One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer

The Jacksonville Jaguars, referenced in my last post, were not the first professional football team in North Florida: before there were Jaguars, there were the Jacksonville Bulls of the old United States Football League. What? You don't remember the U.S.F.L.? Well, for a couple of years a few rich dudes, armed with Herschel Walker and the New Jersey Generals, tried to create a league to compete with the N.F.L. (Before Steve Spurrier brought the Gators their first of many SEC championships and its first national college championship, he coached the Tampa Bay Bandits in that league). The league didn't make it, but Jacksonville's fans turned out for the games, and apparently impressed the money men enough that Jacksonville ended up with Florida's third N.F.L. franchise. Anyhow, when I was a law student at Stetson in St. Pete, and mine and AndyMan's buddy, Steve Davis was a law student at the University of Florida, Steve scored a couple of Bulls tickets and invited me on up to catch the game.

So, I travelled the hour and a half or so from Tampa to Gainesville. I'm pretty sure it's not even legal to go to football games completely sober, so Steve and a had a few cocktails at his apartment in Hogtown. We'd've probably been okay, except Steve had recently gotten a new George Thoroughgood C.D. (or album), which contained the following song:



The problem with mixing drinking and catchy songs is that really bad ideas start to sound like really good ideas. Our rally cry for the evening became: One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer! We took the hour or so trip from Gainsville to Jackson, and watched the game in the rain. It's not a lot of fun watching a football team you don't really care about in the rain. A popular franchise nightclub in Tampa at the time was Confetti's, and we'd heard that Jacksonville'd had a Confetti's, so soaked and besotted, we invaded.

We made numerous trips to the bar. Each time, we demanded, "One bourbon, one scotch, and one beer". The bartender would sometimes ask stupid questions like, "What kind of bourbon?" or "how would you like your scotch?" or "bottle or draft?". We were having none of it! If George Thoroughgood had meant us to be specific, he'd have been specific. "I SAID One Bourbon, One Scotch and One Beer. I WANT One Bourbon, One Scotch and One Beer! You got our order, now get us a bourbon, a scotch and a beer!" This did little for either the bartender's disposition or ours, but ultimately, we got what we ordered. A few times. Each.

If you get "One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer" a couple of times, you've done some drinking. We were now bullet-proof, and it was time to find some companionship. On our best days during these years, neither Steve nor I were what you'd call "smooth". This was not one of our best days. Steve and I must have asked every woman in the place to dance. We got no play. Could our lack of success have anything to do with our ridiculous comments, our bedraggled appearance and extreme intoxication? Of course not! We arrived at the conclusion that we had walked into a lesbian bar by mistake, and we'd just go somewhere else. We went to another bar with dishearteningly similar results. Apparently, Jacksonville was a hotbed of Sappho inspired man-haters.

So, we did what anybody would have done in our condition, we went to Daytona Beach. Well, I say we went to Daytona Beach. We only made it as far as Ormond Beach, just North of Daytona. We couldn't go another mile, so we pulled into the parking lot of a private resort community on the beach. We walked by the pool, and I grabbed a deck chair and set it up on the beach. Steve just passed out in the sand. You know how, when you sleep outside, you generally get up when the sun first comes up? Well, that wasn't the case. We woke up at ten. People were walking by and staring at us. We were... ill. Nevertheless, we soldiered on. I grabbed my deck chair. Steve brushed some of the omnipresent sand from himself, and we waved to the security guards as I put the chair back whence I gotten it.

Off now to Daytona Beach. After a couple of hours of arcade games on the boardwalk, we decided to visit my grandmother in Orlando. She was not as pleased to see me as she generally was. Hey, guess we all have bad days. Maybe she was having one. Anyway, after a tunafish sandwich and some fairly stilted conversation, we went back to Gainesville, then I went back to Tampa. And I slept. A lot. And I learned something from my experience: Jacksonville is not a good place to pick up girls. Either that, or never take advice from George Thoroughgood. One of those.