When: May 22, 2013, 9:58 p.m.
Where: the streets of Nashville
When your evening activities require signing a waiver stating that if you don't wear a helmet, you're assuming responsibility for any potential injuries or fatalities, you know you're in for one wild ride. That, my friends, is how you start an evening on the Nashville Pedal Tavern.
The Pedal Tavern is a sort of mobile biker bar, but more pedal than metal. Perhaps you've seen the Tavern — a caboose-sized bar powered entirely by imbibing individuals on stools fitted with bicycle pedals — weaving through the streets of downtown Nashville. Perhaps you've wondered what drunk assholes would partake in such an activity.
Well, tonight, we are those drunk assholes.
I meet up with 15 partners in crime on Demonbreun near the roundabout. Josh, our driver — and guide, bartender, babysitter, and distributor of waivers — doesn't blink when I hand him my thoughtfully selected poison of cheap box wine (this Tavern is BYOB) or my Frugal MacDoogal checkout-line impulse buy, a can of something called "Liquor Whipped Vodka-Infused Whipped Cream." I'm guessing he's seen weirder stuff.
As we board the Pedal Tavern — an awkward activity, if you were foolish enough to wear a dress — we realize that only about half of the stools have pedals. Since I'm looking to burn a few calories during this joyride (everyone knows that whipped cream goes straight to your thighs), I immediately claim one of the pedal seats. Most of my friends make a beeline for the non-pedal seats, essentially becoming dead weight. As Josh stocks the bar, my co-worker Leah distributes hats, feather boas and Mardi Gras beads to the group. We look like an over-the-hill frat party.
Until I climbed on the Tavern, mooning my friends in the process (really, don't wear a dress), it didn't register that the only thing between the rider and the road is a stool with pedals attached to it. I nervously glance down at the street. Even though we can't be more than a few feet off the ground, I'm getting a little panicky, flashing back to the summer after first grade, when I flew over my bike handlebars and knocked most of my teeth out. I am determined to keep all of my teeth tonight.
Fittingly, Josh starts going through all of the Tavern rules, specifically forbidding dangerous activities such as Chinese fire drills, giving alcohol to people on the street, or climbing on fire trucks. I'm only half listening, because I'm busy writing my name in vodka-infused whipped cream on our photographer Michael's arm.
"Please don't make me have to add new rules after tonight," Josh pleads.
I smile at him and squirt a pouf of whipped cream in my mouth. God, that is awful. It tastes like saccharine lighter fluid, which surely is the taste of bad decisions. I wince as I wash it down with my equally disgusting box wine and pass the can around so everyone else can share my pain. We hit the road.
Pedaling down Demonbreun is easy. A little too easy. I immediately pedal my heart out, and as we start to coast down the hill, I get that familiar old sensation of flying over my handlebars. Fortunately, I stay put this time, and Josh reminds me I don't have to pedal when we're going downhill. Duh, it's just like a real bike, right?
"We need some music!" I announce as I plug my iPhone, a sticky mess from the whipped cream, into the nearby auxiliary cord. Distracted by the whir of surrounding traffic and the imminent danger of dropping my phone, my cup, or myself in the street, I can't find a suitable song in my iTunes in time. A somber Nick Drake tune starts to boom (can a Nick Drake song even boom?) throughout the vehicle. My DJ privileges are immediately revoked, and somebody plugs in a phone that has more "butt music" on it.
After tackling a slight hill, which felt like climbing Kilimanjaro — thank you, dead-weight friends — we pedal down Broadway. Random people on the street are taking pictures and videos of us, and I start to feel a little self-conscious, being so exposed. What if my ass — literally — ends up on YouTube? I'm grateful when we make our first stop at a bar I'd never noticed before, one that looks like a movie set version of a honky-tonk. At this point, we lose my friend Kay, who has a low tolerance for bars that resemble movie sets. She grabs her wine-filled water bottle and wanders back up Broadway.
After shots of moonshine — really, why not mix all types of liquor at this point? — we jump back on the Tavern. Josh steers us down to the riverfront for a lively game of flip cup.
As we take in the view from First and Broadway, my self-consciousness disappears as I realize that — despite the fact that we've been pedaling around one of the busiest streets in Nashville for the past two hours — I have not seen one person I know. None of us have. How is that possible? This is a city where you can't go to the grocery store or gym or Hustler store without running into an acquaintance. Is it possible that by being so exposed in this exoskeleton of a moving bar, we are somehow concealed as tourists?
Armed with this knowledge, we feel a certain sense of freedom. You know, the kind of freedom that inspires you to perform an interpretive dance to the entirety of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the riverfront, or attempt to steal a tractor, or tell Jack Ingram that you really like his hair. But the rest? What happens on the Pedal Tavern stays on the Pedal Tavern.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
