Continued… How could I say no to that?  If this guy Mike said the Brown Jug was the “Best Bar in the World” it had to be a pretty fucking strange place.  I almost felt like it was my civic duty to go check it out.

No one is quite sure exactly how old The Brown Jug is; they only know for sure that it’s been there since at least 1941.  They know this because recently someone found a raffle ticket from that date.  It’s said that back then the Tenderloin had at least four bars on every block. My first impression of the Brown Jug was that it looked the way that Redneck biker bars always look in movies.  There were framed posters of motorcycles on the wall, and a neon Budweiser light that kept trying to end its miserable life and finally flicker out for good. Instead of playing the expected music, like Lynyrd Skynyrd or David Allen Coe, the jukebox was blaring mid 80’s adult contemporary light rock, like Level 42 and Hiroshima. A bit confused and caught off-guard, we sat down at the bar and prepared to order some drinks.

I addressed the bartender who was drying some glasses behind the bar, “Hi, are you Shelley?”

She eyed me suspiciously and said, hesitantly, “Ya.”

“We just came from Jonell’s where we met Mike,” I said. “He told me to tell you ‘hi’ and that he sends his love.” She shook her head, chortled a bit and walked away to grab some more glasses. Shelley put down the glass she was working on and spit out her reply, “I don’t talk to that motherfucker when he’s been drinking.  Shit, I don’t even talk to that motherfucker when he’s been thinking about drinking, that rotten piece of shit.” Shelly then picked up the glass again, took a breath and said, “Now what the fuck can I get you?”

“Two Budweisers,” Kenny answered.

She brought over the beers and Kenny paid her while I was doing my best not to look him in the eye for fear of losing my shit and cracking up. So I turned to my right and saw at the end of the bar a lady looking like a washed up, drunk Diana Ross making weird scrunched up faces at her drink.  She and I made eye contact so I waved to her and said, “Hello.”  She replied by giving me the finger.  She continued to do so every time I looked over there for the rest of the night.

“Fuck it,” I thought, and turned to my left where I saw a crumpled up old man who looked like he’d been sitting on the same barstool every night since 1948.  I smiled at him and nodded, but got no response. Just as I was about to return to my notebook, though, some cheesy song that only gets airplay on your mom’s love-song stations, like “I Go Crazy (Each Time that I Look in Your Eyes)” came on. The old guy next to me suddenly got all animated and started silently waving his cigarette around in the air and grinning like someone who just had their first taste of flesh and realized that they loved it. This was the point when I realized that the Brown Jug probably was the best bar in the world, but that it was far too much for my fragile soul to handle.  It was like having your mind opened up to all the secrets of the universe and realizing that maybe you didn’t want to know those secrets after all.

Have a bar story to share? Write or upload it here.