Recently, a long time friend of mine and I were sitting around sharing a few cold ones, just shooting the breeze about nothing in particular, and somehow or another we got on the subject of the clubs and bars in Beaumont we hung out at in our college and after- college bachelor days; and how almost all of them are gone now.
No big surprise there – clubs and bars come and go with regularity, always have and always will, it is the nature of the business. And we are taking about places we patronized 20 years ago, or more. Nevertheless, we went on to compile a list of a dozen or so of our ‘favorites’, and I thought it would be fun, it being Friday and the traditional start of the weekend and all, to list a few here.
I have the idea at this point to do it as sort of a series, a new installment each Friday. This will allow me to be a little expansive about each place if I want to, and at the same time hopefully won’t bog this place down all at once with nostalgia overload. Also, it will unburden me of the sometimes maddening process of thinking of something even vaguely interesting to write about. For one day of the week, at least.
So, anyway, here’s the first of what will hopefully be several installments. This week it concerns the establishment that was sort of the “mother” of all my later bar-hopping experiences, a place I first started going to halfway through my senior year of high school (when one could still drink legally at age 18), and which probably altered my later path in life more than I would ever like to admit, even (especially) to myself.
No big surprise there – clubs and bars come and go with regularity, always have and always will, it is the nature of the business. And we are taking about places we patronized 20 years ago, or more. Nevertheless, we went on to compile a list of a dozen or so of our ‘favorites’, and I thought it would be fun, it being Friday and the traditional start of the weekend and all, to list a few here.
I have the idea at this point to do it as sort of a series, a new installment each Friday. This will allow me to be a little expansive about each place if I want to, and at the same time hopefully won’t bog this place down all at once with nostalgia overload. Also, it will unburden me of the sometimes maddening process of thinking of something even vaguely interesting to write about. For one day of the week, at least.
So, anyway, here’s the first of what will hopefully be several installments. This week it concerns the establishment that was sort of the “mother” of all my later bar-hopping experiences, a place I first started going to halfway through my senior year of high school (when one could still drink legally at age 18), and which probably altered my later path in life more than I would ever like to admit, even (especially) to myself.
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1. The Cactus Lounge. The Cactus Lounge was located on Park St., just northeast of Railroad Blvd. There was a drug store on the corner, then the Cactus. A grocery store was across Park.
The Cactus was kind of a dive, a small, two-story wood frame building of indeterminate age. There couldn’t have been more than 300 sq. ft. of usable space on the ground floor, where the bar was; a three sided bar with a wall behind it, in the middle of the room. There was a warped shuffleboard table along the south wall, and a jukebox and old style analog pinball machine on the east wall, next to the entrance. Behind the bar on the north side of the building was an area with a couple of tables and chairs, and a pool table. On the west side were the restrooms, such as they were (let’s just say I was glad I could stand up to piss; or as some graffiti in the men’s room read, ‘Go ahead, crabs can’t swim upstream.’)
The place was always dark and smoky, and decorated with all manner of promotional material from the beer distributors – neon lighted Budweiser signs, Miller Lite posters, a Moosehead clock, etc. The negative effect on one’s balance caused by a dozen or so longnecks was periodically enhanced by the rumble of freight trains going by on Railroad Ave. The southwest corner of the building was maybe 15 ft. from the tracks (Railroad ran at a 45 degree angle to its cross streets, including Park), and when the big diesel locomotives would pass by, the whole place would shake.
The proprietor was an old WWII veteran named Les Springs, who lived upstairs. He hired college-age kids to run the bar for him. Meantime, he would sit all night in the VFW hall a block or two south on Park, across Railroad, telling war stories with his buddies and getting loaded. Then he’d show up at the Cactus an hour or so before closing and hold court at the bar. He had two or three stock phrases he used over and over, issued loudly and with slurred speech, the slurring caused by all the drinks he had at the VFW earlier that night, and the giant cigar that was always jammed into the corner of his mouth. A couple of his sayings I remember in particular – when you walked up to the bar, he’d mumble, “Whadd’l’ya have?” every single time; and when he was trying to close the place down and get everyone out of there, he’d yell, “It’s Motel 6 time.” His clientele was almost entirely college age or a few years older, and most of us could imitate him bellowing these bon mots, and often did.
