Wednesday Night DNC Madness
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Sir! Excuse me, Sir!
This has been going on for ten minutes. There’s a man two seats down the bar from me at Aqimero, the lobby bar of the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia. He has been tapping his gold Ivy League college ring on the elevated shelf above the marble-topped bar and shouting “Sir!” any time a server comes within earshot for what feels like hours.
Sensing no one is looking, he now reaches across the bar and steals a half-full bottle of red wine from a service station. He is not reprimanded for this, in part because the bartenders are frantically trying to prepare drinks for the hundreds of people now waiting. The mob seethes.
It is past 3 AM on a Wednesday night in Philadelphia. The Wells Fargo Center, home to this year’s Democratic National Convention, has vomited its contents onto the subways and Ubers as attendees scrambled back to Center City to sleep, booze, and congratulate one another. Aqimero (now a privately operated bar, separate from the Ritz management) is one of a handful of city bars allowed to stay open until 4am due to a temporary city allowance for the convention. Despite it being the third night of the festivities, the owners have painfully understaffed their bar and the five hundred or so convention-goers are not happy.
Four hours earlier, the scene at the Ritz was much different. I arrived with a friend to watch the convention speeches and the crowd was thoroughly integrated — Philadelphia is a majority minority city, with only slightly more whites than blacks in the latest census — and fairly tame. Based on my limited interactions with other patrons it seemed to be a mix of locals and credentialed DNCers who for whatever reason had elected not to attend the actual event that night. Speakers in the lobby poured forth the night’s speeches and cut to background music during commercials and extended CNN pundit roundtables.
Enthusiasm started to pick up during Joe Biden’s speech. Background conversation quieted, faces were turned to the televisions on the wall. The biggest cheer of the night went up when Joe shouted “Malarkey!” and some of the more emphatic applause lines rippled through the lobby.
The marquee speaker who received hardly any notice from the crowd around me was Michael Bloomberg. People went back to their conversations as he slammed Trump on TV. I had thought his material would play better to the Ritzgoers, but apparently they had other things to discuss. The young man sitting next to me looked disconcertingly like Ronan Farrow and was sleazing hard on his date, who was chain ordering black coffee and tea alternately. At one point she put her sunglasses on and pulled a small convention-swag USB charger out of her purse to keep the iPhone in her Louis Vuitton flip case juiced.
Tim Kaine was next up. The highlight of his speech for me was the black woman a few seats down the bar from me who, after hearing a few paragraphs, exclaimed that he reminded her of her ‘drunk uncle’ and that he was ‘bringing that fire!’ She also caught me photographing her and told me she would ‘track me down on Snapchat’ if I made fun of her on the Internet. Quite the opposite; I enjoyed her on-the-spot conversion to the Kaine Train.
In what would become a theme for my night, around the time of Kaine’s speech a large man in a bright blue suit came and stood uncomfortably close to my shoulder, at times bumping into me with no apology, and shouted “Sir! Excuse me, Sir!” at any server, busboy, or restaurant manager within earshot. He was with a man he claimed was a panelist on a CNBC show and a couple of local Philly bizbros who were loudly discussing why Hillary couldn’t be trusted. Their support for Trump was never fully vocalized, perhaps because they were standing near Snapchat Lady and a group of a dozen black men in various states of formal dress who were shouting encouragement to the Dem speakers on TV.
Blue Suit apparently wanted two Goose martinis with a twist, hold the vermouth. I didn’t bother to point out that a martini without vermouth is not a martini. The “martinis” arrived only to have him send them back because they contained vermouth. He issued a string of fake apologies to the bar manager, throwing in a “we come here all the time” for good measure. He tipped a dollar on his $28 tab.
After Kaine the Coffee-Tea Girl had hit her caffeine limit, and left the hotel. Bootleg Ronan Farrow stuck around to chat with some of his buddies, though I thankfully got my bar seat back when they moved.
Obama, predictably, quieted the crowd to whispers. I can’t prove it, but I believe whoever was in control of the televisions turned the volume up even higher. The Ritz, for those unfamiliar with the building, was built to closely resemble the Pantheon in Rome. Though it lacks the incredible oculus in the roof, the designers of the building and the new lobby space had acoustics in mind and Obama’s voice rose through the room, holding the attention of the now sizable group who had gathered. I won’t opine on the content of the speech as others far more capable have already done so, but the crowd at the bar ate it up. Cheers, call-and-response, and applause were common. As it neared midnight we got up to leave, only to turn back around when people exclaimed as Hillary walked onto stage to hug the president. We got complimentary bottles of Ritz Carlton water as we emerged into the street.
