I Love You, Fox's: Ode to a Favorite Place.

My memories of nights and days spent at Fox's are plentiful, blurry, happy, sometimes dramatic, always loving. I fell in love again with this dark, homey place last night, and I feel something like excitement in the prospect of returning, a feeling that had waned over the last year. 

One reason I became bitter toward my favorite bar was because of these new Tuesday night parties where they play club music and rope off the outside for about 300 children under the age of 24 to come out and loiter. I applaud, the manager, Matt's entrepreneurial ways, however, I love the Fox's of Patsy Cline singing softly from the juke box, when the inside is more filled with laughing people than the outside with awkward stances, and what I miss the most are the old guys who made Fox's unique and gave it stories from many generations. 

One older guy I chatted with quite often was a pilot, and lived with his mother. One cool night, he gave a friend and I a good rundown of his perspective of country music. Fox's is the best place to go in Miami on a cool night. This is a fact, don't know why, it just is. This same guy once made me cry during an intense conversation about family not long after my grandmother passed away. I haven't seen him there in a long time, I think the young people must have asked him to leave. Something about this is tragic, because what made Fox's fabulous was that you could have old Miami dudes chilling with 25 year old girls, and not in a pervy way.  

I remember Alison, with her long, auburn hair, walking by with a red purse and me being drunk as shit, saying, "hey, I have that same purse!" Of course it was mine... left in the john. Years later she would tell the story to other people. And they would laugh. That's family.

My brother, and I spent one hurricane hanging out there, as it was close to home, and cabin fever gets to us quickly. We often go there on Christmas Eve. That's the kind of bar Fox's is, the place you go to wait for a Victorian type of Santa with a drink in your hand. It was there and on that day when we got a call that our then 13 year old dog had gotten lost, and we spent the next 20 hours straight looking for her. We found her, thankfully. 

I have been going to Fox's for drinking purposes for almost 10 years, and I think of all the friends I've drank with there, and it makes me happy. Last night I ran into my friend Henry R. at one of the rounded booths, and I told him that when I think of great times, I think of he and I smoking a cig, chatting out on that low brick wall outside. I think of long conversations of varying intensity and importance all had around those walls. I think that it is the people and the place (and the Patsy) that make Fox's the most important bar that I may ever have in my life.