Paul Doyle | Staff Writer
“Copper Face Jack’s is the ultimate night out with friend, stag, hen, or divorce party. The cheap drinks are always flowing and strong. Don’t start out your night here, but rather, end it. It stays open later than most bars on the whole block. They spin the best music too! Top hits primarily. Always crowded! I can appreciate the mix of people that show up here too. All youthful — it has a few students, a few internationals, a few locals, and a few tourists. I ventured here many of nights, and never left unhappy. Sometimes I wouldn’t leave there the most sober, but damn, this is the party place is where the craic is!”
I was lied to.
If every story has a dominant theme or a central philosophical question, this one’s is simply ‘why is this nightclub so popular?’
I sit in a taxi, a naggin and a few cans in the process of mixing into my bloodstream. I’ve just been pre-drinking in some obscure, irrelevant location. I’m in the awkward middle seat (nicknamed ‘the death seat’ on the premise that if we were to crash, I would be ejected through the windscreen of the car), my shoulders crushed together, feeling decidedly uncomfortable already, en route to the nightclub sans seat belt – always the sign of a memorable night ahead. I’m surrounded by people that I sort of half-know, who are making conversation with the driver in Dublin accents that up until five minutes ago I wasn’t aware they were capable of speaking in – that ingratiating sort of manner that over-privileged twenty-something students tend to interact with cab drivers in, adopting an accent they don’t have in the facile attempt at preemptively nullifying any contempt a member of the proletariat might have for someone whose parents almost certainly own a factor or two of production. The taxi driver doesn’t seem particularly impressed at the attempt at banter transcendent of pre-conceived class distinctions, he just wants his fare. I really don’t blame him.
We arrive at Harcourt Street and vacate the vehicle; the bill split exactly four ways. No one can quite remember what the standard fare into town is, and we wonder if we’ve been ripped off. This tends to happen quite a bit.
It’s a long line outside Copper Face Jacks. And it’s cold, – the kind of cold that makes it very difficult to tell when I’m done exhaling after a drag from a cigarette. I can only imagine the existential angst those of us lining up in skirts and heels are experiencing. After a tediously long wait, I shiver and shuffle toward the front of the queue– all the while trying to decipher exactly what decisions I’ve made in my life have led me to this point. ‘Ten Euros in, really? Jaysus. Fine, sure I’m here, I suppose.’ My wallet weeps as the evening begins to unfold before me.
The bouncer is aggressive; to the point that I wonder what has gone wrong in his life to make him so hostile toward half-drunken youngsters. I consider asking him – but that probably won’t end well for anyone, particularly pour moi. I keep my mouth firmly shut and walk down the stairs: straight into the bowels of Coppers.
I’m drinking a cocktail consisting of water and Heineken while observing my surroundings. The notorious Coppers dance floor immediately catches my gaze – It’s everything I was told it would be – the proud owners of lady parts being swarmed upon by approval-seeking hoards of jersey wearing, testosterone filled suitors – it’s almost like a parody of itself. Groups of women dance in protective circular formation, homogenous gaggles of males attempting to gain their attention via the classic ‘grab-grab-grab’ method, exhibiting that special kind of Dutch courage fueled dance-floor bravado in which the subjects are ballsy enough to attempt a courtship, but don’t quite have the tact to realise that a dozen lads dancing around three girls is counter-productive to their assumed goals. I feel kind of like I’m watching some sort of battle, and I imagine that’s exactly what it feels like to the subjects involved; whilst engaged in the act, one is completely immersed, unthinking, viscerally fighting for survival – it’s only from afar that one can realize the true horror of the sight.
I can see far too many tongues in my peripheral vision. There’s an incredibly powerful stench of lynx – it would seem these lads have seen the ads. I begin to hope there are no open flames nearby.
I try and make arbitrary chit-chat with people in my vicinity, but it feels like B*Witched are punching me in the ear whenever I attempt to listen to what anyone else is saying. This was a bad idea. Why am I here, again? I could be watching ‘The Walking Dead’ right now.
Girls maudlin on Bacardi-breezer have drunken deep-and-meaningful type conversations in the corner, telling sympathy-seeking stories the unfortunate listener will never forget – on an evening that the drunken gal in question will, by the looks of it, have difficulty remembering. I have a headache. I really shouldn’t have had that last Jaeger-bomb. Every conversation I overhear sounds the same; some kind of discussion of a previous night out. It occurs to me that if everyone on nights out discusses only previous nights out (as the evidence overwhelmingly suggests) it would mean that there’s an infinite regression of boring chats I wish I wasn’t listening to – a boring chat within a boring chat within a boring chat. Inception?
