So, Barry came by my place and we drove a few blocks to Barney’s Beanery ( anyone not hip to BB should know that Jim Morrison and Hendrix used to frequent this place and Janis had her last drink here before OD’ing down the street…) for quite a few rounds that Mr. Breshnahan was nice enough to cover; he was having pints of Sierra Nevada and i was sticking with Northern California’s best, PYRAMID Hefeweisen. (check out more on Barney’s: http://www.barneysbeanery.com/barneysbeanery/default.asp )

When we’d first pulled up, there, Barry stepped out of the driver’s side and right into a 13″ puddle! It had been raining all day, non-stop, and a lot of streets in Los Angeles flood if we get too much rain. So Barry go a nice soaking! But the drinks were nice and the atmosphere at Barney’s that day was fairly nice; lots of people eating and a few people drinking. No one in there was gonna let some rain get in their way.

Now, around the time we were on our 2nd or 3rd pint, this attractive, tall blonde asks Barry if his accent is real (since St. paddy’s is around the corner, I guess?) and Barry explains to her that he’s Irish, through and through and that women ask him that a lot. She pulls out a business card and says,” Call me sometime.” She was with a guy but it seemed to both of us that the guy didn’t really prefer girls. Barry had a good laugh at the whole event as the woman (and her friend) picked up her pitcher of Coors Light and headed out to the covered patio so they could smoke and drink.

Barry looked down at the business card and read her e-mail address (I am changing it slightly so no one e-mails her!)

“tallblond@aol.com”

I told Barry, ” I can’t believe she put that on her card!” Barry told me to “believe it” as he negotiated another swing down the old hatch. We started looking at the beer menu again and Barry noticed they carried Indian Beer at Barney’s (by the way, Barney’s carries over 100 international beers, ok?) and this sparked the conversation in the direction of my favorite Indian beer, the AMAZING “Taj Mahal,” which, for some very off and fascist reason, you cannot get anywhere except north America. The same company makes that one popular beer that you can get in the UK (i forget the name) but this is BEYOND BETTER.

It was then that Barry told me funny story about a business trip he’d taken to India a few years back. Apparently, after the flight had landed, several business associates and himself were being taxied to their hotel, which was 30 minutes from the airport. Problem was, Barry had to use the bathroom BAD, as his stomach wasn’t in such good shape after the food on the plane, among other things. He told the taxi guy to pull over at the next W.C. he saw. After the guy passed one up, Barry says,” You just passed a toilet right there!” The guy answers him saying he wanted to take him to a much better toilet and that stop was not very good. “Look,” Barry said, his face dripping with sweat and bowels MINUTES from giving way, “I don’t give a f*ck WHERE we stop as long as we stop now…I can’t wait…I mean it!”

So the guy pulls over and Barry races up a flight of stairs to a toilet and “relief” doesn’t do justice to the way Barry described how he felt once he sat down and did his business! Of course, now there was another problem; there was no toilet paper! [ Now, keep in mind, the whole time Barry is telling me this story, there is a tall guy with a very defined face and strong jawbone smiling and smirking all the while! After a few good looks I recognize who it is but I let Barry continue the story ] So I asked Barry the obvious question; what did he do about the problem of having no toilet paper? He told me he walked back to his business associates and they started laughing when they noticed he wasn’t wearing socks…

I laughed for a good few minutes and noticed that the tall guy had moved further down the bar, as to get the bartender’s attention. I said to Barry, “Isn’t that Quentin Tarantino?” Barry looked him over. “That’s him,” Barry agreed. So then I went on to tell Barry how QT had heard the ENTIRE story about the Taxi and the toilet and everything! Barry said, “Man, I better not see one of his movies and find my whole adventure in the story-line!” With that, we sloshed back through the rain and back to my house for some muffins (how quaint!), t-shirt swapping (he gave me a Guiness shirt AND A BOTTLE OF BUSHMILLS and I gave him a super-rare RANDLE/SQUEEZEBOX tour t-shirt from our 2000 UK TOUR) before Barry set out back down south to the gorgeous beach-side community of Laguna Niguel.

Mike Randle