Weekend In Shittown

Oh Boston how I hate thee, let me count the ways.....

So my wife was gone for this past weekend and I decided to do a couple of things. On Saturday I went down to Poughkeepsie to visit a really good friend and spend the night there. So that was all good, get out of Boston for a day or so and have a fun time hanging on a college campus. The night before, I decided to check out a local bar. I really love a good bar, but my exploration of the bar scene in Boston has not been very successful to this point. For starters, too many of the bars here are full of college frat types, which is the same exact scene I avoided while I was in college myself and my hatred for frat boys and sorority girls has never waned. So that's one reason I've had a hard time finding a good bar. But there is a bigger reason. You know the opening song to Cheers, "where everybody know your name and they're always glad you came" yadda yadda yadda and what not? Sure you do. Everybody does. And it helped give Boston this reputation for friendly neighborhood bars. Well if you are a twenty-year regular, and they do in fact know your name, they are pretty friendly to you. But if you are a new person walking in the door you might as well be invisible or look like the devil, because you are either ignored or treated with open hostility. So that makes it difficult. And it's a huge change from living in Chicago, where bartenders will treat you like a buddy the first time you walk into a bar by yourself and it's really easy to strike up conversations with people sitting at the bar.

So I gave it another try last Friday. A neighbor had told me about a place called the Red Hat around the corner from our place. Apparently this is the place all the regulars at the real Cheers moved to after that bar became a Hard Rock Cafe-like tourist trap, and I was told they have good food. So I headed out to watch a little bit of the Sox game, sit at a bar, and maybe have a little dinner. I walked in and sat up at the bar. Looked like my kind of place, with a beautiful looking bar area made of wood with great comfortable stools and a couple of TV's with the Red Sox game playing. So far so good. Only a few of people were sitting at the bar so it was a perfect laid-back situation.

As I sat at the bar, the bartender was in the middle of a conversation with a couple of Southie types (think Good Will Hunting without the good looks or the math genius brains). He looked right at me when I sat down and continued talking to his buddies - for about five more fucking minutes before he came over and asked me what I wanted. As he came over he was laughing from the end of the story he just told his buddy, then turned completely stone-faced when he switched to asking me what I wanted. It was like I pissed him off just for sitting down at his bar. And it was like this every time he came to check on me. Which wasn't very often, because I would have an empty beer glass for ten minutes before he would come over and ask me if I wanted another. And even with only four customers at the bar he never remembered what I was drinking. And sitting at the bar everyone there talked to each other and ignored me. Well, didn't ignore per say, more like glanced over wondering if I was some sort of Commie spy trying to steal their souls. And I tried, fuck I tried. When conversation was about the ball game I would throw in some comments here and there about the Sox, or other little tid-bits that usually break the ice in a bar. No go. Best I would get would be a half smile and nod and then they would go right back to talking amongst themselves, and I swear they started talking lower so I couldn't hear them (OK, probably not, but by this point my ego is about three inched tall). I felt like the new kid in grade school who on his first day fell out of his desk or accidentally walked into the girls bathroom and is then shunned by the herd.

So I left. Didn't finish watching the game. Didn't order any food (of course the bartender never asked me if I wanted to order any food anyway).

And then the weekend ended with another reason I hate Boston: the public transportation system. Sunday night I walk up the street to the subway to catch the blue line to the airport and meet my wife when she gets back into town. I get to the platform and wait for the train. There are several people already waiting so I figured one was due any minute. Five, 10, 15 minutes go by and no train. "OK", I'm thinking, "one needs to come right now or I'll be late" We don't have cell phones so this is a bigger problem for me than most people. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty minutes. Lots and lots of people on the platform now, no train has come from either direction. Now I'm fucked. Then we hear an announcement. Unfortunately it sounds just like one of the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. At this point I'm trying to figure out what to do, since I don't have an easy way to call the wife and tell her just to catch a cab and not wait for me to meet her. A few minutes later there is another garbled announcement but this time I am able to make out two words, "disabled train". Fuck!

Somehow, after many calls from a pay phone, I was able to get my wife paged at the airport to tell her what was up and she caught a cab. It was over an hour before the trains had finally started to run again. It would be one thing if this was a rare occurrence, but this happens all the time in Boston. In every other city with rail lines that I've been in, they know how to get around stalled trains by using track crossovers and minimizing the disruption. Not in this stupid town. One little stalled train shuts an entire line down for over an hour.

14 more months, 14 more months, 14 more months.....