Travels with Barley Read Online Free PDF Page B

experienced, like the mysterious appearance of crop circles, a rash of women prone to ripping off their bras for no particular reason and flinging them at people. Somebody decided that the spoils of this spontaneous sport should be tacked to the ceiling—and, well, here they were. This practice had stopped as mysteriously as it had started, thus explaining the dated and forlorn look of the garments.
    When the band finished its set and the bar started to clear out I wandered over toward the bandstand and bumped into the smooching couple, who, though not smooching anymore, were still sort of pawing each other. They smiled and I smiled and we exchanged pleasantries. They told me they were Steve and Wanda from Birmingham, that they loved the Bama, that they drove over a couple of times a year and were—would you believe it?— married . This is about as far as we got: some friends of theirs barged over to grab empty chairs at their table. But before we said goodbye they told me I couldn’t possibly leave the Redneck Riviera until I’d heard Rusty and Mike play on this very bandstand.
    â€œAnd be sure,” said Steve, “they play that Wal-Mart song.”
    â€œYou mean the one about the guy bringing his drawers back to Wal-Mart?” said Wanda.
    â€œYeah, that one,” said Steve. “And the one about the manatee, too.”
    I slipped out of the bar, promising to try to take their advice.
    The next day, Gilchrist and I sat down for a leisurely lunch over platters of fried mullet at a restaurant called the Point that he said had the best mullet around. I had to admit this was the first time I’d ever eaten mullet. Where I grew up in Cajun Louisiana, nobody eats mullet; they are bottom feeders that people use for fish bait. But I did grow up eating alligator, frog legs, fried rattlesnake, snapping turtle, crawfish, squirrel, and raccoon; and once, on assignment in Alaska, I politely nibbled microwaved whale blubber with an Eskimo who had just graduated from Harvard. So mullet wasn’t that big of a challenge, and my inaugural mullet was crispy, tender, and good.
    I asked Gilchrist, a graduate of Auburn University, if he had an overarching philosophy about life. He smiled and said, “I like beer and money. But beer, like money, is never really yours. You just get to use it till you piss it away.”
    That’s a nice line for the guy who owns one of America’s great dive bars, but Gilchrist clearly knows what he’s about. Before buying the Bama he’d made a study of successful area beer joints and decided he wanted to transfer “that feeling that comes with a neighborhood bar” to a beach location while avoiding the pitfalls of many beach bars—they simply become tourist traps. He was dedicated at the outset to the prospect that live, original music would be part of the formula (and the Bama has live music 365 days a year). But he was also wary of imposing a “Bama notion” until he had a firm idea of the kind of crowd the Bama might naturally attract. “In large-building construction, a lot of landscape architects will go out and put in the landscaping and walkways before the building is ever done,” he said. “But then they find out that people will pretty much walk where they want to anyway. I figured the best approach was to watch where people walk first.”
    We later talked about the Mullet Toss and I asked him about his greatest concern in putting on an event that big. He said it was “keeping the beer cold.”

    Two weeks later when I arrived for the Toss, it was pretty easy to see what a daunting task that would be. It was mid-Friday morning of Day One and already the parking lots around the Bama were pretty much filled up, there was a tailback a couple miles up and down the highway and people were streaming into the bar. It was a warm, clear day and would no doubt get warmer—a beer day if I ever saw one. Gilchrist