“I can’t believe you guys went to that bar on Hemphill!” That’s what Griffey’s girlfriend said to me as I slid her beer across the bar.
I frowned. This was last Thursday, and she assumed I remembered what had happened on Monday night, when her boyfriend and I did something that involved drinking at various places in town, I’m not exactly sure where. I vaguely remembered the Hemphill place. It smelled like bleach, and the cocktail waitress was nice. Everyone else spoke Spanish, though, so I don’t know if they were nice or not. “Yeah, it was great,” I said. To put this all in perspective, when Griffey and I recapped on Tuesday afternoon, his response to my text read: “My fingernails hurt.” (Translation: He drank. A lot.)
See, a couple weeks ago, Griffey had this great idea for a story – it’s a secret, but it involves a coin-toss – so we wanted to work out the kinks. Since I had planned on checking out the Circle M Saloon along The Frontier (a.k.a. Alta Mere Drive), I needed a wingman to corroborate any Twilight-Zonage. If there are two things you can count on about a trip to the Way West Side, it’s that something strange will be afoot and that I will probably forget about it the next morning. So I called him up. “I’ll meet you in about 30,” he said. “Where am I going?”
“I dunno,” I said. “The Oui?” (meaning, of course, the Oui Lounge). Now, meeting at a bar near TCU to scope a bar on the other side of town is probably a dumb idea, but I had good intentions – I told him we’d have a beer to warm up and then move on down the road. This also was a dumb idea. After the fourth round, we had completely lost interest in moving, and I’d resigned to getting hammered with him and look for Frontier weirdos next week. That’s when we met Onion Breath.
We were sitting there shooting the shit about The Wire with Trent, the Oui’s longtime barman and Billy Gibbons lookalike, when this older dame slid into a stool a couple spots away from me and ordered a “Jack up, Coke back.” In my experience, this is an old pro’s order, and it’s why I dig lounges like the Oui – there’s none of that Purple Hooter bullshit that goes on closer to campus. Old Pro just sat there sipping her whiskey, and then her friend came in. The friend was in her late 30s and wearing an unflattering belly shirt but was otherwise nice and affable – so affable, in fact, that when the Old Pro got up to use the can, the friend breached our conversational wall with Napoleonic aplomb.
“Can you guys do me a favor?”
I always go for maybe, and Griffey said, “Uh, that depends?” but she soldiered on anyway. “Listen,” she said. “Would you smell my breath?”
Since she was close-talking already, it wasn’t like we had a choice. “I just ate a sandwich, and I’m afraid my breath smells like onions,” she said. “I’m meeting someone in a few minutes.”
You might think that eating onions before a date sounds like poor planning. I certainly did, but given my own problems with general planning, I didn’t have a lot of room to judge. Luckily for her, she was onion free.
A little bit later, the setting sunlight splashed into the Oui, silhouetting this totally shady dude who had sauntered in, made his introductions, and, five minutes later, absconded with Onion Breath. If you’ve ever wondered what a Craigslist Casual Encounter looks like, I’m pretty sure that was one.
So that’s how it started. We packed it up a bit later and made the West 7th-Fairmount circuit, eventually landing at the Chat Room Pub, where shots were taken and soapboxes stood upon. And that’s what led us to the aforementioned bar on South Hemphill. Remember that place? Well, that makes one of us.
My logic for staying at the Oui (that The Frontier was too long a drive in our condition) had flown out the window, since we were now even farther from Circle M. But, as I say, “Have illogic, will travel.” The part after the Hempill bar is foggy, but I do remember going down the steps into the Circle M and marveling at the sheer volume of macrobrew bottles chilling in a massive ice well. I swear, it looked like a farm growing domestic longnecks. Soon, some dude in a sleeveless ‘Merican flag t-shirt was cackling over some story he was telling Griffey as I was trying to get M&M’s out of a machine that had eaten my quarter. Or maybe it was the pinball machine. Was there a pinball machine? I’m not even sure. – Steve Steward
Juneteenth at Smokey’s
In celebration of Juneteenth, from 2 to 5 p.m. on Saturday, 30-year-old Smokey’s BBQ is hosting Blues & BBQ, a free event of music, car show, horse petting zoo, and dominoes tournaments, with a percentage of proceeds benefiting the Circle L-5 Riding Club, Texas’ oldest African-American riding club that was recently devastated by a fire that destroyed a barn, equipment, and eight horses. – Anthony Mariani
Contact Last Call at lastcall@fwweekly.com.
