The County Line – Saturday Night

As we packed up the gear Friday night from our gig at the County Line, Nabil, Martin and I quizzed each other on the surly details and questionable vibe of the evening. We had seen worse things at some of our performances, certainly I had in Okanogan, but the underlying fog of doom that accompanied the decaying establishment was troubling each of us in a different way.

“We need to learn some rap songs,” Martin broke the meditative silence, “you know, so when a person gets out of prison and immediately comes to us to hear one, we don’t get killed.”

“Martin makes a good point,” I agreed, “I think the best remedy for a situation like this would be to learn a hip hop song, country song, real country song, and a death-metal song.” I moved my eyes upwards as if to scan my brain for any other stereo-types that might hurt us for not knowing a genre they requested, “and a Ukrainian song.”

Nabil laughed, “that was weird, wasn’t it? You looked freaked out back there.”

“Yes Nabil,” I nodded, “because I looked into his eyes, and I don’t know what that man did to get into prison: robbery, drugs, forgery, murder, cutting the tags off of mattresses, it didn’t matter. Do you know why it didn’t matter?” I was going to go on whether he nodded back to me or not, “because once in prison this man had to do things to stay alive that compromised what the three of us would feel to be laws of humanity. When I looked into his eyes, I could see what I was to him: currency. I was the type of person that he would trade for cigarettes and toilet wine. Wait, did I say ‘and toilet wine?’ because I meant ‘OR toilet wine.’ When I understood what he was saying to me with his stare, I realized that although I was ‘prison money’ in his world, I wasn’t worth much of it, so he would have to choose between drink and smokes because I wasn’t worth the bundle.”

I was a little edgy after the show especially knowing that we were to play the same gig in just twenty more hours. None of us felt safe, but we had made a commitment to play and cancelling a date, short-notice, because of a “weird vibe” was out of the question. We had to suck it up and come back and play again.

“How was the show?” my wife sleepily asked after I had made it home around 2am. What she wants to hear is “good,” or “not bad,” but what she never heard me say was:

“Dangerous,” I said.

Wendy sat up, “dangerous? What do you mean dangerous?” she was wide awake now, oops.

“Well, we played fine, but I felt like I was in constant peril. The place was…”

“Sketchy?” she finished my sentence.

“Etch A Sketchy,” I added.

“Don’t ever use that again,” Wendy corrected, “how was it dangerous?”

I filled her in on the freshly sprung inmate, the soul-less eyes of the bartender and the general feeling as best she could. She listened as I explained my heightened sense of fear; fear of being stabbed or shot.

Wendy asked the question I had been asking myself the entire way home: Should I play Saturday night at The County Line? I answered her with the logical argument that had gotten me back to feeling alright about returning. The County Line was a functioning bar and business. The “danger” I had worried about would shut a place like that down, and I had simply let my mind get away from me. Me with my overactive imagination and irrational fear of being murdered on matted, beer and tobacco infused carpet.

What I didn’t know was that The County Line had been shut down for precisely that kind of “danger” many times.

I’m not going to lie to you, I looked up how much body armor vests cost on Saturday. I did. The price was around ten times the $200 I stood to make for the drumming.

When I found that discouraging news, I thought maybe I would just take all my cymbals and set them up around me with their flat bottoms facing the direction of any possible on-coming projectiles. Such a setup was ergonomically unacceptable but maybe a night with that configuration would challenge me as a drummer. However, a quick search on Youtube showed me the secret brass alloy that quality percussion cymbals are made of is no match for a 9mm pistol. (Also, Youtube has a video of literally anything you can think of.)

As show-time approached, I started to make my peace with my possible destiny. If I was to fall at the hands of a drunken misanthrope in a misunderstanding over the true lyrics of a Tom Petty song, then so be it. I packed my gear and headed back to the entryway—in all likelihood—to hell.

The Pedro boys were in good spirits. Clearly they had reached the same stage of grief I had over the situation: acceptance. Nabil led us in the back door bravely and without so much as a pause. His strength was inspiring and his professionalism to complete our contracted arrangement made me note that this was the kind of courage seen in battle.

