I went to Muskingum College (now University, whatever) when I was 18 to study history and business and also play football. I was nervous about getting my ass kicked by college athletes, excited to be jumping into college life and feeling quite unprepared. Just before I went off to make my mark on the world, my Dad told me one piece of advice. It wasn’t just say no to drugs, don’t knock up a young lady or even to study hard. It was “Don’t ever go to Saguarro’s.”
Saguarro’s was a bar, technically, about five miles from campus, east of Zanesville. It was boarded up like a hurricane was coming in and looked like the Double Deuce from Roadhouse, if the Double Deuce took a deuce on a shittier version of the Double Deuce. When I was a freshman, four of my later frat brothers went there and got beat stupid by a black motorcycle gang wearing purple camo – well, three of them did, my pal Quincy was just held back while the whiteys got stomped. Despite that incident and my dad’s warning, I went one time.
I walked in with a group of equally stupid college boys and saw a bar that was more garage or storage barn than bar. I asked the miserable looking barkeep for a bottle of Budweiser. “We don’t serve bottles.” Oh really? “Too many people get cut with them.” Well, terrific. There was a pool table and some stools and really cheap liquor. There were just a couple townies, but I felt safe enough, being a half a townie myself. I went to piss and walked in the bathroom. Just one problem – there was no toilet, just a hole where a toilet used to be (I’m guessing, maybe it was always a hole). So I pissed in the hole, mostly, and we decided to get out of there. Some time later, they got busted in a drug raid for the way too manyeth time and shut down.
In retrospect, I probably should have listened to my dad, which I could say about 300 other topics also. To this day, if a bar doesn’t serve bottles, get the hell out of there and drink somewhere classy, like the Cheyenne where they keep the doors open all year due to the smell or the Doctor’s Lounge, which has a strip club called the Nurse’s Station attached to the back. It’s so good to learn life lessons.
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