DOWN IN SAN LEON
The Sunday afternoon scene in the San Leon Beach Pub is even more laid-back and mellow than it is on most Sabbath days.
“The jam session’s canceled this week,” says the blonde 40-something bartender. “That’s ’cause we had three last weekend—Steve-O’s memorial benefit, the biker run, and the regular one. Everybody’s recoverin’.”
Still, about a half-dozen 60-something men puff on Marlboros and Pall Malls and nurse cold beers and bloody Marys around the horseshoe-shaped bar on a sunny day this February. The burning issue of the moment: How to fix the bar’s water heater? One of the ad hoc plumbers surmises that the appliance’s nipple might be awry. “It’s always the nipple,” one of the drinkers sighs, staring up into a cloud of blue smoke.
A mix ranging from Conway Twitty’s “Hello Darlin’” to Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” burbles from the jukebox as “Gator” Miller, one of the approximately 5,000 philosophers who call this unincorporated community on Galveston Bay home, holds forth over a koozie-wrapped bottle of Miller High Life.
“If you want to go to a tourist trap, Kemah and Galveston are right up the road,” he tells me, his long, curly black hair spilling from under a ball cap reading, “U.S. Navy, Retired.” “But if you want a taste of the real, come on down to San Leon.”
Indeed, San Leon is that. Located on a stubby peninsula about 40 miles southeast of Houston, there’s a timeless quality to its