The bartender approached the lit stage area from out of the gloom of the bar with a smile and a bar towel. “You boys played real nice last night,” she said, and it was genuine. “Can we get you some food or drinks?”

Perhaps I had focused too much on the gloom of the situation and should have accepted this hard-working individual as a person who was just a little tired and needed a break. Maybe I had let my own demons get into my head last night and this place wasn’t as bad as I built up in my imagination. I certainly am prone to exaggeration sometimes. Maybe I needed a fresh new attitude to start this gig off right; a fresh attitude and lemonade!

“Thank you ma’am,” I said with a rogue-ish grin, “I would love a lemonade, please.”

I will spare you from the name I was immediately called by the bar-fly that sat nursing the only thing that could keep the tremors away from his hands. He had overheard my request for an un-leaded beverage, judged me to be less than a man, and made his verdict known to me and everyone else in the bar with a shouted insult.

And there it was, the: “no you can’t!” to my: “I can do this!” It was the choke-chain around the neck of this eager Golden Retriever.

“We don’t have lemonade,” said the bartender.

“Of course you don’t,” I mumbled, remembering that lemonade is a life-giving, refreshing nectar capable of bringing sunshine to the most overcast soul. They wouldn’t have ever had it at The County Line. In fact, at that moment, I would have wagered that if I would have gone behind the counter and added sugar to lemon juice and water, the mixture would immediately ferment into some kind of terrible wine. Lemonade can only exist where there is a possibility of happiness—that’s why it is the only product that even the most economically-challenged child can sell—and there is NO happiness at The County Line.

The band set up and began to play. It was a slow night. There were a few in the bar section, again staring at the shiny big screen television. There were also a few couples that wandered in the bandstand area and sat down to listen to us. They dug us, and stayed for the first forty-five minute set.

It’s always great to look out and see people you don’t know really get into what you’re playing. You can’t help but like someone who appreciates what you do. You smile at them, you might pull a funny face, or allow them to come up and sing a tune with you, you become almost friendly with those that watch with admiration the culmination of years of your hard-practiced skilled. It was for that reason, that after every song, as they clapped, I wanted to tell them to go home before something bad happened to them.

“You’re all very kind to come to listen to us, but please, go home quickly, use the emergency exits and get the hell away from this place as fast as you can,” I wanted to say into the microphone. “Take my car if you have to, we don’t all have to die tonight.”

The three of us believed, as was the case the night before, we would probably live through the evening. In this particular case, ‘probably’ equaled about ninety-percent. The ten percent probability of our violent, and in all likelihood Tarantino-esque death, was the fuel that really moved our inner artists to thoroughly and completely lose ourselves into our instruments. You hear how musicians jam? Well we went to the cupboard, pulled down one of mother’s finest, blue-ribbon-winning canned preserves, pushed our paws through the wide mouth and pulled out the sweetest, stickiest, runniest handful of jelly-jam that we could. That’s what a ten percent fear of death can do to a threatened musician. That quartet on the Titanic must have sounded amazing.

It was during one of our longer versions of an already long song that we were treated to the first sad event. The song was “Cortez the Killer” by Neil Young. The song’s original recording off of the Zuma album, recorded by his band, Crazy Horse, was a meandering mess of a beautiful idea. “Cortez’s” original recording sounded like the sound engineer setup a single microphone to record the second rehearsal and then they threw it on the album and shipped it out. Despite its imperfections, the tune is excellent, but that seven-and-a-half minute recording was what we had to start with. Our version was cleaner, better executed and was around twelve minutes long.

During the song, a woman got up to dance. That isn’t odd, it happens all the time, but she was alone and headed out to the completely empty dance floor with purpose. At this point the stage was lit with yellow, red and green cans from the ceiling, but the dance floor was bouncing the beams of two pin-spots off of the rotating mirror-ball, the rest of the dance floor bathed in a black light.

As she started dancing, the black light attached to all the light-colored areas of her clothing. The acid-stained patches of the original 1987 denim pants she had spent an hour squeezing into that night glowed purple, as did the three white scrunchies she had knotted up her greasy-blonde ponytail with about three inches separating them. The soles of her flip-flop sandals were flashing purple with each spin. There was an interrupted line of fluorescent purple just behind both of her ears, about the size of cigarettes… because they were cigarettes.

