Tantalus
By Tantalus

The Irregular Barfly Column

Conversation Dives

The sign of a good bar is one where you can walk in alone on any given night and engage total strangers in scintillating conversation. My two favorites for this are Angles on 18th Street in Adams Morgan and The Raven in Mount Pleasant. Both are fairly generic dives, but that's the whole point. People go there to talk. At Angles, I've met war photographers, widows of war photographers, Georgetown sorority girls, mob lawyers, and heartland BMX pros. (On a side note about today's generation of sorority girls. The secret's out: You can actually talk to them. I never really knew how to carry a conversation with a ditzy sorority girl. But now that they all do volunteer work, it's become much easier. Just spin some line about literacy training in the ghetto, or legislation for the disabled and watch their palms start to sweat. It works. Trust me).

At the Raven, I've met documentary filmmakers, ex-Sandanista gun-runners and even Ivanka Trump. Ivanka was there recently, with her pudgy, painted baby-face and plucked eyebrows - for my friend Rex's farewell get-together.

So, I said to Rex, "Who's that girl there, sort of high class hooker, right out of "Pretty Baby," that Brooke Shields kiddie porn film?" He frowned and said quietly, "That's Ivanka, a friend of mine." And, I said. "Oops." I made amends with Rex and Ivanka turned out to be very down to earth indeed. She enjoys tennis, golf, and skiing in the Czech republic (her mother, Ivana´s, homeland), and has recently taken up her studies again.

Knowing full well that the best way to a fashion model's, um, heart, is through her, uh, brain, I casually mentioned that many of the cobblestoned streets of Prague had actually been laid during the Nazi occupation. Her eyebrowless eyes widened appreciatively.

Chest Flesh in the Alley

This column will regularly feature bizarro item on DC nocturnalia, and surely the winner this time is an item overheard at The Raven. It features an ex-Marine with a serious drug habit sated one night in a Mount Pleasant alley. After the deal, two bad seeds for whatever reason attacked him and his girl. As one began kicking the girlfriend, she screamed, "Fucking stop! I'm pregnant (which was, by the way, big news to the ex-Marine). But the ex-Marine retained his calm and proceeded to bite an oyster-size piece of flesh off the tit of one of his attackers. This made it easier to later identify the attacker at the hospital (kudos to USMC hand-to-hand combat training!).

I found the story quite amusing and, recalling the ear in the grass at the beginning of "Blue Velvet," Tantalus even went looking for the chest flesh the next day.

Mysteriously, it had disappeared.

The Bad Drink Award

This months Bad Drink Award goes to Perry´s for using some crappy rail tonic that makes cocktails taste like battery acid. If the only way you know whether you have a V&T or a G&T is by the color of the lemon, you know you're being screwed. I have no problem paying seven bucks for a drink (in fact, I quite enjoy it). But for that, I expect a good drink. So, Perry´s, get your act together.

Stripclubs in Skankville

Say you have a super-suave Istanbul businessman friend in town - you know, Mediterranean yacht, dark suit, gold case where the Dunhills are stored - and you want to prove to him that DC nightlife is a lot less pathetic than the world assumes. Well, naturally you'd steer clear of our gimmicky ethno-chic lounges and pedestrian meat markets and head straight to the closest strip club. Why? Because Turkish men (and most American men, though we're too cowed to admit it) really, really enjoy watching pretty women take their clothes off..

First to the (not so) Royal Palace on the corner of Connecticut and Florida. Now this really smelled of cheap lust: surly waitresses, plastic picnic tables, and creepy clientele in a badly lit basement. Sure, they do the full frontal bit - even some acrobatic spreading - but on our night at least, the girls were just a notch above Costco cashiers. So you best just avert the eye.

Then it was on to two places on M St. (between 18th and 19th), Camelot and Joanne's - they're virtually indistinguishable - both long and narrow with a tiny stage in front of which a line of desperados had formed, as if taking Holy Communion, all breathing heavily and briefly reflecting on the mysteries behind that triangular patch of hair. Istanbul and I winced theatrically and suffered through a 30 minute parade of fake breasts, sagging breasts, celluloid ripples, belly jelly, and female faces plain, painted, taut, and drawn. It was so not classy.

Tantalus, who lived in Bangkok for a while, still remembers falling asleep after a few hours at the G Spot on Nana Square and watching hundreds of sugar-plumed breasts dance in his head, all the afterglow of a good night out. Instead, after this experience in DC, I just went to bed and pressed delete.

Illustrations by Matthew E. Dawson

Send comments to Tantalus@Cultureflux.com, and I´ll try to incorporate them in my next missive.

Editor's note: The comments and opinions expressed in the Tantalus column are solely those of the author and are not necessarily those of Cultureflux.com.