One Night at Nasty's

Jeremy Balkin for the DT Weekend

By Jonathan York

Nasty’s Bar (est. 1985) is the dark little room behind Flamingo Automotive. It crouches opposite Amy’s Ice Cream, just off the stretch where Guadalupe Street has stopped being the drag but has not become anything else yet.

Hole in the Wall belongs to Guadalupe. But Nasty’s belongs to Maiden Lane, a street edging into North Campus neighborhoods, where students live in flaking houses or in apartments that resemble old motels. They drink beer at plastic tables in weed-choked alleys, or they creep into Nasty’s, where Jack Bloom is always around.

Bloom, the owner, keeps hard at work in the early afternoon, when the bar remains closed, but the doors are propped open for air or sun. He is a stocky rugby player with brown eyes and big wrists. Since he takes inventory Wednesday, he must spread his attention among distribution men who hurry in and out shouting:

“Budweiser!”

“Sunshine Wheat!”

“You know, you got a little Bud Light left!”

While Bloom signs their orders, a large man bends over the jukebox, the top of which is open. He slides in quarters, fiddles with its guts, then closes it. The casings glow, and a bassy rhythm pumps through the next few seconds.

The distribution men vanish for a moment to the red-and-blue planet their shorts and polo shirts came from. So Bloom is back to talking about the hip-hop night that has happened here on Mondays for about a decade.

“We’re seeing a little bit of a decline,” he says. “Percentage-wise, I don’t know. It’s still a popular night, and it’s still a crowd, but not what it used to.”

Wednesday afternoons and Monday nights here bear no resemblance.

Then, the rickety tables were gone. The room was full of slanted angles, no one standing straight, while about 60 people leaned, grooved and sipped until closing. These ranks of early 20s held more variety than usual for Austin clubs — black, white, male, female in roughly equal proportions.

One saw miniskirts, corn rows, tennis shoes, army boots, camo, baggy jerseys, black caps, striped shirts. The small wooden dance floor in one corner writhed with the slashing and punching motions of stray arms. Mostly women danced. Mostly men stood, arms crossed or sagging, moving less often for the beat than to gulp a beer or aim a pool cue.

This DJ wasn’t up to par with Mel Sandico, who has spun at Nasty’s since ’96. DJ Mel squatted nearby, drinking Pacifico in a blue shirt that said “The Rub.” He stayed there until the beat died, and everyone made a descending “ooooooh!”

Then DJ Mel seemed to be helping the other guy straighten it out. He plugged in his own laptop. He lifted a record and inspected the grooves. Against the small lights atop both turntables, his hands moved quickly and precisely, and in moments the music was better.

Better, but not kicking. By 1:35 a.m., it still wasn’t.

Bloom seemed more imposing then — taking money at the door ($3 for girls, $4 for guys), glancing everyone over — than he does now in the half-sunlight where distribution men scurry. He looked as though he’d been burned before, but decided through faith in people or business that it would not change him.

He is used to fighting for his business. He founded Cain & Abel’s, too. (“I love my brother, but like everybody, every now and then, we have a throwdown.”) And after he sold it, the buyer didn’t pay what was agreed. At least that’s what Bloom said in a 2002 lawsuit to recover the money. Among the counterarguments was an allegation that Bloom’s 60-year-old mother hurled a box fan in a reckless manner.

He doesn’t like to talk about it. His fear these days is the high rate of construction that has made roofs sprout like mushrooms all over his quarter of Austin. He asked the city council in 2004 not to allow big apartments near his parking lot, but they did anyway.

“The more and more you push, the more and more development,” he says. “You ... lose some of the identity of how great Austin is.”

To Bloom, development means higher property values, higher taxes and steeper rent. The current tax assessment on Nasty’s has risen a full digit. He worries about sustaining a place where the lights went out in a recent storm, and in the silence without TV or jukebox, 10 customers who did not know each other started talking.