Wine on Ice, Part 2
Travels into the Sportsman and Other Adventures on Figueroa Street
Like almost everything else over 30, the Sportsman Lounge on Figueroa Street was built to be something other than it is now. Back by the bathroom, there’s a semisecret exit, Santa Barbara dive-bar style, and beneath pallets of booze and beer, there’s a fireplace, long bricked up, painted over, and forgotten. It might have been a rooming house once or a buggy-whip emporium; maybe a grocer’s or a haberdashery. The clientele who tend to congregate down at the end of the bar, there by the Golden Tee Golf video game and the bathroom, also seem to have all left a life somewhere before showing up here. I noticed a “Ladies Room” the other day, though you rarely see a woman at the Sportsman for more than a quick jolt or two, at least when it’s sunny outside.
The walk from State down to the Sportsman is as close as we get here to the rough-and-tumble commerce of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There’s a barbershop, takeout sushi factory, pastrami-slinging deli, Mexican restaurant, and smoke shop with its own wooden Native American warrior chained outside, with leather chairs, hookahs, and Playboy magazines inside. Most afternoons this hazy public den is peopled with middle-aged men telling each other preposterous lies and marveling at how complicated it is to be a man in such a world.
The Sportsman sits in near darkness. The door allows the only substantial light — everything else is beer-sign glow and repetitive jukebox pyrotechnics. The stools aren’t fixed in the floor as they should be; a loose bar stool in the wrong hands at the wrong minute can be one small pour away from a catastrophic cocktail. As always, I note the exits and formulate a plan for flight. There is the bar — still but scarred, made of Formica, and backed by perfunctory, standard wares. This is a shots-and-a-beer sort of place when it’s not the grapefruit and vodka place it appears to be this afternoon.
