Clean and sober: Olive enjoys music and a nonalcoholic drink at the Old Vic.

Straight Edge

Nondrinkers hit the bar-and-club scene

By Shelley Lawrence

MS. OLIVE, 28, is six feet tall with six piercings in her lip. Actually, she’s got six small holes, because she took the piercings out a few years ago. Her hair is jet-black and down to her waist, braided into rags about a half-inch thick. Across her knuckles is tattooed the motto “LIVE FREE.” By the time your eye has traveled up to her shoulder, it has seen “HELL” (on her wrist), “IRONY” (encased in flames), and a fleet of UFOs swarming between inky planets. The entire “sleeve” has been tattooed with a Swiss-cheese effect so that the whole scene appears to take place under the skin of her arm.

Her boyfriend, Sean, 29, is just as imposing. His jet-black hair is spiked stiffly all over his head, and he sports numerous tattoos as well as facial piercings, scars, and stretched ear-holes with metal tubes stuck through them.

Not your typical teetotalers, but both are members of a 12-step recovery program and do not drink or do any other drugs. They do, however, have a great time clubbing and bar-hopping sans hooch. They go to shows, preferably punk or rockabilly. They frequent bars with friends to hear live music or to shoot pool. Sean says it’s easier to go out with friends from the program because the pressure to drink is lessened.

Olive tells me that if she’s feeling shaky or feeling the urge to use, she’ll stay home and cook or garden instead of going out, even if that means missing a show.

For 17 years, Sean used every drug he could, mainly heroin. He’s been clean and sober now for five months. Olive has been clean for four years and 10 months after using heroin, alcohol, and other drugs for six and a half years.

She laughs at herself now, saying she’s one of “those people” whom she used to scorn while getting high.

“And I like it!” she laughs when asked about her sobriety. “You would never have caught me going into a video store before. I’d be like ‘How boring!’ Drugs were my TV, that’s just what I did before. I used to hate people who’d go and watch a movie on a Friday night.

“Now I’ve become that person, and I like it. I mean, you pay two bucks [for a video] and you have entertainment for 12 people for two hours!

“You can’t beat that.”

Sean never drank too much while he was getting high, and now sometimes wishes he could have a cold beer.

Olive did drink a lot–so much that she suffered alcohol poisoning, which led to her quitting drugs and alcohol.

When it comes to going to bars, Olive has “mixed emotions.”

“I remember when it was fun other times going out,” she says, “but now when I go out, I see people in bars being violent and aggressive. I don’t care for drunks, unless I am one. Once recently, I saw this girl who’d been in the program and had relapsed. It was at a party at this punk-rock frat house. I really wanted to see her lying in a pool of her own vomit so I could think, ‘Show me [drinking] doesn’t work!’ It just doesn’t work.

“The party had been fun, and then she started this huge fight and it got ugly there.”

BOTH SEAN and Olive do a lot to stay busy, be productive, and keep themselves from drinking. They are heavily involved in activist work: Olive volunteers for the Purple Berets, the Sonoma County women’s rights organization; and Sean works with a radical environmental group.

Olive previously volunteered to work for the needle exchange in Berkeley, a program to stop the spread of disease among intravenous-drug users. The program offers free HIV tests, vaccinations against hepatitis A and B , clean needles in exchange for dirty ones, cleaning supplies for needles, condoms, and sex advice.

Sean still hangs out with people who use and drink, but has decided the lifestyle is no longer for him. Both Sean and Olive appreciate their fun now more that they are sober.

Olive says that they’ve relearned how to have fun.

“Being in the program, we’ve learned that recovery can kick ass. You’ve just got to meet people who have the same interests. The emotions that brought you to the program are the same. Even though everybody’s situations are very different, the feelings behind them are the same–that’s why we’re all here in this place.

“That’s what brought us here, and that’s what matters.”

Olive and Sean attend 12-step meetings three to seven times a week. Both say that the meetings are a social scene in their own right. Afterward, friends may congregate at an all-night diner for coffee and to pig out on greasy food.

Sometimes everybody winds up at Sean’s house.

As Sean, Olive, and I leave the coffee shop where we’ve met for our interview, I notice that one of Sean’s ears has a gaping hole in it, while the other sports a tribal “plug.”

When I remark that he’s missing an ornament, Sean just grins and answers, “Yeah, some drunk dude knocked it out of my ear in a bar last week.”

From the June 8-14, 2000 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Club Fab ignites Guerneville nightlife

By Patrick Sullivan

Roving spotlights prowl across a stormy sea of dancing bodies moving to the grinding beat of a booming sound system. Two muscular, scantily clad male dancers wiggle their bronze bodies atop two high platforms in front of a giant prop rocket. On a huge projection screen hanging from the ceiling, animated figures wander through computer-generated alien landscapes.

