THE DUDS

JIM: When I was in third grade, I got myself dressed for school, came down the steps and presented myself to my dear mother. She looked me over, warming her bare feet against the heat register and noted that I “looked like a bag of shit with a rope tied around the middle.”

From leisure suits to platform shoes, I have always been on the ass end of any fashion trend and can count the number of times I have actually looked good on the fingers of one hand. Additionally, I have a problem with my ass...I have none. There is a straight line from my shoulders to my ankles, no bump. Though I do have a decent chest and shoulders, I tend to wear things baggy. No ass, baggy shirts...I guess I am a bag of shit with a rope tied around the middle.

When Tony and I first began these Friday night outings, I would wear shorts, Hawaiian print shirts and sandals. I looked like a fucking tourist. I quickly ditched that ensemble and switched to jeans, black boots and “club” style shirts. These were somewhat shiny, and were decorated with skulls or stars or bent martini glasses. Pure poseur. I decided to keep the jeans and boots, but switched to t-shirts extolling my favorite musicians (Ramones, Hendrix, Marley). Better.

I still wear the jeans and boots, but dress it up a bit more with untucked button down shirts, Dickies shirts or graphic prints. I never attempt to look anything but my age. I figure that the bald head, baggy eyes and random age spots trump any article of clothing I might wear.

TONY: My brother may not have the physique of a male model (he is basically a walking cube), but he looks damn good in his duds.

This guy found a look at the beginning of our journey and has kept it pretty well intact. The foundation is the industrial black boots. Of course, proper dungarees are next, though Tony prefers black to my blue. For a long time, little brother was wearing the Lucky 13 button down shirts. This is a black shirt with a cool, Deco style piece of art on the back.

I am happy to say that Tony has branched out recently and is now wearing colors (embracing his long dormant feminine side, no doubt). I don’t think you’ll see him donning a Pink Izod shirt any time soon, but he has added some blues and reds to his ensemble.

I am also very envious of his balls in the hat department. He has been known to jam a pork pie hat on his head from time to time. When in his hand, I am always leery. On his head it somehow works. If I tried that, dirty bar napkins and derisive laughter would rain down upon me.

BOTH: Michigan means a lot of horseshit weather, and one area Tony and I agree on is the wearing of black leather jackets. Tony goes with a shorter motorcycle style and I tend to go with a longer blazer style. My bro is tough, or thinks he is anyway, and never wears any extras. I like to wear a scarf, and for some odd reason it has become known as Jimmy Regal.

IN DA CLUB

One unintended by product from the website has been the curiosity of some over what exactly goes on during our Friday night excursions. What is said, what do you do, who do you look at, and can I go with you?

The answers are: lots, nothing, everyone and no.

Let’s start with the nuts and blots of the evening. Tony and I always prefer to stand as opposed to sit, and if we do sit, it is always at the bar and never at a table. Also, we need to be in the middle of the crowd, with the dance floor in plain sight. Many nights, the first hour of the evening is spent griping about location (“We might as well be out in the parking lot”) and speculation over where we should be ( “I think we can shoehorn in next to the two poseurs”) .

Being a gassy pair, the first few beers of the evening mean the discreet(?) passing of gas and indicating to one another that gas has been passed. Cries of “Jumanji” and “Whammy” often accompany a particularly large passing. On occasion, you might look at the other guy and notice glassy eyes or pursing lips and guess that he has gone “Downtown”. Finally, it is always special to treat your partner to a “Burp and Blow”, a covert burp accompanied by the blowing of the stinky burp breath into an unexpected face. Are you still interested in joining us?

After a beer or two has been had, we typically go on to the betting portion of the evening. This always involves Keno and $1 bets with each other that don’t involve the State of Michigan. We each pick a number and guess the game ( 55 and popcorn for example). As the night progresses, we may add first and last number, even or odd, to the mix. This means that $4 may be wagered on each game (74, Space Invaders, even on the first and odd on the last). We even have nicknames for many of the numbers: 1 is the loneliest number, 2 is worth a deuce, 3 is the intimidator, 6 is Larry Aubrey, 8 is dog balls, 19 is the captain, 55 is met with the singing of I can’t drive 55, 63 is Mister Insignificant, to name a few.

Any sport on TV is a source for more betting. Will the cumulative score at the five minute mark be odd or even? Which team will score the last basket of the quarter? How may pitches will it take Fernando Rodney to get through the first batter?

To the best of my recollection, payment on these $1 bets has never been made. That does not mean that constant bitching and whining does not accompany the ups and downs of your luck. It’s all about bragging rights, money means little to two men of means.

