It's Nargillo Time! (The Boys Consider Local Lounges)

The opening of a new lounge in Larryville is always a cause for celebration--and some concern: could a new one be as excellent as the other three?

Chief among L-Ville Lounges is, of course, the Replay, a place Richard loves with the white-hot intensity of a thousand burning suns (and Esquire magazine concurs, naming it "best bar in Kansas" in a recent poll). Known in some circles as the "pre-lay," the Replay plays host each Friday and Saturday night to a "sidewalk sale" in which everyone gathers outside at closing time and decides who to go home with. How can one not love it? Kip says: "It's easy. I hate that weird place."

Lesser-known but also very interesting is the Shenago Lounge. How is it pronounced and what does it mean? (is it really, as Lawrence.com declares, taken from "shenango," meaning a kind of white china? or is it some kind of urban slang for oral sex, as others have suggested?). Who cares! It's a dark place with cheap pitchers and a bartender who will tell you stories about how the villain who owns Louise's Downtown is a cold-blooded killer who screwed him over and soon will pay!

The most dangerous of the three is the Jet Lag Lounge, a place where Richard came closer than anywhere else in Larryville to getting into a fight on an evening when his French friend Flanagan complimented the wrong girl's shorts, leading a frat boy to offer to kick his ass (and Richard's, for good measure). The Jet Lag also provided the backdrop to another memorable evening in which four sexually ravenous cougars (Kipnote: a cougar is an old woman who likes to fuck) ordered the boys to drink tomato-flavored beer and chased them around the bar trying to mate with them.

So how would the Nargillo measure up? Richard and Kip journeyed there last night to find out, only to discover that...the damn place was a hookah bar and served no alcohol whatsoever. The boys were totally puzzled. "What's a hookah?" Kip asked. "Isn't it a device used to smoke opium? I don't want to sit around chasing the dragon. I want to get drunk!" The disappointed boys ended up downtown instead, at Dempsey's Irish Pub, where a bluegrass jam was underway and the place was full of hippies. Oddly enough, the boys had spent the earlier part of that evening (joined by local sage Matt Cl.thier) in a discussion of whether the cutest hippie chicks, despite their dirty outward appearances, actually always wore clean and sexy underwear that smelled fresh as "the morning dew." Some of the boys argued yes and some argued no. None argued from experience. But Dempsey's seemed the perfect starting point to find an answer to this question. Did the boys find out?

No. But Richard vowed to return again to Dempsey's on Wednesays, declaring it an important new social scene, while Kip vowed to return as soon as possible to Ft. Scott, insisting that Lawrence made him "soft."