Youthful Memories

As improbable as it sounds old folks remember stuff from their youth, often in great detail. Lately I've been reminiscing about a place I used to drink at half a century ago. At first I wasn't sure if I was imagining the spot so I checked the Internet; yes, it's real. Other aging Boomers have vivid memories of it, too.

I spent three years in Boston attending law school (1979-82). My days were fully consumed by study but nights were available for stress-relief. I indulged in a little drinking. A poor student in debt I had practically no money for anything. So I was adventurous. I explored dark sides of the city and discovered a wildly bizarre joint where you could tie one on for pennies. I went there frequently with my artist-girlfriend Maura and several soused sidekicks.

The watering hole was Aku Aku. A fitting name for primal activity. Aku Aku was an old-school Polynesian tiki bar in Kenmore Square. The place also served Chinese food; it was awful and best avoided. Most patrons walked past the empty dining room and into a crowded bar for the real attraction: cheap booze.

At that time Kenmore Square was low-rent and gritty; however, it also possessed vitality since the location attracted students willing to mingle with drug-addicts and bums. ("Bums" wasn't an insult back then, more an accurate description of tatterdemalions.) The area contained halfway houses, dive bars and music nightclubs like the infamous Rathskeller ("the Rat"). Just as seedy were clubs like Where It’s At and Psychedelic Supermarket. Fenway Park (where the Red Sox play) is around the corner and accounted for occasional crowds of drunk, racist baseball fans. I lived two miles down the road and ventured to and from this urban jungle on the Green Line of the "T" (an above-ground electric trolley). Unless, of course, I missed the last train and had to walk home in the cold night.

The tiki bar at Aku Aku was positively surreal: a long room decorated with tiki culture ephemera and a painted mural romantically depicting the South Seas. The mural, created with florid Day-Glo paint, would sway after you consumed a sufficient amount of liquor. Exotic South Seas scenery appealed to World War II vets who swapped war stories at the bar. Their exaggerated tales, amid strange scenes of erupting volcanos, offered an ineffable view of the world. To me, Aku Aku was as foreign as a distant planet. Nothing on television rivaled its dreamlike Dadaism.

The bar's chief attraction was fabulously large alcoholic drinks. Decorated with gaudy flourishes like paper umbrellas, fruit chunks and straws suitable only for children or Midwestern tourists the drinks were mammoth in size and small in price. You got drunk easily without hurting your wallet. My favorite drink, the infamous Scorpion Bowl, was literally a large punch bowl filled with treacly sweet fruit juice boosted with high-octane rum. We joked that the rum had been furtively made in the basement during Prohibition which explained the dusty unlabeled bottles. A Scorpion Bowl was served with one straw, or two if you were sharing it with someone you hoped had no diseases. The bowl contained enough alcohol to fuel a large man for an entire night of woozy inebriation. Bring out the swaying mural.

After I left Boston in 1982 my nearby school (BU) bought up Kenmore Square's real estate. Aiming to calm anxious parents, the University gentrified the area into a flavorless plate of insipid condos. 

The old days of cheap liquor and slum adventure are gone... but they survive in my memory. Long live Aku Aku!