Jake's

Jake’s

            Jake’s was the first job I found when I moved to Austin in 1975.  I’d answered an ad for a Barmaid and was assured that no actual drink-mixing was involved- Jake’s was strictly a beer joint. From the outside, it was an odd shade of green, tucked into an obscure corner of downtown, among the used car lots. From the inside, Jake’s was dark, long and narrow, with a shuffleboard table running the length of the barroom and the sticky vinyl booths arranged along it.  Above the shuffleboard table was a design in pink neon on the ceiling  that brightened the room up a bit. The other distinctive decoration that I remember was a sign that said “Jake’s” made entirely out of interesting pens.  It was a Texas temple to neon, beer and grease.

            The man who ran Jake’s was called Pee Wee, and he lived above the bar with his wife Marie . I felt very lucky that Pee Wee wanted to impress me with  

what an excellent  cook he was.  He fed me my first fried oyster. It was steaming and crisp, contrasting perfectly with his tangy homemade tartar sauce. His fried chicken was so good that my hippie friends would risk bodily harm to obtain some- Jake’s wasn’t the kind of place you saw a lot of long hair in. He tried to get me to try his chicken-fried steak, but that was where I drew the culinary line, back then.

            The waitress who tended the tables while I tended the bar with was a tattooed biker chick- and this was before a lot of women had tattoos. She told me wild stories about her family- her daddy was a preacher and mama was a barrel-rider. Working at Jake’s was my like my personal Texas immersion program.  I liked being a bartender- having the bar between me and the action on the floor made me feel somewhat safe and protected.

            There were mainly two groups that hung out at Jake’s. The afternoon crowd was the quieter set- Government workers and guys from the car lots who’d have a couple of beers and a game or two of shuffleboard before heading off to wherever it was that grown-ups lived.  Later in the evening came the frat boys from UT, including some whose fathers owned those car lots we were surrounded by. Getting drunk at Jake’s was a rite of passage for them and they worked hard to get it right.  The jukebox played “Blue Eyes Cryin in the Rain”, “In Heaven there is no beer” and “Are you  sure Hank done it this way?”

            One afternoon a grizzled patron sat at the bar and issued an order that I could not understand.

“Puh!” he said, “I want a Puh!” I wracked my brains and looked at my selection and decided that he was trying to say “Bud”. I opened a Budwieser and placed it before him.  He looked at it, and me, with utter contempt.

“That’s a Budwieser!”  he sniffed.

“ Well, what did you want?”

“PUH! PUH!”

Finally, the light went on. Oh, Pearl. I’d forgotten about Pearl.  I think probably everyone has forgotten about Pearl.  They tore down Jake’s and really, truly put up a parking lot.