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By The Manifest Staff
When NASA's Spirit Mars Exploration Rover touched down on the allegedly "red" planet last week, Earthling scientists around the world leaped for joy. Here was a new opportunity to study in greater depth the geology, hydrology, chemistry, meteorology, and possibly even the biology of our closest neighbor. We at The Manifest, however, let out a collective yawn: science, schmience—what about the bar scene?
So this past weekend we hopped aboard the ol’ Manifest space cruiser, the MSS Habermas, for a raucous anti-gravity pub crawl across the Red Planet. What we found, contrary to the pile of boring rouge-hued rocks most people expected, was a vibrant planetary club scene which seemed to appeal to every value system and level of consciousness in our drunken, party-time egos.
The night began at 8:34 pm, Olympus Mons Standard time….
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Survivor Bar & Grill
Location: Hellespontes (western edge of the Hellas Planitia crater)
Cheers: This place was cool because we had to find and kill our own dinner. Meera and Corey smoked out a trio of Martian springboks with a well-placed brush fire, leaving Paul to angle in for the kill with his blowgun.
Jeers: Some nightclub: just a bunch of tents flapping in 40 mph winds. If Death Valley were colder than a Republican senator from Alaska’s left nut, it might be something like Hellespontes. Sand got in everything. We were so goddamn busy trying to secure dinner and stay warm we barely had any time to drink.
Merlin’s Shadow
Location: Cerberus Dorsa forage preserve
Cheers: In a cool twist, every bartender insisted on being called "elder." To get an actual drink (try the ultra-potent mead/dandelion wine concoction, pretty tasty), you had to do an elaborate ritual involving the consumption of Martian ox blood and the recitation of the names of all of your ancestors from the last 300 years.
Jeers: You can’t do shit without the approval of the elders. Corey has a tiny bladder, and every time he asked Elder Jim-Bob 87003 if he could use the men’s room, he was denied. He ended up wetting his seat. Meera got so drunk on the mead she thought the paintings of mountains on the walls were personally mad at her.
Wild Rock Pub
Location: a back alley of Hecates Tolus
Cheers: This place was insanity, like a biker bar back home but with MORE hedonism. Some local band was attempting to play an indigenous form of nu metal, but they got the chords all wrong and it ended up sounding like a gamelan speed-dirge as composed by Philip Glass on a Cedar Point rollercoaster after his fifth Red Bull—hilarious. In the center of the bar they had a massive, three-story stone pyramid, where patrons with bad credit were being sacrificed to please the local gods of organized crime the bar owed protection money to. What with the Jello orgies in the back, a "Fight Club" room by the pinball machines, and 6-inch high piles of coke on the main bar, we lost Paul here for a good hour here before we found him with his back all scratched up and a smudge of white around his nostrils, Scarface-style.
Jeers: Every dude here was a pushy a-hole looking for a fight. Blood from the human sacrifices got on Corey’s white Sage Francis hoodie and he had to arm-wrestle twelve Space Truckers to get into the bathroom to wash it out.
Tavern of the Great Book
Location: ancient holy city of Biblis Patera
Cheers: This bar was packed when we showed up. They have a drink called the Black Plague which is to die for—Guinness and some shit we could not identify, but yummy as hell. This was actually the most orderly, purposeful bar we went in. They only have one bar tender, and the whole bar intones the Great Chant every time he serves a drink. They even make you confess a sin each time you buy a shot, kinda reminded us of the Catholic Cantina back home. They also made up this ridiculous, grand story about Where the Booze Comes From, and promise that at the end of the great Pub Crawl of life, you will actually get to SEE Where the Booze Comes From.
Jeers: A total sausage party. The owner told us the women always stay home; only the men are seen in the public sphere. After the insanity of the Wild Rock, this place was like Sunday school on whale tranquilizers. Though built to resemble a scaled-down version of Chartres cathedral, it also managed to maintain all the gray, dogmatic dreariness you’d expect from the myth-dominated middle ages on earth. What’s weird is that they give you a copy of the drink menu at the door when you enter, and insist you memorize it. Then they hold random quizzes, and if you don’t get it exactly right, they excommunicate your ass. After our fourth pitcher, they pulled that shit on us, and Corey mispronounced "Coronado" as "Corona"—fucking booted us!
