As a lark, I sometimes do google searches on places from my childhood. I looked up “Mr Foos” yesterday and it returned only one link. Mr Foos was closed long before the Internet existed or maybe it closed when the Internet opened up. I don’t know. But it truly was a magical place. Ostensibly it was a sub shop in Blacksburg but really it was a sleazy beer joint. They served Pabst Blue Ribbon long before PBR was the badge of cool hipsterdom. On Wednesday nights, they hosted “turtle races” although I never saw a turtle there. It basically meant that if you got there at 7PM, PBR was $1 a pitcher. From 8-9 it was $2 and from 9-closing it was then $3. But most of us were shitfaced by 9PM anyway. In fact, I think I would even show up earlier just to get a seat and watch the insanity. The place would get packed – jocks, freaks, geeks and locals all elbowing each other, starting fights and eyeing members of the opposite sex. One night we got flashed by a local girl which in theory sounds exciting but in retrospect was kinda gross (hairy and a bit too much to see in the “beerlight” of Mr Foos). I once threw beer around somewhat because I could and remain anonymous. Why not? Most people didn’t appreciate it but most were too shitfaced to notice. Was it a smart thing for a college bar to offer such cheap beer on a Wednesday night? Sure. Was it a smart thing for college kids to be patronizing such a thing given all the deadlines, homework and tests they were supposed to be studying for on their parent’s dime? Not really.
Ah Mr Foos. I had a Mr Foos t-shirt which among my set was probably only one step below having a blue skull and roses (Grateful Dead) shirt. I wore it proudly for many years after I graduated. I can’t believe I threw it away and I have a theory that somehow my Mom got into my 20-something apartment/rowhouse and “deleted” it from my life like she did so much of my other favorite clothes, comic books, Mad Magaizines, trashy novels while I still lived with her.
Oddly, I think my Mom probably share the same sort of anonymous on the Internet status that Mr Foos does. Oddly.
For awhile Mr Foos tried to get live music and it was kind of cool to be eyeball to eyeball with Killer the bass player and his blue band (they did a killer version of Ring of Fire) but it really wasn’t meant to be a live music venue.
People who worked at Mr Foos were generally failed students who had either gone native or, it was pretty clear, had a drug problem. That said, they were considered very cool and we (my friends and I) would talk about them, guess about their personalities, backgrounds and what they do on their free time (kill puppies, shoot heroin, go bear hunting, etc.). At one point, I even got to know one of them – a fellow drummer who was sort of a countryfried version of the Muppet’s Animal. I hung out with him during a winter break, drank moonshine and went out to help him chop down trees for the fireplace and for a Christmas tree. Of course, we did this while shit-faced.
Ah what else? Everybody needs a good sleazy bar in their youth. A place where you meet friends, talk up young women, fall in love, start fights, lose fights, get consoled with free beer, plot plots (I think we plotted getting onto the roof of the Virginia Tech basketball arena there one drunken evening), dream dreams, learn how to drink and how not to drink. And so on.
Good bye Mr Foos wherever you area. And yeah, there was a Foosball table there – I guess that’s where they got their name. But it was only one table and only the most elite Foosball players used it (you played with them only if you desired to be humiliated).
And their subs were wonderful.