$1 Pitchers and Polo Cologne
By Mark Jones
I was eighteen when I first walked into the Jockey Strap Saloon in Norman, Oklahoma. The fall semester of ’75. It didn’t look like much. It had a copper-topped bar stained with a thousand spilled pitchers, cracked floor tiles, and a jukebox that played more KC and the Sunshine Band than Led Zeppelin.
They used to say the Strap was the place to see and be seen, and maybe so. Norman had changed the drinking age to eighteen for 3.2 beer, and there was plenty of cheap beer like Pearl, Lone Star, and lots of Coors.
The men’s bathroom had no door. It was just a narrow hallway that reeked before you even made the turn. There was one lonely toilet on a pedestal, like it was waiting for an ovation. No walls, no shame, and few users. The urinal was a paint-chipped metal trough. We lined up shoulder to shoulder, and you held your breath to survive.
It offered $1 pitchers, maybe even cheaper after a win. Oklahoma won a lot back then, and every victory deserved warm beer and sweat-soaked celebrations. After a game, the place lit up even more with frat boys in their Polo cologne and sorority girls in their feathered Farrah Fawcett hair. I wasn’t Greek, but I wore my share of strong cologne and tried to fake my way through the night.
There were pool tables in one section with quarters lined along the edge to claim the sticks for the next game. Pac-Man and Asteroids blinked beside them. Out back, mismatched patio chairs circled burn-scarred tables where smoke from Winstons, Salems, and Marlboros hung like fog. Somebody in the crowd always got loud and sloppy. I was the kid in the corner, just taking it all in.
The Strap shut down in ’83. Several other businesses cycled through the building for two decades, but none worth remembering. Then a drugstore came. It gutted the insides and bricked over the past. Years later, it left, too. The building stands there now, with a new façade on the outside but not much on the inside.
Some nights, I wonder who else remembers the smell, the sound, or the feeling of being eighteen and knowing nothing except this: the beer was cold, the music was loud, and the night felt like it would never end.
Mark Jones is an award-winning author of mystery, horror, and science fiction. His work has appeared in Mosaic Voices, Killer Nashville Magazine, and several fiction anthologies. He is the author of She Watches, Peculiar Activities, and The Man in the Fedora, as well as the upcoming novels No Pain Wasted and Transmission 13. When he’s not writing, Mark enjoys jazz, cosmic horror, and 70s rock. For more information: https://linktr.ee/mejbooksllc
