Cleveland Public Auditorium

Cleveland, OH

I attended The Midwest Beer Fest at the Cleveland Public Auditorium (“Public Hall”) in 1997 or thereabouts, back when the Internet and craft beer barely existed. My friend heard of the fest on the radio and asked if we wanted to go.

“What’s a beer fest?” I asked.

He explained that, as he understood it, for a single $12 ticket you would spend all day going booth-to-booth drinking beer.

I was incredulous.

“Is that legal? Why would they want to do that?” I ask.

“I don’t know, but it’s real,” he answered. “It’s basically,” he continued, “the Louisiana Purchase of beer drinking.”

“OK, sounds amazing,” I conceded, “but, just remember; I have to start a new job the next morning so, I can’t get too crazy.”

“You can’t get too crazy at an all-you-can-drink event?”

“I can get crazy. But I have to get back to Akron! I can’t stay in Cleveland.”

We met at Mitch’s Lounge in Akron, to drive up to Cleveland from there. Mitch’s Lounge was my “college bar.” I put that in quotes because, though it was on the campus of my university (Akron U); I was usually the only person under the age fifty who would go there. Mitch’s was a proper dive bar: a bar that would be unsustainable in the age of Yelp.

It had a huge sign outside that said “Mitch’s Lounge and Restaurant” but the bar did not have a kitchen and, what’s better, the sign was never a problem. In all my years drinking there not one person walked into Mitch’s asking to see a menu. The bar was so visibly dank and questionable from the outside, everyone simply assumed that sign was wrong.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We contacted several of Sean’s drinking buddies from this time and while most agree it had no kitchen, there are some claims of a cook occasionally showing up at Mitch’s and making food. In fact one claims that he and Sean got “sicker than dogs” after splitting a lobster bisque there one night. Sean says, “There’s no way—even if it had a kitchen—I was ever drunk enough to order seafood from it,” and that, “If we did puke, I’m sure it was the fifty beers we drank.”]

We had a couple drinks at Mitch’s and then drove to the beer festival.
 

We entered and paid and the woman at the ticket box explained the rules: We would each be given a lanyard with twenty squares on it. We were told that each vendor is pouring four ounce “tasters” and we could ask for tastes from whichever vendors we liked but every time we asked for a drink, the vendor would place a check in one of the boxes and, after all twenty squares were checked, you couldn’t have any more beers. We did the math quickly: four ounces times twenty…It was about a six-pack. Well short of The Louisiana Purchase we were planning. We objected, saying, “We were told it was unlimited.”

“That brings us to the fine print,” she explained. “Technically, it is unlimited because you can come and get a new lanyard and you can keep getting lanyards—they can be unlimited—if you pass a sobriety test. You must pass a police-issued sobriety test to get a new lanyard.”

Most attendees were upset upon learning the fine print of having to pass a sobriety test, but we loved it. First off, our driver would no longer need to conjecture about their own level of sobriety—if they were OK to drive everyone home—because the Cleveland Police Department will provide a professional assessment. Secondly, we loved the absurdity of the plan:

“This guy failed! He’s too drunk to be here. Throw him out!”

“This guy is semi-passable. Give ‘em another sixpack!”

We walked to the convention floor. The beer landscape was much different back then. There were fewer than twenty vendors and, of those, most seemed to report to huge conglomerates (Budweiser and Miller) and were not even offering beer. We saw booths for new wine coolers and ice coolers and spiked lemonades and noticed, to our surprise, this sugary nonsense had the longest lines; it was in the most demand; But we came to drink beer.

We went to the Great Lakes Brewery booth at which I filled up my entire lanyard. My friends were drinking at a slower pace, probably worried about not being able to pass the sobriety test but I was confident I would pass.

“Well, off to get my next lanyard!” I announced.

“Really? Flannery, you think you can pass a breathalyzer test?” they asked as I walked towards the ticket booth.

I reached the doors and turned around. “Yes, yes, I do,” I responded coolly, then mule-kicked the doors open and entered the vestibule backwards. Now, I did not actually believe that I could pass a breathalyzer—I had been drinking for six hours if you included time spent at Mitch’s Lounge—but I did believe, given how many people were at this event, there was no way they could actually administer sobriety tests in a timely way and that the whole threat was false. I believed they would, in reality, give each of us a new round upon request.

“Hi, need a new lanyard,” I announced to the ticket booth while walking backwards.

“Already?” challenged a ticket agent, who was still hurriedly dealing with incoming customers.

“You got some good beer back there. Hoping you’ll see a lot of me tonight,” I answered.

The agent motioned for me to shut up, dealt with the current attendee, then screamed, “Wolf! Field sobriety test!”

A guy—clearly an off-duty cop—slid off his chair near the front door. Wolf was a frighteningly large, grey-haired man with a mustache, side pistol, and a tight-fitting yellow “SECURITY” jacket. He braced himself, as though about to start a battery of federal safety checks, then asked me, “Name four Cleveland Browns linebackers.”

Back then the Browns ran a 4-3 defense so Wolf was essentially asking me to name one backup linebacker.

I named five.

Wolf turned to the ticketing booth, pointed to me and hollered, “PASS.”

