Liver Damage Venues- the Taxi Club

It seems that the only thing to post about in what has been a generally dull week is various venues that dot my social life, or did when I had one at least.

This venue, the Taxi Club, is synonymous with a really fucked up night on the tiles.  To end up at the Taxi Club is implicitly to find oneself as desperate as it is possible to become.  Inside, one finds a netherworld of all number of freaks many of whom are likely to appear unreasonably scary.  Go for the truckers in drag and stay to vomit behind the poker machines.

From the Sydney Morning Herald

Taxi Club
Tim Dick

Crowd Eclectic odds and sods.
Vibe Fun, tragic or comic. I'm still unsure.
Highs Cheap drinks, 24 hours, trannie-watching.
Lows Wine on tap but only before you're too drunk to care.
Drinks Schmiddies $2.50, spirits $4.

Leotards are back. You'll remember them from jazzercise and the early, best years of Aerobics Oz Style.

Madonna might use them on her latest world tour but it's just as well she's not coming to Australia, or more particularly to the Taxi Club at Taylor Square. Its board of banned apparel clearly states: no leotards.

Fortunately, there is no rule against the simply daggy, so once the $11 membership fee is paid, we're up the stairs and into a weird wonderland of the cheap, trashed and confused.

In common with leotards, wine on tap has no place in respectable modern life. The Taxi Club is hardly a bastion of anything much respectable, modern or otherwise, but it does go too far in one egregious way. Nonchalantly mounted on the bar, between taps serving beer, are taps dispensing wine.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no wine-ist. Some of my best friends are cheap wines. But it's confronting for any drinker to ask for the house red, only to see it flow from a tap into an oversize sherry glass.

The Brown Brothers logo is proudly attached to the twin taps - one white, one red - and I suppose if you're going to ignore accepted alcohol delivery practice you may as well do it with pride.

And when this place is busy, shortly before the sun comes up on Sunday mornings, I doubt anyone will notice that your red came from a hose. For there are many other distractions, such as schlocky cross-dressers and their fans, although on our first midnight visit there were mysteriously few people in the top-floor Disco Bar.

After a couple of super-cheap beers (schmiddy, $2.50), we left for a few hours, hoping for more eye-fodder later. On our return, the gleaming new membership card whisked us past a small queue of tourists and into a bar that was indeed busier but not by much.

This had some advantages: no queues and much space for roly-polies, cartwheels and headstands.

The true measure of an anything-goes bar is to perform amateur athletics and not be promptly ejected. I not only remain inside but the patrons appear to think it's not unusual that I'm standing on my head. In fact, I'm not sure if anyone even notices. This is depressing, as headstands rival drinking as my greatest talent.

And if there's one thing worse than being ejected from a pub, it's being ignored when you try. The transvestites get attention, as does my drinking pal, but I don't. If only I'd worn a leotard.