Of course, looking at and commenting on our fellow bar patrons is also a huge part of the evening. You might think that this is largely based on the female population, but you would be wrong. As street reporter Brian Fantana noted in Anchorman Ron Burgundy, “Don’t get me wrong, I love the ladies...” Well, we love the ladies also, but we are fascinated by the guys and the interactions between the sexes as well.

What we really enjoy are bar folk who physically resemble a combination of famous people. The keyboard player in Derringer at Diamondback’s is therefore Viv Algar, a melding of Spinal Tap keyboardist Viv Strange and Wayne’s buddy Garth Algar. A greaser seen at an east side haunt becomes Reggie Kovacs, a combination of Archie’s nemesis Reggie Mantle and old time comedian Ernie Kovacs. A pumped up black dude wearing a tight tee and black stretch pants at Boogie Fever is simply Black Lalanne, a politically incorrect morphing of his ethnicity and old fart exercise guru Jack Lalanne. Writing this, it strikes me that it may be time to update some of our look alike references.

Other folks receive simpler monikers. Two tiny headed broads giggling amongst themselves become known as the Pigeon Sisters. The tall guy dancing alone with an old school hat on his head is Dave Chapeau. The weirdly Eastern European dude dancing solo in a sea of cowboy hats at All Around is Christo (how this oddball escaped an ass beating is beyond me).

Importantly, the real enjoyment on any Friday Night is just hanging with Tony. We challenge each other to compile lists ( top 3 Beatles tunes, best live albums, most crushing Michigan football losses). We rarely touch on anything heavy and always keep real emotions down in the pit of the stomach where they belong. Laughing and enjoying each other, that is the real reason for the tour. May it live forever, Amen!

GAME DAY

Life may be like a box of chocolates, but I’ve always felt that the work week is like a bar of soap. On Monday, I am a fresh, out of the wrapper bar of Irish Spring. As the week goes on and I deal with one asshole after another, that bar of soap is rubbed between the fingers of life and I get smaller and smaller. By quitting time on Friday, I am the sliver of soap that constantly slips through your hands and collects in the rogue hairs around the drain of the shower.

Tony and I take different paths from quitting time to our Friday night rendezvous.

JIM: I feel like a new, albeit tired, man when I hit my house late Friday afternoon. Gone is the bullshit of the work week, the rudeness of John Q Public and the endless traffic. It is replaced with the relative quiet of home, the love of family and no decisions. My wife has a nice dinner ready and, as is our custom after most dinners, we head out onto our garden patio for games of Rack-0 and Yahtzee. Once Andrea finishes handing me my ass, we talk until 7:30 when she heads over to her dad’s house for a visit.

That is my cue to hit the couch for a nap, or attempt at a nap. My twelve year old Jackson is the X-Factor in this endeavor. As I begin to doze I feel his presence above me. I open my eyes and he asks if he can go to the park and hang. He goes and I start to doze. Fifteen minutes later I hear the side door open and he comes rushing in to take a leak (either he waits to the last second or I have forgotten what a young set of equipment sounds like, but his stream is strong). Out he goes, again I doze. Twenty minutes later, he is back to ask if the guys can hang out in the basement to mess around. One Friday night, my third wake-up came from a knock at the door and the little girl next door complaining about Jack and his friends using a Fart Bag to scare and ruin her evening (bet you didn’t know you could buy a commercial fart bag...ah technology).

At this point I give up and spend the remaining time up to 9:15 watching DVDs. Favorites are any Oasis concert, The Who in The Kids Are All Right, or Guy Ritchie films (weirdly, I get a lump in my throat during the end credits of the Who movie when they show montages of the band leaving the stage kissing and hugging; it’s Keith I guess, a tragic character in the Shakespearean tradition). At 9:15 it is time to drag my sorry ass up and get ready. I shave my head, once every four times nicking some fat ridge until blood flows like a scene from Braveheart. I then begin the daunting task of trimming my nose, ear and eyebrow hair. How these areas can get so wild in seven days is beyond me. I put a dab of Oil of Olay on my bald head, work the deodorant, and steal a touch of my wife’s cover-up for a nasty vein that sits on the left side of my nose. Done!

TONY: Of course, I am not present for Tony’s Game Day preparations, but I do know that they are much more serious and regimented than my own. I have also gleaned that Beth and my mom are to stay the fuck out of his way.

