Senate bill would allow drinking until 4 a.m., but we think you’ve had enough

SB 905, a sober-sounding name for a bill that would allow alcoholic beverages to be served until 4 a.m. in parts of Long Beach and eight other California cities, is drunkenly weaving its way through the Assembly and should be up for a vote soon.

I have to apologize for not telling you which side of the issue you should embrace, because I’ve had my own troubles making up my mind.

I can tell you now that initially, and also ultimately, I’m against it.

But in between there’s the part of me that recalls many happy nights — mornings, more appropriately, those dark and dawning hours between 2 and 6 a.m. — surrounded by friends amid dead and dying soldiers bearing their uniforms of various breweries.

There were times back in the 1980s when some of us would lock the doors of the rightfully infamous Press Club on Pine Avenue, hours, even, after the pressmen would bring the next day’s paper in (an odd feeling, like getting a glimpse of the near future and if you hurried you could make it down to the 7-Eleven and buy some winning lottery tickets by playing the numbers in the paper, or call a bookie to place large bets on the winning horses), and the drinking would continue until the sun came through the Press Club’s front window telling us that it was time to go to back to work.

Or nights when, after staying late in other bars and then swinging by Dick & Faye’s Bistro on Seventh Street where Dick or Faye had a wobbly understanding of the 2 a.m. rule and would pour our group a few pitchers of loudmouth at 1:50 a.m. to drink until we were finished, whenever that would be.

Maybe in those long-ago and perilous years we would’ve been in favor of some bars being open until 4 p.m., though the legality of it all would’ve taken some of the joy out of drinking when all the legal imbibers were already tucked in bed, working on their hangovers.

Almost all of my drinking is done at home now, and with a doctor’s grudging OK (“All right, as long as it’s just two drinks;” it IS, although I didn’t tell him the two are both martinis served in a 5-gallon Sparkletts bottle).

So, it’s typically Baby Boomerish of me to come out against some bars staying open a couple of extra hours in Long Beach, closing that door to extended fun now that I no longer would avail myself of the bonus time. But it’s also Boomerish of me to have sucked up all the luck and entire squadrons of guardian angels that were involved in getting us home after some of our extra-late binges. Don’t yell at us; I’m utterly abashed and ashamed of it now. Those were days before Uber, when every time you told a bartender to call you a cab he’d call you “a cab” and then laugh uproariously.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and West Hollywood are some of the other cities where bars could stay open later, if the bill passes. It will be up to each city; the bill allows, but doesn’t mandate, bars to stay open until 4.

In Long Beach it would pretty much pertain only to bars at or near the Convention Center, and not in Belmont Shore or Bixby Knolls or anywhere else you’ll find places that regularly serve alcohol.

So the booze-rule change, at least in Long Beach, would seem to be geared toward conventioneers, who I’m not even sure want to drink until 4 in the morning, though if they do, there’s always the hospitality room. More likely, it will attract people from Long Beach and beyond who just want to drink till 4 a.m. without the hassle of driving to Vegas.

“A well-planned and managed nightlife can have a profound positive impact on a local economy, generating direct tax revenues, and growing public funds through revitalized business districts, and increased tourism,” chirps the language of the bill.

And I suppose that’s true in the abstract, but I’d be curious to see how one can ably plan, never mind manage, a crowd of people drinking two hours after what used to be last call.