The bars in Alaska closed at 4 am. Since at least one of us regularly sees closing time at home, where the bars close at two, you would think that we would have made it to four on our vacation, but that is not how it works. There are reasons for this. Take the Mecca.
The simple reason that we weren't in the Mecca at four in the morning is that it was scary enough at two in the afternoon. Lots of bars have guys with bad teeth and prison tattoos that ask you sleep with them within minutes of meeting you and then mutter under their breath about you being a lesbian when you turn them down. In the Mecca, the guys not only had broken teeth and the biggest prison tattoos I have ever seen, one of them even had a broken arm. Unset. "It doesn't bother me, I can take a lot of pain." They also don't mutter under their breath. Nothing could get under that breath. Just in case we didn't get it, one of them says "He thinks you are bi-sex-u-al," amazingly still managing to slur his words even while pronouncing them one syllable at a time. So we fled the Mecca.
Then there was the Howling Dog. Motto: Party 'til your crotch stinks. The guys in the Dog had most of their teeth, tattoos with colors in them, and, for the most part, visible means of support. Hell, most of them probably even had driver's licenses, which, together with the teeth, would make them a ten in Maine. Okay, they tended to make me think of the graffiti in the ladies room on the way up to Fairbanks that said "Alaskan men: the odds are good, but the goods are odd," but we weren't planning to go anywhere with them. And besides, the band was proof that there are uses for those long Alaska winter nights: they were good. And they were danceable. So maybe there just isn't an excuse for us not making it to closing there. Well, other than the traditional problem that the designated driver never wants to stay until close. We made it until 1 though, which got us out of the bar shortly before sundown. It's a weird state I tell you.
