UrbanUpdate

After a year and a half of distressed inside living—as meet-cutes, house-party hookups, and blissfully ignorant bathroom-line make-outs were put on ice for health and safety reasons—Americans are back outside, hornier than ever, and unsure what to do with themselves.

But there's no other way to put it; we're rusty. "The first people I saw making out at the bar after we reopened looked very out-of-practice. I don't know if they were drunker than usual, but it looked gross," laughs Justin Kalvin, bartender at The Sundown Saloon, one of the classic dives in Boulder, Colorado. "It was great, I was happy that they had a chance to do that. But I wanted them to move on. I was hoping that I didn't have to stare at that for the next 45 minutes."

The Sundown Saloon has vacillated between various capacity caps over the course of 2020. Sometimes it was allowed to open to 25 percent, or 50 percent, and sometimes it was forced to stay closed entirely. But once the restrictions were firmly lifted in early June, Kalvin says the bar has done its best business of its entire lifespan. The crowds are overflowing and dizzy with euphoria, blowing the pre-Covid headcounts out of the water.

After a brutal, attritional season—with beloved clubs, dance floors, and canteens dropping like flies during the shutdown—there has never been a better time to be in the nightlife industry, as Americans embark on a few months of no-holds-barred, no-questions-asked corporeal binging to make up for lost time. Bartenders, bouncers, DJs, and dancers have returned to their abandoned posts, ushering in our great, post-vax bacchanal. And they all report that while it’s certainly on, revelers might need a bit of time to get our debauched sea legs.

"We have anywhere from college-aged kids to 65-year olds acting the same exact way," says Jeremy Fish, a bartender at the Pensacola-area waterfront pub Flora-Bama, famous for its rollicking beach parties. Fish tells me that Florida had a jumpstart on the post-vax summer soiree--not surprising, given its laxity about Covid restrictions--and the establishment peaked in insanity around March. "Everyone was just like, 'Man, I haven't been out in so long.'" he continues. "It was basically an adult daycare."

Randall, the lead bartender at the up-and-coming queer-friendly Brooklyn spot Mood Ring, likely relates to Fish's experience. The dive has been rocking since New York reopened in late May. Already, he's been forced to turn off a fire alarm in the middle of a raging dance floor, and he had to break up two patrons who were getting a little too frisky in a booth. "That's not something that should be happening in a nightclub at 11 pm," he says—those are borderline pregame hours.

Some men are seeking simple human contact in unlikely places: Although there's a renewed, debauched lustiness in the air at Devil’s Point, one of the many sepulchral red-leather strip clubs in Portland that’s recently re-opened, strippers there say some men are asking for relationship advice as they embark on their first fraught post-quarantine dates, while others just want a hug mid-lap dance. "I can tell that they haven't had someone hug them for months," according to Ivizia Dakini, one of Devil's Point's dancers. "They take a big deep breath and say, 'That's all I needed.'"

On the darker side, some people have forgotten how to pace themselves. "A lot of people are still on Covid-savings time," explains Randall. "They're getting fucked up way earlier than they need to be… I've never felt this palpable energy before; people needing to socialize, needing to go HAM. It's both fun to see, but from the other side of the bar it can give you some pause."

One anonymous waitress at an infamous Los Angeles dive tells me that since getting the job in early May, she's already witnessed her first-ever bar fight. The other day, when she went to cut off a gentleman who had too much to drink, he pulled out a full, unopened bottle of vodka from his backpack. "We were like, 'No, put that back, why do you have that to begin with?'" It's a little helter-skelter out there.

Teron Stevenson, partner at The Friend in Los Angeles, echoes that sentiment. The partygoers that filter in through the cocktail bar have been "more aggressive," he says. "You've got people waiting in line, girls talking bad about a girl in front of them in line that they don't know, people picking fights, it's a younger contingency of people going out anyway. People that are a little more concerned about their health still and not being in a public place indoors with a bunch of folks are probably a bit older."

"I had people dancing on top of my tables and they broke the table in half. It's a solid marble table. People hanging off of things they're not supposed to be hanging off of," continues Stevenson. "My business partner is a pretty famous artist, Andre Saraiva, and he has some pieces in there—there's one sculpture of a building he has that lights up in the center of the room and there's people climbing on top of it, now it doesn't light up anymore."

That sort of bad behavior should be instructive. There is a way to enjoy a safe, equitable, non-toxic slutty summer. Go out all night, bounce between every party in the city, indulge in every hot, lust-blind anonymous hookup you can find, just don't forget your manners along the way.

With reporting by Danielle Cohen.

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