The Bar Bar
What makes a bar a real bar.
(Page 3 of 6)
Some of this has to do with drinking demographics. Your basic beer drinker would probably be willing to knife his wife’s boyfriend after a couple of Slurpees. But I think there may also be a physiological rationale. All drinking involves stages, a series of chambers that the drinker passes through on his way to that rarefied state of drinking karma, what writer Dan Jenkins has called invisibility. One of these stages is a certain, let’s say, aggressiveness. At a magical instant, the right amount of booze reaches the proper synapses, and what results is a catalyst for paranoia—your darkest gripes come rushing forth, and you’re just not going to sit still until you’ve kicked the crap out of someone.
Let’s call this stage of invincibility. Beer drinkers reach this stage and never leave it. Three, four, ten more pitchers are not going to coax them into any of the succeeding, more passive chambers. Hard-liquor drinkers rapidly pass through invincibility, almost untouched. Though hard-booze drinkers may get drunker than beer drinkers, they do so with a good deal more grace. You never see a martini drinker doing something like, oh, dancing. Singing, yes; dancing, never. Dancing is for beer drinkers exclusively, as is throwing up on the sidewalk. And arm wrestling. If the piña colada is the potion of wimps, then beer is all too often the elixir of horse’s asses. When’s the last time you heard a martini drinker say something like “You and who else’s army, huh?” That’s beer talk, as is “Hurry up ‘n’ sit down Junior, before somebody sees ya!”
I included some beer bars in my tour but only grudgingly. The very idea of a beer bar is distasteful; in Texas, however, it’s a when-in-Rome sort of situation. Texas drinking is inextricably tied to brewski. Because of the prevailing climate and the peculiar conjunction of German and Latin culture, beer is part of the Texan blood. From the old icehouses in Houston and San Antonio to the beer gardens of the Hill Country, from the saloons of county-line areas like Mingus to the surviving urban beer joints like Kay’s in Houston and Willie’s in Dallas, it’s clear that when most Texans say, “Let’s go have a drink,” they really mean, “Let’s go have a beer.” After a dozen years of liquor by the drink in the state, beer still reigns supreme. Last year Texans consumed a staggering 462 million gallons of beer—32 times the amount of distilled liquor they drank.
Many bar bars in Texas are, in fact, beer bar bars. I must confess that I developed a reluctant affection for a number of these places. I grew particularly fond of icehouses, not 7-Elevens or Stop-N-Goes but the real old icehouses, like the now defunct Bill’s Ice House in Fredericksburg and the Gomez Ice House in San Antonio. If Texas drinking—meaning Texas beer drinking—has real roots, they are in these peculiar little cinder-block affairs that, depending on which area of the state you’re in, sell everything from beer to live bait. Originally they sold block ice and bottled beer—hence the distinctive boxy architecture of most of them. As business got better, Bill or Mr. Gomez or whoever saw additional profit in serving beer on site. There followed pool tables, pinball machines, jukeboxes, sundry junk food, and ultimately, tables and chairs and, on occasion, hot meals. As the years passed, an eclectic array of other goods and services attached itself to the icehouse. Bill’s in Fredericksburg, for example, used to advertise beer, groceries, live ammo, and hunting licenses; the Gomez in San Antonio complements its food and beverage business with some key cutting.
I grew somewhat less fond of the urban neighborhood beer joint, though it’s only fair to point out that with the exception of what’s being drunk, these places fulfill most of the obligations of a good bar bar. They’re dark and completely unpretentious, peopled by an assortment of regulars, presided over by good bartenders. And because of their age, most of them have marvelous collections of bar crapola on the walls and ceilings: beer signs and calendars, those cute little sayings like “Nobody can force me to drink. I’m a volunteer,” tattered business cards, and endless snapshots of satisfied customers in various poses. The outstanding place in this vein is Little Hipp’s in San Antonio. Aside from Willard the Amazon tortoise—no kidding—and several of those terrific old four-color, laminated photographs of plate dinners, the adornments at Hipp’s are kitsch that only Andy Warhol could love: small beach balls suspended from the ceiling in fishnet and attached to plastic paper plates. You figure it out.
