Travels with Barley (26 page)

‘For an industry rife with big-breasted ladies in bikinis and overt sexuality associated with the marketing of their product, we've found Big Beer to be quite conservative,” he told me. “They have a great thing going and rely fully on their Chicago and New York advertising and marketing agencies. It seems like they don't move without consulting a focus group.”

Still, having beer's fat cats ignore him hadn't discouraged him any. He said the United States Beer Drinking Team had grown to 45,000 members (online sign-up is free) and the Web site was now peddling USBDT-labeled jackets and merchandise. Buettner was actively seeking a place, and sponsors, for a National Beer Hall of Fame. And the USBDT had just been the subject of a favorable feature in
Stars and Stripes
, the official U.S. armed services newspaper.

Buettner had also concluded that if Beer TV was an idea slightly ahead of its time, Beer Radio was a cheaper-to-launch alternative. And so he'd just contracted with a Maryland radio station to buy time for Beer Radio's inaugural broadcast sometime soon. Indeed, Beer Radio officially debuted in January 2004 and, as of this writing, was still on the air.

I left St. Louis on another cloudless day, intent on hugging the river as much as possible by sticking to Highway 61. But as I pushed on south, I found the going slow, the river towns all too often overrun with mall-sprawl and choking traffic. I gave up after about 100 miles and swerved back onto 1-55 headed for Memphis where, in a rare bit of planning, I was going to check into Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel hoping for an Elvis-and-beer connection.

Nearing the Arkansas border, I saw my first signs for Memphis. (And realized that I'd just blown by Kentucky altogether, seeing as how it has, relative to the other Mississippi River states, just a toehold on the river. Oh, well. It's a state far better known for bourbon and racehorses than beer.) But as I crossed over into Arkansas, I realized I actually knew of a somewhat peculiar place where I might get a fresh beer perspective.

It was That Bookstore in Blytheville, which if you've ever been to Arkansas you know is pronounced
Blyville
, the
th
having been declared at some point too troublesome to include (in the perfectly acceptable way that Southerners often truncate speech so that certain words aren't so much work). The owner of the bookstore and the keg that sat in it was Mary Gay Shipley and she'd actually invited me to do a book signing there once, whereupon I gratefully discovered the keg, which was filled with ice-cold Budweiser. It wasn't so much that I wanted a beer myself (though I certainly took one) but I was hopeful that my audience would want several because it had been my experience, based upon events at a literary festival in New Orleans I'd once attended, that beer-drinking book buyers are the most superior book audience an author can have. I did an 11:00 a.m. Sunday morning reading at the Shim-Sham Club on Toulouse Street in the French Quarter and was gratified upon arrival to see that of the fifty or so people in the audience at least forty of them were drinking beer, Bloody Marys, or Texas Bloody Marys (which involves adulterating perfectly fine beer with tomato juice). So though I felt like a dullard at the podium, swallowing my words, the audience had drunk me clever and considered me not just witty but exceedingly wise. And they had extremely loose wallets. It made me wonder why the book trade hasn't set itself up in more drinking establishments, or why Barnes & Noble doesn't go into the bar business.

Blytheville, as I recalled, stood somewhat distant from the Interstate so I cranked up my cell phone and called the store. Alas, Mary Gay was out but, worse, the keg had been removed for cleaning and refurbishing, thus ruining any hopes I had to hang out with a more literary class of beer drinkers. But Amy, a chatty young woman who was running the store in Mary Gay's absence, did tell me that I shouldn't leave Missouri without visiting Woody's, an extremely famous beer joint in the town of Caruthersville not that far away. The main reason it was famous, Amy said, was that Woody's had a firm policy of not serving beer in bottles because bottles, well, are just too hard on the human head.

I hung up and pulled off the road to consult my map and was happy to learn that Caruthersville, in the so-called Bootheel of Missouri where a narrow slab of the state digs hard into Arkansas and Tennessee, was in fact just eleven miles east. It sat on the Mississippi equidistant between Cooter, Missouri, and Owl Hoot, Tennessee (not to be confused with Hoot Owl, Arkansas). I made a U-turn and found it without incident.

