Chapter 5: Patrick's Bar

I've already mentioned the bar Patrick's and how popular a place it was in the early 80's. It was where the young professionals from the downtown area met to meet. It was your average run of the mill, dive with two pool tables and enough Pac man, Defender, Pinball and Asteroid games to keep everyone interested while they downed $1 longnecks. This place was home base for our tournament softball team and our general hangout. It was also crawling with available and ready babes. The gals there ranged from locals to imports. There were local girls, like the ones that worked at Gray's Jewelry and the others that had landed jobs at Phillips. There were others from out of town that worked in various capacities either at Phillips or in the booming economy around town. I got involved shortly with a gal from Gray's Jewelry; she was going through a separation and ultimately a divorce. We met one wild Friday. This gal had a rack from Bartlesville to Tulsa. We ended up driving up towards Lake BarDew and turned off on a side road. Since she was driving a brand new Camaro, I laid her on the hood of the car and we went to town. Either I was in rare form, or she hadn't had any in a long time. Suffice to say we had to go to the car wash to hose off the hood of the car before she took it home. We went back to Patrick's to more than a few winks and nods. She and I kept it up for a few months after that, but it was uncomfortable. I was over at her place one day when her estranged husband came by. I recently heard from her. She looked me up on the web and sent me an anonymous email. She now lives in Florida and was going to B'ville and as she made the drive from the Tulsa airport, she said I popped into her head. I guess they were pleasant memories. They were for me. Wonderful breasts, hers. She says they still are. LOL I remember on one Saint Patrick's Day, I squeezed in between two women at the bar to buy a beer. A short blond with a nice figure got up to go to the ladies room. I pulled some bills from my wallet paid and then went back to talking to my co-worker. He was an old PPCo hand that had been with the company for 25 years and coached the softball team. A few minutes later the blonde came up to me. It seems that I had dropped a credit card receipt on her chair from my wallet. She assumed I had left it on purpose. Well, she had just arrived in town, and was staying at a house a few blocks from the bar. One thing led to another and off we went to tear off a quick piece at her place. Then we came back to the bar. My buddy, Richard, asked where I'd been, and I told him. He just shook his head in disbelief. Patrick's was always the Danish Pastry's and my jumping off point after volley ball. That gave us an alibi. After a while Patrick's began to go down hill. It wasn't uncommon for Patrick to come in and take 90% of the cash out of the register to buy cocaine. He stopped putting money in the place and it became more and more a dump. That started to hurt business. I remember driving him around one Saturday night late so he could score some coke. When I realized what he was doing, I dropped him off and went home. Shortly after than I think he started dealing. I remember how erratic his behavior became. He bought a big boat at Grand Lake and totaled it. He served a course Marshal when the PGA tour came to Tulsa. Boy was he pumped about that. But on another occasion he came back after a weekend in Dallas with several strippers in tow. One was a big blonde with tits bigger than her head. We ran into them at the DI and he walked up to our table. There were six of us sitting by the dance floor. He just swept our drinks off the table, thinking it was funny. He turned into a real flake. It wasn't too long after that that he got busted trying to sell to a cop. He had to sell the bar and it never regained its popularity. Of course by that time Bartlesville was in the depths of a depression, after Phillips had downsized twice after the T. Boone Picken's and Carl Icahn takeover attempts. For those who may not know, PPCo laid off a higher percentage of geoscientists and other employees than any other company in the industry, over 50%. The company was hit by the double whammy of green mail and the precipitous drop in oil prices in 1986. In the event, not only did Patrick's go out of business, but the DI closed then reopened under a different name and management. There were a few other attempts at opening nightspots, but they were pretty feeble or short lived.