Blue Guys

“Every base is covered. There is no excuse to stay sober.”

THE NEW CRITIC

Untitled, Kit Knuppel

Theo Gary is a 22-year-old senior undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying English and History.

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These days you hear endlessly about how “the young people aren’t drinking! They aren’t going out! They aren’t having sex!” And perhaps that’s true. The people I attend school with probably do go out and get drunk and have sex less frequently than their predecessors. All the statistics say so, anyway (and who could ever doubt those). But I am skeptical. My experience — the only which I can truthfully describe — does not align with what seems to be the millennial conception of Gen Z as chronically “home alone, on our phones, jerking off and taking anti-depressants.” Here at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I can assure you, the young continue to live as they always have — stupidly, and with little regard for tomorrow morning.

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We were standing in a lumpy line, more like a mass, students two- or three- or five-abreast, an amalgamation of thirty to forty distinct groups — four guys and eight girls, three guys and five girls — representing every possible combination of gender but not of type. Most everyone here is in a fraternity or sorority. And if they aren’t, then someone else in their party is. It’s not required, and there’s no sort of rule — official or otherwise — but this just is the case. If they weren’t, why be in line at all?

This bar — Joe’s — the place we’re waiting to get into, one of three major bars adjacent to the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is packed, bursting with upperclassmen. Tonight is senior night, a special occasion here — anyone over twenty-one gets in free of charge, no cover. But wait, you might understandably wonder, how does anyone under twenty-one get in anyway? The drinking age is twenty-one, no? And you would be right to point that out. Like every other place, the age at which one may order a drink in Illinois and in Champaign is twenty-one, and there’s no getting around that. However, in this county, the age at which one may enter a bar just so happens to be nineteen. Legal drinkers get a wristband at the door, and we’re hunky-dory, in obedience with all legal rules and regulations.

Usually, not always but often, the bartender will check your wristband. He’ll look at you, and you’ll look at him. He’ll tap his wrist, and you’ll look at him sadly, eyes downcast, and he’ll shrug, onto the next person. Other times, all is well — the bartender asks nothing, pouring your drinks without controversy. Whether or not your wristband will be checked on a given night is impossible to tell; making some connection, however tenuous, with one of six or seven bartenders on duty is the only foolproof way to buy a drink underage. The bartenders themselves are almost always associated with one or another Greek House, the jobs (precious few of which exist) passed down from one member to another like an antique lamp. It’s not a rule, and it’s not ironclad, but to be hired it helps a tremendous amount to be connected — a brother, a sister, a sworn member of the club. Access to these people, a personal relationship with them (or someone who knows them), likely means membership in the same club or at least close association with it. So the bars are an insular little world, populated by recognizable characters, the kind of place where everybody knows everybody else.

It goes like this: your boy daps up his boy. He points at you. You order vodka poured from a plastic bottle mixed with various flavors of Powerade or Red Bull or Baja Blast. You receive four small plastic cups (mixed drinks are ordered four at a time). Over the next several hours, you order five to ten times. At night’s end, you are presented with a bill for seven dollars, gratuity optional. The system works.

Now there are twenty of us here, pushing up to the front, a surging crowd. Hello! My friend! I’m here! I’m at the bar! I’ve got my hand on it! My spot is secure. I’ve pushed my way up ruthlessly. Law of the jungle. Look into my eyes, man; I’m looking directly into yours. I feel wild, and my hands are empty. Will you fill them? Will you, sweaty man with the blank face and tired eyes, give me what I need?

A row of girls, all in matching black tops, credit cards outstretched, stand to my right. One of them orders twenty drinks. Now an exercise in patience as he lays out to the cups, the various combinations of liquor and soft drink. There is somebody pushing on my thigh. One of my sleeves is wet. The bartender sweeps his eyes over me and to the guys on my left who are obviously his frat brothers, laying out a set of cups for them now. After so many passes, it is my turn. We lock eyes. He leans in. I yell: BLUE GUYS (which is a combination of Powerade and the kind of vodka that comes in plastic bottles). He doesn’t have to ask how many. He already knows.

Now, after turning, establishing a defensive perimeter with my elbows, fighting my way back out of the crowd around the bar, very difficult now that I hold two drinks in each hand, the situation has completely changed. My friends, those people for whom I was retrieving the drinks, have all gone, disappearing into the crowded darkness and now replaced by curly haired strangers. Around me, the space is small. There is jostling and elbowing and my defensive perimeter is shattered. A drink spills on me and on someone and — who cares or notices honestly? “Sorry. Sorry.” Keep moving. There are people everywhere, on every side. I am encircled. Beautiful people. Ugly people. Everywhere. In big groups and little ones. Men with women. Women with men. Women with women. They are dancing and laughing. It smells like cigarettes. Where are mine? Where are they? Where are my people?