Friday night dinner is planned well in advance, nothing spicy or garlicky that could upset his delicate tummy or taint his breath. Once dinner is wolfed down, he repairs to his bedroom to watch DVDs, selections being very similar to my own (or is it mine to his?). He branches out a bit and adds Monty Python or 30 Rock to his library.

Somewhere around six, he goes to sleep and nobody messes with him until his wake-up call some three hours later. Lucky guy!

“Hey Tony, how did you sleep?”

“I went down hard and when I heard the alarm I was confused as hell and didn’t
know what was going on...I could have easily slept through the night.”

How I envy the purity of his nap, though he will never know the perils of the fart bag.

Once awake, a scalding shower and nose/ear hair primping begin his preparations (is the nose/ear thing a guy thing or an Irish/Scottish thing?). There is no head shaving for little brother as he is not bald, just balding. He does keep his head well trimmed and always has quite the dapper appearance. Finally, he bathes in cologne, a trick learned from living so close to the largest Arab population in the United States. Viola!

CONCLUSION: Essentially, we are good to go ( I will get into the evolution of our fab gear in a separate section). These routines have lead to a bit of “innocent ribbing” from our wives. They recently got together and compared notes leading them both to one big question: Why does it take longer than six seconds for us to get ready for Friday Night Bug Juice, six seconds being the time it takes for us to get ready for a night with the wives? Really, there is no dark answer. It is a comfy routine, a primping for the entire week and is not an effort to look good for any bar folk. I do want to look nice for Tony, however.

THE LADIES

ANDREA:  I have shown balls maybe three times in my fifty-one years on the planet. Perhaps the biggest came in 1978 when I asked the European Beauty delivering mail to my mom’s house out on a date. I remember thinking that if this went south, I would have to see this girl for the foreseeable future and pretend like the crushing rejection was no biggie. Inexplicably, she said yes and continued to go out with me even after our first date consisted of going to the horse track, drinks at a dive bar called the Token Lounge and a late bite at Denny’s. Oh yeah, I wore light blue pants made entirely of man made fibers and a shiny darker blue shirt with planets and moons. Pure class!

She continued to go out with me even after my asshole neighbor, who happened to be her co-worker at the post office, warned her that by going out with me she “was going to get burned this time”. Geez, you throw a few sodden parties, listen to hours of punk music at ear splitting levels and blow tons of ganja toward his house and this is your thanks.

I believe that in every relationship, it is obvious to the world which person married “up”. I married “up”. Andrea is model pretty (my dad gave Andrea the European Beauty label- he was bombed at the time but it is accurate and creepy). She is also very smart, has a good sense of humor, is a wonderful mom and is the rock of our little family. We have been married for almost 27 years and my only real complaint is that she may have surpassed me in the humorous gas category. Her clinching blow, as it were, came one morning when I got up for work and she saluted me from under the covers with a low, sad breaking of the wind. For that piece of work, she received the moniker of “Mournful Bum”.

In many ways hers is the most difficult blurb I have written, and not just because of my meager writing talents. How do you convey trust, respect, admiration, consistency, honor, courage, and love with words or anecdotes. It’s like living with a boy scout whose ass you want to grab.

I love my wife (She let’s me go out with Tony every Friday night).

BETH: I was leaning against a bar rail having a beer with my brother one Friday night (does every story of mine start that way?), when he moved closer and looked discreetly around me as if he was about to tell a racist joke. “ You know Beth from work?... We have been dating for about five years.”

Thoughts came racing through my head: How could he be dating a co-worker of ours for that long without me knowing?... What about his other out in the open long term relationship?... Had I ever commented about her large breasts in front of Tony?

Once this relationship became public, and Tony’s other situation came to a close, it became clear that these two were going to be in it for the long haul.

I have known Beth through our crappy job for a long time, and always admired her as a worker and a person. She had the rare ability to fit in with people from all walks of life, to make the tense client relax and the crabby client smile. She always made me feel good, and welcomed me each day with a “Hello Mr. Jim.” Any quips toward me from Beth were always accompanied by a huge smile and a quick raise of both eyebrows. More importantly, I greatly admired the selfless way she took care of her ailing dad, never a complaint to be heard.

I was not surprised that Tony and Beth chose to live together in the house we grew up in with my mom, who needs a little extra TLC (whether she cares to admit it or not). I have to admit that I was a bit surprised when they got married as I didn’t know that there was a woman alive who could tame that stallion.

We all love Beth, and welcome her into our dysfunctional family. Just don’t fuck with Bug Juice Friday Nights.

