We were standing against the wall of a parochial school gym in Farmers Branch, JP and I, watching our seventh-grade daughters do something that resembled a sport. It was a Saturday morning. I was not excited.
“Dude,” I said, “how about this? My wife and I have to take a dozen girls to Goosebumps 2 tonight, for my kiddo’s birthday. It’s right when the Ohio State game kicks.”
JP is a resourceful fellow. He advised that the missus and I should drop the girls at the movie, then scoot off to watch the first half of the game. Attractive as that plan sounded, I told JP it gave me pause. As a responsible father, I felt I needed to stay close to the theater, in case my daughter called to tell me that one or more of her friends had been abducted or thrown out of the theater for loudly talking to the characters on-screen, as some people insist on doing in scary movies. There was no place I could think of that had beer and TVs near the theater, the UA Galaxy 10, over by the soccer complex at Samuell-Garland Park, off Northwest Highway, on whose desiccated fields in my early 30s I sacrificed so much skin and dignity playing defender for a club called The Very Fast Rocketships, the roster of which included two of the members of Deep Blue Something. But I digress. JP had a suggestion.
“There’s a bar right down the street from UA Galaxy. It’s called Bombones,” he said, pronouncing it like an explosive and multiple femurs. Bomb. Bones.
JP, you should know, calls himself a coconut, meaning that he’s of Hispanic extraction and has brown skin but is white enough on the inside that he loves Band of Horses. Ours is a complicated world.
So when I pulled out my phone and googled the place and saw that it looked like a Hispanic Hooters, I said, “You gringo. That’s got to be Bombones,” pronouncing it like, you know, it should be pronounced. Bombon-ez.
Another Google search told us that the name meant “chocolates.” At this point, JP and I were both ethnically and linguistically confused, so we ventured up into the stands overlooking the alleged sporting event and consulted with JP’s wife, Maria, who can actually speak Spanish.
“Bombones? That’s like candy,” she said. Then she reconsidered. “No, it’s more like bonbons.”
Ah, yes. To weave Latin with French with Spanish, there is a plethora of double-entendres for los pechos. If you follow. And my wife did. But not for very long.
After dropping the girls at the movie (and after waiting 15 minutes to sneak into the theater and make sure they weren’t misbehaving), we snuck off to Bombones. Now, bear in mind that I’d told my wife nothing about this place. I just said, “JP gave me the name of a bar right down the street from the movie theater.” I was super excited to watch football. But as we got out of our car and headed for the door, there appeared a young woman several strides ahead of us wearing fishnet hose, walking toward the entrance. My wife’s eyes widened.
I quietly said, “I maybe should have told you that this place might be like a Hispanic Hooters.”
She spun on her heels and shot back, “We are not going in there.”
“Why do you have to be so racist?” I asked.
“I refuse to objectify women,” she said.
“Who wants to objectify women?” I asked, trailing her back to the car. “I just want to watch Ohio State play football. This game has serious implications for Notre Dame in the CFP rankings.”
I honestly didn’t want to go to Bombones to see bombones and tried to convince my wife that Bombones held but two attractions for me: TV screens and proximity to our daughter. To no avail. We wound up driving to Go 4 It Sports Grill, a more distant and decidedly less exotic bar where it always seems like half the customers are vaping.
Despite all the drama, my wife and I did have a productive, if brief, date night. We discussed the college football playoff system and who is the better parent. I have one confession, though. I shamelessly objectified Urban Meyer.
