P.N.ZOYTLOW

Beaches and bars coexist easily.  In San Diego, California this is no less true than elsewhere and perhaps more so since this city with its miles of beaches for strolling, surfing, swimming and just sitting is also home to numerous colleges and serves as an important base for the U.S. Navy. The Observer became interested in what a bar near the beach might yield as a focus for Field Research because he passed by them on and noted their considerable number and variety. One, the Lahaina, was more deck than bar and was always crowded with a tanned and muscular crowd  drinking out of soft plastic containers in deference to barefoot clientele. Another, The Open Bar, was a short block off the beach featuring a deck usually crowded with heavily tattooed and pierced hairy men and not-so-wary looking women. But which of these would offer the best results for an hour and fifteen minutes of careful and unbiased analysis?

Enter the Informant, a person who knows bars on the West Coast and who proved to be a capable advisor for the critical stage of picking the site as well as designing some of the methodology. Caveat: The Informant became a necessary interpreter during the part of the observation phase as well; so much so, that inevitably he may be folded into the thicker textures of this little study. It’s all a bit hazy on this point.

Since there are always those skeptics who will question whether useful research can be conducted on a site where alcohol is present, let us say at the outset that both the Informant and the Observer consumed no more than 36 ounces of beer each. If this research were only about beer, we would have to say that the bottled beer, Pura Vida, from Costa Rica was too ordinary for comment, the Guinness was disappointing and did not deliver its potential even after a great show of microscopic bubbles, the Newcastle seemed too flat, and only the Sierra Vista Pale Ale was adequate and met expectations. But this research is not about beer though hindsight requires the admission that perhaps that would have been a better choice of subject matter.

The observation took place on Sunday, March 6, 2005 at [the] Beachcomber (known locally simply as “The ‘Comber”) which is located on South Mission Blvd. The time spent in formal, rigorous research at The Comber was between 4:50 and 6: 05 PM. South Mission has other bars along it and all of them share the bar/beach duality since the Pacific Ocean is less than a short block away and can actually be seen from many of these establishments, particularly if they face west. In the case of the Pennant, a bar directly south of The ‘Comber this is enhanced because that bar’s principal feature is a deck on the second floor. The Informant and this Observer toured the Pennant briefly in order to verify that a patron could peer from the Pennant into The ‘Comber and perhaps make a shrewd decision to move from one to the other if circumstances so dictated. It was not clear what those circumstances would be, though the Informer assured me that at times the line waiting to get into The ‘Comber might stretch back along the outside perhaps a block or so. Critical mass, a vague notion if there ever was one, is the only explanation for this phenomenon.  On dense occasions, the most you could expect was standing on a ‘Comber 16 inch square floor tile with one other person. California real estate being what it is, you could not expect much more space than that for the small amount you would spend on a beer. But this afternoon was not one of those occasions, else it would have been impossible to note anything except great noise and heat.

As to The ‘Comber itself, there are worse bars and better ones. If a grade of 0 signifies intense worries about one’s health and safety and 10 a place with the antiseptic appeal of a three-star hotel bar, The “Comber checked in at a 2.7. Was this place being remodeled or slowly dismantled? Many of the walls were a patchwork of particle board possibly affixed to hide something even less inviting. Behind the bar sat ten plastic coolers filled with bottled beer for there were no refrigerators here, just ice in coolers as if the whole enterprise might shift to the back of a truck.  Where did the tap beer come from? Perhaps beneath our feet there was a chamber for that purpose but who would want to find out? The bar itself is a rectangular affair with 23 stools and a few small, high tables closer to the narrow windows which faced the street.  Most of the clientele, on busy nights, would be standing.  Four televisions were silently at work in each corner but no one seemed interested. Towards the rear, away from the windows, a surfboard with the word “Budweiser” hung on a wall overlooking the sole pool table. In the dark recesses of the rear of the bar were small utility rooms  where glasses were washed or stored and where one would find toilets. There was no impression of the women’s toilet possible except to note that it did have a door.  The men’s did not, only a grey plastic curtain shielding patrons from possible observation. The Informant was quite sure that this particular room had once featured a plain trough, but these days three urinals had replaced it.  Overall, The “Comber shared many features with those dingy bars in rural Minnesota where there was a disinclination to plump up the infrastructure: the place would be a gold mine no matter how the owner maintained it.

This was a Sunday afternoon on a beautiful day and that anyone was in a bar at all recalled the quote about millions yearning for immortality who cannot find anything to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  Whatever the nexus between this place and the problem of immortality may be, it’s like the question of who ordered two urinals to replace the trough:  beyond the scope of this research. And yet, as we all know, a decent concern for mortality and its attendant existential dread can seldom be absent from the affairs of humankind.

