Two bar memory lapses (1 of 2): Hispanic neighborhood.

Two times over two days a friend has mentioned having some very specific bar memory with me, and I just don’t remember it all.

First, my one (Asian-Canadian) friend was reminiscing the time we did this long barhopping night in a poorer (hispanic) neighborhood in the city, and he was like, “Being in  that one bar creeped me out.”

“Which one?”, I was like.

“The one where the bartender said not to worry, he used to be a wrestler and would protect us.”

I then verified that it wasn’t the small run-down bar occupied by an old (Mexican) guy across from an industrial yard and with an interior bar on the left that had a small wooden roof, or the bar down the street where people warned us against it because trouble happened there but it turned out to be rather mundane, with cool-colored tiles and photos on the walls and a couple tvs mounted high up on the walls playing, with an old lady bartender and a very quiet clientele.

Instead, he said there were a lot of small round cocktail tables to the left, and the bar was at the end to the right and wooden and had shelves or a rack at waist-level up, and the people were mostly Mexican couples and stared at us suspiciously and so we went to the very end of the bar where we wouldn’t be as conspicuous.

“And what did the bartender look like?”, I asked, and my friend said he was built kind of big and was a Mexican or Mexican-American in his early 30s.

My friend also confirmed that it didn’t seem to be one of those Mexican bars where they pay women to sit around dressed up and have drinks with you.

“I felt safer at the bar where they patted us down,” he then added.

“The one where you played pool with everyone?”, I asked.

“Yeah,” he was like.

Oddly, he described where the bar was, but nothing rang a bell, though so much else did about that night – I could remember the bar where we started out, and the 2 bars I suspected that bar was (including one by name), and the bar where they patted him down at, and this bar with what seemed like 3 young latina lesbians working, and at the front they had a scary Halloween dummy dressed up with a gigantic black dildo tucked in its pants (that was the other bar that I remembered by name!), and then finally the last bar of the night, in this reputedly violent (Irish-American) neighborhood where I had been before...  

At that bar, we had satten in the middle-right of a U-shaped bar and the then-new Taylor Swift song “We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together” played almost as soon as we got there, and we discussed the spoken voiceover part of the song.

I also remember on that barhopping night seeing this one bar with a blue neon sign just down a side street and having it be open the first time we passed and closed when we returned the same way, so a whole different time I had to return to the neighborhood just to go to that bar, and it had high ceilings and beige walls and bright lighting and was run by a (Polish) woman who kept her mail out up and down the bar like a messy kitchen table, and the clientele was Mexican, and a short suited (Mexican) guy on a guitar had wandered off the street and was standing towards the entrance and singing there for money as I walked in.

I’ll have to go look through my barlog and see what I wrote down for that night, especially for that bar where my friend remembers there was a wrestler.