They gave me a new lanyard for twenty more drinks and I ran to my friends to share how easy the sobriety test was.

We kept drinking and getting new lanyards. As the night progressed and I got drunker, Wolf ’s questions became easier. At one point he asked me to name ten American cities. Not state capitals or cities with hockey teams: just ten cities.

A buddy said that Wolf asked him: “What’s the difference between a burrito and an enchilada?” and according to my buddy, Wolf seemed to be genuinely asking it. Wolf must have always wondered what the difference is and was willing to give a new lanyard to the best answer.

Eventually we all got so drunk we slowly lost one another. This is by far the greatest improvement cell phones have made to drinking, maybe the only improvement.

Before cell phones, when a drunk friend became separated, going after them was like trying to find a bird that left from an unopened cage. You could only hope that, by chance, they might later land on the same bench you both previously visited.

So there I was, six lanyards deep at Cleveland Public Auditorium, beginning to feel a little worse for wear and with no idea where my buddies were and perhaps more importantly where our driver was located. I scanned around and most of the crowd was as lost and drunk as me. Wolf ’s easy trivia questions—God love him—created mass bewilderment; it felt like I was inside an airport where they just announced that every flight was canceled due to a blizzard; people were sleeping on the floor, others running to the exits, yelling, “I need to get to Beachwood tonight!” Nobody had a plan. Fortuitously though, I saw a buddy, Frank, who was not in our original group. Frank was attending with a separate set of friends and added that they had room in their car for me, if I needed a ride home.

“Thank God,” I answered, “I was worried I wouldn’t get home tonight! I’m starting a new job in downtown Akron in the morning and can’t afford to be late.”

I woke up in Huntington, West Virginia.
 

WHAT THE HELL AM I READING HERE?

Hi. My name is Sean Bair-Flannery. I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife Jessica and our three kids. I perform standup comedy at night and during the day I fix computers.

 

This is chapter from my book, “Places I Can’t Return To”.

 

Each week, I release a new chapter (the current one completes below). If you enjoy the stories, you can buy the full book below or, next week, you can come back and read the subsequent chapter.

 

Purchase Full Book:

    Digital                                 $4.99

    Paperback                   $14.99

    Audio                                     $19.99

 

This book is true stories, but it is not a memoir. It is a more an illustration — maybe a warning — of what your life will look like if you decide to live everyday like it’s your last. I actually followed that advice. I followed it for a good fifteen years.

 

I can’t re-enter most the places I visited in that time.

—S. B-F

Frank and I had another friend who began working at Marshall University earlier that summer and we both intended to visit this friend in the past but each time it became delayed or canceled. Apparently after dropping someone off in Portage Lakes, Ohio (which is about twenty minutes south of where we both lived) we miscalculated that we were at about the halfway mark to Huntington West Virginia and being halfway there, we convinced our driver to turn south, not north, so we could finally make this trip to Marshall University happen during what is clearly a convenient itinerary.

I looked it up on a map a few days later: we had miscalculated the halfway point by about 7,000 percent. We were twenty minutes into a four-hour drive, when we announced we were halfway there.

If time travel is invented, the inventors will want to know if the human mind can handle the pressures of such traveling and they will surely use drunks as their initial test subjects, as we have the most experience of waking up in an unfamiliar environment and piecing together where we are and how we got there from small clues. We have “The Right Stuff ” for this mission.

We do it every weekend, and we solve it in steps, based on our senses.

The first is tactile: Upon waking up, you first notice you are not only not in your bed, but also not in a bed, period. You feel thick, bristly cords below you with no cushioning—you slept on a carpet—or your head rests on a piece of wood and the pillows below you have fused with your skin: you are on a couch!

Next is sight, which is when you apprehend the horror: you are not simply in the wrong room at your home, you are in the wrong home! Worse, it is rarely a hotel room or anything so recognizable or reassuring. No, you open your eyes to surroundings that are equal parts bewildering and horrifying; there’s usually mounted deer heads or posters on the history of evolution or old, forgotten sports teams like the Baltimore Colts. A drunk person is never given rest near the hearth of the house: they are dropped into the least-used room, the room that used to the youngest child’s room but was turned into a de facto storage space when they went off to California, surrounded by all the detritus and accoutrements the owner finds too embarrassing to place in the open.

You are put in these rooms mostly to reduce screaming in the morning. It’s a bit like those family movies, where the kid finds Bigfoot or a friendly ghost or a caring robot and they want to put them in a room where no one will find the visitor before they can explain. Last—and most debilitating—is your hearing, because this is when you learn that you’re not even in the wrong home in your hometown. A moment after rousing, you hear a tugboat blow its horn just outside the window or a freight train building steam or the pilot announcing they will taxi to runway two.

On this morning, in Huntington, West Virginia, I awoke on the floor underneath a giant flag of the Notre Dame fighting Irish leprechaun. I lifted my head up and saw that I had fashioned a pillow out of my jeans and shirt. I was wearing boxers and socks. Frank made some noises on the couch and I asked where we were.

“Marshall, dude.”

“What?” I screamed back in disbelief.

“You were totally in favor of the idea. You said you had nothing going on today.”