The Search for the Perfect Sidecar

I first encountered the sidecar—and I mean the beverage, not the wheeled buggy attached to a motorcycle—when I lived in Houston, Texas. Ground zero for that life-altering encounter was a smoky little bar downtown on Travis Street named Warren’s.

Warren’s had this turn-back-the-hands-of-time appeal that drew an odd, but oddly stimulating, cross-section of Houston’s bibulous classes. Step through the door at happy hour and you’d find downtown business types loosening their Gucci ties and stretching their legs after a long hard day in the cubicles; reporter types from the newspaper building one block away, slightly scruffier, full of embellished tales of the “real” Houston; beauty parlor blondes with perfectly square nails and rose-lipped smiles.

By around nine, the yuppie mating ritual would have concluded, and the hipster artists would have crowded in. You’d know them by the mantle of cool they wore like cowtown royalty plus the uniform: the paint-spattered jeans and stained Chuck Taylors, the vintage cowboy boots, or, if they were Urban Animals, the skates.

Closer to closing time, you’d find the pressmen from the paper—men who really were the real Houston, who looked like they remembered the days when a bottle and a gun were stashed in every copy editor’s desk, who looked like they might have kept similar items stashed in their lockers.

The fellas’d tip their baseball caps at me and Janelle (mostly at Janelle) and sit at the bar trading beer and shots of amber-colored fluid with buddies who were, in fact, wearing guns because they were, occasionally, off-duty cops but, more often, well . . . bounty hunters.

Warren’s, with its leatherette seats and ancient barkeeps and waiters—all male at that time, not a perky waitron to be found in the joint—yes, Warren’s attracted them all and kept them all coming back for more by sticking to a simple formula: Warren’s was a drinker’s bar. You could get anything in Warren’s—anything at all, from absinthe to a Pimm’s Cup to a Rusty Nail. And you’d get a whole lot of it, too. A review I read recently described Warren’s as a place where the singles were like doubles and the doubles were like a whole fifth. An exaggeration, but the bar has earned its legend.

I had, of course, done some drinking at Warren’s before I met Janelle, but it wasn’t until we bonded over headlines and page proofs at the newspaper that the full potential for a girl like me—or like I was then—in a place like Warren’s—as it was then and as it apparently will be forever—could be fully realized.

Janelle and I moved through that dimly lit and masculine milieu as all women in their twenties who know themselves to be hot have moved for time out of mind: as if floated through the door on a cloud of their own exquisite scent. We made a striking pair and we knew it: Janelle with her masses of ruler-straight blonde hair, her swimming pool eyes, and Vargas girl figure; me, with my dancer’s build, short black curls, honey almond skin, and legs and an ass I’d been told to my face were the best in the newsroom.

I’d come to Houston just a few months before as a pending divorcée, a late-eighties true confession headlined: “My husband dumped me for a crackhead!” My life had unfolded into the kind of low-life-imitates-art tawdriness that lands a hard right hook to a girl’s selfesteem. In times of crisis we need a story to tell ourselves. Mine was, “following a dream, a sheltered Southern girl slogging obits and breaking news at the Miss South Carolina pageant gets a chance at the big show” kind of dream—I’d moved 1,500 miles west to a real paper, a big paper, to forget him, to show him, to show everybody . . .

. . . Only to myself floundering in the...