Deciding this is no time to be philosophical; I move.
At first the smoking area looks promising. Not for long. Three drags into my cigarette, a rather large, overbearing GAA type has decided that I look ‘bent’, and he informs me so in a quasi-aggressive, half-mocking fashion, the kind that bullies use if they think that they’ll have later to deny they were being abrasive to some kind of authority. The bouncer is watching us – maybe he isn’t so bad after all. Not quite sure how to respond, (this not being a playground) I inform him that I am not in fact ‘bent’ (although in retrospect, I now realise that I really shouldn’t have – because to do so is to tacitly legitimize that kind of criterion for judging people, but more importantly to tell him I was ‘bent’ would have wound him up, and although I definitely could not conceivably beat this gorilla sized man at fisticuffs, I should have, at the very least, attempted to rustle his jimmies just a little bit.). He looks like a kind of hairy, bloated, belligerent version of a child making their confirmation, as though he’d been held back and made repeat sixth class for a decade or so. He informs me he’s ‘only having a laugh’ and rustles my hair aggressively. I can’t help but feel slightly violated. I ask him why he has a problem with gay people. Words of wisdom emanate from his face hole in response to my query “I have no problem with gays, but queers now, if you were a queer, I’d punch you in the face”. Lovely. I don’t stick around to hear the anthropological distinction between ‘a queer’ and ‘a gay’.
Time to go back inside, methinks.
There’s been a fight. The bouncers are struggling to evict two nubile gentlemen in freshly ironed shirts. I wonder if someone was told they look ‘bent’. My drink is no longer cold. A pretty blonde girl smiles and waves, I’m shocked at how happy she is to see me, we have, after all, only just met. In her little black dress (the one that I’m informed every girl owns at least one of) she has the air of confidence that only women equipped with the knowledge that they can have any male in the nightclub because they adhere to the certain aesthetic conventions of whatever sub-culture the nightclub has been designed to attract, seem to have. I return a smile. She’s waving at the guy behind me. I decide it’s time for another drink. I think I can hear my wallet screaming.
The bar’s countertop is sticky. Another H2O and Heineken, please barkeep. After some encouragement, I attempt to neck it, but it goes down wrong and nearly comes out of my nostrils. I cough, trying not to spew foam on the floor, and after thirty seconds of the blank stare that results from solemnly trying to compose oneself after nearly gushing watery beer onto a dance floor, the couple near me engaged in what can only be described as ‘heavy-petting’ now think that I’m staring at them. Wunderbar.
I once again awkwardly move.
During the course of almost every night out, you’re at some point bound to run into that drunk guy – the one who drinks to impress and is subsequently babysat by hesitant half strangers for most of the night. I see him puking in a bathroom stall, being laughed at by his two assumed carers for the evening, as well as that guy who hands out aftershave and lollipops for tips. ‘No spray, no lay’, he says, to the amusement of some of my fellow patrons of the restroom. The Gents bathroom is cramped. There’s a sense of haste that only very crowded men’s bathrooms have, as though no one quite knows where the exit is. Someone tries to make chat with me while I’m standing at the urinal. How he thought this was an appropriate location for making a new friend is beyond my comprehension. People are leaving without washing their hands.
The night has been, to put it very lightly, a bit of a fail. At this point in the evening, I decide that I should probably hit the ol’ dusty trail. I find my friends, but am disappointed to discover that they’re staying until closing, in what I can only imagine is the hope that a good buzz will arrive deus-ex-machina.
As is the usually the conclusion of every tale of a dire evening in the Pale, the journey home is going to be significantly more expensive than anticipated. Somewhere between the taxi rank and the club I hear a noise in the near distance, the source of which can only possibly be a particularly obnoxious stag-do. There are quite a few of them, big lads too. One of them throws a glass bottle against a wall, smashing it to pieces, much to his own amusement. “Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!” You know the kind; loud, hostile, football hooligan types – the variety of person whose ideal evening would include getting drunk with Prince Harry and shooting Afghan children from a safe distance, swiftly followed by a generous spot of racially themed banter. I’m standing directly in their path. They don’t notice me, and continue to cheer and strut as they walk by the club. I’m relieved. If one good thing has happened this evening, it’s that I didn’t get beaten up.
I look across the street to see groups of lads hail taxis and proceed to wave them back to the street upon seeing the colour of the driver’s skin. Racism – it’s a disgrace, Joe. At this very moment, emigration has never seemed more attractive. A chicken fillet roll later, I deliberately hail a black driver to spite them.
I didn’t choose the student life, the student life chose me.
TLDR: Coppers – not for everyone.
