During my youth, there was a joke: If you want to clear out an East Village club, all you had to do was walk in and yell, “DEA”—meaning “Drug Enforcement Agency.”
The East Village has gentrified enough that I doubt any of those clubs still exist. About fifteen years ago, Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood was more or less like the EV of my memory. I guess it’s a sign that I really am well into midlife that I don’t know where the current epicenter of the club scene is—or whether they can be cleared out by yelling “DEA!”
I was reminded of that old joke when I read about an eight-day stage race in Spain. One week ago, on Day/Stage 6, 130 of the 182 riders bailed out because of “flat tires” and other maladies that coincided with the arrival of Spanish anti-doping authorities the way plane crashes, defenestrations and “accidental” poisonings follow expressions of dissent from, and other opposition to, authoritarian regimes.
Alvaro Marza, a former time trial champion who finished eighth in the race, noted that relationship between flat tires and the arrival of the anti-drug officers. “It is not a complicated mathematical formula, but it is the harsh reality,” he wrote in an Instagram post.