The Cactus’ license was for beer only, and the place closed every night at midnight, even on the weekends. Pitchers of draft beer were less than $2, longnecks were I think $1. Wednesday thru Saturday nights, it was usually packed. The jukebox was almost always blaring, and had an eclectic mix of music I don’t think ever changed the four or five years I hung out there, and most of it was not of very recent vintage – some Sticky Fingers era Rolling Stones, other assorted mid 1970’s hard rock, Jerry Jeff Walker and Hank Williams, Jr. of course, and some country songs I never knew the singers of (I’m not much of a country fan), but which are permanently burned into my brain, from hearing them a gazillion times while drinking at the bar or playing shuffleboard or trying to put a move on some sorority babe out slumming – “999, 999 Tears”, “From a Jack to a King”, “Hello Walls”, and several others.
As time went on and my crowd got wilder and wilder, the Cactus evolved from a destination for the evening into a starting point for our night time forays – whatever was planned for later on, we’d usually meet up at the Cactus around 8:00 or so and spend a few hours drinking beer and loosening up, before we embarked on more terminal activities.
For me and I think most of the people I hung out with, graduation from college roughly coincided with drifting away from the Cactus scene. I’m not really sure why. Anyway, we went there less and less, and of course the loosely allied group I ran with in school drifted apart as well, as life’s responsibilities began to intrude into the picture.
1. The Cactus Lounge. The Cactus Lounge was located on Park St., just northeast of Railroad Blvd. There was a drug store on the corner, then the Cactus. A grocery store was across Park.
The Cactus was kind of a dive, a small, two-story wood frame building of indeterminate age. There couldn’t have been more than 300 sq. ft. of usable space on the ground floor, where the bar was; a three sided bar with a wall behind it, in the middle of the room. There was a warped shuffleboard table along the south wall, and a jukebox and old style analog pinball machine on the east wall, next to the entrance. Behind the bar on the north side of the building was an area with a couple of tables and chairs, and a pool table. On the west side were the restrooms, such as they were (let’s just say I was glad I could stand up to piss; or as some graffiti in the men’s room read, ‘Go ahead, crabs can’t swim upstream.’)
The place was always dark and smoky, and decorated with all manner of promotional material from the beer distributors – neon lighted Budweiser signs, Miller Lite posters, a Moosehead clock, etc. The negative effect on one’s balance caused by a dozen or so longnecks was periodically enhanced by the rumble of freight trains going by on Railroad Ave. The southwest corner of the building was maybe 15 ft. from the tracks (Railroad ran at a 45 degree angle to its cross streets, including Park), and when the big diesel locomotives would pass by, the whole place would shake.
The proprietor was an old WWII veteran named Les Springs, who lived upstairs. He hired college-age kids to run the bar for him. Meantime, he would sit all night in the VFW hall a block or two south on Park, across Railroad, telling war stories with his buddies and getting loaded. Then he’d show up at the Cactus an hour or so before closing and hold court at the bar. He had two or three stock phrases he used over and over, issued loudly and with slurred speech, the slurring caused by all the drinks he had at the VFW earlier that night, and the giant cigar that was always jammed into the corner of his mouth. A couple of his sayings I remember in particular – when you walked up to the bar, he’d mumble, “Whadd’l’ya have?” every single time; and when he was trying to close the place down and get everyone out of there, he’d yell, “It’s Motel 6 time.” His clientele was almost entirely college age or a few years older, and most of us could imitate him bellowing these bon mots, and often did.
