It all started
rather innocently.
My partner,
Terry, turned to me and uttered these deceptively benign words: “Johhna and
Patty are going to Pecan Lodge for barbecue on Sunday for lunch. And then to
The Anvil for drinks. Wanna go?”
Me, taking
roughly one second to consider all angles: “No.”
Terry: “No on
which part? The barbecue or the drinking? We have options here.”
Me, slightly
annoyed that I have to explain myself, because we’re in a long-term
relationship, and there are certain things that should be instinctive by now.
“Well, definitely no on Pecan Lodge. That place is insane. You can stand in
line for two hours. And there’s no guarantee that there will be any food left
by the time they bless you with entrance to the building. I don’t understand why they don’t plan any
better. They need to have more meat.”
Terry: “We all
need to have more meat. Meat is good. If
everybody had meat, we wouldn’t have war. But now I’m not sure what we’re
talking about.”
Me: “I can’t bear
the thought of standing in the Dallas heat for hours and then not getting any
meat. So, it’s a no on The Lodge. The psychological cruelty aspect is just too
much.”
Terry, adjusting
his spreadsheets: “Okay, no meat. But
the drinks?”
Me, already
sensing that I may be venturing into Total Regret territory but not wanting to
appear completely anti-social until it becomes popular to be that way again:
“Yes, we can do drinks. Quick drinks. Then we flee.”
Terry: “Got it.”
Then he is immediately texting Johhna and/or Patty, using a complex mix of
hand-held devices, intricate communication networks, and global satellites,
none of which were necessary back in the day when you simply picked up the
hard-wired, stationary phones and spoke to your friends in a real-time manner.
At that point I
wasn’t too overly concerned. It was only Saturday afternoon, Sunday was still
years away, in that lazy manner you have on the weekends where nothing is
really all that important until you have to do something about it. I had plenty
of time to make up excuses or flee the country, should I come to a decision
that I didn’t want to go drinking in a place that I didn’t know, this Anvil Pub
that was somewhere in the Deep Ellum section of downtown Dallas, a funky, often
trendy bit of the city where you could have a really good time or you could be
car-jacked. Lots of time to develop Plan B.
But then it was
suddenly Sunday morning, late Sunday
morning, and Terry’s face was in mine as I awoke from a dream wherein I was
running about on a nude beach in the south of France and having a festive time
because I had acquired a tan that I normally am unable to acquire, and certain
hot guys were showing appreciation for such an acquisition. And for my nudity.
This is not a development that one wishes to awaken from. But I was. And there
was Terry. “The girls are already at Pecan Lodge. They’re still in line. But
the clock is ticking.”
Damn.
So he ran off to
make us breakfast, which is nice of him and all, and I lay there in the bed,
trying to think of at least one valid reason why I should leave the bed.
Nothing immediately came to mind, especially when you considered the
possibility of falling back into slumber and playing a rousing game of leapfrog
on that beach where nobody knows the name of your clothes. Sunshine, gentle
lapping waves, and friskiness. How can you argue with that?
Terry could.
“Breakfast is ready!”
So I schlepped my
ass into the part of the house where we don’t have beds and pleasant dreams,
and both Terry and I began to nosh on the results of his culinary expertise
whilst we watched an episode of CSI: New
York from one of the 4,000 boxed sets that we own due to compulsive
purchasing issues. We mistakenly believed that we still had plenty of time,
because The Girls were standing in line at one of the hottest restaurants in
Dallas. They would be there for days.
This illusion was
shattered three seconds later , when Terry’s phone loudly buzzed and jingled,
indicating a text intrusion. The Girls were nearing completion of their meal
and would be heading toward the questionable bar in Deep Ellum within 15
minutes. What the hell? What kind of superpowers did these women have that had
somehow allowed them to triumph over all odds and get serviced in an expedited
manner?
This text alert
meant that, in an ideal world, we should race to jump in the shower, scrub our
sins away, and then pile in the car, gunning the engine so we could meet our
friends in a respectable amount of time, despite the heat of Dallas in
September, a heat that can suck your soul out of your body.
