Four months before June 21, 2006, I got a bunch of new, older friends, adopted the after-dusk persona of “Euni”, and established a reputation as a semi-regular customer of some of the more popular watering holes around the campus area.
Euni was Korean-American. She had short black hair, brown eyes, a heart-shaped face with a pointed chin, and stood at about 5 feet 3 inches.
A far cry from my own Chinese ancestry, longish dark-brown hair, wide, flat facial features and 5-foot-6-inch frame.
But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was the fact that under the dim lighting of most bars, Euni and I melded into a single indistinguishable being – especially (or so I thought) if I walked into a bar wearing a hoodie and glasses instead of my contacts.
I figured that my best bet at passing as Euni would be to straddle the thin line between looking enough like my ID that the more flippant bartenders would not think twice about letting me in, and looking different enough from my ID that if I encountered a more suspicious sort of bartender, I could plead maturity and an image makeover to make up for the fact that I have a wide, not narrow face, and that my eyes are more cat-like than almond shaped.
The first time I ever used it was to go meet a friend at Rennie’s early one Friday evening. My friend met me outside the bar. She was a regular, so I figured walking into the bar with her would give me automatic credibility.
We walked in together, and it was early enough that there was no one stationed at the door checking IDs. So I managed to get right up to the bar and order a drink before anyone asked to see the ID.
It worked. And at that moment, my life was complete: I was now a card-carrying member of the Eugene bar scene.
For the next four months, I exercised that privilege liberally. In hindsight, too liberally really.
It helped that I lived in an apartment an equal distance between Rennie’s and Max’s. And it also helped that my new best friend enjoyed a drink or two after work every night, and that she liked having me drink with her.
We’d hang out on the outside porch at Rennie’s, me nursing a gin and tonic, and her alternating drags from a cigarette with sips of a double vodka tonic – two lime wedges please.
Sometimes for a change of pace, we’d hit Max’s instead. And it was here, amidst handfuls of butter-soaked popcorn that I acquired a taste for beer – a beverage that I used to think tasted like piss. At Max’s, I cut my teeth on Wyder’s Pear
Cider, then worked my way up to darker stuff like Widmer’s
Hefeweizen and less sugary brews like Skinny Dip.
Then the worst thing happened: Bartenders began to learn my name. Hanging out at bars with a regular when you’re not really the person that your ID claims you are is a double edged sword: while it gives you credibility with the bartenders, it also means that they’re more likely to learn your name. Soon, I was getting friendly calls of “Hey Euni” whenever I walked into Rennie’s. By April, the bartenders at Max’s carded me with a rapidly decreasing frequency rate.
May rolled around, and my friend chose to commemorate the end of her college days with a 30-day bar crawl. I tried to keep up with her for a while, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I could only drink so many days in a row before the very idea of any sort of alcohol flowing down the back of my throat made me nauseous.
My friends and I buried Euni for good on June 21, 2006. In fact I have a picture of me at Max’s that night, my grinning face flushed red from drinking, jubilantly holding up Euni in my right hand, and Stef in my left.
At midnight, the girls got the entire bar to sing happy birthday to me. And I grinned sheepishly as a couple of the bartenders stared at me with looks that can only be described as amused astonishment.
Strangely enough, the night we buried Euni also marked the night that the bars finally lost their appeal. Maybe it’s because my drinking companion graduated and moved away. Maybe it’s just because I traded in my social life for a staff position at the Emerald this year.
Whatever it is, the magic disappeared on my 21st birthday. And to this day, drinking as Stef has never been as fun as all those nights that Euni spent outside on the porch at Rennie’s, half-cursing the fact that we had to be outside because of my friend’s smoking habit, but simultaneously basking in the one-of-a-kind glow that you get only from a blend of good company, night air, and the secret satisfaction of knowing that the alcohol coursing through you was obtained by illicit means.
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