She danced the way people should dance, with reckless abandon, and it was reckless. There was a substantial amount of real estate and she intended to use all of it.

Anyone could see that she wasn’t built for speed, but try arguing that with physics once momentum took its course. The woman skated around the large dance-floor with surprising grace. She looked like Tonya Harding, but if Tonya’s outsides matched her insides. You know, awful.

Now sweaty with the excessive movement, the rotund woman pranced, then bounded toward the stage. Martin and Nabil, almost completely lost in the progression of the song, quickly calculated what it would take to stop this woman and stepped out of her path. She stopped short and leaned over the front of the stage with surprising control and looked up at the three of us exposing a sly smile revealing several vacancies available for a tooth or three, if any traveling enamel needed a place to stay.

We all wondered what the smile was about, and she quickly shuffled her feet straight back out onto the dance floor, back-pedaling with both hands now grasping the front of her shirt. She hit the center of the floor under the mirror-ball and with dramatic force, ripped her button-up blouse open and then off of her body, revealing a hazy, purple-glowing, over-burdened brassiere.

What a treat.

There was a single “hoot” from the bar but none of the silhouettes turned around for the spectacle. Was this a regular show, not worthy of distraction from whatever reality series was running on the tube? Perhaps the patrons already knew to look away from this spell-binding performance of desperate, exotic dance.

As brutal an image as it was, it certainly was hypnotic. I tried to avert my eyes as one would attempt to avoid staring at a wrecked locomotive with escaping circus animals. It simply could not be done. The scene was like a live-action version of a dancing hippopotamus from Disney’s Fantasia with a hint of the “Pink Elephant” scene in Dumbo.

The dance itself was a mixture of the worst elements of Jazz, Interpretive and Modern styles, certainly tribal, but of what tribe in the world? Her spins were dizzyingly fast, with kicks lashing out from her torso. It was clear now that she had to dance alone. She would have kicked the crap out of any partner, maybe even knocked them out. But still we let her dance.

Nabil figured we should keep the song going, it was sounding good and we were getting a fascinating floor show. My only concern was the integrity of that dirty, sweat stained bra. Would it hold? I was certain that if the maxed out undergarment blew open, or if a breast somehow got loose, results could be cataclysmic. Without the assistance of the restraining power of a strong brassiere, the shirt wouldn’t be able to go back on either. It would take some serious time to pack even one of those floppy suckers back into one of those cups.

Please understand that the horrible nature of the ocular offense was NOT that the woman was too heavy. The size and dancing ability of the woman would have been completely socially acceptable, even graceful and pleasant, had the third important piece of the equation been correct. It was not that the woman who was too big, but the clothes were too small. Had she had clothes that did not require Vaseline and vice-grips to get into, she just would have been another lady dancing… and removing her shirt. Instead we had a dark reminder of where bad choices, bad clothing choices, can land you; and that is the dance floor of The County Line.

She made an ungrateful exit of the dance floor under the veil of some unlucky person’s satin jacket with the help of an annoyed but understanding bar-maid. The struggle was brief, with a short reprise of a double spin by the punching-bag machine, and then she was removed from our sight cooperatively, because you can’t make a woman like that leave anywhere if she doesn’t at least subconsciously want to go—not without a dually pickup truck and a cable winch.

The guys and I hoped that would be the last of our strange occurrences for the evening. But hope is just a wish, a wish is just a dream, and a dream always seems to evaporate away when you open your eyes.

A large group of rowdy young women came in as part of a bachelorette celebration. One of those lucky ladies was getting hitched soon, so they chose to get together at… The County Line.

How a young group of women could have chosen that place for the festivities completely blew my mind. I can only imagine that The County Line was on a dartboard of choices somewhere and the thrower was blindfolded—and impaired in some way. Perhaps it came down to a coin toss for their two choices, The County Line or the ladies restroom at a Greyhound Station and “tails” one. Did the bridesmaids hate the soon-to-be betrothed?

Yes.

