One of the nice things about being young is you meet new people all the time. It just happens naturally. Often these fall into unfortunate categories: sexual predators, adepts of cults, or mythomaniacs who want an audience. But sometimes it can be interesting. Once in the late 1980s I struck up a conversation with a guy at Louie’s Bookstore Café, and this led to his inviting me to a private club called The Baltimore Beer Bath.
The Baltimore Beer Bath was a place where for just a few dollars, one could bathe in an Olympic-sized pool filled with cheap beer until the desired state of semi-consciousness was attained. Every night it was filled with bathers (not swimmers), mostly young men and women with artistic leanings. Artists, poets, musicians, all were bathing freely, mouths open, drinking like fish while exhibiting their best strokes.
The Beer Bath was the idea of Brent Scopter, the son of a wealthy investment banker from Guilford, in the northern part of the city. He saw it as his personal art project, combining performance art with large-scale installation. He said his goal was to represent “the soul of Baltimore at the present moment”. It was located in an abandoned high school pool which he’d bought on the outskirts of Highlandtown. He had a refrigeration unit put in so the beer stayed cold. It was continually filtered through a multistage electrostatic web-density system designed by a friend of his father, an engineer at the Martin Marietta Corporation. The Bath was open all year round. In the winter, it was heated by a coal-burning blast furnace in the shape of Moloch’s head from the Italian silent film Cabiria.
The bathing beer was usually National Bohemian, but sometimes there were special nights featuring Rolling Rock, Budweiser or Miller High Life. On certain holidays there’d be an import. I recall on Beethoven’s birthday there was a Saint Pauli Girl night, and for the commemoration of the Great Celtic Migration of 500 B.C., it was filled with Guinness.
Everyone who went in had to pay a flat fee of ten dollars. Then they had to promise they wouldn’t piss in the pool. I’m pretty sure that everyone kept this promise, but if they didn’t it would be doubtful if anyone would have noticed. The first time you went you also signed a note saying you wouldn’t tell anyone about it or divulge its location. Membership was by personal invitation only.
Like all social scenes, the Beer Bath had its own etiquette. Since the whole thing was an enormous art project, it was natural that the style of one’s arrival be a conscious question of display. Looking nonchalant and cool played a big part in the ceremony. First, you changed into your bathing suit and took a quick shower. As often as not, this was followed by a short stroll around the pool. This was used to great advantage by many of the seductive female bathers, looking like Nymphs of the Hops Field.
Next came Entering the Beer Bath. Though there were no written rules, if you jumped in too quickly, it was bad form. Many people (though they might not admit to it) spent their day planning in advance how they’d enter the pool. Should one dive in with a backflip? Do a jackknife, a gainer, pike or tuck? Once decided upon, the bather would perform his or her dive to the admiring looks of those assembled by poolside. Cannonballs and bellyflops were frowned upon, but as the night progressed, this rule was quickly forgotten.
There were a couple of lifeguards, who, in keeping with the Baltimore aspect of the Beer Bath concept, wore Natty Boh costumes. One of these guys was named Ricky Skeets, a metal sculptor who had helped with the Moloch furnace. He and a poet who was known as “Boomer” were in charge of keeping things civilized. The bathers maintained a large degree of self-control, yet occasionally Ricky and Boomer would caution them if they started splashing other people or running by poolside, with its ensuant risk of slipping and concussion. But as the atmosphere was already chaotic, and since Ricky and Boomer would frequently take their own bathing breaks, most behavior was accepted. “Jump on in!” they’d holler! “The beer’s cold and the bathing’s good!”
The Baltimore Beer Bath lasted for three years. Then came the snowy evening of January 8th when two people drowned. Their bodies were discovered when the pool was drained that night. As both Ricky and Boomer had been bathing heavily, they weren’t sure how to deal with it. Finally, according to court records, Boomer said, “People die man, fuck it.” He then recited “Be Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire and put the bodies into the roaring Moloch furnace. This news reached Brent’s father and the place was closed. Since that time, the building’s been torn down and replaced by a KFC.