MOM: When I was eight years old and in third grade, the class had to write a story about our moms and I cried. For my mom’s eighty-first birthday, I wrote a note inside of her card and I cried. My mom makes me cry.

In Sister Fabiola’s Fourth Grade class, I faked being sick the morning of a class field trip to the circus. I was afraid to go on the bus to a strange place (and maybe a little afraid of the clowns). My mom easily saw through this, but instead of forcing me to go, or trying to teach me some kind of life lesson, she understood. My mom let me stay home, drop the facade and told me that my dad would take me to a Red Wing game instead. Later that year, I got to stay home for Game 7 of the ’68 World Series.

In this world, people talk a good game. My mom delivers the goods. If she walks into a roomful of strangers, in ten minutes she will be best friends with two or three people and commiserate with them about family problems or revel in their little triumphs. She is Christian, but not pushy. She is sweet, but not saccharine. She is a mom to the core.

She just gets it.

My mom gets a mention here for many reasons, but one is that she is the bookend of the Friday Night excursions. When I pick Tony up around 10 pm, we always stop and look in on my mom. She is lying across her bed, wrapped in an afghan, asleep in front of Frasier DVDs or asleep listening to a book on tape. She always wakes up and asks Tony and I if we have our wallets. Perfect! At night’s end, as I drop Tony off, she wanders out of her bedroom into the kitchen where drunk food is being prepared. Quite possibly the highlight of the week. Tired, crazy hair and ready to talk about the night or criticize the drunk food. Kissing her goodnight and heading home, I feel great, about ten years old again.

I know I don’t have the market cornered on great moms ( my mother in-law Betty was also a mom hall of famer), but, as I used to say when I was a kid, “I love her more than all the grasses and the sands.”

TONY

Recently, my little brother got married in Myrtle Beach. Since not many friends
and relatives could attend, I threw a little party for Tony and Beth at my house.
I felt honored to make a toast, and had a pretty good joke about his wife Beth’s
boobs, so I gave it my best. After my boob joke was received with decent laughter,
I tried to say something about my brother. I was shocked to hear my voice cracking
as I told family and friends that when it came to Tony, “ I could not think of
anything funny to say.” When I turned to look at my brother, all I could do was
mumble that I loved him so much and give him a kiss and hug ( he had a fresh, soapy
smell).

I really should not have been surprised, Tony and I have been close since forever.
I am six years his senior and have pulled a lot of crap throughout the years.
When he was in little league, I was umpiring and can vividly recall the traitorous
look on his face when I called him out on strikes on a chin high fastball.
I got him high for the first time in his life, and promptly abandoned him when my
mom came home and busted us ( he thought he was going to die that night and kept
looking at his fingernails for signs of his impending doom). We now work together
at the aforementioned shite job, and when not complaining, we are drinking or
planning to drink.

Physically, Tony is thick: Wide feet, stout legs, muscular torso and arms.
Like all the men in my family, his hair is beating a hasty retreat. He is
always messing around with his facial hair, but more often than not he sports
an iron jaw type of beard.

Inside, Tony is Irish to the core: Fiercely loyal to his inner circle, a
momma’s boy in the best sense of the word, quick to laugh and quick to anger.
Quite simply, he is the single funniest man I know; equal parts Monty Python
and Groucho Marx, wrapped in a well read steel trap of a mind.

In short, he is a devil and devilishly handsome.

JIM

I am a mess. On the outside, I look like a lot of fifty-one year old guys who
are desperately trying to hold it together. I have whipped my body into decent
shape, having lost about forty pounds, and now carry 202 pounds on my 5’10” frame.
I have no hair on my head, the retreat having started about twenty years ago.
I wear a fu manchu mustache and sport a soul spot, both gray as hell.
My outstanding physical feature is a nose that is pretty red in the winter and
bright red in the summer. All in all, a real treat on the eyes.

I have been married for twenty-seven years ( I will get to that poor gal later),
have three great kids, a steady job that I fucking hate and a small house in
Allen Park that is paid for. I can be fun to be around and have a good sense
of humor. Sadly, I intersperse that with periods of melancholy, thinking about
the big picture and threatening to overturn rocks and examine life. What a prize!

I decided to chronicle my Friday night excursions with my brother Tony (he suggested
calling it "Friday’s with Tony", but I hear Mitch Albom, despite his lack of size,
can be vicious). I come from a journalism background, actually worked for a
weekly Dearborn paper in the eighties, and only quit that because I am a coward
who looks for the easy way out (redundant?).

Hopefully, these reviews will help you spend your bar money wisely and give you a
little insight into the lives of two hapless Irish louts.