"TOliver" > wrote in message
...

>> Barton Springs?

> After an afternoon in the cool/cold enough to cause your scrotum to
> attempt to enfold itself waters of Barton Springs (where in the old days,
> regulars

I have very fond memories of Austin. I published "Outward bound" (see below)
on Nerdnosh many years ago when I had time for such things:


--
Bob
http://www.kanyak.com

"Outward bound"

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away I was one of a group of about a
hundred dewy-eyed young souls who were attending an intensive
language-training program at the University of Texas (Austin). (Summer of
1967. Deposition of evidence of my presence in the city: We were put up in
an air-conditioned box of a dormitory called the “Dexter House” and we went
swimming in a place called “Barton Springs”.)

There was the usual segmentation that occurs in such groups. I fell in with
one that did its serious self-inflicted liver damage in an establishment
that was by no means a “fern bar” (since the concept didn’t exist then) but
which I’m sure--if it survived--grew up to become a fern bar eventually. Its
principal attraction consisted of cans of chalk on the tables and a
table-high frieze of black slate around the walls on which the clientele
were encouraged to write. They did.

One evening our drinking squad took in a movie way downtown. One of the
(many) rules of the program that we were attending was that we were not
allowed to drive motor vehicles (a rule that I have assiduously adhered to
ever since) so we all had to use bikes to get around. Since Austin is
Flatland-awful horizontal, hills were not a problem; distance and heat,
however, were. Pedalling back to the Dexter House in that oppressively hot
Texas night, we were overcome with severe cases of beer deprivation. It was
late and the herd, knowing that it was a long way from its favorite watering
hole, was verging on panic. Just as I was thinking that I might sell my
otherwise unmarketable soul for a tall, frosty beer, I heard what can only
be described as a sharp, metallic “ping”. Suddenly a pink and green neon
“BAR”-”BAR”-”BAR” loomed in the distance, beckoning will-o’-the-wisp-like
from within the all-enveloping heat and dust-laden air.

There was a brief, undignified stampede as the twelve of us hauled ass up to
the door and dismounted to discover, first of all, that there was no
“door”--just a pair of swinging wooden shutters designed to impede the
movement only of creatures standing taller than a dog or incapable of
flight. This was an ominous sign. One of the first lessons we northern boys
had learned concerning the southern architectural discourse was that in a
Texas summer, unsealed windows and doors mean *no AC*. A few of us peered
inside. The interior was dimly lit by a couple of bare light bulbs suspended
from the ceiling and seemed to be empty save for a rather swarthy-looking
bartender standing behind a bar which, from where we stood, looked as if it
had been knocked together from orange-crate slats. There was nothing around
it on which to sit. At this point a few of our weaker members chickened out
and decided that the risks of dying from dehydration and heat prostration
before reaching safe haven were preferable to whatever horrors that might
lie inside. The rest of us, lulled by the Siren-like serenity of the
pink-and-green “BAR”-“BAR”-“BAR”, went into a huddle, screwed our courage to
the sticking-place, and advanced, boldly, inward.

I recall the bartender smiling and making a broad welcoming gesture. I
recall eyes watching us warily from tables set in shadowy corners. Some of
us croaked “Beer”; others, more linguistically endowed, croaked
“Cervesa”--just to be on the safe side. I however was studying the “bar”.
It *had* been knocked together from orange-crate slats and was really little
more than a counter. Worse, there were no taps. My god, what have we gotten
ourselves into?

And then a wondrous thing occurred.

The room was bathed suddenly in a brilliance as pure and refreshing as a
sunrise over the Cascades. The bartender had swung open a meatlocker-size
refrigerator door set into the wall. Menacing fingers of mist slithered out
and recoiled off the floor in eddies. From one section of this vault he
removed the requisite number of bottles and from the hidden cryogenic
recesses of another he extracted tall beer glasses so cold that the white
vapor spilled off them as off the LOX tanks of a Saturn missile and your
fingers adhered to the surface when you touched them. Bottles and glasses
were handed quickly around. Caps were somehow opened. The near-freezing
barley-water of the bottles hit the sub-zero silicon dioxide of the glasses
and was magically transformed into a gelid state of matter midway between
solid and liquid. Glasses were inverted and their contents were inhaled.
Such was the evening and morning of the first round.

The second round was essentially a repetition of the first: more bottles
were produced and glasses were extracted from the freezer, passed around,
etc. Repeat. Somewhere around the middle of the third round the temperature
of the room finally dropped to “endurable”. A few of us dropped out during
the fifth and sixth rounds and on the seventh, the survivors settled up the
tab and left.

The bartender waved us off. As we were leaving, his eyes and mine met
fleetingly and in that instant I could have sworn I detected an evil,
satanic gleam that shouted triumphantly “You are MINE!”

Our drinking-group split up after that. The four of us who made it to the
end never returned to the proto-fern bar and its blackboard walls but
instead began exploring the local options. Try as we might, we never found
“BAR”-“BAR”-“BAR” again; but we did turn up some pretty good alternatives:
not only there in Austin but also, later, in Houston, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico
City...

Many years later chance brought the four of us together again here in
Istanbul and gave us an opportunity to compare notes: only one was still in
teaching; two had been in Saudi Arabia; three had married; two had fathered
kids; one was divorced. The only common thread in our lives was that all
four of us had chosen to settle down permanently abroad: Robert in Istanbul,
John in Paris, Arlo in Barcelona, and Ian in Singapore. What was even
stranger was that, so far as we could tell, no other participants in the
Austin project that summer had chosen to do so.