The Viper Room...

In my heyday, I would have loved The Viper Room.  It is dark and dingy and a little disgusting.  And I loved that back in the day.  Live music blaring so that you can even barely hold your own thought, let alone talk with someone who is standing one foot away from you.

Because I didn’t grow up in or around LA, and I was long sober before I ever moved to California. I have this romantic notion about LA clubs, and there is still this part of me that wants to explore them and just be in these iconic places that I have read and heard so much about.

The Viper Room of today, is not The Viper Room of yesterday.  I am sure there is a new LA Club where the rich and famous go to get drunk and high and fuck indiscriminately. The Viper Room is now an old venue where cool bands come to get a chance to play in a Los Angeles Icon.

I went because a friend’s boyfriend’s band was playing.  Heavy metal, original music.  They were AWESOME!  Her boyfriend is a super talented guitarist.  And the lead singer had the thing that just draws you in.  Holds you in place and experiencing the music in a way that a lame lead singer just can’t.  In short, they were cool as fuck and I am so glad I went!

But as I looked around, I saw all the human decay.  People who hard worked this venue for years.  Every night another band, another crowd, more people getting wasted and destroying their lives.  Certainly not all the people there were hellbent on self destruction.  But some of them were, and I found myself wondering what that does to a person who has worked there for decades?  How can you get up and go to work everyday and watch all of the people just living on the fringe? What does that do to you over time?  Did the lady that worked there for literal decades, is this what she always dreamed her life would be like?  Does she love the city and music so much that she chose this life, or did her own drinking and drugging choose this life for her?  If she had it to do all over again, would she do it differently?

I used to hang out in places like this.  I used to be there every night, a somewhat desperate hanger on’er.  I got sober at 25 thankfully, because who the fuck knows who I would have been had I not been spared a lifetime of sex, drugs and rock and roll.  It was fun to engage, knowing my appearance would be a very limited engagement, one night only!  But I spent the entire night thinking about how my life could have turned out quite differently had I made some other choices...

I sat in the booths thinking, “I wonder who did blow here?”  “Who had sex here?” “Who ruined their life here?” Because we all know The Viper Room (and places like it)  have been the ruin of many more than we would like to admit.  

I found it odd to come to a place willingly where drunken debauchery is idolized and worshipped.  Where everyone is trying to make a life for themselves, while also engaging in behavior that will never grow into a productive life, but instead ruin the one you’ve got going...

Last night The Viper Room was pretty stayed.  No one was wasted, no one was having sex in the bathroom, no one was doing blow on the table.  And as much as there was a part of me that wanted the vicarious pleasure of seeing hedonism in full swing, I was grateful that the people there were just enjoying a Saturday out, watching cool bands, play good music.  That is when I realized that that is what most bars are to most people!  They are just places to visit. Places to socialize and have fun and then get back to their regularly scheduled lives already in progress.  I realized the fact that places like that are literal thirst traps for me, places where I have lost myself so completely I wondered if I might ever be found again.  I mean, I wasn’t getting fucked up in places like The Viper Room, no, I was more of a dingy pool hall or other dive bar type.

What struck me on my drive home was how places like The Viper Room are only this completely other thing for people like me, addicts and alcoholics.  For everyone else, they are just a good time, one time and then they are back their lives...but for people like me, places like that can be our undoing.  And thinking back to who and what I was back in the day, I would have fucking loved The Viper Room, and while it would not have been the only place I hung out, it would have for sure been in the rotation.  And I would likely not be here writing shit like this because I would be long dead from some horrific tragedy that got kicked started in a place like The Viper Room.

No accident that my first time at The Viper Room was at 56. And I am happy to report that I have absolutely no desire to give my life and will over to The Viper Room or any place like it.  I am immensely grateful that years of living sober have allowed places like The Viper Room to just be a place where I spent an evening of my life, enjoying my life, participating in my life. Not burning it to the ground.

Again, still...