In the
(Mexican) neighborhood in back of the stockyards, like other Mexican areas in
the city, there’s signs of Polish people having once lived there - for example,
this one bar with a (Polish) woman’s name as part of its name that was
advertised by a blue neon sign in its window, and that was located down a
sidestreet across from a small parking lot for a Mexican grocery store, which
bar unfortunately was open when me and my one (Asian-Canadian) friend began
barhopping in that neighborhood, but closed when we finally had gotten to the
point of trying to stop through that particular bar.
(That
can be difficult, figuring out which bars to go to first; it’s not always
obvious which bars in a neighborhood stay open the latest.)
A few
weekends ago, I was returning from the mixed (black) and (Mexican)
neighborhoods just south of it, which I had been barhopping in in the late
afternoon (=the safest time of day to go to bars there), and I decided to swing
through to see if that bar with the Polish woman’s name in it was open.
So, it
is, and I walk in, and it’s brightly lit with a high ceiling, with the bar to
the right with mail on it right by the door, and to the left a table with a
large vase of big flowers on it behind a very short (Mexican) guy playing a
guitar, and a pool table toward the back, where a couple tall big-shouldered (Mexican)
women are playing pool, with some guys nearby at the bar watching them.
And, the
whole place smells like a nursing home.
I sit
down at the bar, but no one comes to get me a drink, not even one of the
(Mexican) women playing pool, one of whom I assumed was the bartender, from the
way that they moved around the place authoritatively with their slouchy tits
bursting out of their halter tops.
The
short (Mexican) guy playing guitar stop and collects money and leaves, and
still no one approaches me to get my order, so I turn to this (Mexican) guy to
my right, and I’m like, “?Donde esta el bartender?” (“Where is the
bartender?”).
“Wait,
wait, she is coming,” he says to me, and just as he says this, this back door
behind the poor table opens, and this very large (older) (kind of white) woman
with straggly and greasy dirty blonde hair and baggy skin waddles out, and
comes up to me at the bar.
“?Hables
espanol?”, I was like. “Queria una
cerveza” (“Do you speak Spanish? I’d
like a beer”).
“Un
pocito,” she was like, “A little.”
“Oh,
okay,” I was like, “I’d like a beer,” and after she got me my Miller Lite
bottle (=the cheapest beer they had), I asked her if she was Mexican, and she
was like, “No, Polish,” and instantly I was like, “Chladnie mowie po-polsku”
(“I speak a little Polish”), at which the woman smiles, and was like, “You look
Polish.”
Then,
she came out from behind the bar, and waddled down to the end of the bar and
sat down where the mail was, and began going through it, even though it was
like 8:30pm on a Saturday night.
I sat a
while with my beer, and watched the “Polish Idol” version of American Idol that
was on TV, and then finished and got up to leave.
I
stopped by to talk to the bartender, and I asked her her name (in Polish) – it
was her whose name was on the bar! - then I said the proper response and
introduced myself (in Polish), and added “Thank you for everything, and good
night” (in Polish), to which she held out her hands high up and began
applauding, and was like, “Bardzo dobrze, bardzo dobrze!” (“Very good, very
good!”).
Then, I
left.
. . .
My one
friend who’s a professor of modern Czech literature has said that I’m the bar
mayor.
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