Hussong’s Cantina on Ruiz Street in Ensenada, Baja, is one of those checklist places that anyone from San Diego had to visit at least once.

An original Caesar salad in Tijuana (or one of the more unsavory attractions), a margarita at the Rosarito Beach Hotel, a stop for lobster and a pitcher of margaritas in Puerto Nuevo, and a night at Hussong’s, ebbing and flowing with the tide of drunken masses.

Now that was a pretty good weekend.

Hussong’s was unique among cantinas. It wasn’t artificially constructed as some faux Mexican fantasy to pull in the tourists with campy decor and T-shirts. Hussong’s holds liquor license No. 2 in Ensenada and is in the same building John Hussong bought and gussied up in 1892.

That was the last time any gussing-up was done, near as I could tell when I patronized the place in the 1980s. The kind of hoi polloi joint a Hemingway or Mankiewicz or Hecht or Chandler would fall into in search of a creative jolt while escaping the vacuum that is Hollywood. I still savor the smell of sweaty youth and stale beer.

A group of us were walking toward Hussong’s when we ran into a few more of our San Diego newspaper colleagues. They had just gotten off a cruise ship and were on a shopping spree. Duty-free rum and tequila to take back on-board for the short jaunt home. They joined our band of merry margaritos.

In the chaos that is Hussong’s, I don’t think one of those bottles made it back to the ship. I recall bottles slipping from wet bags like bombs out the bay doors of a B-52, exploding on impact in the bar and on the sticky streets of Ensenada.

If you hang out in Hussong’s for any length of time, one of two things might happen: 1. You’ll pass out. (Or, at best, grow obnoxiously incoherent.) 2. You’ll begin to notice the rhythmic dance of the crowds as they burst in like supernovas and totter out like black holes all evening long.

The cantina’s floor is a living, organic spectacle (and not from the decades of spilled beer in the sodden floorboards). As groups enter in numbers — two, five, twenty — table and chair combinations move about and merge, grow, break up, and scatter according to social needs. Five friends join four more and any loose tables and chairs are fair game. Sometimes two tables of strangers strike up a friendship and form an ad hoc community for the night. Merged tables feel like the signing of a pact — good times to be had by all.

It is a hypnotic dance over the span of an evening. An ever-revolving and colorful kaleidoscope of Hawaiian shirts, tank tops, Tees, tube tops, souvenir sombreros, and cold-shoulder blouses. set to music as wild and carefree as the people. This ain’t the Hotel California. You can check in and out whenever you want. And they do.

The chocolate-bronze Aztec called “Juice Man” would join a table and extend silver electrodes to companions on each side. All would join hands to complete the loop, and he would hand-crank the box on his lap. Slowly at first, with a sly grin. How wide that grin would grow, as his crank-hand flew faster and faster and the voltage surged through boozy veins!

The first person to break the connection — usually with a scream of agony, and tears of laughter and relief from everyone else — bought a round of drinks. House rules.

For his efforts, I think the Juice Man, in his mocha suit and lime green shirt, got $200 pesos. He’d make the rounds all night long. As long as there was a table of willing machos and masochists …

Then there were the dirty sandal and a shoe sticking out of the faded mural. Thrown and permanently affixed since the 1960s, I was told. “No need to remove them,” a bartender said. “Somebody else would just through another.”

I can’t speak to Hussong’s today. Maybe the shoe and sandal are gone, maybe the mural is gone, maybe the floor is waxed and polished, maybe the souvenir t-shirts are worth buying. I don’t really know. I suspect the crowds are the same as they ever were – no one age, no one type, no one reason to be there except to drink and laugh and forget for a while.

It is frozen in time, locked in my memory, a memory probably buffed and polished a bit over the decades. No need to ever go back. Not while the memories hold.