Streetside cocktails to beat the heat

On hot August nights, when the air has no room to move in cramped Tel Aviv apartments, the only thing to do after the fifth cold shower of the day is to join the sidewalk cocktail party.

At two in the morning between Thursday and Friday and Friday and Saturday, there are traffic jams on Dizengoff and the wide seaside boardwalk of pebbly concrete is packed with people.

The outdoor bars do the best business, with each place catering to a clientele of regulars augmented by convoys of Subarus from Holon and Bat Yam, the Queens and Bronx of Tel Aviv's Manhattan. The regulars are defined by profession or often merely by the claims of profession.

This place on Ben-Yehuda is for movie people. That place on the seaside strip is where the teenagers go. This joint on Trumpeldor is for the journalists, that flourescent and neon lit place on the other side of the Yarkon for models and photographers and advertising people, who like the bright lights so to better see each other.

Taxis shuttle back and forth from these places.

The drivers are valuable sources of information about the clientele of each place.

They know where they take the pretty girls and the big tippers, where they take raucous teenagers and the barefoot beach-freaks.

They know where a new place has opened, and some can guess which place will succeed and which will fail.

Pubs, saloons, bars, nightspots, joints and essen and fressen places open and close in Tel Aviv with as much regularity and excitement as synagogues in Jerusalem.

"What are they loooking for, what are they looking for?" asks the 64-year-old driver of a seven-seat Mercedes, while he takes a passenger from one 2 a.m. sidewalk cocktail party to another.

He doesn't seem to want an answer to the question, and anyway, for each person in each place, the answer is likely different.

In every place, the stranger comes in and searches the crowd for a familiar face, and no matter how huge the city, there are always familiar faces ion the crowd, even if the faces are familiar from tv or advertising or the gossi columns of the women's magazines.

Here's a place on the beach: Some fifty huge round tables made of wooden reels that once carried telephone cable, slope down terraced steps to the sand and water. Groups of five or six or ten people chat and shout and sing and make scenes or watch other tables where scenes are taking place.

Soldiers on weekend leave; dating couples in the strange finery of fashion made from a combination of Tel Aviv's Mediterranean presence in the Middle East and its aspirations for northern Europe; a sprinkling of provincial celebrities; and a dozen waitresses rushing back and forth with watermelon, Bulgarian white cheese and milky glasses of arak; it's lively, especially because just past this place, there's a park of grassy knolls overlooking a part of the beach where there are no lifeguards and few swimmers, but many midnnight fisherman casting into the waves.

In deep summer, the park is dotted by green and yellow and orange tents, and from the tents come the sounds of voices and music coming from tapes sold in the central bus station. Sometimes the music is natural, voices rising and falling with tambourines and ouds, bongo drums and guitars.

The sounds rise in the air like the smoke and smells from the charcoal grills outside the tents, wafting in the breeze until broken in the west by the rhythms of the waves, or dashed in the east by the four-lane highway that rushes between Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

There seem to be kilometres of cars parked on the sidewalk of Herbert Samuel Avenue, and it's surprising that nights go by without a tipsy reveler ending up in the hospital after trying to navigate his way through the streaming lights of the cars speeding back and forth along the strip, driven by other nightime carousers trying to navigate their own way.

On Thursday nights, those who can walk or bicycle to a neighbourhood pub take over the sidewalks outside these places. Everybody is there to find a way to sleep. For some that takes a few drinks, the alcohol exuding into the sweat that first cools the body and then becomes a miserable stickiness. For others, sleep is found in the spontaneit of the kind of sudden affair that in the morning often turns into embarrassment.

There's room for everybody at all the joints on the sidewalks of the city, which means that even though the police come by at one to remind the owners that they have to close, until two or three in the morning it's hard to find a table. There's room for everybody at all the sidewalk places, because it's actually a sidewalk cocktail party, where the guests lean against the pillars of the building, against the fenders and hoods of the cars parked illegally on the main street.

Strangers becoming nodding acquaintances, nodding acquaintances becoming drinking partners at these nightly affairs. It's not the loneliness of a New York singles bar.

It's a temporary escape from the miserable weight of sweat drying breezeless and sticky in the hot August nights of Tel Aviv.

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