Nightlife in Hell: College Station, TX

Hey everyone. (For the record, I didn't write this one!) An article on the "hell" of small town nightlife in College Station.

[Clubplanet] Link

You don’t feel them at first, not right as you walk in the door. It’s not until you’ve paid $6.50 for your pitcher of Miller Lite, weaved your way through the mixed crowd of older hard drinkers and college age bar hoppers, and sat down on a hard wooden chair that you’re aware of the eyes staring at you.

Once your beer is poured into its plastic cup and you’ve sat back to enjoy a night out, that’s when it hits you just how many dead animals they’ve got hanging on the walls at Fitzwilly’s, a popular bar that for years has served as the unofficial western border of College Station, Texas’ Northgate. This strip of bars and bookstores has been around for decades and shows no signs of slowing down, so it’s there I went to judge just how crappy the nightlife is in a typical small town.

Those cold, plastic, staring eyes peer out from enough mounted animal heads here at Fitzwilly’s that you could start the world’s creepiest petting zoo. There’s a moose, the front half of a billy goat, something that looks like caribou, a boar, a wolf, and multiple deer mixed in with a (delicious) bass and a duck. There’s also fair number of saddles draped over the rafters in case we need to rustle us up a posse and catch us some horse thieves. Sheeeee-ooooot! Or whatever.

Oh, but the lameness doesn’t end there, my friends. The rest of the place is decorated in old tin oil company signs and the obligatory NASCAR hood. But doesn’t, you may be wondering, that clash with the Enigma playing over the sound system? Or the Sinead O’Connor that followed it? Only if you’re not in the right redneck frame of mind and can’t appreciate things like arm wrestling on TV (I’m not kidding) and a herd of crickets chirping so loudly they could be heard over the sound system.

Having finished our pitcher, my friend (who might be the whitest person on the planet and who I must therefore call “Enrico” for the rest of this article) and I decided to stroll through the Dixie Chicken, College Station’s most famous bar and the place rednecks must face when they pray.

“Stroll” might be a bad term to use since we had to squeeze by the 20 or so tables (all with deep grooves from patrons carving all manner of things into their surfaces. Did I need to mention we saw plenty of pocketknives while we were out?) and the hundreds of people inside violating the fire code.

The crowd in the Chicken is far from rustic, but the décor sure is; you’ll find more dead stuff on the walls, more tin oil and soft drink signs, and a live rattlesnake behind a thin sheet of glass in the pool table area. I know what you’re thinking, and yes that is as dumb of an idea as it sounds. Speaking of the crowd, a fair number of the tables were occupied by people playing dominoes. At a bar. On a Friday night.

I want to know what person thought it be a good idea to play an engrossing game in a bar full of attractive people in their early 20s. Whoever it is needs to be stabbed in the jaw, because he (A&M was an all-male military school until the mid-60s) made it a tradition ‘round these parts. You get your pitcher of beer (the Chicken only serves beer and wine), set up your dominoes, and settle in for a night of absolute boredom punctuated by trips to the tiny, filthy restroom.

From there Enrico and I took a quick trip through Gatsby’s, a new place just off the strip that I liked quite a bit the first time I went there. Times have changed as now the bar is now trying harder than Brendan Fraser’s character in Bedazzled.

The bar was going for a tropical look, and apparently that meant they needed to throw a foot of dirt and hay on the floor. Gatsby’s now sports a raised DJ booth floor for some reason, the kind that would look normal at a club in New York or Houston but just looks odd and out of place here. The music this DJ spins is so loud and thumping that your clothes vibrate and people spontaneously do the Humpty Dance.

Interestingly enough, these new touches brought out a young, trendy, and attractive crowd, but there is a problem: the place is basically a hallway with a bar. It’s long and narrow and people seem to be confused as to whether or not they should be dancing. About a fourth of the crowd was looking for someone to serve, the other 75% was looking at them like they had lost their damn minds.

Our final stop of the evening was Dudley’s Draw, THE place to go if you’re a graduate student, liberal, or gay, or if you just want to relax after a long day. I’ve been told that the animal heads on the walls, the tile so worn in places you can see the previous layer of tile and the concrete slab, and the inches of dust on all of the decorations are all supposed to be ironic, but I’m not buying it.

Still, the crowd here is educated enough to have intelligent sounding political debates one second, and goofy enough to spend 5 minutes talking about the hottie that just walked by in locker room detail.

Dudley’s wasn’t crowded and the mix of trendy and classic rock wasn’t too loud, so it’s the perfect place to actually get to know someone better if that’s your goal, and the beer is cheap enough ($6.50 for a pitcher of local delicacy Shiner Bock) if all you want to do is get someone drunk.

Like the Chicken, the tables here have been carved up, but not so badly that it’s uncomfortable to rest your elbows on them. Dudley’s, Enrico and I found, is a non-judgmental haven in the midst of establishments and people trying way too hard to be noticed.

The dancers reading this might want to know about that scene, but I’m sorry to say it really doesn’t exist. Like 97% of white men my age I refuse to dance, so the absence of any real club scene isn’t a problem for me. For the 100% of women and 3% of white guys in this town that feel the need to shake what their mamas gave them on a regular basis, the pickings are slim if they don’t know how to two-step to George Strait or jitterbug to John Michael Montgomery (who I’m not sure is still alive).

Oh, there’s a club that plays dance music, but the parking lot there is as empty on weekends as it would be were they hosting a “Hillary in 2008” rally in this reddest of red states.

If you try hard enough you can overcome adversity and have a good time in this town. Or you can move to real city and see how the other half lives.

Houston, here I come.

 

Nice.