Down the Hatch: Belting it

Drinking near-beer the Cain's way

A six-pack (now four-pack) of Coors Banquet dangles from my brown leather belt on my right hip. I feel like one of those girls wearing a belly chain in the music videos, except this one is heavy and has special powers—namely, the ability to give me a buzz.

Yes, it’s 3.2 beer, yes by the end of the third the stuff tastes more like lake water than corn-and-hops bitter-sweetness, but this is what you do at Cain’s Ballroom. 

Jonathan Tyler has just come back out to sing a song with Ray Wylie Hubbard. Tyler is wearing a white cowboy hat and a red satin baseball jacket, looking like he just won the rodeo. Hubbard looks like a gypsy who’s just emerged from a covered wagon. They’re singing about powerful lightning and the broken-winged angels smoking Marlboros in heaven’s back alleys. Those angels might like a banquet beer, too. 

Both singers are from Texas and I’m from Oklahoma and I think Cain’s might be the best example of a shared home for the two states—after all, it’s “The Home of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.” We’re separated by the Red River, but our music and liquor laws are similar and the grit is shared. California conjures images of vineyards and oranges, Ohio of the Amish and beekeeping, Montana of big sky, Maine of those quaint covered bridges. But Oklahoma and Texas? Lake beer, red dirt country, temperamental weather and weathered people. 

My thigh is cold from the beer; I yank another off my sagging belt. It springs back from release of the weight. Another beer gone—knocking pins down. I wish I’d worn my dad’s hand-tooled leather belt, the big thick one with the silver and brass buckle initialed “B,” for Blood, the name Ken tattooed in fat, white CAPS on back. For another night, another sixer. 

In “Down the Hatch,” assistant editor Liz Blood offers a look inside Tulsa’s many bars, pubs, saloons and gin joints. Send suggestions for future columns to liz@langdonpublishing.com or @lizblood on Twitter. For another sip, try Herman Marshall Small Batch Whiskey.