Menchaca Bar

      ...We strolled back outside, sat down against the gas pumps, and leaned back enough to get a little shade from the overhang. I took a big swig of my cold Pepsi to make some room to fill it with my peanuts. The fizz burned nice and cold all the way down the back of my throat, and I could have drunk ten more of them.

            I poured the peanuts too fast into the bottle, causing it to foam and shoot up like a volcano, spilling most of it on the ground. I moaned watching it soak into the chalky dirt.

            I looked around again, mostly to confirm that it was Billy’s daddy’s truck that I saw when we first walked up. I could see it was still there, parked at the local dive bar across the way.

   We sat a while longer and watched a stream of dusty beat-up trucks slowly roll in, one after another. It was getting to that time of day.  There were very few cars on the road, mostly trucks and nothing new except a big dually pickup that must belong to one of the Reiner boys, whose family raised most of the rodeo stock around here. Before it even came to a full stop, a couple of local alley whores appeared out of nowhere and made their way over to the passenger window like hungry scavengers and beggars.

             Time was of its own essence, so it felt. It seemed not so much slowed or stopped but rather more warped in a strange and odd way as if this place revolved in its own universe where life moved too fast and the days too slow. I felt I was no part of it at all on most days and once again found myself sitting here feeling like I was watching a movie.

            Billy’s daddy had probably been here from just past noon for the sole reason that they won’t sell you liqueur until past then anyway on Sunday to keep anyone from showing up at church drunk.

            Nevertheless, looking across the street at the busted neon, I was thinking, It could be any damn time of day and I still wouldn’t understand why anyone ever wanted to go in that poor excuse for a bar, especially in the daylight.

            This was a far cry from the Broken Spoke. It was less sturdy than a trailer house and was pretty much just four plywood walls on a concrete slab. There were clearly no windows except a cutout hole with a dripping noisy air conditioner sticking its rusty ass out of it. The ceilings were so low inside that you had to take your hat off to keep from knocking into the neon beer signs hanging everywhere. Most of the beat-down vinyl tile floor was covered by a pool table that was tattered, torn, and full of beer stains and cigarette burns. I can’t believe the place had never burned down, with the walls covered from floor to ceiling with these beer posters from the distributors. They piled up over the years in layers on the walls, sufficiently used as cheap insulation and a way to cover the mildew and brown asbestos water stains that were everywhere. It was dangerously one big fire hazard like being in a paper mache box with that yellow bug zapper in the back acting as a match almost torching the place every few seconds a bug flew at it....

Broken Spoke