Caruthersville seemed pleasant enough, a cotton-farming community of modest houses and tree-lined streets with a sign that told me the population was about 7,000. I learned that it had once been called Little Prairie until 1811, when one of the most violent earthquakes to ever rock North America (8.0 on the Richter Scale) knocked Little Prairie flat and heaved fire and brimstone out of the ground, causing residents to think the end of the world had come (and for some, it had). Perhaps seeking better luck, Little Prairie rebounded as Caruthersville.

I found Woody's thanks to four kindly men who'd been drinking beer out of brown paper bags in front of a grocery store and volunteered to drive by the place as I followed behind and point it out to me. It was a good thing, too, because Woody's didn't have a discernible sign out front, though, from Amy's description, I might have picked it out anyway. The bar sat in a compact, rectangular, somewhat faded building. It was about one o'clock in the afternoon and I only counted two cars in the parking lot. I wasn't even sure the place was open but I tried the front door and it gave. As I pushed through and my eyes adjusted to the dim light within, I realized that Amy had undersold the place.

The decor—well, the aura might be a better term—made the scruffy Flora-Bama back on the Gulf Coast look like a beer joint out of
Vogue
. The first thing I noticed was a well-worn, cigarette-burned pool table standing in the middle of the floor surrounded by a vast pile of empty beer cans and peanut shells. I'd say 400 to 500 beer cans might be accurate. Some were crushed. Most were not. Also, every inch of every wall in the place that could be written on had been written on, signed apparently by exuberant patrons. The ceiling was hung with dusty, grimy baseball caps that had once shielded heads from oil changes and chicken coops, and undergarments that looked like they belonged to people who might: have been better off keeping them on. I settled in at the bar and was greeted by a lanky man who told me his name was James Ford. I asked him if there was in fact a Woody attached to Woody's. He said there was but that Woody was away at soccer practice.

I perused the beer choices such as I could see them and could tell right away Woody's was a Bud haven. I asked Ford what he served most of. He thought it over and said, “Well, a lot of my customers who don't have much money drink Natural Light. It's cheap, so the fellows who go through a half a case or more a night drink that.”

I have to admit I'd never drunk Anheuser-Busch's low-calorie corn lager (it was the company's first light beer offering) so I ordered one. As Ford fetched it, he told me he'd worked at Woody's for a few years and bartended at other places around town. I pointed to the mountain of discarded beer cans and asked whether maybe the cleaning people were on strike.

“Oh, that,” he said. “Nah, people just throw their empties under the pool table. When there's too many of them, we sweep them up and take them out.”

It did make me wonder how many had to pile up before the too many limit got triggered, and whether Woody's was worried about its customers tripping over this beer-can minefield or setting off a beer-can slide. That's when I spied a big sign above the bar that seemed to address my concerns: It said, “No Crying!”

I sipped my Natural Light and decided it was a bit sweet and thin for my beer tastes (it seemed like water to a Hophead) though there was nothing particularly terrible about it. And anyway, as I confessed at the very beginning of this book, I don't drink
anybody's
light beer except, as I was doing now, for research purposes. I did wonder, though, what discerning beer people made of Natural Light so I later went online to BeerAdvocate.com, a popular beer enthusiast site that allows consumers to post beer ratings by brand. Natural Light had gotten ninety-three reviews; of 2,833 beers rated to that point, it ranked 2,829th. Still, it had some fans, like BeerGator2003, who wrote: “It has drinkability … if you chug it. If your wallet's in a pinch and you have to have a beer, this works well. Let me tell you, there's definitely worse out there.”

On the other hand, a writer named Hotstuff stated: “This beer, when poured into my glass, had a large white frothy head with small bubbles that fully diminished… . Very little carbonation was observed. There was very little flavor and the mouthfeel was light and watery.” As I understand the Beer Geek take on mouthfeel, it's basically a sensory evaluation of the weight or viscosity of a beer, i.e., whether it is light or heavy to the palate. I honestly couldn't argue with Hotstuff's evaluation.