The Martian night sky reels as Paul drinks the Mars Spirit rover (at right) under the table
Belching Smokestacks
Location: northern side of Coprates Chasma
Cheers: Bar is actually a series of round, cog-like rooms that interlock and rotate like a giant clock. Unlike the top-down dogmatism of Tavern of the Great Book, this joint let you actually pursue your own pleasures in one of three sub-bars. Paul chased an absinthe waitress into the Art Garrot, Corey bet on particle accelerator races in the Science Lab, and Meera got in a war of words with two neo-Transcendentalists and a Spinoza freak in the Salon of Morals. A fourth room was actually a Mars GAP store, where Corey found a white Gift of Gab hoodie for half the price and Meera stole some scrunchies to give to homeless people having bad hair days.
Jeers: We watched in horror as a huge dumpster filled with burning clothes and broken bottles was emptied into the chasm. In fact, the entire bar seemed totally oblivious to the beauties of the natural Martian landscape, with virtually no windows and a horrid ventilation system pumped with the hottest new Martian cologne, Marvin Underarm. Corey got beaned with an inflatable Mission to Mars Gary Sinise doll and lost his shit.
The Swamp
Location: Labeatis national park
Cheer: After the piety and structure of Tavern of the Great Book, and the relentless energy and sickening materialism of Belching Smokestacks, this joint as a welcome respite. Noticeably more female and minority bartenders, better natural features like big windows, ventilation, and plenty of gardens. Corey felt most at home here.
Jeers: Weak-ass bouncers kept letting in macho assholes from the Wild Rock Pub, who would disrupt the drum circle, beat up the kids in the hemp space suits, and make off with the hottest chicks. Swamp patrons have a morbid fascination with the Survival Bar and Merlin’s Shadow, to the point of wanting to destroy all the other bars, especially Tavern of the Great Book.
Tier 2 Lounge
Location: Olympus Mons
Cheers: View was breathtaking. A rather large balcony surrounds the main bar area, and from there, for about ten bucks, you can look through a set of binoculars and actually SEE all the other bars you went to over the course of the night. The best part is they include the best parts of all the other bars in this place! They have a hunting room meant to resemble the dusty game craters of Survivor Bar, a video gallery of some of the better rituals performed by patrons of Merlin’s, a group of capoeira fighters on loan from Wild Rock, a reproduction of the elaborate stained glass windows of Great Book, smaller versions of the Art, Morals, and Science rooms at Belching Smokestacks, and all the eco-friendly amenities of The Swamp.
Jeers: This place was totally fucking dead when we got there, except for a couple of twenty-something white dudes who couldn’t stop discussing "theory. " You may think this is the ultimate bar, but as they say on Mars, there’s always another, which brings us to…
The Eye
Location: in orbit
Cheers: The Eye is actually a space station in continual orbit over Mars. Every single bar around the planet has a launch pad to accommodate the TransPerson shuttles running up and down every hour. And while we were thoroughly impressed by Tier 2 Lounge, the Eye seems to be the kind of perfect, dreamy place that every bar aspires to be, whether they knew it or not. We could’ve sat for the rest of our lives in this crystalline, spheroid orbiter, stocked with only the most ineffable liquid energy drinks, drifting in the total emptiness of outer space. And we even got to see Where the Booze Comes From!—a dirty brown solar freighter called the MSS Hafiz Winebringer.
Jeers: After an hour or so sitting completely still in the blissful Eye, we actually started to miss all the assholes and chunderheads running around like clueless idiots down there on Mars. It seemed kinda cheesy for us to keep this place to ourselves, so we talked to the Owner and made a promise to go back to Mars and promote the place. No one should have to miss out on that View.
Well, what can we say?—it was an amazing night! Not only did we get to taste a breathtaking range of Martian nightlife, but Paul went home with some blue-skinned opera singer with tentacles coming out of her head, Meera was elected Interplanetary Commander of the Teen Urantians, and Corey set up a string of DJ gigs for the nuclear storm season on Jupiter.
Next week: Venus!
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