Travels with Barley Read Online Free PDF Page A

publicist for the legendary radio DJ Wolfman Jack and is one of those people who could charm a rabid dog. Gilchrist had hired her to, among other things, organize a tribute party to cops, firemen, and rescue workers; she’d coaxed Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel into donating a lavish space and letting the Gulf Coasters bring in their home-cooked seafood.
    I was down in New Orleans for this book, trying unsuccessfully to get a Budweiser distributor to let me ride through the French Quarter on a beer truck, when I ran into her. When she heard I was interested in the Bama, she told me about her dealings with Gilchrist, including a story about a funny moment that had transpired during the Waldorf soiree. It seems that one of the tag-along Bama musicians, not exactly living up to Waldorf dress codes or table manners, was mistaken for an intruding bum as he pawed shrimp, unencumbered by toothpick or napkin, from a silver platter. He was about to be bounced when Long intervened. Anyway, she volunteered to introduce me to Gilchrist. I accepted—in fact it was a deal closer.
    Face it: there are almost 295,000 licensed “on premise” places in America that serve beer; even after subtracting hotels, restaurants, sports venues, and bowling alleys, that leaves a lot of beer joints. Quite a few hold annual events equivalent to the Mullet Toss. I could go watch one anywhere. But I was leaning toward the Bama precisely because it wasn’t an obscure dive resisting its popularity like some Mississippi juke joint that only locals could guide you to. It seemed a paradox: a bar that had managed to capture something of that very mystique by assiduously managing its dive-bar image. It was a beer joint that, according to its Web site, had a special-events coordinator. From the Web site you could also learn that the Bama had been written up, in the same “you-gotta-check-out-this-crazy-place” way, in a lot of national publications, Playboy and Esquire among them; it was even featured in John Grisham’s evil-law-firm thriller The Firm . And I’d not yet met many saloon keepers who hire publicists. In light of all that, the Bama being named one of Stuff magazine’s greatest American dive bars seemed about as accidental as Microsoft’s becoming a software juggernaut.
    I did wonder, though: would it feel like the real deal, or would it feel like a biker bar set in Disney World?
    I admit this question was only peripheral to my mission, but I am fond of bars and I like to think I can tell a pure one from a phony. Like Joe Gilchrist, I’d spent a fair amount of my youth exploring them. I’d learned a lot as a cub reporter on my weekly hometown paper back in Houma, Louisiana, by deconstructing school board stories and cop features with pals over $2 pitchers of Miller Genuine Draft at Curley’s Lounge, a dark and dingy downtown hole-in-the-wall. It was run by a crusty (and bald) retired air force sergeant whom everybody called Curley and whose real name nobody ever seemed to know. Curley liked it that way. I was on as good terms with Curley as anybody but he kicked me out one night for kissing my girlfriend at the dark table way at the back of the bar, even though we were about the only people there. When the next night I asked him why, he told me it was the way we were kissing that bugged him, not the kissing itself—implying that I had a lot to learn in the kissing department. From that moment on I knew Curley was a keen observer of the human condition. (I also developed a keen desire, as yet unrequited, to be a bartender one day.)
    As a journalist who has traveled widely across the U.S., Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, I have found bars to be perennially reliable oases in strange towns and foreign countries, not just places where you can get a beer and take the sting out of the day but places where you can get the real dope about a place, plus pick up story ideas. We scribes call this