The Third Most Important Bartender In Mississippi

Before he became Oxford's favorite restaurateur, Randy Yates was Mississippi's third most important bartender. There was a pretty far space behind Johnny Gore, Mississippi's most important private bartender, who knew by heart what every mover and shaker in Mississippi drank, and their wives, and Cotton Baronich, Mississippi's most important public bartender, who knew those things, plus what their girlfriends drank too, and how to keep his mouth shut. I had faith that one day, Spud would rise to a level all his own. He could talk pretty good politics and sports, but being thirty years younger than the lead men in that industry was a handicap and the men in the first two positions were legends.

One night, I was lubricating my troubles at a bar called M&M's in Banner Hall. It's now Broadstreet Bakery. A freshly turned twenty-year-old, Kathleen Conner, was waiting tables and really pretty nervous about these older kids carrying on around her. I was in a conversation with Big Mike Koskie and Randy, the bartender, about the differences between the book Field of Dreams and the movie. I'm not even sure what started this conversation. I think Raul Romero, Cuban law student, husband of Alisa Keogh, and the most popular waiter at The Iron Horse Grill said something like, "If you build it..."

I was a vodka drinker in those days unless Keogh was bartending. Then, I would have her mix me something by color, which was probably not a good idea. That night was a vodka night, and I had several of them, possibly a cigar, but definitely more cigarettes than necessary.

After discussing the book with two guys who were clearly much smarter than me, I realized that it was never like this with Cotton or Johnny Gore. It was never like this at other bars. Nobody was trying to impress anybody. Nobody was trying to win anybody to their side, and nobody was complaining about some guy from the other party who's just an asshole. This was a bartender that reads.

A few years later, Spud moved to Oxford. Nobody knew it would be permanent, and nobody knew Oxford would become what it was. For most of my life, Oxford was just another ratty Mississippi town with a dying economy and a dying downtown. Something happened in Oxford, though. A seed was planted, and Oxford showed very real signs of new life and remarkable growth.

Oxford did have the most famous bookstore in the state. People were whispering about the revival of Oxford Square, and it was becoming a thing, but Square Books was already an established destination. I knew people who drove from Jackson to Oxford just to drink coffee and buy a book they could just as easily get in Jackson. The other thing Oxford had was Barry Hannah, who was involved in the business of assembling a literary colony in Oxford, which became a legitimate phenomenon. “A Secret History” was a product of the Oxford colony, and there’d be more to come. There is still more to come.

Spud had taken a job at a place in the newly refurbished square called City Grocery, which had a bar upstairs I'd been hearing about. The owners had some success in New Orleans and brought Bill Neal’s “Southern Cooking” sensibilities and recipes to Oxford and from Oxford to Mississippi. I'd been hearing about how the bar upstairs was the favorite place of Oxford's Larry Brown; a firefighter turned writer that Barry Hannah discovered when he showed up in a creative writing class.

My sister married a man who would trade a limb for Ole Miss Football, even though he never played himself. That sort of thing makes sense in Mississippi. One weekend, my sister found something more interesting to do, so I became his date for an Ole Miss game. This might be my one and only Ole Miss story, so enjoy it while you can.

Jay and I went upstairs to the bar at City Grocery. I'd already mentioned that it'd be cool if Larry Brown were there, but I figured it’d be a long shot. He was not there when we arrived. Jay got distracted by some Phi Theta Delta heathens, so I waved him on, saying that I'd be fine by myself at the bar. It would hardly be the first time I'd sat at a bar by myself.

Sort of watching the overstarched Oxford cloth shirts and happy handshakes in the mirror and thinking my own thoughts, I was pretty satisfied with myself for having never attended Ole Miss when Randy said, "Boyd, you know Larry Brown?"

"I do not," I said, quite taken aback, and shook his hand, trying to be cooler than I was

"I read your book," I said.

"Yeah? Which one?"

"On Fire," I said, and I asked him about a particularly vivid passage he wrote about trying to keep the fire away from a propane tank. Country houses sometimes had propane tanks to fuel their stoves and their space heaters. We had one at our little place called "Lazy Log Lodge" out toward Raymond. Propane has a smell associated with it that lurks around these tanks. They generally sit a body's length away from country houses, I suppose, to protect the house should the tank ever go up in flames, but I always suspected if one of those tanks ever went up in flames, it’d explode like a German bomb. Larry Brown was of the same opinion. His writing invoked my memories of propane tanks, which sounds odd and perhaps not that impressive, but it was to me. He was impressive to me. I tried very hard to remember that I was basically just a fan, and Larry Brown had a reputation for not spending much time with fans. He was really very gracious with me, though, and granted me a portion of his time much larger than I deserved before he began talking with people he already knew.

I've known a lot of bartenders—some would say too many. Each had a quality that made them important, and each a quality that made me remember them, but only one introduced me to a writer I really wanted to meet. Something like that can make a fella considerably more important than the third-best bartender in Mississippi.