Dive Bar: Cowabunga Bar
Address: 402 E Travis St #1, San Antonio, TX 78205
Hours: 11am to 2am
Song Playing: "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom," by Selena.
Billiards: Yes
Every beautiful town has a hole in the wall, and just like the ones I got used to seeing as a child, it was probably put there by some guy “on accident.”
I’m betting most of us who frequent these establishments also got here by accident: dragging our hands along brick walls and cracked windows and stumbling in through the first open doorway we encounter. It seems the tunnel through every dark city with a “bright future” always ends at the threshold of these neon lighthouses; weathered yet withstanding against the threat of change and progress.
I certainly didn’t pull up a stool at this bar top and ask for “whatever’s on sale” on a Tuesday at noon because I’m going places in life, and the bartenders don’t care enough to judge.
(Sometimes I wish they WOULD judge me, but then I’d probably need a lawyer, and chances are high that the only lawyers I can afford are drunker than me right now.)
There’s a couch in the corner that faces a wall that’s been dressed up to look like a disco. Occasionally, little haggard bits of tinsel come flying into the spotlight of a recently installed- yet somehow ancient- wall-mounted television screen. The sound is never on, and the captions are all jumbled, but it’s a comfortable place to set your eyes before anyone has a chance to catch them.
I come to this hole in the wall simply because no one has plastered over it yet. It is a fortress in the war being waged between this city’s past and future. It is the meeting place of the downtown vampire army: the bartenders, and the servers, the line cooks and the whores. The lawyers who don’t want to be recognized, the lifers who don’t want to be lonely, and the old folks who don’t know what’s gotten into people lately. In a city that sweeps its guests underground to be swindled by salesman peddling fools-gold disguised as culture, it is an island for outlaws and rebels and anyone else with an ax and a secret.
So, yea.
Perhaps many of us were drawn to these barstools “by accident,” but we stayed for a reason. And if you find yourself lost on the sidewalks of a shape-shifting city, just follow the neon at the end of the tunnel.
All are welcome in our army of misfits, but we can’t tell you how to get here.
That’s simply none of our business.
