David Remnick: Next week marks the official start of summer, the solstice but in places like Houston, Texas, it's already well into the 90s.
Bryan Washington: Right now, it's a little bit past 6:00 and it is sufficiently swampy, and it's pretty disgusting outside, actually but I think that's just what we've got to work with until July-ish and then it only gets swampier and then it will disappear around November.
David Remnick: Bryan Washington is a Houston native who's published essays and short fiction in The New Yorker. A couple of years back, Bryan took us to one of his favorite places in the city, a local institution known as the West Alabama Ice House. Now, what exactly is an ice house?
Bryan Washington: I think the idea of an ice house is really debatable. I think the only consistency with everyone's definitions is that there really is no one true definition of what an ice house is. Some folks would argue that it has to have been a place that literally sold ice at some point in time. Some people could argue that an ice house's signifier is shitty parking to accentuate the fact that it's a community hub, and people from the community would walk over and just hang out.
Some people would argue that an ice house had to have originally served as a convenience store because that's how many ice houses started out and that they sold ice, they sold milk, they sold bread because it was a place that could keep those things cool. I think it's literally different from a regular bar, in that swathes of it are outside and swathes of it are populated by benches. The ice house doesn't sell liquor, either they sell beer, they sell cider, they sell water, they sell sodas, but they don't sell hard liquors, this is just not something that they do.
If you were walking from off the road, you're just walking to the ice house from up the street, you're going to run right into some benches, you might stub your toe on one of them as you head your way to the bar and if you turn the corner, there's a bit of an awning with a series of TVs or most folks are watching whatever basketball game, right now it's the playoffs.
Speaker 3: They're just so inconsistent, getting them to show up.
Speaker 4: I know that morning chicken truck was very inconsistent, but it's summertime now, and we need to [unintelligible 00:02:27]
Speaker 3: You know I want to eat.
Bryan Washington: Well, I think the concept of ice house started in the late 1800s, because you had these ships that were coming down from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, and they would stop over in Galveston, and that's where they would unload and sell the ice that they had left over. I first started coming to the ice house because it was a meeting place or an access point because the first I was hanging out in Montrose, I had never been in this neighborhood before, so I was just still exploring and mostly just clubs and gay bars around the area and it was a great place to meet people because everyone knew where it was.
It served as a landmark, so you could pregame and get a beer or whatever for significantly cheaper than you would at whatever bar or club that you were going to and then just go off and enjoy your evening. It served as a introduction to the neighborhood in this part of town for me and it remained in my life since then.
[unintelligible 00:03:27] How are you doing?
Speaker 4: How are you?
Speaker 5: Pretty god. Can I get a Bohemian and then can we also get a Topo Chico?
Bryan Washington: I've had not great experiences in ice houses as well, I've gotten kicked out of this particular ice house twice. The first time that I got kicked out, I was just hanging out with some friends and we were sitting next to the table and there was this group of burlier white guys, and they were talking very loud and one of them was very literally homophobic which now, I would not have the reaction that I did then but as someone who had just come out a few years ago, I hadn't had too many contacts with blatant open homophobias.
I picked a fight and I say, kicked out, but that's a bit of a euphemism, it's not like it's a movie where we were literally thrown out but the bartender came over and they shoot us out and that was my end of my relationship with the ice house for a few months or a little while. The other time, I broke up with someone, we had a pretty significant argument being right before we were asked politely to leave.
Speaker 4: I'm not a DJ though. Yasha, what do you want to hear?
Bryan Washington: These days, I'm here about once or twice a week and if I'm here, on a weekend, let's say that I'm probably working on something, so I'll have my laptop and I'll just edit whatever I need to edit or just work on emails or whatever for a few hours and then inevitably I'll end up people watching and just gelling with the ice house itself, whatever the vibe is, for that particular day. There have been times where I've been here and there have been wedding parties, let's say, and they've asked me to sit with them.
They might have too much beer or they might have too much food and you end up talking to people when you get swept up in whatever the excitement is. It's a space where I just lift here, run through the spectrum of emotions, and I can't think of too many places outside of an actual home or an actual workplace where that would be the case.
David Remnick: Bryan Washington at the West Alabama Ice House in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston. We spoke with Washington in 2019 and his novel, Family Meal is set to come out in the fall.
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