Meerkats and Warthogs
A text: “I’m here.”
A volley of additional texts. Finally, my friend and I figured out why we couldn’t find one another. He was idling in the parking lot of my apartment complex, having misinterpreted my original injunction to “meet at back lot,” while I had gone on directly to the aforenamed dive bar.
It’s true. The decidedly unglamorous drinking hole, plopped next to an auto body shop and a feminist witch-themed pole dance studio, is exactly the type of establishment one might mix up with a parking area. Cornered by an expanse of gravel, its faded yellow paint recalls the “millennial mustard” of Buttigieg’s campaign website—and is just as likely overlooked.
But woe to anyone who overlooks it. Back Lot is the best dive bar in Austin, and it’s not even close.
~
A Tuesday night. Under wooden rafters punctuated by demurely relentless ceiling fans, among paintings that marry Warholian and AutoCAD vibes, patrons imbibe.
Most of the older ones have already left—those in baseball caps and faded camo who cluster at the bartop in the late afternoons. Now, a group of five, two of whom sport bucket hats, have claimed the dart boards mounted over a painted outline of Texas. Toy Story plays at a disturbingly high frame rate on a screen above one of the booths. And ensconced in the booth itself is a young woman in a neon harlequin windbreaker, a garment which would’ve distinguished biblical Joseph in a vaporwave universe.
Off to the side, a good-looking if “basic” co-ed group—UT Austin students, maybe—clusters around a billiard table illuminated by an upside-down trough. Eyeing the circling co-eds, I wonder: “What is the difference between a watering hole and a trough?”
~
Back Lot is a watering hole, not a trough, I’ve decided.
A trough is all routine and pleasurelessness—sustenance for identical, bordered, non-agentic creatures.
A watering hole is a globalist micro-utopia, where meerkats and warthogs with surfeits of personality, tastes, interests, and aspirations can all swill together. And that’s precisely what Back Lot is, despite its humble Texan trimmings. Indeed, looking closely, one discerns that each conventional flourish has been updated: the taxidermied mammal behind the bar boasts sunglasses, and the jukebox proposes a QR code, burying its analog charm under what Byung-Chul Han would call the “infosphere.”
But at least the poisons are without pretense: four-dollar well whiskeys and three-dollar drafts equally accessible to the ranch hand and the MFA poetry student.
~
No—you’re not supposed to come here if you have a “lot”; it’s not that type of establishment. The patrons here are “back” of those who have a “lot,” at least superficially. The truth is, though, a wide assortment passes through: filmmakers, producers, accountants, lawyers, journalists, podcasters, communist witches, and anarchocapitalist crypto bros. This motley also accords with the name of the bar. The chance encounter, the game of “lots,” is another feature of the watering hole.
At least, this is what I think each time I spot one bartender’s tattoo of a cottage on chicken legs—the dwelling of Baba Yaga, an old woman representing the chaotic, amoral forces of nature in Eastern European folktales. Back Lot is indeed her house in the woods!
Anything can happen here. Anyone can be happened upon.
~
In a satisfying sort of tessellation, there is a back lot at Back Lot—an outdoor enclosure with eight picnic tables and benches, arrayed dining hall style. The crowd here strikes me as a shade more “alt”; everyone is either smoking or in the vicinity of a smoker.
On the table where I’ve moved to nurse a mango White Claw (four dollars), I notice “Rebecca Black’s tits” scrawled in black Sharpie. The reference likely accurately dates the average age of the Back Lot patron. Suddenly, a couple plunks themselves down at the other end of my table; the man asks if he can borrow my lighter as he reaches for it. His date, a platinum blonde in an impeccable white coat, shoots me a look.
The blonde begins to declaim how little she cares for smoking. Sheepishly, the man snuffs out his cigarette. But his date goes on, dropping her voice to a whisper and disdainfully taxonomizing everybody around us. Finally, I overhear her disparaging my shoes (oxblood Docs). “How is this any different from Brooklyn?” she hisses.
I want to tell her that it’s different. I want to tell her that there is an outline of Texas painted underneath the dartboards. I want to tell her that it’s rude to make assumptions about other people, and that she shouldn’t just say out loud what I write into my notebook.
Stephanie Yue Duhem is a poet in Austin, Texas. She can be found online at www.sydpoetry.com.