What I’m getting at is that beer bars have sufficient funk to be bar bars, but they lack the requisite soul. That elusive quality is inseparable from booze—whiskey, martinis, and of course the ever-present shooter of tequila or schnapps—and the special kind of stupor it creates. Beer can just never quite get you nowhere, and thus, while beer bars are vastly superior to many other genres, they are forever doomed to being a brick shy of a full load.
First bar regular: Hey, Dave, how’s it goin’?
Second bar regular: Oh, Bill! I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you in the daylight.
—Conversation not from a bar
Now that I’ve exhausted the subject of what a bar bar is not, let me explain what it is as succinctly as possible. The model I will use here is Joe Miller’s in Dallas, not because it is necessarily the best bar bar in the state but because it is my bar bar.
Let’s start with
Atkinson’s Fourth Rule of Drinking: Liquor was not meant to be consumed in the presence of light, either artificial or natural.
This is to say that good bar bars are a lot of things, but first and foremost they are dark. How dark? Mine shaft dark. I don’t mean just shadowy or atmospheric or even dim. I’m talking about total pupil dilation.
I can’t say this with complete authority, but I’m fairly certain Joe’s is the darkest bar in the state, if not the nation. I have been drinking with Joe ever since he moved over from the Stoneleigh Terrace Hotel bar and opened his own joint in 1977, and I have never failed to have the sensation of hitting the wall when I enter the place. In fact, one of the more common pastimes at Joe’s is sitting at the bar watching people’s tortured attempts to adjust to the darkness upon entering. There are two types here: those who take the conservative approach by standing at the entryway in a catatonic pose, waiting for the cornea or the retina or whatever the hell it is to do its thing, and the reckless types who never break stride, gambling that they will somehow make contact with a barstool before they get to the aquarium or to a table loaded with glasses or to some judge’s wife’s chest area. I’m not sure why, but this is definitely one instance in which adaptive learning simply doesn’t happen. I know of no one, including Joe, whose eyes have become even vaguely proficient at adjusting to the dark in his joint, nor have I met anyone who has learned to handle that megablast of sunlight one collides with upon leaving.
A great bar like Joe’s needs to be dark for the obvious reasons. It’s the most economical way to get you nowhere before you’ve had even your first sip. It follows, then, that all other matters involving decor and atmostphere are completely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what a bar bar looks like, because you’re not supposed to see it in the first place. Hell, you’re not even there, so who cares what kind of wallpaper or carpet it has?
Joe’s is more than exemplary here. I can’t honestly tell you exactly what the place looks like. As best I can put it together, it’s a little like a set in a Perry Mason episode. It’s vaguely fiftyish with a long, serpentine bar that has, of course, a very kneadable vinyl arm-resting area and cheap carpeting on the front. Elsewhere, there are Formica tables and imitation-leather director’s chairs, a fireplace with a couple of couches around it, a men’s room without stalls, a small TV set, a lot of bar crapola, a whole lot of pictures of Joe and various friends, an aquarium, a large clock patterned after Joe’s distinctively mustachioed face, and an extremely large blue marlin. You get the idea. It’s a little like a Holiday Inn room; the immediate function supersedes everything else, especially what it looks like.
In much the same way, Joe’s stands as an archetypal bar bar simply because of its name. I tend to think that when that often-quoted archeologist of the future digs through our remains, among the things that will vex him most will be the names we give our bars. A quick jaunt through the Yellow Pages: The Family Affair? Concorde Casablanca? Georgie’s Kemosabe Lounge? Come on. The Bwana Dik Club? Barton’s Boozery? The Cool Million? Wet and Wild? For goodness’ sake. The Brass Asp? This is Texas? Gregory’s Penthouse of El Paso, Inc.? Boy! The Common Interest Restaurant & Piano Bar? Harpoon Henry’s? Randi’s Stagecoach?
My Library