I have begun to float, to pace circles around this place shiftless and friendless, observing — like a ghost — the people hermetically within their little circles. I would like to join them, to be a living person again, but how? It cannot be arranged. I am trapped here among all these people alone and filled with dread. Why have I failed? Why am I so drunk? I should just leave. And maybe I should, if the wobble in my legs is any indication. But at stake are greater things. I cannot leave. That would constitute failure, and if there is one thing that I am not, it is someone who fails. The only solution, then, is to push through, to immediately finish two drinks, freeing my right hand to grab my phone to text and shout into and generally badger every person with whom I entered the bar. Most do not answer. Those that do reply with phrases like “downstairs” and “back” and “left lol.” But given the bar’s size and geography, this is a tremendous help.

Apparently, they have made their way to the first floor, and not only that but they’ve found a new bartender — a friend of a friend’s sorority sister. Even more exciting, they have claimed a “bench” — a huge, resin-coated thing built into the wall — which is the only opportunity in the whole place to sit, hard to come by this late in the night. Though it means remembering to close out my tab upstairs later on, the spot is a fortunate one, right in the corner, right next to a bartender, and thus an irritating search transforms into a happy reunion. Hey! Where did you go? I receive some indecipherable answer, something about a girl or a new ‘tender or whatever. You got cigarettes? No. I ran out. Fuck! What the fuck. Do you have a tab? Yeah. Can you get me something? No. What? The line! Look at the line! And it is long. Or, more accurately, it is dense. Getting to the bar would require pushing through a clump of thirty girls in black tops and jean shorts, girls the bartender is currently serving anyway.

So there is nothing to do but wait. To find a hole as one appears and slip into the clump unnoticed. What am I doing down here anyway? I’m here to see my friends. Right. My friends and the promise of free drinks, drinks provided by who I’m really here to see, who the whole system is arranged around. How many people can she serve? How many tabs can she draw? Nobody is counting the number of drinks because it doesn’t matter. The bar’s money, insane sums, is made on cover almost exclusively. Some nights — and I have seen this with my own eyes — reaching thirty-five dollars to enter, all cash. And the line wraps around the block, which is why anyone would be willing to pay that much anyway. Girls will stand out there in the cold and snow and rain, in below freezing temperatures at eleven on a Friday, in heels and a small coat, and they will tell you that it was such a great time. The men, with a frozen ass and ice in their hair, will do the same. There’s even a fast pass. Pay ten dollars, skip the line…pay cover anyway.

Ask anyone, and they will tell you that these places suck and that they don’t want to go and that they’re tired. Yet here they will be, shoes sticky, a drink in each hand saying so good to see you. Heyyy. It’s her birthday — it says so on the sash. Happy birthday! How’s it feel? So good! Yeah! And we join the little circle of people. Everybody is here — the whole crew — my friends, my wonderful friends.

We desire these places despite their filth, and despite their absurdities. Entering is to be confronted by a sort of unreality, a new set of rules about how one is meant to be. Staggering, yelling, and most of all constant movement: these places are repositories of energy. Those who enter put up with much that they would not otherwise. The primary sense in which the three major bars on campus — Kams, Red Lion, and Joe’s — differ is exactly how dirty you plan on getting within them. Everything is sticky at Kams: the floor, the table, your socks, the other people — standing still, they sweat and the sweat dries. In the bathroom, one stall is always flooded. At the medieval-themed Red Lion, one is greeted in the men’s bathroom by “the Cocktagon” — eight urinals without dividers arranged, as you might imagine, in the shape of an octagon. Nobody washes their hands. At Joe’s, the floor is not sticky but flooded with up to an inch of liquid. There is even less room to maneuver. Being pinned up against a wall as the people around you stomp and splash, filling your shoes with liquid, is just the price of doing business.

And they come every day! They come on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and all the way down ‘til Sunday, when they give it a blessed rest, carving out the two hours they need for a week’s worth of business school homework. The bars have it all worked out, marketing their way into a six-days-a-week drinking calendar. Monday Night Lion (one-dollar wine bottles). Timewarp Tuesday (throwback music and special cups). Big Cup Wednesday. Senior night on Thursday. Every base is covered. There is no excuse to stay sober.

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There are not enough bars in Champaign. It is my impression that too many line up on a Saturday, on a Tuesday, on a Thursday, for this area to be anywhere near bar capacity. On a campus with thirty-seven thousand undergrads, where the vast majority find themselves concentrated into a one-and-a-half square mile radius, it is downright preposterous that outside of the big three, there are only four other bars. Couldn’t there be a few dives, a few more places to watch a game and eat a meal? It strikes me as strange.

