Category: Settings

Lipsweet of Santa Monica

Lipsweet of Santa Monica

This part of Santa Monica was choked with sunshine and whackjob vagabundos. The sidewalk was lined with tents and broke-down camper-vans. The acrid scent of meth smoke filled the air, alongside wriggling plastic shopping bags and a slow, slurred murmur from the hobos.
Now the streets loomed like a labyrinth in every direction, and he got nowhere to go. He was gonna have to hustle up a lifestyle, se acabó la fiesta.

From Chuy the Ex-Con

Lipsweet was rollicking and raucous when Anthony got in. His brother Chuy didn’t see him cuz the line at the door was crowded and another bouncer checked Anthony’s idee. He passed Chuy in the crowd once he got in. Chuy’s knuckles were bloody, his round mug serious, capped by a brown knit cap. The bar boomed with bass blasted by Bud — the club deejay — while some glorious chica strutted her feminine things on stage.
The men stared like hypnotized sheep at the chica. Their pants bulged and throbbed. It was all so predictable. Anthony’s ability to not watch the women was like a superpower in a place like this. He could rob every man here. Nobody paid him any mind.
Well, the other dancers would see, and the money Anthony would be stealing would otherwise end up in their pockets (or g-strings anyway), so they would stop him. Not that Anthony had any desire to rob anyone.

It was a Mexican bar. Not all Mexican, but mostly — Lipsweet was controlled by the Latin Kings. Many of the men were Latin Kings — as was Anthony’s brother Chuy. Latin Kings ran this place.
Cholos from other gangs were not allowed. Gringos without any gang connection were fine.
Opinions were mixed on black American men. Very mixed, often intense opinions. Anthony didn’t get involved. He liked all colors of men.

From Cholos and the Raunchy Hobos of Santa Monica

Lipsweet of San Francisco

Lipsweet of San Francisco

Buck done visit San Francisco when he was in the Army — only briefly, but the city still cast a sweet shadow o’er his memory. He enjoyed his time there and the purdy ladies. T’was the last place he dallied b’fore’n leaving American soil fer a spell, a spell that took him to Vietnam and other ports most unpleasant indeed. He ain’t realize til he returned that the scattered longhairs he recollected done growed into a wave of hippie freaks flashing doobies and tuning in to drop out. San Francisco done got overrun.

From Buck the Conservative

San Francisco was a bustling city crowdier than anything Graham “Smooches” Smucciano was used to. He’d hitchhiked through some big cities on the way out west — Denver, Saint Louis, Las Vegas — but he didn’t stay long in any of them. He didn’t let himself take in the cities themselves.

That was unavoidable here. San Francisco wrapped him up like a joyful quilt. It dripped with excitement, passion, embraces and music and colorful clothes and ethnic peoples he could never have imagined. It felt like the future, or the future he hoped would come to be for the whole world. Everything was peaceful and creative and affectionate.
He danced with strangers and wandered through the little encampments of musicians and poets and free-loving women scattering kisses and joints on every man in attendance. Smooches explored the scene, but he didn’t stop for any of the women.

From Buck the Conservative

She went with Buck to the local haunt, a trash-and-all bar called Lipsweet. Buck thinked fer sh’ore t’weren’t the kinda spot that woulda e’er got took o’er by hippies, but they filled e’ery corner with they skinny limbs and sneering noses, dancing to plinky folk music.

From Buck the Conservative

So that was how Smooches found hisself walking into Lipsweet, which was the kinda bar his father woulda said not to go to. It stank of home-rolled cigarettes, cheap beer and pop wine, and the women were outgoing and vivacious. Smooches’s father would have warned him off them women too. “Vivacious” women weren’t for wifing, he would have said.
But Smooches sat down at a table with Buck, whose eyes bugged out at sight of all them loosely clad women, none of whom looked like the wifing sort. Their bosoms bounced unburdened by bras. Smooches tried to play it cool. He was all ’bout free love and free bodies, after all.

From Buck the Conservative

Lipsweet of Richmond

Lipsweet of Richmond

Description

Lipsweet was a big, wide bar with a low ceiling, like an excavated basement-cum-dive bar. It was between a crackhouse on one side and a Gilded Age mansion being used as the headquarters for a global fashion chain on the other side. Above it were apartments, Avery was pretty sure, but he thought they were being used as flophouses and fuckrooms by the waitresses at Lipsweet.
Avery went there a lot because a lot of intensely arousing wrestlers came through. Nearly every night there was a match on the TVs in every corner. American-mixed league wrestling was on right now, of course, but they showed the European League tournament matches, the Greco-Roman American League, the International Pehlivan League in the spring, wrestling entertainment shows in the afternoon, etc. Boxing and MMA sometimes graced the screens too.

