The College Bar

The bar sat on a quiet block of Morena Boulevard, a flat-roofed building with two small windows on the front and five parking spaces crammed between the front door and the curb. It was wedged between a cheap motel (the Seaside Inn was many miles from the Pacific Ocean) and a small house. It served the students of the University of San Diego, a private, Catholic, liberal arts school perched above the dingy little neighborhood that housed Nico's Taqueria, a smattering of auto repair shops and strip malls, and our beloved Mo Club.

Despite the aggregate affluence of the USD student body, most of us were cash poor during our college years, and the Mo Club provided all that we needed - cheap beer, pool tables, a jukebox - and perhaps the greatest meal in the world to a young college student, the Mo Club's famous grilled cheese sandwiches.

While two pieces of white bread toasted with mayonnaise and Velveeta cheese might not sound like haute cuisine, the old woman who kept bar as she chain-smoked Camel cigarettes added her own touch, lovingly placing hamburger slice crinkle cut dill pickle chips between the slices of bread, tucking them into the freshly melted cheese.

Cheap American beer was sold by the pitcher and, because our friend Bob, a diminutive Irish kid from Long Island, was always with us, we deferred to his preference for Coors Light.

We would shoot pool, eat grilled cheese and down pitchers for hours - the bartender ignoring us except to shout out that another sandwich was ready to be picked up at the bar. Most of us had a particular song on the jukebox. The playlist never varied, though the person who had to feed $5 into the jukebox did. Pat always got the first song and the samba beat of Elvis' "Viva Las Vegas" would serenade the first break on the pool table. The rest of us would make little three quarter stacks on the far rail to queue up for the next games - the winner never paid for his next game.

After Pat's song (which suited him well, for I've seen Pat lose many hands of blackjack on Las Vegas pool tables since our college days) the first high pitched notes of Geddy Lee's voice would tell us all about today's Tom Sawyer in honor of Jeff. Bob's Billy Joel tune would round out the first set while my roommate Dan and I were content to share the encore performance of Jimmy Buffett's country twang on his old classic "Miss You So Badly," which Dan and I would lament along to as if we also had a long lost girlfriend that we were pining for, instead of contentedly shooting pool with our friends.

For us, the Mo Club was strictly a guy's night out. The six of us would shoot pool and drink beer in a sanctuary away from the pressures of the single life that was prevalent at the beach bars and dance clubs downtown.

That didn't mean that on the few occasions there were female patrons at the bar we would not give them our undivided attention, but the Mo Club was not intended to be a place to find a girlfriend. Pat did try one night, but unfortunately his undeniable charm couldn't compensate for the fact that he threw up on the bar while talking to a perfect stranger, one who helped him clean up after himself, thereby ensuring that we weren't permanently blacklisted from our own college hangout.

I had a chance to return to San Diego this summer with my girlfriend. Twenty years, two kids, and one divorce later, things had inevitably changed to my old neighborhood. The university had expanded much since we'd been students, and its slow creep down the hill had obviously raised property values. Gone were many of the auto repair shops and strip malls, replaced with apartments and groceries and liquor stores so necessary to the daily life of college students.

Sadly, gone too was the Mo Club, another victim of gentrification and progress. My college, where I had spent so many fondly remembered days, had succeeded in bringing about the end of the bar where I'd spent so many nights laughing, drinking, and shooting pool with my friends while Jimmy Buffett would remind us in his southern twang how badly he missed his own true love.