After reading this blog, the anecdote about the bar owner brought back my own memories of a place called The White Horse on Sunset & Western, located beneath the rooms of a shady East Hollywood motel.

East Hollywood, for all my years in LA, has never been the most comfortable part of town. To put things in perspective, Charles Bukowski used to live on the next block over from my own shitty apartment and I sometimes thought I'd see his drunken ghost sleeping in the front bushes of one of the neighboring buildings clutching dirty bar napkins with poems scrawled in bleeding pen. There is an ominous atmosphere of despair lurking over this little corner of town. From the Food 4 Less to the driveway of Home Depot where illegal immigrants will stand in front of your car to let you know that they will work for you for cheap to the countless motels to the potholes... Depressing shit, man.

The White Horse, with its neon sign glowing bright except for a few letters, was a welcome landmark. A, the son of the owner (a feisty Romanian woman whose name I forget) will tell any pretty girl smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk about how he almost died but his mother brought him back from the brink. He'll show you the scars from the terrible car accident, and he'll point to the place on his forehead that the rear view mirror was sticking out of. He'll beam with pride when he tells the listeners of his story that his mother was the one that refused to let the doctors pull the plug on his life support. A is an intimidating guy, and even though he's big and scarred up, the story is so touching that you can't rightly turn away from it. 

One night, I went to the White Horse around the corner from my apartment with the girl who had just moved in with me. We were gonna get to know each other a little better over a beer and a game of pool.  There was something very cliche about her story (pretty girl from a small town goes to the big city to chase her movie star dreams), and there was also something a little crazy about her. I didn't used to mind crazy. I do now.

 She chalked up her cue and I copied her exactly. She seemed to know what she was doing and I'm about as good at pool as I am at keeping a boyfriend. It was an interesting method, the way she would aim while at the same time wiggling her right foot into the ground. She told me that her father taught her to shoot pool like this, her father who was a master hustler and infamous ladies man. She said this to me while winking over my shoulder at A, who was tending the bar that night. 

This was the kind of girl that got drinks bought for her. I don't know how to do that. A, and the Irishman that was manning the door, brought us a couple of Bud Lights and instructed us on how we could improve our shot. Late into the night, A and Irishman kicked the rest of the patrons out, but told my new roommate to stay and hang out. I was just along for the ride at this point. 

Now this could have very well led to a night of some amateur soft core porn, I'm very well aware of that. Especially after someone whipped out a joint that was shared between the three of them. Here's the thing: I've always been kind of square and I kept thinking about how I could just hop over this concrete wall behind the place and I'd be in my backyard. Finally, the new roommate had smoked enough pot and saw me looking just kind of miserable and we left, with her kissing her new friends on the cheek. That was just the preamble for what it was going to be like for the rest of the year we'd live together. And it all started at The White Horse. 

My favorite night (and I'm sure this reveals the morbid side of my nature) was when I was having a drink with a friend of mine and just down the bar, a man and a woman were having a heated conversation. I see the woman's eyes go wide and well up. The man is gesticulating to her in an angry fashion and it just makes the woman he's with break down even more. The Romanian bar owner, who had been serving vodkas, popcorn and hot dogs stopped whatever she was doing and starting yelling at the guy.

"Hey!" she cried. "Get out of my bar!"

His anger now directed at her, he told her to mind her own business. Of course, everything this man was saying just made the poor girl cry even harder.

The Romanian pointed her index finger at him and said, "I will throw you out of here. You don't make girls cry in my bar."

The man throws some money on the bar and the crying woman gathers up her purse and coat and they leave, with the Romanian woman shaking her head after them. The woman turns to me and says, "Terrible! These men making girls cry in my bar. You don't do that here."

Then she continued telling patrons about the hot dogs that they could help themselves to.

I wish I knew what happened between that couple. The Romanian woman was right, though. You don't make girls cry at The White Horse. That's just unseemly.