Tray held high, a smiling waitress makes her way across the chaotic dance floor. Just about the only woman in sight, she dodges two shirtless guys doing some hip version of the lambada, then makes a wide circle around a slender raver twirling a pair of glowsticks and watching the green trails in the huge mirrors on the wall.

But getting back isn’t going to be easy. Suddenly, as if by prearranged signal, a fresh wave of club-goers surges down the steps, bringing new energy and new body heat to the already crowded dance floor. All across the room, more shirts come off and the dancing gets wilder.

No, this isn’t some club in the Castro or some after-hours gay rave south of Market. Welcome to Saturday night at Club Fab in Guerneville.

Since it opened just over a year ago, the 7,000-square-foot dance club has been gradually building a reputation that now extends far beyond the boundaries of Sonoma County. Most summer nights, gay men and lesbians from Santa Rosa, San Francisco, and beyond pack the dance floor. But several new events are also attracting a growing number of straight patrons.

In the process of building an audience, Club Fab is doing its share to help reinvigorate nightlife in the river area. And that, says Greg Seiler, who co-owns the club with his partner, Edward Martinez, was the whole point of opening the doors in the first place.

“We just got tired of apologizing to our friends when they would come up from the city,” says Seiler, a San Francisco resident who has maintained a second home in Guerneville for more than a decade. “Following the ’95 flood especially, there was no nightlife. It just sucked. When this building became available, we just had to do it.”

“We wanted to bring a world-class entertainment venue so that people would have another reason to come up, because a lot of people were coming up and not taking the area seriously,” Martinez adds.

But before Club Fab’s doors could open, the new owners had a few challenges to overcome. The building, which occupies a prime position on Main Street, has a long and colorful history. Built in 1946 as the River Theater, it was a movie palace until 1984, after which it took on a new incarnation as a string of dance clubs and concert halls with names like The Pit and Ziggernaut. But time and neglect took their toll, and when Seiler and Martinez began making their plans, the interior was a mess.

“When we walked into that place, it was being foreclosed,” Seiler explains. “They had taken all the electrical equipment and clipped it loose with wire cutters. It was in a big pile waiting to be auctioned off. We had to put the whole place back together. It was kind of like rebuilding the Mayan Empire.”

After an extensive renovation (which carried a total price tag that Seiler estimates at somewhere close to $100,000), the building now sports a new dance floor, two state-of-the-art sound systems, and a multilevel arrangement of lounges, complete with pool tables and spots to check out the dance-floor action. And, of course, there’s the giant rocket.

“Edward owns the biggest prop house in San Francisco,” Seiler explains. “So we’re able to bring in all kinds of fun things. One night we brought in a 20-foot Egyptian Pharaoh.”

But props aren’t all that’s coming up from the city. Because the club also features an upgraded DJ booth with big-city-style equipment, Seiler and Martinez are able to attract guest DJs from San Francisco.

And their fans follow. Seiler estimates that, on many summer nights, roughly 70 percent of his patrons are from outside Sonoma County. But tourism from the south falls off during the winter months, which is one reason the club has worked hard to build a local audience.

The effort seems to be succeeding. For one thing, an increasing number of straight people are coming through the door, drawn primarily by Club SEXY, a dance party hosted by DJ Dave Matthias from radio station SEXY 95.9. The club’s cabaret nights, which feature drag talent from across the Bay Area, also draw a mixed audience.

“I’m amazed,” Seiler says, “by how many straight people show up on those nights.”

What does the future hold? For one thing, according to Seiler, Club Fab will play host to more live music. The west county-based Institute for the Musical Arts recently put on a concert at the club, and singer Vickie Shepard performed on Memorial Day. Expect to see more acts along the same lines, Seiler says.

“But it’ll be a different kind of music–nothing angry,” he adds with a laugh. “No angry music allowed.”

From the June 8-14, 2000 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Daring Drinks

Belly up to the bar and blow your mind

By Marina Wolf

By 1862 the first bartender’s guides were circulating, and British correspondents already were complaining about American drink names; “an obvious defect in manners,” said one.

You’ve seen them before: the shot glasses glowing with a liquid rainbow, the martini glasses radiating colors not found in nature, the coconut goblets topped with an umbrella, a plastic sword, and Carmen Miranda’s hat. They’re the drinks that make you wonder as you sip carefully at your vodka tonic, “What the hell is that?”

Believe it or not, they all have names, and some are listed in standard bartending textbooks. Most of them even make sense. Girl Scout Cookie? It’ll have mint and chocolate (provided by dark cacao and white creme de menthe, layered with Bailey’s in a shot glass). Russian Quaalude? Gotta have vodka, at least, and it does (along with Frangelico and Bailey’s).

