Next Bar of the Night...

The next bar of the night was tucked away on a side street right up next to the back end of the stockyards, and a (7^th generation Mexican) (female) bartender from earlier in the night had told me how to find it.

On my way there, I passed by this busy private club full of (Mexican) bikers in leather, with at least 15-20 bikes lines up out in front of the clut.

Then, on that same residential street in an industrial area, the bar is there, a yellow place with its name in black letters backlit in red, and I walk in, and the bar falls silent.

It’s full of (white) people, mostly regulars, and someone was like, “Hey, why’d you kill the party?”.

“Not my fault!”, I was like, “I’m just here to grab a nightcap!”.

Then, everyone went back to talking.

A third of the way done with my beer, the older balding (white) security guard comes up, and checks my ID, “Just to be sure,” and from his eyes you can tell he’s a heavy drinker and maybe a bit odd.

After I left, I stood outside with him and chatted a bit.

He said the (Mexican) bikers don’t come by that much, but when they do, there’s almost never any problems.

He also said that he was surprised that the racing hadn’t started up that night, and that you could just stand out there and hear it, all the guys who come from all over the city and bust into the stockyards and do illegal racing in souped-up cars.

“They start by midnight,” he was like, “But sometimes they already start by now,” he said, checking his watch.

“ZHHEEEEEEEEEENH, uh-ZHEEEEEEEEEEENH,” he then burst out, making a sound of racing cars going fast and changing gears.   “Just like that, you can hear them.”

“Like Mexican, Polish, American?”, I was like.

“Mexican, Chinese, everything,” he was like, “All mechanics.”

He then added that he used to be a security guard in the stockyards, and he never called them in for trespassing and racing, since he liked to stand outside at his guard booth and watch them fly by.

One night, he added, the police locked all the gates but one, and he watched the racers go in a high speed line from one locked gate to the next, slowing down and doing a u-ie still in that single line of cars, “Just like in ‘Fast and Furious,’” till they finally got to the one open gate and the cops busted them all.

He also said that he’d seen semis just bust through one of the locked gates, since no one was around to open it, and they didn’t feel like driving all the way around the stockyard, but rather straight through it.

At that point, this (Mexican) biker couple in leather pulled up and got off their bikes and went to ask him something, so I said bye friendily and he then said goodbye and I went to go on my way.