Monte Carlo Midnight

Monte Carlo is one of those places you like visiting if you have a lot of cash. If you don't have a lot of cash, you enjoy visiting it until you look at your bar bill the next day and realize that the kids can't go to college.

I went for a night on the town with a few buddies of mine. It had been years since the place saw my shadow, and back then I was only there during the day to take photographs and wonder what it would be like to be rich and famous. Years have passed and I am still not rich, nor am I famous, but I am a much wiser man: in a place as expensive as Monte Carlo, you need to take at least five friends with you wherever you go. That way, you buy a round of drinks and scream when you get the bill, but you only have to do it about once an hour. When you're on your own, you have a minor heart attack with every beer that lands in front of you.

The beer test is the way single guys sum up how expensive a place is. Some people go online and research a country's GDP. Women take the exchange rate into account, or what a leather bag costs at the mall. Single guys ask for a Budweiser and then say something like, "Well, that's about what it is at home," or "Holy shit, this place is dirt cheap, let's open a bar," or, "Jesus Christ, who ordered the tequila at 12 dollars an ounce?"

The beers in Monte Carlo cost 8 Euro for a draft, and ten or more for a premium bottle. At today's exchange rate, that's about 10 dollars for a lousy draft of suds, about triple what you'd pay if you're from some Northern Quebec craphole, or four bucks more than LA. Hard liquor is pricier still, with a martini running 10 to 12 Euro depending what you put in it. As a general rule of thumb, drinking with men is cheaper than drinking with women. Women order such new fangled, odd sounding, and awful tasting chick drinks that the bartenders up the price simply out of spite. When it takes ten minutes for them to prepare the thing, I don't blame them.

The beer test is the ultimate indicator of how expensive a city is, because you can be sure that a city charging 1o dollars for a draft beer is not going to sell you a house for under a couple of million. To make a two million dollar house sound reasonable, just tell yourself that it's only worth two hundred thousand beers. Besides, what do you expect in a place like Monte Carlo, where Grace Kelly was a Princess and their Grand Prix has the Mediterranean for a backdrop?

Monte Carlo is not for regular folk, though you wouldn't know it to look at the locals. I didn't see any rich people, I only saw people that had a lot of cash. There's a difference. The people in Monte Carlo are so used to having money that they don't give a shit about it. I met an Australian expat living in Monte Carlo, and while he bought us a round of shots, he told us that when he first moved here, he spent 1.5 million Euro on his new apartment. He said it like a man telling me about the new handsaw he bought at Home Hardware.

The locals in Monte Carlo don't dress the part. They have a ton of bread, but they don't spend it on clothing. They wear jeans, shorts, flip-flops. The Aussie expat told me that anyone who dresses too well in Monte Carlo sticks out as a snob. When everyone around you can buy and sell everyone else, what is the point of trying to go them one better in the shoe store?

It occurred to me that this meant me and my buddies could fit in. All we had to do is pretend to have a lot of cash because we already looked like locals. A friend of mine suggested we go hunting for sugar mommas to take care of us for life, but were disappointed to find that most of the chicks in one jazz club were themselves looking for sugar daddies. The rich stay at the bar and drink their faces off, while the wanna-be's like us are on the dance floor, entertaining them with our antics.

And we're more than happy to oblige, too, so long as they don't look down their noses too much when we blanche at the sight of a hundred Euro check for four beers and a couple of whisky chasers. But the people in Monaco's bars don't look down their noses at anybody, at least as far as I could tell. Nobody was rude, not even the bartenders. That is a miracle in itself. Even the doorman said good evening, if you can believe it.

The locals I met at one club were telling. It was a bar located on the last turn of the Grand Prix, the home stretch. Nearby, massive yachts bobbed in the harbor. In the bar, a rock band was playing, and I was struck again at the absolute dominance of American music culture around the world. From Tianjin to Monte Carlo to Singapore, you don't have to go very far before hearing Elvis Presley and Springsteen.

The bar was packed with locals on a Tuesday night, and not one of them was an asshole. No smugness, no attitude. With a lot of real money comes a lot of real confidence. The people that live in Monte Carlo have nothing to prove to anyone, because they've already proven it. They know they're rich, but it doesn't mean much in their scheme of things. When money has ceased to matter, you have to find other things that do. I don't know what they do in their downtime, but I'd like to find out.

Would I go back to Monte Carlo? Bet your ass I would. Just lend me a few bucks, won't you?