In reality, it
meant that we finished watching the episode of CSI: New York. This particular episode was from the first year,
that lone season where they had that fascinating, somber color palette that was
all about blues and grays and coldness and a morgue that looked like an
abandoned subway station from 1912. After that, the fool producers brightened
things up and killed the Gothic tone and made it look like CSI: Miami, just with a different address and without David Caruso,
who can’t say a dramatic line without placing his hands on hips and tilting his
head to the side.
Wait, I seem to
have lost the narrative. Where was I? Oh yeah, it was time to get my ass off
the couch, move beyond the cloning of American television, and cleanse my
special bits. So I did.
A few years
later, Terry and I were motoring our way into the head-scratching environs of
downtown Dallas. I’m not sure who designed the layout of what is now the epicenter
of a major American city, but that person was clearly on drugs. Nothing makes
sense. There’s no simplicity, no life-affirming agreement that the roadways
should somehow conform to basic plot-points like North, South, East and West.
Nope. Somebody thought it would be
really super-neat to have streets meandering in haphazard directions that would
boggle the minds of any known GPS software on the planet.
And when you
throw in that jacked-up mess about one-way streets, where you have to traverse
acres of civilization just to navigate your way to a destination that is only
millimeters away from your current position, but you can’t easily get there
because some dumb-ass in 1812 made a poor zoning decision? Seriously, what is the point of a one-way street, other
than to intentionally piss off half the driving population?
Speaking of
people: Because downtown Dallas is now rather trendy, it’s filled with trendy
people doing what is now apparently the latest trendy thing: Walking and
driving around whilst texting and paying absolutely no attention to anything
that is going on around you, such as other people who are trying to navigate
past your annoyingness so they can actually accomplish something in their
lives. (#asshats)
In any case,
Terry managed to find a parking lot with multiple available spaces, a discovery
that was almost erotic because sometimes it can be very hard to find a parking
space up in this hood. We secured the vehicle and wandered around the corner
onto Elm Street, where we were nearly flattened by some very exuberant
motorcyclists straddling thundering hogs. One of them was wearing an “Anvil”
t-shirt, our destination. It seems that we were about to enter a biker bar
where people enjoyed being loud. (I breathed a couture sigh of relief, since I
had wisely donned blue jeans and a grunge-tribute shirt, instead of the disco
pants that had briefly caught my eye.)
So we trot into
the establishment, slightly wary of what we might find. (Biker bars in and of
themselves are usually just fine. But a biker bar packed with trendy people who
are trying to be street when they’ve never actually straddled anything in their
lives? We could have issues.) Turns out that the quality of the clientele was
not what we needed to be worried about. Instead, all other concerns in the
world were immediately forgotten when we strolled up to the bar where Johhna
and Patty were sitting, and found them drinking this:
“What the hell is
that?” I asked, fear coursing through
my body.
“Well,” said
Patty, turning from the bar so that we could see her better, because she’s the
more performance-oriented of the two and she doesn’t want to disappoint her
audience, “it’s a Bloody Mary. With lunch on top.”
I didn’t know if
I could take this story on faith. “Are you sure it’s not a Lady Gaga
bobble-head?”
Terry chimed in.
“Or Patti LaBelle’s hair?”
And both of us
briefly paused to gauge the distance to the front door of the pub, just in case
we suddenly needed to run back out it after the thing on the bar pulled out a
tiny machete and tried to cut a bitch. (This is a survival instinct that has
developed after watching horror movies, where you are schooled in what happens
when stupid people don’t make adequate flight preparations upon discovering
something odd sitting where it shouldn’t be.)
“It’s really
good,” piped in Johhna. “You should try one.” (She did not, however, let us try
hers just in case there were
compatibility issues. I made a mental note that she might have a slight selfish
streak, something I would need to keep in mind in case we ever got stranded in
the Andes Mountains after a plane crash, and she decided that she was very,
very hungry. Not turning my back on her, no sir.)
Still, they
seemed sincere about the pleasures to be had from getting intimately involved
with a five-gallon bucket filled with liquor and topped with a garnish the size
of Detroit. So I ordered one. (Terry refrained. He has a thing about tomatoes,
especially the juice, although he worships ketchup. I’m sure there’s a
fascinating story behind it all, perhaps a tragic incident in his youth, I just
haven’t bothered to ask, because sometimes the first step toward healing is to
never talk about it again.)
