Travels with Barley by Ken Wells

lot of turtle to feed the hordes that showed up each Friday. But word came that Elmo had caught a 110-pound alligator snapping turtle—a turtle with a head the size of a cantaloupe, jaws as powerful as a great white shark, and a spiky shell that made it look prehistoric—and was planning to sacrifice it to the common pot. But anyone who wanted to see the turtle before it became supper was welcome to go view it.
    I was nineteen then and had gotten my first journalism job, a part-time position writing obituaries and cop briefs for the weekly paper in Houma, about five miles east of where I’d grown up on Bayou Black. When I mentioned this turtle to my editor, I was immediately dispatched with a camera to go take a picture of the beast—monster turtle pictures, I was admonished, were potentially front-page material. I got there and, sure enough, the turtle was hunkered down atop the bar, a crowd of beer drinkers around it. Its massive head was partly retracted but when Elmo offered it a can of beer—well, prodded the turtle with a can—out came the head and, ker-chunk! —it bit the can in half, sending beer everywhere.
    Elmo’s may not have been the Perfect Beer Joint. But as beer joint moments go, you have to admit that one is pretty special.
    Another of my favorite all-time beer joints was the bar tucked into Japan Town Bowl in San Francisco. I worked as a reporter for the Journal ’s bureau there in the ‘80s and some of my colleagues and I joined a bowling league because everybody in San Francisco was into fitness back then, and we knew bowling to be on the fun side of the aerobics spectrum. In 1988, I’d even written a page one feature for the paper about how bowling had made it into the Olympics as a demonstration sport that year, so this gave our theory great credibility. (Point of fact: Olympic scientists told me that it takes more pure athletic ability to be a 200 average bowler than it does to become an 80 percent free throw shooter in basketball.)
    The most important thing about bowling, other than aerobics and getting to wear bowling shoes, is coming up with a good name for your team. Since most of us on the team were journalists and thus professional wordsmiths, we arrived at the Pinheads , which of course is wonderfully wry, clever, and full of subtext on several different levels. We were quite proud of our name.
    Now, as part of our bowling aerobics ritual we would arrive at the alley about a half-hour before our match started and head for the bar to limber up. As bars go, it wasn’t much to look at. It was small and dark, the tables crowded together, and the decor was heavy on the Formica and vinyl side, though I recall something vaguely Tiki about the whole thing. It did have cold beer and a jukebox that had both Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” on it. Given that on most nights, bowling is either raging triumph or utter tragedy, the management of the bar had figured out that those were the only two songs the jukebox really needed. The bar had a convivial waitstaff—well, it had Brenda, a friendly and effervescent thirtysomething Southerner who understood the indisputably direct connection between cold bottles of Budweiser, tips, and the length of her denim miniskirts. Our team, being better than average customers, became great friends with Brenda later on, whereupon it was revealed that she had several advanced college degrees and was qualified to do both psychoanalysis and landscape architecture. But she liked working at the bar at Japan Town Bowl, which totally deepened our esteem for the place. The bar also had gloriously greasy cheeseburgers—another plus among the bowlingentsia.
    Anyway, you see what I’m getting at. Outsiders might say: Oh, just another dumpy, dark, bowling alley bar. But for me at the time it had a lot of Perfect Beer Joint qualities.
    Perhaps best of all, it was a social