Some 25-40 persons were present during the research period,  perhaps half seemed to be over fifty and were in many cases probably members of the OMBAC, the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club. Their particular type of athleticism was not clear, but judging by some of the memorabilia on the walls, at least some of it was due to OTL, or Over The Line, a game unknown to this Observer, originating fifty years earlier in San Diego. It seemed to combine some features of baseball (bat and ball) tennis (hitting the ball into zones) and soccer (the fielder having something of the challenge of a goalie in anticipating where the ball might be hit). Each team was made up of three persons and traditionally these teams were distinguished by their intensely lewd and perverse  names. It is beyond the objectives of this research to have investigated this, but it is part of the lore of OTL that it cannot be televised simply because the names of the teams are so highly objectionable and would unquestionably require large fines to by paid by the offending networks  A striking photograph behind our place at the bar showed the game being played on the deck of an aircraft carrier (the “Comber is popular with Navy folk) and two others showing OTL tee-shirts being held by people in Africa and on The Great Wall by Chinese soldiers. Still another photo suggested a  strong connection between this little known game and large-breasted women wearing thong bathing outfits and posing shamelessly, some would say. This is another mystery which cannot be brought to light in a mere hour and fifteen minutes, and isn’t the purpose of True Research to frame questions for those researchers who will follow?

So, if OTL players had selected this bar as a watering hole, then surely there should be something as rowdy as the pierced and tattooed bikers were staging a mile north at The Open Bar where one may see big men roar at each other like bull walruses. But this was not the case here.  These old boys, most of them with their ladies, were tame. The were without the tusks and goofy noses of true bulls down the street. They were good fellows and gentlemen.

More noise came from five maidens  singing something like  “doop doop doo” (this is an approximation)  inspired by some tune played at their request by the disc jockey, a friendly chap who appeared halfway through the research period at 5:25 PM.   The maidens were seated around one of the small high table on stools. Each one had long straight hair down to mid-back. Each one had a fashionably short top and low cut jeans and so exposing  a goodly six inches of tanned torso.. When there was, however, briefly, no music to inspire them to jump off the stools and dance among themselves they were hunched over their drinks. Should you pass by them at this time of hyper-animated conversation, you could not help but note that each has a tattoo at waist level on the posterior.  Mostly these tattoos are symmetrical in nature. A butterfly alighting exactly on the spine. A Moorish design reminding one of the reluctance of Islamic artists to depict other than the abstract.  An arrangement of flowers.  A more involved scene suggestive of a fairy tale, perhaps something out of the Brothers Grimm by way of Disney. These were among the designs which presented themselves easily and without the need to become excessively intrusive as an observer.  I should add that to assay butt art  (or less bluntly stated, the art of the supragluteal) is best done by a disinterested observer when the medium is drunk.  What  had brought these maidens here?  Clear it was that they were enjoying themselves and adding disproportionately to the communal din.˛  The Informer,  apparently disinterested in such phenomena simply noted the category “beach girls” when their yelping momentarily distracted him from the micro-bubbled transformations in his freshly drawn glass of Guinness.

If these two archetypes, the aging, OTL athlete and the tattooed maidens a.k.a. “beach girls” were dominant in The ‘Comber  during the time frame of the research, it must be noted that there were a few variants as well such as the Androgynous Guy who entered  with dark glasses offsetting his bright-blond hair and  garish blue Hawaiian shirt.  As he later happened to stand near us at the bar one could also note gold earrings as part of his ensemble. He told the Informer that his shirt was perforated (small, imperceptible holes everywhere) to help him stay cool and that it came from Quicksilver, an important outfitter for surfers. And that, as tangential as it was, together with the Budweiser surfboard, was the only reference to surfing in The ‘Comber during the period under investigation.  This is not a surfer bar, more a place for OTL veterans, their ladies, and the beach girls. Quite in a category to themselves was the forty-something couple at a table staring at a sheet of paper which they must have picked up while looking for real estate. Charming South Mission Condo! was the heading and towards the bottom of the sheet, $525,000. Sobering! No wonder their beers had scarcely been touched.

Perhaps it was the low ceiling with its particle board treatment that captured all sounds and let them hang there, making talk and eavesdropping next to impossible. The burly bartender, normally the expected source of small talk, was working alone and too busy drawing beer and mixing drinks.  No alternative except to listen in as best one could despite the din and the music coming out of the two oversized towers of Peavey speakers. You could make out words such as “hey!” or “sure!” and even fragments such as the sleek seal-maiden who, having ordered a Pacifico called out “limon, limon, limon!” to no one in particular. The longest sustained communication recorded was something about “old Ronny Reagan took these Marines, see, and….”  with the response “you haven’t seen me at my best!”  Whatever these fragments mean, at the very least they support the likely conclusion that The ‘Comber is a happy bar and that its patrons have a tentative answer for the problem of existential dread.

Time was up!  The Observer cannot risk having these Field Reports become a source of derision and so the time frame of 1hr. and 15 min. will be, it must be(!)  scrupulously observed.