From Rough Trade Wrestlers

Lipsweet of Maui

Lipsweet of Maui

Teddy threw away the half-used limes and lemons, their little squashed wedges like dead soldiers on the cutting board behind the bar. It was almost closing time. He made a loud noise clinking glasses together as he cleaned up the izakaya near the beaches of Maui.
But he wasn’t allowed to actually announce that closing time was soon. That wasn’t proper, he had been told. He wasn’t sure if that was specific to this kind of bar — Lipsweet was a Japanese bar — Japanese in clientele, not decor — or if Japanese bars in general didn’t do that.
The drinkers here all knew that closing time was soon. Even without announcing it, they would be heading out the door at the appropriate moment. Japanese were like that. If it was a normal American bar, they’d dally and complain they weren’t adequately warned. If it was a Hawaiian bar, they’d just plain refuse to leave and stay there all night.
But the Japanese left at the appointed time without being told.
Conversation was a low murmurant hush that filled the spartan little bar with the high-priced drinks and the uncomfortable chairs — Teddy didn’t get why they used such uncomfortable chairs and stools. Maybe it was a yakuza thing.

From Wuzu the Yakuza

Lipsweet of Martinsburg

Lipsweet of Martinsburg

Description

Lipsweet was a fat squat slab of concrete surrounded by a muddy gravel lot, just a few hundred feet from the highway. Above the parking lot blared a blinking neon sign advertising the name Lipsweet with a picture of a buxom girl in a frilly dressy that revealed her leg up to and just barely past her knee.

From Ex-Con Cravings Can’t Be Refused

Lipsweet had a large back area, including dressing rooms, champagne rooms, a locker room and gym for the bouncers, a couple offices and storage spaces for the Gregarian family (who owned Lipsweet) and a locked warehouse that Teddy was pretty sure was full of guns. He didn’t ask about that door though.

From The Scarred Bouncer

The three of them were in the “champagne room” at Lipsweet, a low-class strip club of the type that Lee would never have entered without Ezra to accompany him and pressure him into it. Mom would never allow that. She would hate it. She would think this was oppressive to women.
The men here were frightening. It was a country bar, full of white men with literal red necks, wearing workpants, dirty boots and cowboy hats, plus a smattering of black men in football jerseys and saggy jeans. He smelled something smoky and floral and herbal that reminded him of the hippies and club kids in college — was that cannabis? Maybe it was a “blunt”, which he knew was something black people rapped about, but he was too embarrassed to ask Ezra what it was. Maybe, he thought, he was becoming “stoned”. Maybe that was why he was nervous.

From The Factory Foreman

It was all the same. Gray. Monotonous. Uneventful.
A lot happened — it always did. He was simply inured to it. Tonight, two men had exchanged blows over their beers, one of the dancers had run out of the room crying for reasons Teddy was not privy to, another fight had been broken up by the bouncer Buck, then there was a series of attempted groping incidents that turned into another fight that ended with Buck dragging a drunk man out by the waist of his pants, then a man had vomited in the men’s room and again Buck was the one who dragged him outside, and then Buck had to punch out some big farmboy who threw a couple good hits in his attempt to get backstage to see his “girlfriend” (a dancer he had been stalking).
The dancers had to deal with that stuff a lot. That was just how it went at Lipsweet, a strip club on the outskirts of town. Buck kept the riffraff away, at least at the club and in the parking lot (and sometimes, at their homes — Buck often sorted out boyfriend-related troubles for the dancers).

From Aroused by Ex-Cons

Lipsweet of Key West

Lipsweet of Key West

That cantina was called Lipsweet, and it was far from the tourists thronging Duval in downtown Key West, which was what Max liked most about it. Lipsweet looked onto the sweet Caribbean sea and the hodgepodge of boats on the hook, casting tiny silhouettes on the setting sun itself.
Max sat outside the bar to drink his drink and watch the astronomy blanket the night. A long row of wooden tables at Lipsweet overlooked the sea. The evening was young though, so Max was alone out there for now. Lipsweet didn’t pick up until later.
A chivalrous part of Max remained strong, a relic from his childhood, an innate part he couldn’t get rid of, a part that disliked Davon for being pimp-adjacent and Haykh for being an actual pimp and himself and the other men here for supporting this whole corrupt business.
But where else was he supposed to drink? Cantina Buena? The Hemingway Bar? Those were tourist traps. La Patria was for Cuban gangsters, the Seaside was for pretentious artists. The Blue and the Green was expensive and elite. Lipsweet was basically the only bar in Key West for ordinary conches.
The other men in the bar snuck leers at the women too. That was the whole point of filling a cantina with beautiful women in skimpy clothes, after all. They were here to tantalize and tease. Ernie was a deadbeat not because he stared but because he did not hide it. The worst thing a man can do to a woman is respond to her provocations.

From Max the Beach Bum

Lipsweet of Dallas

Lipsweet of Dallas

That was a grimy football bar just outsidea Dallas. It was a football bar, but the honkies who habited there was mostly okay. Lipsweet was the last place he visited before his arrest. It was the only place he done seen so far that he visited back then that still existed now in the same form, run by the same family of Armenian shitheads. So Thumper damn well do wanna see it.
Plus the waitresses was hot to rock.

From The Ex-Con, the Prettyboy Thug and Gang Loyalty