My First Night at the Rondun

There were two entrances to the Rondun, the third-rate tavern on Dundas St. W., just north of Roncesvalles. One was Ladies and Escorts. The other was Men Only.

My three friends and I used the Men Only entrance and walked into a dimly lit, musty room with battered chairs around small, round, scratched and cracked tables where dishevelled, scruffy men sat nursing sweaty glasses of draft beer.

Presto! Now you’re legal

One friend, Rob, was not of legal drinking age, which was then 18. He was 17 and had a driver’s licence. In those days, licences were barely scraps of paper, easily adjusted.

Using a typewriter, he changed his birthday by one year and presto — he was 18. Vince was 18 and had a birth certificate to prove it. Nick was 19 and had a birth certificate and driver’s licence, which he gave to 17-year-old me.

“What if the waiter asks for ID and sees we have the same name?” I asked.

“We say our mothers are sisters who married brothers, got pregnant at the same time, had babies on the same day and both called them Nick,” Nick said.

We didn’t have to worry. The waiter couldn’t care less how old we were and didn’t ask for ID as he took our order.

We ordered eight glasses of draft beer — two each — and sat back waiting for the Men Only entertainment to begin. And begin it soon did as brassy music started to blare out over tinny speakers.

The entertainment was … interesting

The Men Only bar in the Rondun had no stage, so the entertainment — a stripper — used the floor, dancing between tables, taking it off. Taking it almost all off. (She kept her g-string.)

Many of the men were deep into their beer, busy playing cards or talking gruffly to each other. They barely looked up as the stripper danced around the room. Some were passed out, heads on the table. In their state of extreme drunkenness, they couldn’t care less.

At 17, I had only seen breasts in Playboy and Penthouse. Never in person, so to speak. I was entranced as the stripper slowly and seductively — at least what I thought was seductively — stripped down to nothing but skin.

Soon, there they were. Two naked pale white orbs with red nipples all but staring me in the face. I could not take my eyes off them as she danced around the room, making her breasts swirl clockwise and then counter-clockwise.

When the brassy music ended, the stripper covered herself with her arms and left the room through a door that led who knows where.

Rob, Vince, Nick and I sat at our table talking about hockey and movies and other teen stuff, draining our draft beer. We ordered eight more as the brassy music started up again and the stripper came back for round two. And then round three. Then four. Five. Six.

Drunk as skunks

We left at closing time, drunk as skunks. I can’t speak for my friends — we never talked about the show we had seen — but visions of pale white breasts with red nipples danced in my head as I walked home to my house on Sunnyside Avenue. And promptly threw up in the toilet.