A Neighborhood Christmas Eve Story

For those who may have missed it in the past, I share this Christmas story with Bloga readers each year around this time. Merry Xmas!

                                                                                     

                                                                                     

Boys of the Lucky-U

     My father could only remember the first line of the poem published Christmas Day in the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Metro Section, “Twas the night before Christmas and all through the….” He thought the next word might be “bar,” but he wouldn’t put money on it. 

     That’s about as much of the poem as anybody in the neighborhood could remember; though, they all knew about the incident that inspired the revised poem. Yes, it had been the night before Christmas on Los Angeles west side, and it had occurred at the notorious beer joint known as the Lucky-U bar, second home to many, mostly, Chicano “spirit” enthusiasts. 

     On Santa Monica Boulevard, in the heart of the Sawtelle shopping district, the Lucky-U was located two blocks from the National Soldiers Home, where many disabled WWII and Korean veterans parked their wheelchairs along the sidewalk, some around the corner in front of the Vet’s Bar, on Sawtelle Avenue, and a few adjacent to the lesser-known bars in town, true “dives”. 

     Seeing as it was barely a decade since the end of the wars in the Pacific and Europe, many men, some fresh from Korea, numbed their ailing bodies and minds in the neighborhood’s local beer joints. 

     By 5:00 PM, the end of the workday for many of the Lucky-U’s regulars, it was rare to find an empty stool at the bar. Within the dark, musty room, some men listened to jukeboxes, others hung around the pool tables as someone called, "T-'em up," but most sat or stood around, drinks in their hands, laughing and telling tall tales. 

      The men knew each other, most hailing from L.A. Westside’s different neighborhoods. Many were related or friends since childhood, their parents fleeing the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Most couldn’t claim true allegiance to any one neighborhood since they’d moved about the westside their entire lives, always on the lookout for cheaper rent and reasonably priced homes to purchase, the G.I. Bill catapulting the more ambitious into a higher social bracket. 

                                                                                    

Inside Lucky-U, Morrison's favorite breakfast joint

     Behind the bar, in the tiny kitchen, Robert, the cook, served an assortment of Mexican “quicky” meals, burritos and tacos, and menudo, but only on weekends, which some said was the best menudo in town. Truth be told, in the 1950s, there weren’t but three or four Mexican restaurants on the entire westside. Doors' lead singer Jim Morrison, in 1967, discovered the Lucky-U, called it his favorite bar, and no doubt, after tossing back a few, writing such lyrics as "Break on through to the other side."

      On this one particular Xmas Eve, the Lucky-U had closed before midnight, seeing as even serious drinkers needed to spend more time at home with their families and loved ones. Now, here’s where the story gets a bit murky. It wasn’t clear, in my father’s telling, whether Joe, one of the regulars, got caught in the bathroom and didn’t hear the “Last Call,” or whether he had something else in mind. My father had said, "Who'd want to rob the Lucky-U, anyway?"

     For the owner, there wasn’t much need to search the premises. No one in his right mind would want to stay locked in the Lucky-U overnight. Rushing to get home, the owner decided to leave the money in the cash register and collect it the next day, Xmas Day, when the place was closed. So, he locked up and stepped out through the back door into the alley. He hopped in his car and drove home. 

     When Joe came out of the bathroom, he saw the place was empty. He decided to take advantage of the opportunity and down a few, “on the house,” before heading out the back door. Did the evils of alcohol get the better of him? He reached over to check the cash register. When the till opened, he marveled at the different denominations of bills, and he began stuffing his pockets. 

     Joe was a long-time Lucky-U customer and not a thief, by nature. Surely, he considered the Lucky-U’s owner a friend, who was known to give patrons credit to partake in the establishment’s delights. If Joe did surrender to a lapse in mental judgment, maybe he had good reason. Maybe he wanted to come home to his family and show he hadn’t spent all his money drinking. Maybe he didn’t want to return home broke and with nothing to show on Christmas Eve. Maybe he had bills to pay and found himself more desperate than ever. 

     This, he never confessed to his friends. What he did confess to was that as he made his way past the bar, the strong urge to have one more drink was hard to pass up. Just one more, how could that hurt? Booze always tastes better when it’s free. Sure enough, he sat down, reached for another bottle, and poured himself another, then another, and, well, you get the picture. 

     When the owner came in the next morning to collect the prior evening’s “take”, he found Joe slumped across the bar, bills sticking out of his pockets and littering the floor under his bar stool. Seeing as there was no break-in, it confused the owner, but it didn’t take him long to put 2x2 (or is it 2+2). together. 

     I can only surmise how the Hearst newspaper reporter learned about the break-in. The Lucky-U owner must have called the local police, the satellite precinct just down the street from the bar. The desk sergeant reported the robbery to an otherwise listless Christmas Day news desk, sending the reluctant reporter from his warm cozy desk in downtown Los Angeles out to the Westside to check the minor infraction. 

     After conducting rudimentary interviews with people at the scene, the Herald’s reporter, his creative juices flowing, decided to forego penning a mundane piece about a neighborhood drunk serendipitously breaking into a local bar, and, instead, chose to memorialize the escapade in verse, borrowing the elements of prosody from a Christmas poem published, anonymously, in 1823 which began, “Twas the night before Christmas/ and all through the….”