The ordering of
the Mammoth Mary is a complicated process. For starters, they plunk down a
glass of beer, a PBR. (“Pabst Blue Ribbon”, for those trendy texting people who
have never experienced anything that doesn’t involve social media.) They call
this PBR the “appetizer”, which is kind of cute, but it actually means “it’s
going to take us a decade or so to put together all the nibbly bits that go on
top of your bucket, and you’re going to be really thirsty before it gets here,
so drink this.”
And it did take a
long time. Long enough that my PBR glass was bone-dry and abandoned, rolling
around on the bar. (There was even a brief moment of boredom where I actually
watched the Cowboys game on a monitor in the bar. Those who know me well will
realize that I must have been absolutely desperate to do such a thing.) But
eventually, somebody fired up a forklift, drove the beeping machine out of the
“kitchen” and lowered my cocktail onto the bar. You could hear the foundation
of the building groaning as this took place.
Let me break down
this drink for you: It comes in a Mason jar. Not the little version, the kind
you use to make your own jelly or to store buttons that you will never actually
need. The big kind that you would use to pickle a watermelon, or that serial
killers would use to store the heads of their victims in formaldehyde. This jar
is filled to the brim with the main attraction, the actual Bloody Mary. The rim
of the jar is encrusted with black pepper and salt, which allows you to use
your tongue to moderate the seasoning level of the beverage, which is always
fun, who doesn’t want to demonstrate
the agility of their tongue in a room full of drunken strangers?
On the second
floor of the libation, we have the artwork, the creatively arranged snacks that
are anchored in place on a number of shish kabob skewers. Rumor has it that the
niblets can vary from time to time (this was according to a free-spirited woman
who happened to wander by at one point, with her and her unrestrained but
combative breasts informing me that she’s “seen all kinds of mess up on those
things.”)
My current
version of the mess included: a celery
stick (natch), a green bean (no idea), a small wedge of broccoli (looking like
a little green Don King), pickled okra (I’m assuming pickled, I don’t touch okra
unless it’s fried and this was not), a cooked Brussels sprout (I’m guessing the
uncooked version proved impenetrable for the skewer), a single shrimp (more,
please, it was quite tasty dipped in the Bloody Mary), a wedge of salami (also
a good dipper, not sure why), a chunk of artisanal cheese, a cherry tomato (one
of the few things that was cherry in that
bar), an onion ring (always a good choice, regardless of circumstances), and an
actual slider cheeseburger.
There may have
even been more snackies involved, but I did reach a point where I was tired of
leaning in for a slurp and getting poked in the eye by a skewer stick, so I
popped the structural mechanism out of the jar and chunked it to the side.
(Side note to the Anvil Pub staff: Longer straws, maybe? Sure seems like a good
idea to me. If you can afford to stock up on Brussels sprouts, I’m sure you can
find longer things in the stockroom that people can suck on.)
In any case, the
drink itself was quite satisfying, leaning toward the spicy side, which all
good Bloody Marys should do. (It took me well over an hour to finish the drink,
in case you’re keeping score.) And speaking of leaning and spicy, we were about
to meet someone who was both. (Well, only two of us got to meet her. The other
two in our motley crew chose not to participate in what quickly escalated into
an eye-opening adventure, and therefore missed out on the glorious joy of
having a complete stranger barge into your personal space and then proceed to
have a neurological breakdown, complete with random spittle and exuberant hand
gestures.
This development
also started innocently enough, or at least as innocently as things can be when
you are smoking behind a rowdy bar in a questionable area of Dallas. Johnna and
I had decided that we needed a quick nicotine fix, so we worked our way out the
back door of the bar to the designated area. We fully expected this little
quest to result in us huddled in a smelly alley, taking hurried drags as we dodged
homeless people and possible gang members who had just decided they needed
another teardrop tattoo and they were looking for people who couldn’t run very
fast.
