The Guardian has a strange (to me) story about the world’s cocaine bar, called Route 36. It’s in La Paz, Bolivia, and because it’s an after-hours club which, you read that right, serves cocaine, it’s constantly on the move. For some reason, the neighbors tend to complain.
It’s not the idea of a cocaine bar that’s so strange to me, though. That part actually seems, well, inevitable. No, it’s this part of the description that got me shaking my head.
Down in Route 36’s main room, the scene is chilled. A half-hearted disco ball sporadically bathes the room in red and green light. Each table has candles and a stash of bottled water, plus whatever mixers one cares to add to your drink. In the corner, a pile of board games includes chess, backgammon, and Jenga, the game in which a steady hand pulls out bricks from a tower of blocks until the whole pile collapses. If it weren’t for the heads bobbing down like birds scouring the seashore for food, you would never know that huge amounts of cocaine were being casually ingested.
I’ve never used cocaine personally, so I can’t speak from experience, but I never would have imagined board games, especially Jenga, as a pair for coke. Video games, maybe, but Jenga?
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Coke (and amphetamines) makes whatever you’re concentrating on extremely interesting, even if it’s cleaning or reading Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! So, yeah, board games and even Jenga makes sense to me. Not that I would know and all that.
In my experience, anything that doesn’t require too much concentration and doesn’t go on too long is ok. Reading Faulkner, somehow I doubt it. Playing Connect 4, on the other hand, sounds about right.
As the inventor of the game Jenga, I have played my game in a myriad different places under a myriad different circumstances, though never in La Paz, or under the influence of cocaine. However, way back when, once or twice, with very close friends I confess I did play a version of the game that we called ‘blow’ Jenga. Rather than poking or pulling a brick, in Blow Jenga, players were expected to literally BLOW a brick out of the tower – a potentially tricky operation that required a great deal of puff. But then puff and hot air were in plentiful supply, given that most of my companions were Oxford undergraduates at that time.
Well it’s not called route 36 for quite a while now. The place moves around quite often and its’ location is always secret. I give personalized extreme insider tours of La Paz. If interested give me a shout route36lp@hotmail.com
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