Quite a night -- drinks, and drinks (part II of II): the black neighborhood bar.

So, after taking my leave of the white neighborhood bar, I went to meet my friend from the masters program at the black neighborhood bar, and she was sitting there reading a book she has to read for class on the sociology of the Hell's Angels, and she had a pitcher out and was like, "Hey, just grab a glass," and the big black bartender ambled up and mumbled something, so I got out my ID and showed it to him, and he was like, "No, I don't need that, I know who you are, I said what do you need?", and I told him a glass as well as a glass of water and he got me one, and then I introduced myself... He always has seemed a bit standoffish, but, it was a good opportunity to finally meet him.

"He's so nice," my friend was like, and then she was like, "Did you see we're the only white people in here!", and she was right.

So, I had a glass of beer and we talked about this and that, and I was bitching about how I had nothing to read, and she was like, "Sonny Barger wrote a memoir", and then she started flipping through her book and was like, "Here, they describe it as 'a self-aggrandizing tale full of rapes and murders' - I guess that sounds like what you're looking for?"

Then she started telling me about how her dad was in a motorcycle gang, and used to get in shootouts in the streets of Detroit and shit like that, and since I knew her mom is a feminist sociology prof, I asked her how they had met, and she said that her dad migrated west in the mid-70s after being a doorman at a club in the Haight, and when her mom was a barmaid in Kalamazoo since on an impulse she had taken all her money for college and went to Europe to live for a year and was then broke, this huge tornado hit Kalamazoo and destroyed the buildings behind the bar where her mom worked, and her dad needed money and was on the clean-up crew, and after every day's work he used to come into the bar all sweaty from manual labor and order a burger and a beer, and two months later when he had to flee town because he had started stealing cars again, her mom was already pregnant with her, so they fled town together and went to a small cabin in rural Kentucky that was owned by a friend of a friend to stay put for a while and avoid the heat.

"It was one room and somehow the shower worked but no other plumbing did, and since it was a dry county, they sold moonshine, and they were really poor and would eat squirrels and shit, but" - and here my friend looked away a bit and her eyes got all misty, since her parents are now divorced - "they still both say it was the happiest time of their lives." She then told me about how they also held cockfights in the basement for spare cash, and her earliest baby picture is of her dad holding her behind the bar in the basement while an illegal cockfight is going on.

A little while later she told me, too, that she had heard from someone that the black neighborhood bar, while not technically a gay bar, is a bar in the neighborhood that gays go to, but she said she's not sure if it's true, since every time she goes there to drink and study, she never notices any signalling or anything between the men, though she never gets hit much, and a couple of times she's seen some women doing some close dancing that was more for them than any men in the room.