They sat far off in the distance, closer to the bar. There were close to ten of them, all decked out in flashy attire and “fun” feather boas. From farther away, we could hear their party getting louder and louder, with high-pitched giggling and squeals turning to shouts and challenges. They were difficult to see, but they began to rumble dangerously close to the limit of public social acceptableness. It was difficult to see all that was going on at their table, but I did see them drunkenly invite two or three sauced men from their well worn grooves in the barstools over to the party table.

The men, later victims, were about twice the ages of the females waiting for them. Though I had not seen one of those men move more than a lifted elbow the entire night, they seemed to come alive in a very jerky, clunky way, like statues that had just been animated from slumber. They were their own victims of atrophied muscles and poor circulation.

The band was coming up on its final set break of the evening and it was a good thing too. Somehow, despite the lack of lemonade, I had to pee, and it certainly wasn’t going to wait until we were done for the night. After a few minutes of silent debate, I made the difficult decision to use the restroom. I really had to go, but I had misgivings about exposing even the slightest amount of flesh to the environment of The County Line.

The restroom was located just beyond the bachelorette party table, through a greasy black swinging door with one of those brass plates, where everyone is invited to place their hand to push the door open. It appeared to have had a hole eaten through it via tarnish or some other communicable evil. (I used my foot.)

As I passed by the table, I heard nothing but the seven words you aren’t supposed to say on television mixed with several new ones and variations on combinations of lot. The ideas being expressed at that table would have made a table full of drunken pirates stand up and leave in a huff. One of them caught my eye and sneered at me as I passed, offering her middle finger as probably the most polite things expressed through all of their separate discussions. The girl with the finger was sitting next to a bleary-eyed drunkard whose unassuming smile was the last thing I saw before I entered the bathroom.

Surprise! The restroom was fine. It was even clean enough, I had decided, for me to wash my hands. Let’s face it, sometimes in a select few establishments, it does more harm than good.

As I exited the restroom, I saw that the Bachelorette table had erupted into “riot level” violence. All were on their feet and attacking the helpless men that they had invited over. It must have happened seconds after I had entered the bathroom, because the fight was in full swing. My first thought was that the women were eating the men, or at least prepping them to be eaten immediately. They were on top of those poor lushy bastards with a fever!

I had seen bottles broken on heads before, but when I saw one of the women pick up a pounder beer glass and smash it over the head of a man, severely lacerating his scalp beneath his under-shampooed curly black locks, I thought to myself, “This is it.”

This was not it. As the blood started to stream down the dazed, drunk’s face, I started to back away from the brawl quickly toward the stage. Somebody yelled, “knife!” and I double timed it to the stage. The bartenders could not get the fight under control and within minutes, every single deputy sheriff in King County was in or around The County Line bar. Every. Single. One.

It must have been a planned ambush between two ancient Southwest Seattle street gangs. The White Center Womyn versus the SODO Jerks over some unsettled score concerning payphone turf, or something chronologically pointless like that. The Womyn went in looking like a bachelorette party and invite the Jerks over for some drinks and an epic beatdown for which sutures would be required.

“Well,” Piped Nabil, “Shows over.”

Martin and I didn’t argue. That many law-enforcement officials meant that the bar would be shut down for the night. We packed up quickly and made for our vehicles outside, getting paid the full amount despite performing one hour set too short. I didn’t feel bad. I can never un-see a glass tearing open a man’s head with purpose so I figured we earned every dime.

We talked behind the place for a few minutes, all debriefing what had happened. We agreed that if The County Line ever re-opened, we wouldn’t play there again. We also agreed that we would play better gigs, gigs that didn’t require us to price out body-armor.

Because good generally triumphs over evil, I’m happy to say that the establishment is no longer open for business. Coincidently since the demise of the establishment, cases of dysentery in the Seattle Metro area are down dramatically. Well, I don’t know if that’s really true, but it is closed. It may have never re-opened after that night. That night may well have been the swan song of a place that should have died out years ago, maybe with those awful aluminum beer-can pull-tabs in the early eighties.
After all, like the sharp, detachable tabs, The County Line had been responsible for some ugly cuts too, and that’s the Damm truth.