Long story, but I’ll start at the beginning and try to make this short. And to be clear this is not a story of physical injury or grievous insult, it’s more a story of subtle “What the fuck is wrong with this world”.I live in a majority Hispanic area of Denver, precentagewise growing moreso by the year.
Now for my story. There was this bar I used to go to many times years ago. I knew the bartenders and owners and we were friends. About 2 years ago a new guy bought the place, the guy is hispanic. About three weeks after he bought the place it was not doing well, about 4 people were in the place at any one time. At the time, I was in there once and a couple guys walked in drunk, at tries to start shit. I had the owner’s back and helped him to get the guys kicked out (it was a fight and we won to, put it bluntly) . For whatever reason(which I really don’t know) I didn’t end up back there for about a year and a half or so.
I started going back about 3 months ago. When I started going back the bar was really busy, and I was the only white guy in the place, it was all Hispanic. It didn’t seem like that big a deal to me but a couple people asked me what was I doing in ‘their’ bar. Being a very confrontaitional person I said “I’m here to drink, you got a problem with that?” and they never followed up. Then I began to notice that people would lie to me when I asked about an open seat, and the bartenders would ignore me as long as they could.
Then one day as the bartenders were ignoring me, I saw a guy come up and tell them to serve me. I recognized him as the bar owner that I helped in a fight years ago. Now, through the past three months he has asked them to serve me a various times when they were ignoring me, and bought me a couple of drinks here and there. I assumed it was out of gratitude for the fight long ago.
But tonight I was there again and things got wierd. Not to draw out that part of the story, but the punch line is that he didn’t recognize me from back then. He assumed that I am some cop who has spent the last three months there to try and bust him. Because I am a white guy who goes into a Hispanic bar I must be an asshole cop (who by now would have broken every law of entrapment) trying to get him in trouble. Now I’m a long haired wierdo who is about as far from being expected to ‘look like a cop’ as anyone. I also happen to be a very heavy drinker, and apparently someone who can drink 5 shots and 6 beers in a hour must be faking it to screw someone over. So he made it clear that I was not welcome back unless I was willing to bring and smoke some pot with him to prove I was not a cop.
Now here is my dilemma. First of all I smoke pot all the time, and it was just a matter of unlikely probability that I didn’t have my pipe and a quarter with me tonight. My choices are, go back in a couple of nights with some stuff to exonerate myself (from something I never was, and even if I was what the hell did he have to fear if he was the hard working business man he claimed he was). Or I could just not ever show up again out of outraged principle, but would help confirm his apparent thought that all white guys are the enemy, out to fuck him over. Or I could follow my strongest ‘fuck you, I did nothing wrong’ principle and just keep going there without offering to smoke with him, which would at best result in him and his bartenders uncomfortably working around me as I sit there as the alien enemy, and at worst result in them trying to teach me a lesson(whcih is something he hinted at tonight, but would be really stupid if I was the cop he thought I was in the first place).
I’m a damn good bar goer. I drink quitetly unless someone really gets in my face. I tip much better than most people, and make friends with most everybody. I just wanted to go to the closest bar on occasion and grab a drink, but now because I was guilty of being white in the wrong neighborhood I’m in a strange situation. Like I said it’s not an outrageous situation, but what the fuck, I just wanted to hang out. 