OLD CABANITAS GONE, EL PUNTO BAR ALSO ON THE BLOCK

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Was it just last week that we stopped at Las Cabañitas for a cold $2 beer?

There we sat at the bar among the bar girls shouting over the too-loud jukebox for lemon and salt for our cold Bud Light, and remembering.

Remembering Moi, and Cesar before him who ran the joint. And going to the men's bathroom with the urinal choked with small ziplock bags left there by previous customers with more intoxicating pursuits than beer. 

Cesar went on to run the Silver Sea by Market Square (la marqueta) , which then burned to the ground when Don Carlos and Tencha – from Los Pescadores Bar (now also gone) – took over and they then moved on to El Capitan, where Rodrigo's Double Trouble is now.

Moi got into a little trouble after a guy was killed there and he tried to move the body outside and mopped up the floor before the police got there. He went on to run El Mante, then turned it over to Don Lupito, who retired from the PUB.

But like any other congalito on 14th Street, you either loved Las Cabañitas in all its gaudiness and debauchery – or you didn't and stayed away. 

It wasn't much to look at, but you didn't go there for the decor.

Handwritten cards with moralistic messages "Si en la calle te hicieron enojar aqui no vengas a chingar" or a picture of a woman sitting on a  stool with an ample derriere with a sign that said "Yo vivo de lo que tengo en el banco" or "Hoy no se fia, mañana si" were pasted on the mirror behind the bar or on the wall.

Las Cabañitas was one of those joints that appealed to the shrimpers some time ago and they would  come in after months at sea and blow their advance pay before their old lady found out they were on land. The sight of a mad old lady dragging a protesting wayward partner away from his table of fellow shrimpers as they made fun of him was a recurring scene.

Later it became the haven of would be Southmost  drug Scarfaces who pulled up in their customized pick up trucks (mamalonas y nalgonas) decked with thick gold chains and centenarios and ostrich boots buying the whole house round after round. And if they paid Moi to close the door, you had better leave because no one was going to be let in or out until they did, which sometimes could be days.

And if they got hold of the musicos (traveling conjuntos like Los Prietos who cruised 14th Street, Market Square and to the bars up toward the port like Sophie's Whitey's, Ernie's Xochil's, etc.,) the nights would seem endless...

Once that died down, less savory (if the term could be used) characters – small-time drug runners or those who would move people to just below the checkpoint at Sarita where they would get paid – filled the joint. El Leon, la Burra, and a whole menagerie of human wildlife inhabited the dark environs of Cabañitas. 

Then there were the Vallejos de la 30 feuding with Los Gorillas (Los Ayalas) del Puerto. When they met at a bar they drank warily eyeing each other...

Next door, Juan Ybarra, also gone now,  had his JP Bar, followed up the street by Juanita's El  Tejano Bar, next to the other Juanita's Domino Bar. The two Juanitas hated each other and accused each other of stealing big spending drunks. The El Tejano Bar is now tied up in probate court and that Juanita is – for now – out of the picture.

Ybarra was a damned good pitcher and his catcher, the late Pete Avila, said a scout for the Boston Red Sox recruited him, but Ybarra opted to stay home with his kin and lady. 

"I use all my hand to throw the curve," he told us once. 

Chapa's (now La Catorce Bar) was next and then El Tenampa y luego El Monkeys. At one time Enedelia, La Changa, had the bar and reigned from a thronal chair wearing a different wig each day. A blonde one day, silver-haired  the next, then brunette, you never knew.

 

And of course, the babes. It seemed like you could associate each bar with a specific couple. La Colorada (a guy)  con Noemi over at Siete Mares, Chuy Picaso with Polita at the 123, Javier with Cami, Felix with his lady Dora at Chapas, Rossi con Julio, etc...

Beer posters with buxom Latinas from Bud Lite or Lite beer covered the bare walls of most of these congales. 

Of course, there were no air-brushed, Photoshopped babes at those clubs. 

But every once in a while – as during the Salvadoran and Hondurans exodus – beautiful women on the way north would work there to have the means to live on until their people in the north would send them the fare to pay the coyote to send them past Sarita and then everywhere else after that. (That's Suri at right at the bar at Cabañitas who said she was Argentinian. Who knows?)

Las Cabanitas and El Punto Bar (once known as El Rincon de Pancho) are gone now, just piles of rotten wood in the Dumpsters. 

But they will live on in the memories of times gone by.