Turns out, this
was not the case at all. Instead, we stumbled into a very nice patio area, with
thick, brick walls that would help prevent us from becoming a crime statistic. Cozy
tables and chairs and umbrellas. The only slight drawback is that it was still
117 degrees in the Texas heat, even under the festive umbrellas. Not a
particularly thrilling environmental aspect, but it also meant that the patio
was completely deserted, and the entire kingdom was ours to rule as we pleased.
So we did,
sitting down and lighting up.
Our reign, though
glorious and marked by festivals thrown in our honor by the peasants, proved to
be a rather short one. We were barely finished with handing out knighthoods for
the first fiscal quarter, when the back door flew open with a bang. We turned
to see who had made it past the Palace Guard, fully expecting to find an
assassin, sheathed in black and sent by our pesky enemies in the neighboring
kingdom of Fort Worthia. Instead, our eyes fell upon a tall woman whose own
jittery eyes were staring back at us in confusion and wonder.
We knew
immediately that she was insane.
There are times
when folks can fool you about their madness, feigning sanity for hours or days
or years before you run across them eating purple crayons and doing unspeakable
things to donkeys. That was not the case here. We were in the Express Lane, no
doubt about it. She was wearing an outfit that might best be described as
“soccer player on acid”, she had a hairdo that implied “I only bathe when I
remember what that is”, and she marched right up to our table, whipped a
cigarette out of her pack, and proceeded to throw the pack on our table in a
clear homesteading maneuver.
This is one of
the ultimate taboos in the smoking world.
Yes, the 12 smokers left in the United States often find themselves in
temporary-bonding situations, as they huddle together 50 yards from the entrance
to a restaurant and try not to get shot by vigilantes, but there are still
protocols. And one of them is that you do not stake a claim at an occupied
table in a smoking-zone unless you have slept with someone at that table on at
least two prior occasions.
Since neither
Johhna nor I could recall ever having been horizontal with Medusa of the
Doorway, we were a bit affronted. Then again, we’d just consumed a Bloody Mary
bigger than a car, so there was definitely some flexibility here. Besides, a
runaway train of cray-cray can be very entertaining, as long as you remember to
get out of the way before the derailment. So we sat back and just let Medusa
share her thoughts on mankind.
Boy, did she
ever.
At first, her
ramblings were a bit benign. She initially
babbled about how the weather was ultra-pleasing today, words that she on/off
muttered between bouts of staring at those things in the back wall. (They’re
called bricks, sweetie.) Then there was some mess about how she had kicked off
her morning by indulging in something that was not alcohol and most likely not
legal. (She definitely had a fondness, or inability, for choosing words that
had any real concrete message, a theme that would continue throughout our
fellowship.)
Then she
eventually wandered her way into incoherent tales of working for some type of
adjunct program with the Sierra Club, a community-service (or so it seemed)
type of thing where she would pay money to go on a trip and do manual labor for
needful local citizenry. She mentioned the name of this program several times,
but the name didn’t fully register because I was too busy watching her eyeballs
vibrate. (Dear Sierra Club, I am not trying to besmirch you in any way. I had
no way to gauge the truthfulness of this woman’s oratory. Please see above
references to Medusa, lack of proper sportsmanship in social settings, and
inappropriate wardrobe selections.)
Whatever the
program was called, Sierra Club involvement aside, it cost 300 dollars per
trip. The financial part was very clear, because this woman repeated that
figure at least 20 times. 300 dollars. Over and over. It’s like she was going for some type of door
prize for the number of repetitions. I felt like I should write “300!” on the
wall behind us so the poor wretch would stop bellowing that number. Sadly,
Vanna White did not walk up and offer me a writing implement, so I couldn’t do
this.
Johhna, on the
other hand, didn’t need a spokesmodel/failed actress to further her cause. She
decided that it would be jovial to query Neurotica Nancy on the finer details
of her vague endeavors. “So, person, what did you do on these trips?”
Person: “Trips?”
Johhna: “Not the trip that you’re on now, the thing
with the Sierra Club. What did you do? How did you help?”
Person: “Oh… um… we… there was weeding…”
Johhna: “Oh?”
Person: “Weeding management.”
