Day Drinking

It’s time to answer the question that, I’m sure, is foremost in everyone’s mind: Where can I get a beer in Union Station at 8:30am?

And I don’t mean buying one at the liquor store, or getting one down at the weird pizza joint in the gladiator pit food court and drinking in a corner like one of the bums. Fingerless gloves, covered in ash from sweeping chimneys, drinking from a plastic cup and staring at the deaf girls from Gallaudet. That’s what I do every morning!

No, it’s time for A Touch of Class. I want to sit at a bar like a normal yuppie and be served a beer by a bartender. And I don’t want to have to cajole the bartender into doing so, or be given a judgmental stare like I just sat down and screamed, “I CAVORT WITH SATAN!” I want someone to serve me a beer at 8:30am like they do it all the time.

You’d think that, at a cosmopolitan railway station, and here at the Capitol of the Empire, bartenders would serve you in the early AM without hesitation. “Hiya Floyd, I just signed a bill that’ll murder millions. Can I have a beer?” Or, maybe, “Hiya Floyd, my motherfucking MARC train was just delayed for 17 hours because of a flash flood warning 1500 miles away in Louisiana. How about a beer? And some heroin?”

The plan: I leave home early, hit Union Station at 8:30 or earlier, find an open bar, and gauge reactions and quality of service. I’ll drink like a fish, scribble insane notes in my little reporter’s notebook, then totter to work and pretend like everything’s normal as I throw up on my supervisor’s shoes and then feverishly masturbate in the bathroom stall to mental images of the deaf girls from Gallaudet.