But there are other names that reveal nothing: Bad Sting. Ice Pick. Wombat. Pangalactic Gargle Blaster (note: flaming not recommended).

These are all from a book called Simply Shooters: Coast to Coast Shooter Collection, which boasts “over 1150 recipes.” And mind you, that number’s just for shooters.

John Burton, owner of Santa Rosa Bartending School, teaches how to concoct over 100 mixed drinks, which is considered the bare minimum for today’s bartender. But in reality, there are an “infinite number of possibilities,” says Burton.

Two hundred years ago, when mixed drinks were first dubbed cocktails, things were a lot simpler. The cocktail was first described in print in 1906 as rum punch laced with bitters. By 1862 the first bartender’s guides were circulating, and British correspondents already were complaining about the vulgarity of American drink names; “an obvious defect in manners,” said one.

Even then the rage for the outrageous was alive, with names like Corpse Reviver and Chain Lightning. But the cocktails themselves were not absurd: whiskey, rum, and gin, mixed with soda or sours. These simple, strong drinks suited the tastes of the men who were the principal patrons of the saloons in the early 1900s. The women’s temperance movement, combined with a Victorian devotion to propriety, kept public consumption of alcohol to a minimum.

All this changed in the 1920s, when women became emancipated, both socially and politically, and took up drinking as almost a civic duty. A new drinking demographic was born. At the same time, Prohibition settled in, and a thirsty nation sought ways around the federally imposed drought. Speakeasies flowed with strong liquors that were the easiest to bootleg. Faced with liquor of dubious flavor, bartenders created new mixed drinks that simultaneously hid bad liquor and appealed to the new woman drinker.

The names, too, grabbed drinkers with their innuendo; Classic Cocktails lists some crudely named concoctions of the period whose popularity–and formulas–have faded, but whose names live on in a sort of soft-core, F. Scott Fitzgerald fantasy: Atta Boy, One Exciting Night, Bosom Caresser.

Since then, there have been several waves of adventurousness, mainly in response to new spirits and mixers on the market. When vodka and white rum become available in the ’40s and ’50s, lighter, sweeter cocktails appeared on the scene, including the new drink called the screwdriver.

Burton, who has been tending bar for 40 years, remembers the first time a lady ordered a screwdriver at his bar: “People looked at her and said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding.’ ”

Blue curaçao in the ’60s, Italian syrups in the ’80s–each time something new hits the market, new drinks have to be invented. Now there are thousands of kinds of liquor on the market, scores of vodkas alone. Add to that the different juices, sodas, and mixers, and you have a universe of drinks with just a dash from a different bottle.

Not surprisingly, liquor companies are the prime movers behind the recent cocktail renaissance. They host their own competitions, with cash prizes, and sponsor regional, national, and international events as well. Winners often get written up in industry magazines, and the winning recipes go out with marketing packages.

Galliano’s recent competition yielded, among other things, the G-Spot Shot (Galliano, Midori, and blue curaçao) and the G-String (Galliano, orange juice, and Stolichnaya Razberi–another new spirit).

The newest field of daring drinks is shooters, those miniature cocktails that are created in a shot glass and chugged. Shooters offer a powerful hit of flavor, with surprisingly little alcohol content, says Flamingo bar manager John Timberlake; if you really want to get drunk, get a shot and a beer. But the names promise an extreme experience: Deathwish, Toxic Waste, Hand Grenade, Nuclear Accelerator (flaming definitely not recommended). And it’s difficult to resist the raw sex appeal: Bend Me over Easy, Leg Spreader, Busted Cherry, French Tickle.

THE TAXONOMY of these new creations is elusive. Take the Sex on the Beach series listed in the Shooter Collection. There are nine, including Sex on the Beach for a Week, and not a single common element is to be found in all nine (vodka and Chambord are in six each, peach schnapps and Midori are in four).

The few guidelines that do exist are pretty straightfoward. Blue drinks contain blue curaçao. Green drinks could be lime, Midori, or green menthe (double-check the name for context).

Anything with the word fire, flaming, or inferno in the title could be with Tabasco, cinnamon schnapps, or pepper vodka, or might be set on fire. And anything with an orgasm theme, either explicit or implicit, will have Bailey’s or cream involved (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

This brings up the gender psychology of these bizarre beverages. Men may go for the zowie, maxed-out shooters of death, but women are the primary consumers of most multi-ingredient mixed drinks, according to bartenders.

“You think men would order a piña colada with whipped cream in front of their friends?” asks Timberlake with a snort. “Women, they like to think they’re shocking bartenders. They’ll come up and say, ‘I’d like a Screaming Orgasm.’

“I just say, ‘Gimme 10 minutes.’ ”

From the June 8-14, 2000 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.