Edelweiss. New York City, 1990 or so. If you know about that place, you’ll know what I mean.
Some biker bar near Red Rocks, Colorado. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
Started off quite quietly, so we had enough drinks not to be able to drive away from the place, but then this huge influx of Hell’s Angel-looking people came in about 9pm, and the evening started to get really messy. First some wild-eyed guy cornered me in the toilet and told me how he’d used an M16 he keeps under the sofa to threaten “some goddamn fuckin’ Mexican” who called at his house to see if he had any odd jobs doing, which was real fun because “normally I just beat them with a baseball bat”. Then some huge hairy fucker comes over to our table and asks my girlfriend for a dance. She refused politely and he just stood there glowering, until we were saved when someone else broke a bar stool over someone else’s head, and he joined in the melée on the dance floor. Glasses being thrown, people smashing tables, just like in a movie. We crept out and slept in our car in the parking lot, but about an hour later on I had to use the bathroom, so went back in again to find the fight still going on. Scary shit.
The bar in the Golf Club in Wilcannia NSW, on the night of the last State of Origin match.
I know it doesn’t sound that bad, but you’ve obviously never been to Wilcannia, a charming town of 900 people in the outback, with a high unemployment rate and more than you average number of surly drunks.
This is nothing like some of the other stories, (in fact, it’s nearly the opposite.) I was meeting a friend for dinner in San Francisco’s Littly Italy and decided to pop into the Condor Club because I was early. In its heyday the Condor club was the first in a long line of strip clubs on Broadway so I was assuming it would be at the very least kitschy along those lines. What I found was a sports bar so prim that I think the target audience was 4th graders. I had to tell the bartender:
a) what goes in a Cosmopolitan, and how much of it
b) what kind of glass it goes in
and
c) “WAIT WAIT! You have to hold BOTH GLASSES before you shake them or the top glass and the entire drink will fly across the room!”
I swear I’m not making this up. They must’ve had cockfights or something in the basement because I’m sure no one ever had drinks there twice.
I could tell several stories about the worst clubs I’ve been to, but most were unpleasant rather than scary. The only strip club I’ve ever considered to have any “scary” factor was one in Toronto; I think it was called Fairbanks. It was actually a pretty good club and had some attractive dancers (all Asian incidentally) but it was clear that most of the clientele were local gangmembers. Everyone was wanded at the door and there was no overt problems but the friends I was with felt uncomfortable and wanted to leave.
The Manhole in Chicago, pretty scary.
I was the only woman there, and I don’t think I was welcome. You had to get a key for the bathroom because they wanted to prevent guys from going in there and doing stuff. They also had a room that you had to be either bare-chested or wearing leather, but they guy wouldn’t let me take my top off. It was hilarious, but it was a very short visit. 
Back in my reckless teenage years, I wanted to experiment with cannabis; a guy at the pub said he’d take me somewhere I could get some; I ended up driving him to Derby Road in Southampton (at the time, this was infamously the worst and seediest area, densely packed with brothels) - we went through a residential garden, climbed over a fence and down some grubby stairs into a basement, wherein was a ‘shebeen’ or unlicensed bar - it was pretty grotty and incredibly scary to the extent that I don’t actually remember any details.
Looking back and imagining what the regulars must have thought of a couple of twitchy teens walking in there, it’s a wonder we came out of the place alive.
When I was in grad school I was on a field trip, and the professor decided it would be fun to take us to an all-black bar in Atlanta. It wasn’t really scary, but we did all feel a bit uncomfortable. No one paid us any particular notice, as far as I can remember.
It was kind of odd that we felt uncomfortable, since we fairly regularly went to all-black bars in Over-the-Rhine, in Cincinnati. But that was just down the hill from the university, and they were used to white kids showing up.
The scariest was a biker bar in a small PA town that a friend of mine frequents. Since my friend is a biker, I wasn’t very worried, but had he not been there it’s nowhere I’d have wanted to be. Nasty people. I advised him to not even think of taking me to such a place again.
A friend and I were out one night and decided we wanted to shoot some pool. We stopped in the first hole in the wall pool hall/bar we drove by. We weren’t looking to drink, just shoot some pool. We hadn’t been there 30 minutes when voices started to be raised, a waitress was thrown over the shoulder of some burley guy and pool cues were being turned upside down and gripped on the small end. Never a good sign individually, taken together these add up to severe trouble. We decided to leave. Quickly.
The Rose, Dickson City, PA.
4 dancers, 12 teeth.
A shithole off Soi Cowboy where the bartender pulled a switchblade on one of his customers.
One night, and the tough guys tumble indeed.
I was escorted out of a gay bar by a bouncer wearing nothing but chains. The three guys I was with, (2 gay, one straight) didn’t notice I was missing for 10 minutes or so.
Tijuana. We were in San Diego on business, so drove down there because one of the guys I was with had never been there before. This was the middle of the day, so TJ wasn’t too crazy, well, for TJ standards anyway. So we do some bar hopping. We go into this dingy bar with a very uneven brick floor. We all get a Corona and start bullshitting about where to go next. Then I see my buds looking down the bar behind me, so I turn around and see this heavy-set, middle-aged woman wearing nothing but a dirty shower robe standing on top of the bar, walking towards us. I was speechless. One of my buds pointed at me and said, “He’s the single one”. So she stops in front of me, squats down and buries the neck of my beer bottle somewhere in her pubic area. She smiles to show me she has no teeth, opens up her robe to reveal her oh-so-unattractive body and asks me in broken English, “Go to back room?”. I didn’t bother retrieving my bottle. I quickly stepped outside and waited for my buds to follow, they were laughing their asses off of course.
No, I do not know about the place. I do not know what you mean. See, that’s the thing about communicating – often the people with whom you are communicating, via message board of whatever, do not already know everything you know. Amazing, eh?
Holy Sequential Thread Title!
We’ve got:
What is the scariest bar/strip club you’ve evern been to?
And
Strip Clubs - Most full contact?
I can’t help but think that that’s a common thread (if you will) in the stories here.
I wonder if I can throw in a story for the scariest strip club story that made me never want to go to strip clubs. I was hanging out with a couple of friends one night and with nothing to do, I shot out all sorts of suggestions. One of them responded, “let’s go to Crazy Horse (supposedly a little raunchier than the venerable Admiral, but nothing that would lend itself to posting in a story here).”
He went on to explain that whenever you go, you always have to tell them that it’s someone’s [in the group] birthday. They then take you on stage and the strippers reach into your pants and pull your underwear until it rips off.
I thought that scamming a free underwear-rip was a little peculiar, but what came next floored me: He said, “you have to cut your underwear on the sides so it doesn’t hurt so much coming off and make sure that you’re wearing clean underwear. It’s embarrassing.” :eek:
I was mostly shocked that someone had done this so many times that he knew the ropes as it were…
Kind of lame I suppose.