Strangers in a strange bar

My roommate in college found a new bar: “Come on! It’s great! Dollar beers!”

I was skeptical. If this dollar beer place was so awesome, why hadn’t we learned about it from our peers? But, she talked enough of us into going that I went along too.

“Dollar beers” turned out to be 5 ounce Dixie Cups of watery Pabst. No one but myself and my friend Jason seemed to mind this place, so we played along. “Yeah, dollar beers, Becky. This is great,” we smiled disingenuously. Jason and I scanned the barroom for threats. The local patrons were all true-blooded rednecks and proud of it. We were the college kids. While my friends laughed loudly, only Jason and I saw the glowering looks from the other clientele.

“Let’s go play pool,” I suggested, thinking it would lighten our wariness of the dive.

We went and laid our stack of quarters on the nearest table. Jason and I kept an eye out, and the two players finished their game, but they started racking up the balls again. We didn’t want to lose our turn, so the two of us walked over. “Hey, um, you skipped us. We had quarters down for next game.

The two players were a short, rotund man with thinning brown hair and a thicker mustache, and a tall woman who had kept her figure despite the fact that all the best efforts of this bar were trying to bring her down. She smiled benignly, warmly, and stretched out her arm to hand me her pool cue. I started to reach toward her.

“Hell no you can’t play pool on this table!” the suddenly red-faced round man shouted at us.

Me: “But, we put our money down.”

Lathering-up redneck slams his hands against the table: “This is Bob’s table!”

“I don’t understand.”

“Nobody plays pool on this table but Bob!” He screamed at me and Jason. Completely at odds, his smiling female companion said, “Go ahead and let them play.” For a second, it looked like we might get the table. But, no.

The short man started shaking his head furiously and getting so red he was starting to turn purple, and he seemed to be puffing up somehow: “You wanna play pool on this table? You gotta ask Bob! This is Bob’s table!”

Jason and I were thoroughly confused. As far as we could tell, only Bob was allowed to use the table, so who were these two?

“Are you Bob?” I asked.

Whoa-ho! The angry redneck looked like he might have an aneurism. “Of course I’m not Bob!” He started shouting even louder, but no one looked our way or made any attempt to intervene. “Do I look like Bob to you?” he screamed at us.

“Who’s Bob?”

“Well Bob’s the one over there!” If you can shout and sound exasperated at the same time, that’s what he did.

“Um, over where?”

“At the end of the bar! Where Bob always sits! Everyone knows Bob!”

Jason and I turned to look. There, at the end of the bar, a tall, well-dressed cowboy wearing the latest Garth Brooks style color-block shirt smiled smirkingly at us and took a pull from his brown bottle of beer. We figured we’d gone this far with angry dude and the oddly smiling pool partner, so Jason and I might as well see it through. We walked over to Bob.

“Can we play pool on your table?”

The cowboy waited, still smirking a cock-eyed malicious grin. “Sure,” he said, really slow. “Soon as they’re finished with their game, y’all can play.”

Jason and I sat back down. Somehow, none of our friends had noticed any of this happening even though it all occurred within a ten foot radius of their table. We were pretty spooked and drank our “dollar beers” grimly. “I’m gonna piss. I’ll be back in a minute,” Jason told me. I sat fidgeting while he was gone. I was rattled by this scary, foreign place, but my friends were all laughing and pounding back their Dixie Cups of beer. Each time the bartender got a tip, she rang one of those brass maritime bells with a bitter vehemence, as if announcing, “Yeah, fucker, I know you didn’t tip me enough.” Each of her clangs shot through me while I waited for my friend.

Finally, at my side, Jason started handing me my coat: “We’re leaving. Now,” he said. After the confrontation we’d just had with Bob and not-Bob, I didn’t question his judgment that something else had gone horribly wrong in Dollar Beer Bar.

“What happened?” I asked as soon as we had shuffled into our coats and left with a few hasty goodbyes to our friends.

“I was standing at the urinal, and when I looked up, right at eye level was the sentence, ‘If you was a nigger you’d be dead now.’”

We were silent for the rest of our walk home to the apartment complex. Jason and I never went back for dollar beers again.