[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to the Town of La Pointe on Madeline Island and composed this article for the September 2004 issue of the Ripsaw magazine.]

Holy crap is it a beautiful night out here on Madeline Island. It’s warm, with a cool breeze coming off the lake, and I’m sprawled out on the sidewalk polishing off a 40 of Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor and watching the Northern Lights burn across the entire sky, like the good Lord himself is vomiting white Russians all over the universe. I’m thankful to be alive. I’m lucky to be alive, too, as there are a lot of ways to die on this island, all of them alcohol related.

The downtown La Pointe area is small and concentrated, so it’s not unusual that a cop car has cruised by me a few times now. Each time I wave, and the cop waves back, because everything is fine; the speed limit here is 40 oz. See, unlike most of the United States of America, it’s perfectly legal on Madeline Island to walk around town with a beer in your hand, as if you live in a free country. You can carry your bottled or canned brew from one bar to the next, or just sit on a hollow log in front of the Chamber of Commerce and chug away. This place has everything Duluth has an ordinance against.

Eventually, when the Aurora calms down, I get antsy. It’s time to stumble down the street to my destination for the night: Tom’s Burned Down Café, a seedy, junk-filled, tent-like structure that was slapped together when, as legend has it, the actual bar burned down on the night of its grand opening.

College students: If you major in something useless like humanities, no doubt you’ll end up unemployed and drunk in a place just like this. And you’ll learn a hell of a lot more. For example: “Summer people. Some aren’t.” How’s that for wisdom?

A band called the Ditch Surfers is rocking the place tonight. There are four people in the band, all of them inebriated, just screwing around. The thing is, it sounds great. Some dude in a cowboy hat is ripping his guitar apart like Eddie Van Halen, and scaling the walls in the process. A couple hippie chicks are up front, performing a kind of dance that involves rubbing their asses on everyone in the vicinity, then burning people with their cigarettes. This place is awesome.

Wanting to get positively tore up from the floor up, I order a Long Island Iced Tea, one sip of which is a lot like someone snuck up behind me and tagged me in the back of the head with a tire iron. But y’know, like, in a good way. It’s the best five bucks I’ve spent since I bought those two 40s earlier this evening.

Suddenly I smell something really good, and I start to get hungry, so I elbow the fellow next to me and ask what kind of food’s being served. “There ain’t no food,” the fellow says, pointing to a nearby fat guy. “He’s fartin’ pizza from Bayfield.”

This is about all I can take. I’ve got Eddie Van Halen hanging from the 2x4s and French Larry over there kissing his own arm. One more Long Island and I’m going to steal the local camel and ride it to the campground.