I Found Love in an H-Town Place

My coastal sensibilities were piqued by a picture of America I haven't seen in a long time.

This week I found myself in a dive bar on the northern outskirts of Houston, Texas at 1 AM; within two minutes of showing up the bartender mopped up a 60-year-old hammered lady's spilled beer with his gray wife-beater t-shirt. As he sponged up the pool of liquid, a massive Bowie knife that would be illegal in every other of the United States revealed itself on the thick leather belt holding the jeans up around his keg-sized waist.

"I could use the bar rag but that would be no fun," he shouted over the tunes with a grin behind a grizzly beard that hung down to his barrel chest. His accent had a twang that was music to my ears after hearing nothing but flat vernaculars rounded to homogeneity by the concrete and steel of the urban world.

I flew from DC to Houston to do a podcast and, while I have visited 47 states in this great Union, it’s been over a year since I traveled beyond the East Coast. My flight had been delayed and I spent over an hour waiting in line for my rental car. By the time I got on the road at 12:45 AM I was so rattled from the experience that I needed a beer in a place that also served food. Per my usual protocol, I hadn't booked a hotel yet. When I travel alone I like to play it one day, one hour at a time. As I raced north on the vast empty highway I called the first bar that was close enough to the studio and within walking distance of a Motel. That way I could drink to my heart's content without worrying about a run in with who I understood to be hard-ass Texas cops.

I took my first sip of a local IPA and marveled at the bar keeps serving drinks with both efficiency and glee. It occurred to me that I forgot how real and fun people are in the interior of the United States. In DC, everyone postures their big powerful positions. In New York, everyone flaunts their big money. In Texas everything is actually bigger so they don't have to worry about that.

I looked down at the plastic ash tray and inhaled the smell of stale booze and cinders. I smelled the stinky freedom with pride. A white dude wearing a black hoodie was rapping Notorious B-I-G’s classic, “Big Papa” on the speakers blaring beneath the tacky styrofoam tiles on the roof of the pub.

While the "Coasties" clutch a prevailing perception that the so-called "flyover states" are an uncultured wasteland of strip malls and ignorant fools, I was surrounded by blacks, whites, uglies, cutes, skinny skaters and fat guys with t-Shirts that featured all forms of Texas pride logos atop their bulging guts. A girl bopped her head to the tunes, oscillating with costume elf ears and a dress that looked like it had been converted from an old tablecloth. Another girl dressed like a dude stepped up for her performance and bellowed Bieber into the karaoke mic.

The bar was festooned with trinkets and pictures of all kinds: A bright yellow Pittsburgh Steelers "Terrible Towel" hung above my head, stained by something that had somehow blasted its way 10 feet in the air. I had no time to wonder how the towel had been soiled because the bartender picked the spilled beer up off the bar, placed his thumb over the top of the bottle, and proceeded to spray it all over me, the 60-year-old drunken geezer, and everyone else who was nearby. No one even batted an eye. In DC this would have been considered assault.

Droplets of swill landed on the notebook where I originally wrote this post, and as the bubbles caused the ink to bleed I felt the arrogance of my East Coast roots wash away like the tide sucking dead driftwood back out to sea.

I ordered the barman's favorite item on the menu, turkey and cheese in between two slices of sourdough bread. "You want Doritos or Lays with that?"

"Whatever works," I replied.

As I ate my turkey samich and munched the RFK disapproved seed-oiled chips and washed it down with another beer, I examined the artwork on the walls and the eclectic clothes that populated the bar. There were random pictures that had no rhyme or reason, a stark contrast to the corporatized interiors of nearly every restaurant back home. There was no binding "theme" beyond the fact that it was a dive bar whose decorations seemed to scream from the flatlands "Fuck your culture, this is mine!"

I examined a small painting of a British pub with a large sticker plastered onto the glass that dominated the frame. It was the picture of a red street sign that read, "WARNING: THIS SIGN IS A DISTRACTION." I contemplated the diversion of diversity that we clutched like pearls to our allegedly cultured and well-educated chests in DC. It was a lie.

While my friends in the cities would be up a river without a paddle if they were forced to change a tire or the oil in their car, it was the folks in front of me who would be called in to fix such things instead. From this perspective, they were the capable ones and the college-educated people with callousless hands were the ones who, when confronted with mechanical adversity, were as helpless as a newborn lamb. I peered above the sticker to another picture of an Irish bar with a plastic skeleton hanging from the weathered wooden frame.

Whether the Brits and the Irish, the flyovers and the coasties, the blacks or the whites, I was stricken by the notion that we were all completely different and awesomely the same at the same time. Americana, baby, I thought as I took the final bite of my samich and washed it down with the IPA that tasted like dirt but perfectly complemented the sweet mayo and sour dough of the bread that sandwiched the meat together in my hands.

Given I hadn't a drive ahead of me, I inquired with the bartender for a digestive of sorts, "what kinda’ decent whiskey you got?"

"I got Maker's Mark for five bucks!" he said with a smile.

"Ah yes, a bourbon. Even better! In DC that would cost fifteen dollars!"

"This ain't DC," he said as he poured the fattest shot of booze I had ever seen.

He slid the glass down the darkly varnished bar and turned to the crowd.

"Gay!" he shouted at a man who was wearing I tight shirt with a deep vee that showed his hairless chest. The man turned and, with the flip of his limp wrist, revealed that he probably was, indeed, gay. As if it was part of his dance routine, the apparently homosexual man leaned back his head. He opened a mouth surrounded by a baby face and the burly, bearded bartender poured the bourbon straight from the bottle into his mouth. Yet another long pour straight into the belly of the young man. As he impressively gulped the entire spat of liquor he turned to the barkeeps and exclaimed, "Heyyy!" with an inflection that confirmed he was definitely gay.

As I swilled my own thick glass of brown liquor, I felt the familiar burn that any man with name as Irish as mine both loves and hates at the same time.

This place was the most culturally "diverse" room that I had the privilege of seeing in well over a year. And it was neither a hipster bar in Brooklyn nor a speakeasy in a basement of nation's capital. It was in a random bar next to a Walmart in Houston, T-X.

Stumbling back to the motel sign, I laughed at how much fun I just had at some random Irish pub smack dab in the middle of the United States. The sounds of big trucks whirred by as I walked up to my fifty dollar room.

A dead cocroach sat outside the door and, rather than looking at it with disgust, I gave the carcass and the rusted out railings, and the jalopy cars in the parking lot a wry grin. A huge American flag waved in the humid Houston wind.

I found culture in a place that was supposed to have none. I found a priceless experience in a place that was cheap.

As I drifted off to sleep I could smell the cigarette smoke that still permeated the hairs on the wispy mustache under my nose.

America ain't perfect, but she's the best country we got, I thought. This was the last idea in my mind I had as I drifted off and dreamed of the forgotten places in America, which, though dirty and stained with stinky fermented beer and years of ashy cigs, was more beautiful than even the finest European artworks in the alabaster art galleries of Washington, DC.