Next stop was Vango Lounge, a bar and nightclub in Center City with a roof deck. DNC Nights, a Philly Professional Network series of nightlife events, had booked the venue along with 2 others on Monday and Tuesday. Two nights prior Eric Holder and his wife had been at one of the events. We had high hopes.
Vango was two thirds full by the time we arrived, the crowd nearly all African American. They had been watching the speeches in the bar, and the crowd was hype. DJs on both floors blasted trap anthems. A guy in a custom silk waistcoat patterned with dollar bills twerked behind a large woman in a cocktail dress. Groups smoked hookah up on the roof.
We were uncertain whether the crowd had anything to do with the DNC directly or had simply come out to have a good time. I did not see many lanyards or other credentials, so I had to assume the latter. Regardless, we had some drinks and listened to some music. I wondered though, what was going on back at the Ritz two hours later? We decided to find out.
The scene at Aqimero had changed dramatically. It was now over half full of people who were quite clearly from the moneyed and moneyed-adjacent classes. My friend was lucky enough to snag us seats at the bar, and due to her friendship with a very nice bartender got us a tab open promptly and secured a couple rounds of drinks with little hassle.
Things started to go off the rails around 2 AM. During our prior visit, the three bartenders had been supported by two helpful bar managers to prepare drinks for maybe a hundred patrons. Now the two managers seemed to have vanished and three bartenders were attempting to make drinks for more than twice that number. As far as I was aware the DNC was not allowing any drinking at Wells Fargo, so we now had hundreds of tired, irritable, mostly sober Entitled White Folks pouring into a bar that was horribly ill-equipped to handle the surge.
Nearby our seats at the bar I recognized a couple MSNBC contributors and a few bloggers and essayists. They all looked a bit run down in person. Everyone appeared to be barely holding back exhaustion and physical collapse.
The first nice people we struck up conversation with were a young black couple from Washington D.C. He was a computer programmer and she ran a non-profit for inner city youth. Her proud husband showed us photos of his wife with Hillary, Bill, and a surprisingly well-done selfie with Tim Kaine in the background. His wife had to wake up at 7 AM the next day, and they were fruitlessly trying to close their bar tab. My friend assisted them, and he told us that we had better look him up the next time we visited D.C. or he’d find out.
Despite the genial conversation, we were in the midst of a sea of rising tension and attitudes. People were starting to shout at the bartenders. Everyone — almost all men — was raising hands and flailing in the vain hope of getting a bartender’s attention. A young man came up next to us and bragged that his company “black card” would surely get him faster service. It did not. He eventually left to join one of his friends who had somehow secured a drink.
I went to the bathroom, and the stall I chose had a huge pile of wadded toilet paper soaked with urine. I used it as cautiously as I could, and backed away to find that the sensor wasn’t working. I pressed the manual flush button and it vanished with a whoosh. When I got back to the bar I told the story to a sharply dressed young black lobbyist who had taken a spot at the bar near me. We both agreed that a bunch of white Democrats pissing on something and leaving the mess for someone else to clean up was a good metaphor for the scene at the bar.
The lobbyist was from Mississippi, and after a little drunken ribbing of his state we discussed how he felt about the convention. He said that it had been a good opportunity to meet people he normally didn’t see, but that it was largely a lot of the same. It was a business convention for him, he was there to make contacts, try to further his firm’s interests, and hopefully get a beer or two before the bar closed.
Around 3 AM things got ugly. Ring Tapper had started up his percussive chorus in my left ear. People were shouting louder. A man behind us offered a 40% tip if he got a round of drinks. Someone bought 3 bottles of white wine at once, which led others to follow suit. One man walked away holding two unopened bottles of rosé champagne by their necks. A guy who looked very much like a BLM protester in a lime green cutoff shirt and basketball shorts snaked one of the bottles of wine a group of white delegates had just purchased, and no one said a word to him.
I went back to the bathroom and on my way out a Pennsylvania state trooper held the door for me. I asked him how he had enjoyed dealing with the crowd tonight and he simply laughed. I told him I thought these white people were out of their damn minds. He nodded solemnly and told me to have a great night.
My friend had struck up a conversation with a British television producer by the time I returned. Not long after he got in a shouting match with one of the MSNBC pundits who had tried to order Tito’s vodka cocktails and then argued with the bartender when they told him they didn’t carry the brand. Even 30 seconds of chitchat was too much for angry white folk waiting for their drinks, and he was chastised loudly. The producer finally got his beer and walked off, much to the annoyance of my friend who had been enjoying his accent.
330 AM last call came like a beautiful sunrise. The lights rose on the chattering throngs of Delecrats. We beat a quick exit to the now infamous Broad Street Wawa, though we did not see any cable news anchors. It was tired city workers, cops, lanyards, and hoagies. I walked home down a deserted Broad Street, City Hall blazing red, white, and blue in the background.
