Travels with Barley Read Online Free PDF

Reporting from the Mahogany Ridge. Anyway, I collect bars, metaphorically at least, the way some people collect beer cans, or shampoo bottles from motel rooms. I was plenty curious about the Bama.
    I liked the place as soon as I darkened the door. It was a Friday night about 9:00 P.M. , and we joined a line of people waiting to pay the $5 cover. Dell Long being Dell barged up ahead into the crowd before I could stop her to announce that a journalist writing a beer book was coming through and to convince the door person to waive the cover since Gilchrist was expecting us. I figured it was easier to go along than hold up the line in a discussion about journalistic ethics, and why it was necessary for me to pay my own way into the bar. I would just catch the doorman later. This did have the effect, though, of having an attractive woman at the door buttonhole me as I squeezed by to say, “You oughta go interview my husband. He knows everything about beer or at least everything about drinking it. In fact, we’re getting divorced over beer.”
    She laughed when she said it, so I felt I should laugh, too.
    The Bama, I would learn, is a bit of a maze, and as we pushed through a small outer bar into the first bar with a bandstand, people were thick as schooling snapper. A group called Jezebel’s Chill’n was onstage, playing stuff that sounded like a cross between rockabilly and blues. They were loud, people were clapping and swaying along, and some people were even trying to dance, though, as far as I could tell, there was not an official dance floor (not that that ever stopped a beer-enthused, dance-minded person in any bar I’d been in). I later learned that many of the dancers were elementary school teachers in town on one of those seminar boondoggles—they were certainly dancing like they didn’t have school in the morning. Pitchers of beer stood on every table and the beleaguered servers behind the bar, where every stool was taken, were bobbing about and jabbing at beer taps like harried prizefighters. And this room, with maybe a couple of hundred people crammed in it, turned out to be the smallest part of the action.
    A few things caught my eye: a sign on the wall that said “Having Sex on the TV Can’t Hurt You—Unless You Fall Off”; the fact that a huge number of bras, in various stages of deterioration, were hanging from the raftered ceiling; and that over at a table by the bandstand a couple, oblivious to this sea of happy turmoil, was furiously making out. I knew even if crusty old Curley were here they wouldn’t get thrown out: nobody could get to them.
    Someone had sent word to Gilchrist that we had arrived and out of this chaos he appeared, slowly fighting his way through the crowd like a salmon swimming upstream. Long introduced us. We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries and off we went on a Cook’s tour of the place. It was so crowded and noisy and Gilchrist was so often stopped by friends and well-wishers that we agreed we’d meet the next day for a proper interview over lunch. Then he was swallowed up by the crowd again.
    I wandered around on my own for a bit, satisfying myself that the rest of the Bama would live down to the first of it, and it did, quite nicely. (Somebody, in fact, would later describe the bar as “the kind of place where you wipe your feet on the way out”) Then I decided to go back to our starting point to see if I could get an explanation for those bras. I spied a few other things along the way that warmed me to the joint; one was a vending machine that, besides the usual items like chewing gum, pocket combs, and potato chips, sold guitar strings.
    I fought my way back into the room where Jezebel’s Chill’n were playing, found a seat at the bar and ordered a Heineken. During a break in the music, I learned from a bartender that sometime back in the ’80s, the time frame no longer being exactly clear, the Bama had