstairs bar was sparsely populated and incredibly foul-smelling. This was like three-month-old-gym-sock-stuffed-up-the-nose-with-gorgonzola-cheese-and-stagnant-urine bad. We ordered overpriced beers and moved on to the upstairs dance area, where we could hear the action from below.
Here we encountered more bad hip hop, more bad smells, and more goddamned penis straws. I saw people at The Oasis from every other bar we had been in that night, as if this place has some kind of evil, smelly, tasteless gravity. The back corner of the room is devoted to a stage with a stripper’s pole, where more attention-hungry girls could show their stuff. The rest of the floor was devoted to pushing, grabass, and spilling drinks. At this point, I wrote – among jostling elbows and pre-weathered, $25 baseball caps – “SWEATY ASSHOLES ABOUND.” One jostling elbow landed under Mich’s bottle of beer, chipping a tooth. We moved downstairs for some air and to explore the dirty, butt-strewn outdoor patio.
It was last call, a horrific scene of screaming bouncers and drunken patrons desperate for one more drink and a last-minute hook-up, topped off nicely by a cocktail waitress tripping over her own self-loathing and spilling a tray of test-tube shots and dollar bills everywhere.
Our loathsome assignment over, Mich and I headed to Bill’s Pizza for some overpriced slices. I’ll never be back again.
