The All-Nighter

These days, I have a 'local' - a bar that has become special to me not just for its convenient proximity to my home, but also for its atmosphere, its people (the head barman is one of my oldest friends in these parts), the fact that I will always be recognised and welcomed there (even if I haven't been in for months). "Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in." Robert Frost

I haven't been in much recently - short of cash, trying to lose weight, turning over a new leaf (ha!). But then on Monday, I got the call, or rather the text message, from my buddy Tennessee Tom, inviting me to join him there. I hadn't seen him since we got back from our respective summer breaks a week or two ago, so I couldn't very well say no - not on the flimsy basis that the next day I had an interview for a potentially life-saving job with a major IT company.

I should perhaps have made more of an effort to be 'sensible', 'responsible' (and all of those other things that I'm not - "tried it once, didn't like it"). 

The problem (no, the beauty) of this environment I find myself in is that all-night drinking is commonplace, almost, you might say, de rigueur: there are no legally-enforced opening hours for bars (they may occasionally kick you out when the staff get too tired to continue, but more often they'll keep serving you as long as you want to stay there, even until dawn); and most of us foreigners here are happy-go-lucky freelancers who frequently have no pressing reason to be out of bed before the middle of the following afternoon. It's a dangerous combination of circumstances.

Monday night evolved into an all-nighter, or very nearly so. My mostly dormant sense of self-preservation eventually kicked in, and I made my excuses around 4am, getting home shortly before dawn, and managing 5hrs or so of booze-befuddled sleep before my interview. Tom and his pals showed no immediate sign of quitting when I left them.

What a fine evening it was, though - hitching a ride on someone else's nostalgia trip, as Tom swapped reminiscences with a pair of visiting high school classmates, giving me a glimpse of a world known previously only through TV and films (it did in fact sound exactly like Richard Linklater's 'Dazed & Confused'). And the drawl came out of hiding. Tom's laidback Southern slur is one of the most engaging accents I've ever heard; but usually it's in the background, just adding a few traces of colour around the edges of the middle-of-the-road 'business voice' he affects most of the time. On Monday night (Tuesday morning!) we were transported to the backwoods and hollows, the secret swimming holes, lazy summer evenings with an illicit keg, moonshine stills in dry counties, TP attacks on unpopular teachers. With the native Tennesseeans holding a 3-2 numerical advantage, the accents grew thick and slow as molasses - and it was a delight.

I'm sorry I went home so early.