License to Dive
Taco Gentrification Comes to Chicago's West Loop
This week I’m doing something a little different. I voice recorded the essay/review below. Since it’s 2023 and not every wants to or has the time to read, I figured this might be a good alternate option. I’m also going to syndicate these audio essays as a podcast, so if you want you can subscribe to a feed and have them delivered to your favorite audio devices. More on that soon.
The downside of listening to this essay is that you will discover how bad my Spanish pronunciation is. Apologies to all my Latino brothers and sisters.
While this audio is free, most audio, like the essays, will be for paying subscribers only. If you’ve been a free subscriber because you hoped for an audio option, consider upgrading your subscription. —Best, Mike
The days of the weed-addled HGH-engorged Van Dyke-sporter moonlighting as the portal sentry and distracted scanner for teen scofflaws at the local late-night vomitorium is gone.
I don’t know how the kids get fake driver’s licenses anymore. State IDs have holograms, invisible inks, and thermal seals. Production of counterfeits is now basically the domain of the dark web.
Even if you procure one, the barcode on that new fake ID is more likely to be encoded with the “My Sweet Satan” portion of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven than to be legit.
Bars are big biz and even those with the most spotless shots have dram insurance premiums that require Scrooge McDuck swimming pools of gold. That’s why states and taverns have invested in facial recognition technology that not only will boot your Logan Paul-loving ass out the door, but might alert the popo that you need to be detained because you’re a serial Crocs shoplifter.
It’s interesting that governments have spent “Beautiful Mind”-levels of engineering resources to prevent underage alcohol consumption while shrugging as toddlers get shot. But we are not here today to bury DeSantis.
Speaking of which, this Burning Man of a lib on fire can, for the first time, see the appeal of the red hat, because in the 1990s, while the oval office was still the domain of an alleged rapist, fake IDs at least in that time were indeed great.
All you needed was a thermal printer and a lamination machine, and in my case a sixteen-year-old who we’ll call Marvis. Marvis was an ID forgery artist and also operated the largest lawncare business in southeastern Michigan. Both of these operations were solely created to pay for Marvis’s fetish for audiophile stereo systems only Hollywood moguls and successful coke dealers could afford.
If the cobbler’s kids have no shoes, Marvis’s friends had no counterfeit cards to con the credulous. His was a strictly cash business and I had little. I didn’t need one anyway, because Marvis had a third job in pizza making, an occupation he also hooked me up with.
I met a lot of stoners at the pizza shop who taught me about shit I still don’t understand, Truffaut and Fellini and Pink Floyd, and a lot of stuff I still do, like Monty Python and Robert Plant.
I also met some of Shelby Township, Michigan’s finest cops who exchanged free pizza for their personal services. Because Shelby was whitebread burgeoning richville, these particular piggies spent most of their workdays and evenings confiscating liquor from underage teens.
When they finished those shifts, they returned out by the dumpsters behind our pizzeria, popped open the trunks on their pinstriped Impalas and flipped open coolers full of confiscated cerveza. They sat on the tailgates of shiny El Caminos as well and welcomed us pizza pirates, many of who were, OMG, underage, to partake in a regular weekly shitty-lager-palooza.