As If Washington Avenue Could Get Even Worse
Enter Fat Boots: Three Yankees' conception of a white trash bar
What’s worse than a dive bar that opens up new and billing itself as a dive bar?
How about a new bar that bills itself as a trailer park-themed dive bar, that is not only brand new, but a corporate concept being onboarded in Houston, with locations to follow on Bourbon Street and somewhere in Nashville, presumably downtown.
Which over the last 25 years has gone from a line of desperado dive bars and seedy peep show theaters — a real-deal hillbilly 1970s Times Square — to the Bachelorette Party Center of the Universe for Brides-to-Be Who Are Scared of New Orleans.
The next three pics tell the tale:
Photos of old Lower Broad by Bill Rouda. He didn’t take this one of the new Lower Broad:
So…this Washington Avenue joint is going for that kind of vibe. I guess newly-gentrified Inner Loop Houston, as a B-grade party town, is becoming a decent spot to float trial “concepts” like this, which isn’t even new: Dallas has had a popular faux trailer park dive called the Double Wide for nigh on 15 years now.
On a visit to the Big D five years ago, I pondered Dallas’s relationship with White Trash culture in general:
No city seems to have enshrined and commodified the dive bar like Dallas. Up here it has been transformed into a "concept." There are "dives" geared towards well-heeled hipsters with names like Lee Harvey's and the Double Wide, a "dive" "honoring" "white trash culture," with slogans like "Drinks that hit harder than yer dad!"
It is even built to resemble a trailer! Ain't that just the cutest?
I am about to see if these North Texas neo-dives are anything like real dives, of which there are plenty in Dallas. (But few offering cocktails with names like the "Yoohoo Yeehaw," a "White Russian meets White Trash.")
The fetishization of white underclass culture in Dallas is really weird and something that totally makes it differ from Houston.
I was in an ornery mood that night — it was the same foul evening Charlie Strong’s Horns Lost to Kansas. I didn’t make it to Lee Harvey’s or the Double Wide, but I did check out the little sibling of the latter:
Walked to the Single Wide and checked it out. It is a lot like Poison Girl, only with deliberate attempts to be "white trash": taxidermy, velvet paintings, thrift store kitsch. It is on Lower Greenville Avenue so it is by no means a true dive bar. It seemed more like a date spot, a place where frat dudes took their dates for two or three drinks between one fancier place and another.
It had a tattooed DJ playing deep soul, which was totally wasted on the audience. There was no back patio for the smokers. I don't think the owner was laying out a free feed on Thanksgiving and Christmas for the regulars, because I don't think it even has true regulars. And yet it makes most lists of top 10 Dallas dive bars.
SMDH.
Still, I didn’t quite hate it as much as I thought it would…
But this place coming to Washington Avenue is a whole ‘nother level of absolute nightmarish fuckery.
Remember in The Sopranos when Chrissie is confiding in Paulie about how be believed he’d died and gone to hell?
“The Emerald Piper. That’s our hell. It’s an Irish bar where it’s St. Patrick’s Day every day forever.”
I am not Italian, nor am I quite Irish enough to feel at ease crooning about the Foggy Dew on St. Paddy’s Day. I am descended from White Trash along multiple lines of my ancestry, some near and some far. And this Fat Boots is my hell: a corporate fake trailer park dive where every day is Cinco de Mayo, because of course that it is the occasion of this atrocity’s grand opening. What better occasion than a misunderstood Mexican holiday that has become nothing more than a highjacked drunkfest to keep cash registers chingalinging between St Patrick’s Day and Memorial Day weekend?
Anyway…Fat Boots promises to be not just a theme bar, but also an immersive, Coyote Ugly-style show and “Instagram playground.”
Some pics should clue you in:
Um…whose fetish is that? Cheez-whiz?
Drank and spank may rhyme but that slogan makes no sense, folksy or otherwise
A very authentic peach-and-salmon-colored trailer with the customary potted plants.
Bah. The people behind it come out of backgrounds including Live Nation, the Coyote Ugly bar phenomenon, and Vegas, where one of the founders operated some lounge called Pure and another themed after the Pussycat Dolls. Real high-concept fare here. As with most authentic dive bars, you can book tables in advance for VIP treatment. (Kidding.)
I dug up an old interview with Jennifer Worthington, the co-owner with the Coyote Ugly background. (I was subjected to that movie on a transatlantic flight; I didn’t order the headphones and I don’t think I missed much.) There was a nice little gotcha moment in this chat:
Las Vegas Sun: Bikini's was your second Las Vegas club. How did that come about?
JW: The Rio was looking for a nightclub and we sort of wanted to do the next level, the next demographic and we were really interested in doing sort of a Miami-themed nightclub.
The thing about Tangerine is we're sort of taking that to the next level. We ... believe in blending the performance and a nightclub into one.
Sun: Was Tangerine molded after Carmen Electra's Pussycat Dolls?
JW: No. No. The burlesque trend has really sort of become very strong in the last year all over the country and it's sort of a natural fit for Las Vegas for all the obvious reasons.
The nice thing about burlesque is women like it as much as the men love it so it's not anything that in anyway alienates women. We try to be very careful about that.
My partner and I both have 4-year-old daughters and I think that we sort of look at things from that perspective that we don't want to do anything that would in any way embarrass our children. We look at this as good clean fun. It's risque without being really risque.
A few questions later:
Sun: I hear that you're looking to open a Girls Gone Wild establishment.
JW: It's a project that the company's working on.
Girls Gone Wild was good clean fun? If you say so.
The ad copy for Fat Boots is nauseating.
“It’s all good in the trailerhood. Just a few minutes up the way from downtown Houston and a sharp right turn at the broken mailbox is Fat Boots Trailer Park Bar, where farmers tans beat spray tans, bathing suits outnumber business suits, SPAM is glam, and the locals dance on the bar. IT’S SEXY AND YOU TOW IT.
Fat Boots visitors are invited to kick up their heels and enjoy a colorful world of woven webbed lawn chairs, six packs, and inflatable pink flamingos blazing atop the patio turf.”
Really, this corny and dated aesthetic seems themed more on the glamorous lives of the goateed Winter Texans I see in the RV parks scattered from Alvin to Brownsville, Frank and Edna from Waukesha, down here escaping the snows of Wisconsin before heading back home come May to bingo and the Elks lodge in the newly thawed land of cheese.
So….less trailer park than lower-middle-class snowbird.
With blandly sexy girls in Daisy Dukes and boots performing mildly Sapphic acts with cans of Cheez-Whiz and boxes of crackers to Bro-Country and alt-rock jamz.
Again, my version of hell.
The Fat Boots Trailer Park Bar makes me think of Le Petit Trianon, where Marie Antoinette and all her courtiers dressed up and play-acted as shepherds and shepherdesses, only the FBTPB is full of irony-poisoned petit bourgeois dumbasses, not aristocrats, and they're cosplaying farmers and extras from Toby Keith videos.
I miss Wabash, the real one. And riding my bike up Washington before it became a hell hole.
I miss the coffee shop that was in a former church and is now some bougie club.
Actually, i miss Houston in general.