March 28, 2008
I am an expert on bars.
This is the result of an unrelenting life's study. I started early, and haven't quite quit yet, at least not in a final sense. I've slowed down. I've tapered off. I've taken to drinking at home, and the homes of others. And I have, on occasion, and sometimes because of a lack of an occasion, given up drinking all together. But bars draw me back, as surely and unapologetically as gravity induces the dust to settle when the wind stops blowing.
I've worked in bars and suffered reciprocal ownership relationships with a few. To the uninitiated, the idea of drinks at wholesale may seem enticing, but in retrospect I can testify that paying full-pop retail and tipping heavily is the cheaper way to go.
Bars, of course, serve needed functions in society. Before wars were plotted in corporate boardrooms, they were plotted in bars. The American Revolution was fomented over pints. Even as recent a war as World War Two was born in a beerhall. World War Two may have been America's last military engagement that was provoked by a drunk and not technocrats.
For the young, bars are staging grounds for the social identities they will assume in life, in counterpoint to the hypocrisy of their identities at family functions and church socials.
As one matures (or not), bars take on a different function. Bars are like the spawning grounds to which salmon go to reproduce, without the withering and dying afterwards. Bars are the social centers where young adults go to experience the opposite sex, and maybe get lucky. Or not.
As people get older -- thirty, thirty-five, forty – bars are places to go to synthesize the impending drooling and babbling of public senility.
Recently, in the guise of altruistic community service, I came across what is, in my expert opinion, the best bar in El Paso. Of course, it's in Juarez.
La Cucaracha is the first bar on the strip, across the walking Paso del Norte bridge in downtown El Paso. There, on the corner, next to the old stairway that led to the Follies in more innocent times, La Cucaracha is a throwback to different era.
La Cucaracha is like Rick's American Bar in Casablanca, the consensus Best Movie of All Time.
The last empressorial incarnation at this site was a Goth joint called the Submarine, a tribute to a literally underground dive that died in early eighties. The new Sub itself died three and a half years ago. Before that, this location was an obscure bar called La Palmira, owned and operated by the current owner-operator, Roberto Lopez Moran.
Roberto's father and namesake himself ran the first incarnation of La Cucaracha, a block south, between what continue to be the Kentucky Club and Martino's.
The senior Lopez Moran was an operator and entrepreneur. His father ran Circus Beas, which employed two hundred people and performed all over Mexico. He wore a diamond pinky ring, diamond tie tack, and six carats of glittering carbon crystal on his left hand alone. Fifty made-to-order suits and a hundred ties hung in his closet, and fifty pairs of shoes lined the floor. He ran Cafe Central until it closed in 1973.
And three and half years ago his namesake son opened La Cucaracha.
Let me give you an idea of the place. The German Wurlitzer is full of music by artists such as Suzanne Vega, James Brown, Miles Davis, Jeff Beck, Velvet Underground, Weather Report, Gillian Welch, Duke Ellington, Creedence, Jose Alfredo Jimenez, Ry Cooder, Pedro Infante, Radiohead, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Louis Armstrong, Traffic, Billie Holiday, Las Negresses Vertes, Frank Sinatra, John Lee Hooker, Stan Getz, and a lot of bands to hip for even me to know them.
There are four pool tables. The three coin-operated tables are fifty cents a game, and the Brunswick is two dollars an hour. All the tables are level with good felt, and you find a decent stick.
Besides the standard assortment of bourbons and scotches and vodkas, and a pretty good selection of tequilas, La Cucaracha stocks an excellent bootleg Sotol, the Tarahumara tincture Chuchupaste, and a dried fruit maceration in Cuban rum. And Cuban rum. Prices are generally in the three dollar range, in a day when decent drinks even in dive bars might cost five.
Despite the bargain basement prices, the place is swank. A variety of musical instruments, strings and brass and woodwinds, hang on the cream colored walls. The bar is varnished so thick it looks like mahogany, or maybe it really is.
In the thirties, immediately post-Prohibition in the U.S., the building was occupied by El Ranchito Escondido, Roberto tells me. El Ranchito Escondido functioned as a casino, bordello, dancehall, saloon, restaurant and hotel. Kind of a miniature prototype of modern day Las Vegas.
Nowadays, La Cucaracha is open every day but Monday, hypothetically at 6:30, but I get the feeling that Roberto's kind of casual about it. Nonetheless, I recommend La Cucaracha. If this bar were in San Francisco, or New York, there'd be hours wait to get past the velvet rope, and the drinks would cost four to six times what they cost now.