TVs, TVs, Everywhere TVs
Any man knows that being good at barbershop chit-chat is far more important than being adept at high-level intellectual discourse.
“Some off the top, leave a little on the sides. Yeah, right, these politicians are all the same. They’re all in it for the dollar, screw you and me. Patriots 24-17 Sunday, but they better get a better running game if they want to keep it up. Brady can’t do it all.”
It’s harmless and fun. Small talk. Good-natured banter that gets one established as a regular guy. But now the chit-chat is no more. At least in this one barbershop I sometimes go to.
They just put a TV on the wall, up over the barber’s chair. It’s the kind you see everywhere now: two feet by three feet, flat screen, with a black metallic frame around it. And the thing’s turned on all the time, regardless of what’s on. The day I was there everyone in the shop had their eyes glued to an Andy Griffith rerun and I couldn’t get more than a grunt out of anyone. Friendly chit-chat versus Barney Fife? Forget it.
By the time I left the shop I was feeling kind of irked, and as I walked down the street, with the cold November air blowing against the back of my freshly shorn neck, I became more and more agitated about this TVs-everywhere-you-look thing.
The corner variety store where I go for the paper in the morning now has TVs on the wall behind each cashier. The manager told me they’re working out real well, because people used to get impatient waiting in line and now they don’t. It’s amazing how they usually watch only the TV in front of the line they’re in, he says, even though they can see the others just as well. Doesn’t seem to matter what’s showing, either. It’s just that it’s a TV, it’s turned on, and it’s right in front of them, so they immediately zone in on it. Many of them are still in a TV stupor when they leave the store, he says, and it’s fun to watch them back out the door with that slack-jawed, glassy-eyed look they have while still watching the tube.
Someone told me about a bar in the Old Port, Fore Play, on Fore Street, that has a real lot of TVs, so I went and investigated. Anything in the name of research. Sure enough, I counted 17 TVs. All of them on, with no one watching any of them. The young people there were all involved in various degrees of … well, remember the name of the place. Good to see at least one thing hasn’t changed.
I told the doorman what I was up to and he scoffed. “Try Binga’s,” he said. So I did.
Binga’s Stadium is a very spacious, two-floor bar/nightclub/lounge/game room on Free Street that has … 52 TVs. Fifty-two large TVs. All along the walls, upstairs and down, and all of them on, always. The bartender upstairs told me Binga’s is connected to nine satellite TV stations, and each of them delivers scads of channels.
Like at Fore Play, though, there’s not as much TV watching going on at Binga’s as one might suppose. The TVs are largely for effect. Most of their customers, the bartender said, come for the video game machines, which are numerous and incredibly alluring. Oh, if a Patriots game or some major sporting event is on, the TVs get a good deal of attention, she said. But otherwise, the TVs are there — all 52 of them — to provide the white noise, or white light, or whatever, that their clientele has grown up on and needs to have, whether they’re watching or listening or not.
It’s not a generational thing. These days most bars are filled with TVs regardless of their clientele’s average age. At a neighborhood watering hole where I continued my research — a place much smaller than Binga’s, with an older and harder-drinking crowd — there are a half-dozen TVs, one in each corner and two larger ones right behind the bartender, directly in front of people sitting at the bar. You can’t sit at the bar and not watch TV, at least with some portion of your brain.
The bartender and I just happened to get on the subject of TVs in public places and she went right at it, full bore. “The damn TVs all over this place are the worst part of my job!” she said. “They’re as bad as cigarette smoke used to be. When it was just one little TV up in the corner, it was OK, but now it’s in your face everywhere you look! TV is all friggin’ degrading, mindless garbage, but the worst part is the evening news! Every friggin’ night there’s another sorry-assed low life who’s done some sicko thing somewhere that I don’t have to even friggin’ know about! Or maybe there’s been a terrible accident. Whatever! I don’t want to hear about these things every day. They always come up with some stupid violence or sex thing no matter what. I don’t want it in my head!”
Gee, TV used to be such a fun thing. We’re under siege by it today. When you’re out in public with your head stuck in a TV — or with one on somewhere in the background, so you can keep your equilibrium — you’re not out there with other people. You might be getting a haircut, waiting in line with a bag of groceries, or having a drink at your favorite bar, but if you’re watching TV, that’s what you’re really doing. We’re talking the plug-in drug here, and it’s everywhere, everywhere.
Well, there is at least one place you can go have a drink in Portland that doesn’t have a dreaded TV. That would be the one and only Geno’s, where, when you’re there, you’re there all the way, take it or leave it. Geno’s son, JR, takes a lot of grief for not having a TV, but that’s just the way it is.
A happy medium ground, I should add, might be The Snug, where I found only one TV, and it wasn’t turned on when I visited. Reserved for special events, I assume. Very cool.
By the way, the Andy Griffith episode that was on in the barbershop had a scene in which Barney gives a sobriety test to Otis. That just about cracked me up. As drunk as he was, Otis could stand on one leg and hop up and down better than Barney could, and it drove Barney crazy. I was too irked at the time to let those guys see me laugh, but I felt like it.
Maybe I’ll just get over there being a TV at the barbershop and time my haircuts for when Andy Griffith is on. That’s the way a regular guy would handle it, I guess.