So far as I understand, at one time we did have more bars, quite a few more in fact. Through the 1980s, 1990s, aughts and early 2010s, there were, in addition to the three (which were already present, albeit in different forms), several others — smaller places where one could watch a game or a band — which were, over time, closed and consolidated by local bar magnate Scott Cochrane. Over time, and especially during the latter half of the 2010s, decades of cut-throat competition narrowed the options to a dominant, ruthlessly efficient few. Kams, as the best known bar on campus, may as well stand in for all the rest. In various forms, it has been an institution on this campus for the better part of sixty years, the sort of place your mother may remember, or your grandmother. But like the campus itself — whose landmarks have in recent years given way so quickly to new development — it is no longer legible. For most of its life, Kams lived in a dingy single-story building just off the quad. At one time, I think, it was carpeted. Cochrane bought it. He closed it. He moved it. And now it is split-level, able to accommodate double the students and double the business. It is now a club.

Over the same two decades or so, Champaign has witnessed the appearance of ten-, twenty-, and thirty-story apartment buildings, turning Green Street — main street — into a real big-city block. Every year, a few more buildings are knocked down, and every year, a few more go up. These are boom times, fueled, one suspects, by an exceptionally large enrollment of well-moneyed international students. After all, and strangely for central Illinois, the majority of restaurants serve Asian food. Money in the form of tuition, rent, car payments, and restaurant bills flows into this little multicultural midwestern island from China, India, and the Middle East. It may be glimpsed on the facades of Chinese restaurants and the sports cars — leased to the sons and daughters of Shanghai, Mumbai and the Persian Gulf — driving slowly down Green Street.

Turn back a measly ten years and you will find a town of fewer high-rises and new constructions, a place whose bars were smaller and more numerous. Look any further than that, and you will find a place that has changed radically. No longer is this the school of Risky Business, a party school attached to an engineering program, a place devoted mainly to the sons and daughters of hog farmers and suburban car-dealership purveyors. Today, Champaign-Urbana is a city of the world, an attraction for the best and brightest STEM students on offer.

And piled on top of all that change is another new development in The Way We Live Now. Nobody is complaining! There is no resistance, organized or otherwise, to the state of affairs as it appears today. If you really think about it, the system works. On weekends, the bars fill to overcapacity and on weekdays they fill to a respectable fifty to seventy-five percent. My impression is just that — an impression — and a wrong one, I suppose, borne of exceptionally frequent encounters with these places. I would like more bars because I have often been to the ones which exist. Over time, it is not only that the place has changed but that the people have too. I figure, if you polled the campus, you would find that the average person does go out very often (maybe once or twice a week) and that when they do, certainly, they do not hang around a place like Kams until one-thirty in the morning. I may go out, and I may drink, and I may carouse as much if not more than my elders, but about the rest of my cohort, I must begrudgingly admit, the millennials may be right.

There is a look or phrase from certain people I meet which betrays particular discomfort with my scene: Kams? On a Tuesday? Oh, I stayed in. We baked cookies. From them I receive no direct recrimination, no outward displeasure, but judgement all the same. As if I am a silly child, someone who does not know what’s good for him. But why this reaction? It’s something I struggle to understand. The majority these days, I suppose, is made up of those who do not go out, whose main entertainment seems to be the computer and the PS5, who go to bed on time and wake up early, adherents of a culture which views alcohol use not as a moral failure, as sin, but as an impediment to self-actualization: people for whom the bars are too deeply intertwined with a Greek system (on this campus at least) and headed down the path of terminal decline. After all, there are only so many curly-haired suburban boys to go around, and a significant chunk now attend the University of Alabama.

Of these people, my own impression is that they are simply afraid, that drunkenness and illicit behavior present a challenge to orderly life, and that it is much easier to ignore this challenge rather than meet it, leaving behind an empty gap of time which would typically be spent communally. And the university knows this, advertising its counseling services, its registered student organizations (RSOs), etc. It fills the gap, or at least tries to, by offering a safe, comfortable center for whatever passes as communal life these days. But more than that, the university allows a significant subset of students to remain, like emperor penguins, huddled within its comfortable bureaucracy, sheltered against the cold winds and dark skies gathered on its outer edges. And students are right to be afraid. The social life that the bars profit off of and enable is bad. It is not healthy to drink five or six nights a week, and it is not healthy to make friendships based on a shared habit which lasts only as long as your buzz. Basically, the entire reason for being at these places is lust. Stated plainly, college students want to fuck, and the most direct route there is cheap drinks and dim lights, a combination even the Greeks would have understood.

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Those having the best time at the bar sit up top above the benches with their feet on the tables, observing the crowd, the whole seething mass, music blasting so loud it penetrates the subconscious, merging with the drunkenness, becoming part of it, this whole thing, men stumbling to the bathroom, workers — trashcans above their heads — pushing through it; thick necks, short shorts; flesh, blood, and spit. Stumbling home, shouting at each other and passersbys in the shadows of apartment buildings and frat houses, across from the new, multi-storey Raising Cane’s. Waking up the next afternoon for a big breakfast, waiting on a text that will inevitably come: Roll Kams. Everyone’s there.

THE YOUNG AMERICANS