The Cactus’ license was for beer only, and the place closed every night at midnight, even on the weekends. Pitchers of draft beer were less than $2, longnecks were I think $1. Wednesday thru Saturday nights, it was usually packed. The jukebox was almost always blaring, and had an eclectic mix of music I don’t think ever changed the four or five years I hung out there, and most of it was not of very recent vintage – some Sticky Fingers era Rolling Stones, other assorted mid 1970’s hard rock, Jerry Jeff Walker and Hank Williams, Jr. of course, and some country songs I never knew the singers of (I’m not much of a country fan), but which are permanently burned into my brain, from hearing them a gazillion times while drinking at the bar or playing shuffleboard or trying to put a move on some sorority babe out slumming – “999, 999 Tears”, “From a Jack to a King”, “Hello Walls”, and several others.
As time went on and my crowd got wilder and wilder, the Cactus evolved from a destination for the evening into a starting point for our night time forays – whatever was planned for later on, we’d usually meet up at the Cactus around 8:00 or so and spend a few hours drinking beer and loosening up, before we embarked on more terminal activities.
For me and I think most of the people I hung out with, graduation from college roughly coincided with drifting away from the Cactus scene. I’m not really sure why. Anyway, we went there less and less, and of course the loosely allied group I ran with in school drifted apart as well, as life’s responsibilities began to intrude into the picture.
Sometime later, Les died (I used to wonder at times if he hadn’t already died awhile back, and was just preserved from the inside out by all the alcohol), and a couple of former habitués of the Cactus a few years older than I bought it and ran it for a year or two. Eventually a government grant came through to move and re-route the railroad tracks running down the middle of Railroad Avenue. The city would condemn land on the north side of the street, and widen it to a six lane highway spur with a median in the middle, and rename it MLK Parkway. They were building an “inner loop” from South Park to the north end, and easing traffic congestion around Lamar University. Some of the first casualties were the Cactus and the buildings immediately surrounding it.
It was sometime before that happened, probably three or four years after my time as a 'regular', that one mid-week night my cousin and I got to feeling a bit nostalgic, and went by the Cactus for a few beers and I think to relive old times a bit (though this part was never mentioned between us.) When we walked in, though, there was a young kid behind the bar and maybe three customers in the place. The atmosphere was entirely dead, and to me profoundly depressing. As Thomas Wolfe said, you can’t go back again. I shouldn’t have even tried.
Then, not long after, that small piece of real estate where I and so many others had misspent a good deal of our youths was cleared for road construction, and only an empty grassy knoll was left at that spot (save for a few stunted wisteria trees the city had planted), overlooking busy MLK below. I thought they should have erected a plaque at least, to commemorate the place. ‘Here stood the Cactus Lounge, a drinking establishment where a generation of Beaumont’s youth, full of vigor and promise, spent their time; where some of them first contemplated the notion of selling their souls, thus beginning the long process of happily pissing it all away.’
It was sometime before that happened, probably three or four years after my time as a 'regular', that one mid-week night my cousin and I got to feeling a bit nostalgic, and went by the Cactus for a few beers and I think to relive old times a bit (though this part was never mentioned between us.) When we walked in, though, there was a young kid behind the bar and maybe three customers in the place. The atmosphere was entirely dead, and to me profoundly depressing. As Thomas Wolfe said, you can’t go back again. I shouldn’t have even tried.
Then, not long after, that small piece of real estate where I and so many others had misspent a good deal of our youths was cleared for road construction, and only an empty grassy knoll was left at that spot (save for a few stunted wisteria trees the city had planted), overlooking busy MLK below. I thought they should have erected a plaque at least, to commemorate the place. ‘Here stood the Cactus Lounge, a drinking establishment where a generation of Beaumont’s youth, full of vigor and promise, spent their time; where some of them first contemplated the notion of selling their souls, thus beginning the long process of happily pissing it all away.’
2 comments:
You nailed the Cactus. Sounds like we were there at the same time 84-89
I was at Lamar 83-87. Never forget my first visit to the place. Great memories.
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