Sosume

South Great George's Street

or

Study for a pub review, by The Bastard Kesey.

Contents

The Birthday Party • Frightful Scene In Dublin Restaurant • Flight From The Law • A New Horror • Lost Among The Simulants • Terrible Revelations In A Toilet • Panicked Retreat

Preamble

Sosume is the latest bar on South George's Street (believe me, there's nothing "Great" about this particular thoroughfare, home as it is to fearful holes like Hogan's and The Globe.) I'm sure that "Sosume" is the punchline to some horribly politically-incorrect joke, something along the lines of, "what do you call a Japanese Jew?" Ho, ho, ho, I kill me.

Having insulted two ethnic groups in the first paragraph of this review (I'm on a roll here!), let's get down to business. Sosume, apparently, is Dublin's first Japanese bar. Right. So here we have an Irish establishment pretending to be a Japanese interpretation of a cultural artifact that is considered to be quintessentially Irish. This is way too post-modern for this reviewer's addled head. I suppose that this development was inevitable, given that we already have plenty of Irish pubs pretending to be Irish pubs. (See Sinnott's, The Hairy Lemon, passim.)

Personal Narrative

Scene: Temple Bar, Dublin. A Friday night, Summer 2001.

It was the occasion of Heinous' birthday that brought us to this Japonesque menagerie. The Gurrier and myself had been anticipating violence all night; when it finally erupted, we could only feel relief. Not the most stable of personalities at the best of times, this reminder of his encroaching mortality, combined with numerous after-work scoops, had energised some strange circuits in the brain of Heinous. The night had started bad and could only get worse. We could hear the sirens of the converging ambulances and squad cars as we bundled him out of the back of the restaurant, a stained army blanket over his head. Terrible gnawing sounds came from under that blanket and a horrible tittering voice reciting "happy birthday to me" over and over again. The Gurrier was looking ashen. "We'll have to hide him," he was saying. "The law will have the whole City Centre sealed off by now. They'll hunt us down like feral goats. Damn your eyes!" he spat at one of Heinous' cowering workmates. "That crack of yours about how you'd rather screw the pizza and eat the waitress: what class of eejit are you to put ideas like that in his head?"

It was a pickle to be sure. It was 9pm on a Friday night. All the pubs were full to bursting; certainly, none of the bouncers looked ready to admit a gibbering cannibal with a blanket over his head, and his half-dozen mates in the early stages of post-traumatic stress. Fuck!

Then: salvation! A new pub on old George's Street, all neon and clean lines. No-one would think to look for us in a place like this! The Gurrier yanked the blanket off Heinous' head and flung it into the gutter-- a recumbent homeless man squealed in terror and scrambled away as the soiled article nearly landed on him-- and attempted to make the birthday boy presentable, or at least as presentable as one can make a delirious food-molester with a headful of impure and illegal notions. Then, bobbing and grinning like Jesus freaks, we made our way past the bouncers, how's it going, nice night, grand place you have here. The poor amateurs! A real Dublin bouncer would've sussed us in seconds and slapped us senseless for trying to smuggle a pizza-fucker onto the premises. We'll see how long they keep their naïveté in this town. For this is Degradation Hour, folks, when the creepy youth of Dublin come to be robbed and partake in their depraved rituals. After a few weeks of door duty, you will see things that will turn you into a machine or send you gibbering to the Gorman.

Initial impressions

This place is huge. Every time we thought we'd reached the back, it opened out again. Two floors. The decoration is minimalist: blonde wood and metal tubing, with the odd bonsai tree and statue of Buddha here and there to remind you of the ostensible oriental theme. Ikea meets Edo: yawn.

(Narrative continues)

We finally found a place to cluster-- seating at this stage was out of the question-- at the very back of the top floor, an area which a small sign informed us was the dance floor. After a few hours of uncomfortable shuffling, we managed to lay hands on a few chairs. They were armchair-type articles, upholstered in some sort of vile, shiny, sparkle-effect vinyl material that was last seen in the 1960s and good riddance too. In the hot muggy atmosphere of the pub, the stuff clung to your bare skin like a leech... before sitting, I had to inspect mine to make sure the epidermis of its previous occupant was not still adhering to it. God knows what Heinous would've made of that.

Secondary impression

Christ, the place was hot, even with the high ceilings. Maybe this infernal heat was part of the whole faux-Oriental ambience. At the time, I put it down to the outside weather, which has been a bit humid of late. But, no, by the time I came to leave the place, it was quite chilly outside. They need to have their air-conditioning checked.

(Narrative continues)

Or maybe I was overdressed. The crowd were young and carefree, disporting themselves in garments that covered about 10% of the surface area that mine did-- and probably cost 10 times as much as mine did, to boot. They didn't seem to notice the heat. A real Red Bull and Vodka crowd, eyes glazed and vacant, yammering non-stop into their mobile phones. There's no drink better than Red Bull and Vodka for unleashing one's Inner Brute; a potable pre-frontal lobotomy, the spirits stun you all the way back to the brainstem and leave your caffeinated body to get on with its headbanging and twitching. Little enough of that kind of carry-on on display yet, though. The night was only getting started for these kids. The heat, the designer-wank-mag furniture, the trendy posters (the management were unable to resist the modern pub cliché of hanging old-fashioned beer ads on the wall, but these were prints of Japanese repoductions of old-fashioned beer ads! How outré, darlings!), the perky people, the whole thing was getting more and more unreal by the second. It was like some sort of out-of-control VR environment. Welcome to Simulant Central. Resistance is futile. Have a Red Bull and Vodka. Everything is great.

A visit to the toilets confirmed my worst fears. The toilets are spacious, minimalist in keeping with the rest of the décor, and after the heaving steam-bath upstairs, mercifully cool. They were clean enough too, given the traffic through the place, but one cubicle was full of broken glass, another with vomit. This is what brought it home to me; this is the heart of the matter. This new generation of Irish, these children of the Tiger: they may be slimmer and sleeker and perkier and prettier than the rest of us, but they have the minds of feral mink. And when the shite-rain starts in earnest and the giblets of the Celtic Tiger's corpse go sluicing down into the drains, they will eat our brains unless we give them their reality TV and their personalised mobile phone covers and all the other shiny things they crave.

This was no good. We had evaded the law, but at the risk of some non-trivial psychic damage if we stayed here any longer. I cornered The Gurrier who was hunched sweating behind a table, whisky and Coke in hand, casting wild panicky glances about the room.

"We have to get out of here!" I hissed. "The Devil take the law! They won't be expecting an ambush! We'll be through the swine and on our way before they know what hit them. Let's go!"

"Are you mad?" he snapped. "After what he did? They'll murder us for sure this time and dump us in the Liffey to save themselves the paperwork. I know. I know!" He gripped my forearm with a hand gone clawlike with fear and bad booze.

So I left them there. What else could I do? Outside, it was blessedly chilly after the hothouse of Sosume. Of course there was no pursuit, no cordon of hard-eyed coppers waiting for us with nets and cattle prods. The whole night made me slightly depressed. These days in Dublin, a nutter can fornicate with his dinner in public and gnaw on a waitress's pancreas, and no-one will care.

© 2003 BeerAndLoathing