I’m sitting in this neighborhood watering hole because of a guy who sometimes has a TV where his head should be.
The name of the place is Bender Bar & Grill. The name of the guy is TVHeadATX. And I’m a journalist for the Austin Chronicle.
That’s right: Austin. Deep in the left ventricle of the increasingly sclerotic heart of Texas.
This Bender, it’s not a hifalutin’ sort of place. It’s a working-class sort of place, a longtime-regular-and-their-Jameson-straight-up sort of place. It’s a beer and tequila shot purveyor way south of the Colorado River that bisects the formerly weird city, a node of mad funkery on the edge of a vaguely commercial outcropping off Ben White Boulevard. In business since 2007, the place somehow resisted stultifying, squeaked through the slow COVID days. Long, crooked-elbow of a bar with a few citizen slackers holding down their usual stools; wall-hung screens aglow with whatever sportsball drama is currently exciting the masses; the joint’s well-worn interior not so much a darkling aesthetic as a default toward any dimness less abrasive than the sun setting fire to the world outside.
I’m there in the middle of the afternoon, there to meet TVHeadATX, a local street artist. Who is anonymous. Who I have no idea what the fuck he looks like. Who’s the subject of the article I’m working on for the Chronicle’s food section. Because this TVHeadATX, he seems to have landed his iconically provocative images on the boxes of a new pizza place that video-live streams every pie they cook, and I figure my readers want to know what’s up with that?
I haven’t been to Bender before. I asked the Chronicle’s music editor about the place, because that’s Kevin Curtin – madman, reprobate, hard-working reporter, doting father of a blondly photogenic sprog named Quinn – and Kevin knows about these sorts of things. “Oh, yeah,” he told me, “Bender’s has been there a long time – it’s, like, legendary. A great place to hang out. Who are you interviewing?”
TVHead, I told Kevin.
TVHead, I tell myself, looking at the west wall inside Bender – upon which an array of posters and paintings by the notorious provocateur are arranged in rough but compelling buy-me-now patterns. It’s obvious why he wanted us to meet here: Bender Bar & Grill is like TVHead’s headquarters, his secret lair, his Fortress of Boozy Solitude.
Later, sitting with the man at a booth along one wall of the place, I ask what he likes about Bender.
He’s not wearing a TV on his head at this time; his face is naked for all to see. He cautions me against revealing his identity, as the authorities would surely like to haul his ass to jail for having enhanced – some might say desecrated – so much of Austin’s urban landscape with his giant wheat-pasted posters. I sip my scotch – and, yeah, it is Jameson – and I ask TVHead, “Why this place in particular, man? As your, ah, base of operations?”
He shrugs, scratches at his chin’s salt-and-pepper scruff. Runs a finger down the neck of his cold Shiner Bock. “One,” says TVHead, “it’s close to home. I live right around here. And it’s like, ah, it’s like – the Cheers bar of South Austin, I guess you could call it. I like the atmosphere, the inexpensive drinks. It’s a good drinkin’ place, but it’s also some of the best grilled food you can get. They’ll run specials where they’ll have, like, fresh catfish. The kitchen here goes out on a limb to expand us past some of our mozzarella-stick-and-french-fry-eating habits, you know?”
I look over at the bar, clocking the spread of leisure time humans, my ears catching wisps of displaced Yankee accents jawing about how construction’s fucking up Downtown driving, about the current lottery possibilities, about everything and nothing in the whole wide world.
“Seems like a pretty friendly dive,” I say.
TVHead nods his very human noggin, takes a swig of Shiner. Looks to the far wall. “Seems like Austin,” he says.
