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+29+ FORT WORTH BARS ERNEST HEMIN GWAY has a lot to answer for. He may have been the best American writer of his time, but he had a baneful influence on the health and deportment of a whole generation of young men who grew up wanting to be writers in the 1950s. I was one of those young men, and my aspiring-writer friends and I were convinced from reading Hemingway that if we wanted to write about life, we had first to experience it. Experiencing life meant hanging around bars and rubbing shoulders with "real" people, real people being people who were not our parents' friends or our professors, but the down-and-outers and boozers that Hemingway's characters associated with in the alleys behind Les Hailes or the bars of Montmartre. Unfortunately, my friends and I were not growing up in Paris but in Fort Worth, Texas. Nevertheless, we sought out authenticity and gritty reality in whatever bars and hanky-tanks we could brazen our underage selves into, always keeping an eye on the door for the Liquor Control Board agent who might appear to check IDs. Of course, there was the standard off-campus college bar, a dive on Berry Street called Duke's, but we had to share Duke's with fraternity boys and their girlfriends and the occasional jock who was breaking training. Duke's did have the attraction of having an owner who used to hint vaguely of having underworld connections , and it had a resident authentic character, an older man called Cowboy who had allegedly once been arrested for riding a horse down Berry Street while inebriated, but in general it was too tame for most of us, and we eventually shifted our after-class drink-

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