I am, unbelievably, now what they call “retired.” This is a complicated description for the chapter of what they tell me is the rest of my life. My enemies predicted dissolution and the conspicuous consumption of pulp fiction, too many matinees, and, finally, a fatal collision with nostalgia that will certainly leave me embittered and muttering in my tear-salted beer about wrong roads taken and people who have forgotten me altogether.
I was thinking a semblance of the above when I walked to the beach the other day and then stopped in at Joe’s afterward. Joe’s has been on the same street, State, for a very long time. Once it was down the road where Holdren’s is but now resides at the corner of Cota and State. It’s a real saloon. The bar stools are fixed into the floor, on the walls are black-and-white photographs of Santa Barbara’s past, and there are pies in a display case next to the kitchen, the men’s room, and an exit few people use or know about. Modest TVs are above the bar. I don’t think there is any ambient music at all.
The waiters have those cool aprons that run all the way to the ankles. All the waitresses have been there for decades or more. They call you “honey” or “hon.” There is, as there should be, a long wooden bar backed with a cityscape of liquor bottles stacked in the area between the drinkers and the eaters.