The only other person in Woody's was a retired bartender and short-order cook named Cecil who said he liked the bar a little better in the daytime since it could get kind of rowdy after dark. He was also drinking Natural Light and going on about a man who'd committed suicide a day or two before by jumping off the Caruthersville Mississippi River bridge. He noted several times that the unfortunate man was from Arkansas, which made me wonder if this happened to other Arkansas people who came to Caruthersville, or if Caruthersville people had a dim view of Arkansas people, or vice versa. I did manage to steer the topic on to the Perfect Beer Joint for a moment. Cecil said he was fond of Woody's but it wasn't the Perfect Beer Joint because “the Perfect Beer Joint would serve free beer.”

Ford, the bartender, offered me another Natural Light but I declined. I inquired as to the location of the men's room. Ford pointed it out and I went in, for the sole purpose, actually, of discovering what sort of graffiti covered the walls
there
. One thing I'll say: Woody's graffiti writers were prolific and had pretty much left no room for new artistic, poetic, or political statements. And it probably wouldn't shock the reader that the preoccupation of Woody's scribblers was whether certain men were as manly as they claimed, and whether certain women did or did not perform certain carnal acts that, as described, probably are banned in any number of states. I didn't learn anything new but it did make for five minutes of highly entertaining reading. I was kind of sorry that I couldn't stay around and hang out at Woody's after sunset and watch the beer cans and peanut shells fly. But Elvis was calling.

However, being a dedicated scribe and not wishing to disappoint my readers, I did find a web account of a night at Woody's. It was a small part of a lengthy journal written by two intrepid modern-day explorers who were navigating the Mississippi by canoe around the time that I visited. One of them, David Groppe, gave me permission to share it:

(Stag, I might add, is another of the relic beers in the Pabst stable.)

By 3:30
P.M.
I'd pulled off the Interstate into Memphis and onto Elvis Presley Boulevard in search of Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel. I was assured, when I phoned ahead, that it would be easy to find because it was the only big white hotel in a big parking lot more or less across the street from Graceland, which itself could not be missed because it was the big house with the big white columns, the big lawn, and the big fence around it. Oh, and just look for the swarming tour buses. And besides, the hotel had a sign in big black art deco lettering across its art deco inspired facade that said “Heartbreak Hotel,” emblazoned with a big red heart stuck on to the word “Hotel.” These were fine instructions and it was as easy to spot as a white alligator in a black water swamp.

I realize that Memphis is not known particularly as a beer town. Memphis, in fact, is known mainly for three things: barbecue, blues, and Elvis. The first two things go well with beer but I wondered if Elvis did?

This is why I'd chosen Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel, which I'd been assured had a bar that served beer. Was there an Elvis-and-beer connection to be made? I was curious for I had been bedeviled by a question that I had assumed would be simple to answer but for which I had not yet found a convincing result: Did the King himself drink beer and if so did he have a favorite?

You'd be surprised at what a controversial notion this actually is among certain of the Elvis People. To explore this, just browse the hundreds of Elvis sites on the Web. Many, many Elvis People insist Elvis didn't drink at all (he was of good evangelical Baptist stock from Tupelo, Mississippi, after all), and when I fired off a beer query by e-mail to a person on an Elvis experts Web site, the answer I got was that this was such an impertinent question it was not deserving of an answer. Opinions on other Web sites insisted he drank sparingly but he didn't really
like
beer or liquor very much. The actress Stella Stevens, in an interview with Fox Movie Channel a few years ago, seemed to be contradicting this Dry Elvis image when she said Elvis swilled rum-and-Cokes on the set of
Girls! Girls! Girls!
the 1962 movie she made with him. When the Beatles visited Elvis at his Bel Air, California, home in 1965, it was well known that Elvis drank 7-Up while the lads drank Scotch and bourbon.