Johhna: “I see that. And where did you go?”
Person: “Go? Um, we went… Alaska… and some other…
I’ve been four times… other states… Washing and Origami…” (Keep in mind that
during the pausing bits, Person would stare at the ground as if contemplating
where she might be at the moment and whether or not she turned off the iron
back at the halfway-house.)
Johhna: “Uh huh.
And when you were there did you-“
Person: “Hawaii! We went to Hawaii!”
Johhna, smiling,
because she lives in Hawaii, and this suddenly became very interesting: “Really? And where did you stay in Hawaii?”
Person: “The big one… the big… island. And the other
island.”
Johhna: “And what
did you do there?”
Person: “Do? Oh… there were waves. I could sit and watch. The waves would come
in, and the waves would go out. The waves would come in, and the waves would go
out. The waves would come in, and…”
Johhna:
“The waves would go out?”
Person: “Yes! And then the waves would go out and-“
Johhna: “But what did you do there? Help me
understand.”
Person: “There was… there were people… and they would
decide about… and we would do… and they would plan things and… we… they had to
make decisions about… decisions… and we…”
Johhna: “Yes?”
Person: “The waves would come in…”
Johhna: “They do that a lot.”
Person: “It was 300 dollars! And that’s a lot of
money for me, I’m a teacher!”
Those last three
words were the most chilling of the afternoon. She was a teacher? Holy crap.
The back door of
the pub suddenly slammed open again, and we were presented with a waitress
proffering a steaming bowl. “Do you want your chili out here or back inside?”
My mind boggled.
What the hell?
Then the waitress
glared at Crazy Train, her expression indicating that she had heard, many
times, about the waves coming in and out, and she no longer cared for the
constant updates. She just wanted it to be the end of her shift, and if people
had to get hurt to make that happen, so be it.
Crazy stared at
the bowl, flummoxed. Then she turned to look at us.
Johhna and I just
stared back at her. We had nothing to do with this chili development. It’s all
on you, girl. Deal.
Crazy swiveled
back to Waitress. “I… think that… the waves should go in.”
Waitress promptly
turned and fled, mission complete.
Crazy turned back
in our direction, although it took a bit for her to determine exactly where we
might be located. Then she decided that there might be something to be gained
from becoming even more intimate, as if such a thing were even possible. “I’m
Gillian. And that’s my real name.”
It was fully
understandable that this woman might need an alias from time to time.
Still, the random
arrival of the chili did present a convenient exit opportunity for Johhna and
myself, should we choose to take it. (I was more invested in departure than
Johhna, who seemed to be enjoying this spectacle far more than she should.
There was a definite entertainment factor to it all, but it was hot out here
and things were becoming damp in unattractive places. Besides, we hadn’t
bothered to frisk Gillian for weapons, despite that being an obvious course of
action once Gill opened her mouth and the Mental Institution Alumni Newsletter
fell out. She could jump us at any moment, thinking we were weeds, and the
hacking would begin.)
So I took the
initiative to make imminent departure moves. (Which basically consisted of me
staring at the back door of the pub with obvious longing, a single tear running
down my cheek. This triggered something in Gillian’s psyche, probably a trace memory of the Native American in that
long ago anti-litter commercial, where he was pissed off about the trashy white
people throwing their beer cans and McDonald’s sacks on the side of the road,
and Gillian mistakenly assumed that it was time to report for litter detail on
her next Sierra Club adventure. Only 300 dollars!) She faced the door as well.
Which left Johhna
as the only one not studying the woodwork, so she grudgingly got out of her
chair and joined us. We graciously allowed Gillian to wander in before us (I
was NOT going to allow that woman to be behind me for any reason), and as Gilly
pinballed her way up the hall, Johhna thought it would be festive to holler “And
the waves roll out!”
Gillian didn’t
hear a thing. Of course she didn’t.
Meanwhile,
somewhere in Dallas, there’s a group of confused students sitting in a
classroom, awaiting the return of their teacher. They’ve been sitting there
since Friday, afraid to move since they weren’t properly dismissed. All they
know is that Miss Gillian said something about needing some chili and that she
would be right back…
