The Longhorn

“YOU SUCK!” came a voice out of the dark from behind an old saloon bar.The loud, and distinctively tired voice the judgement came from belonged to the owner of the bar, who happened to also be the bartender that night. She meant what she said too. She wasn’t teasing us or playing around like so many other owners or managers of live music establishments might. She thought we sucked. The problem is, it was the first song we played of a four hour gig of a two night engagement.

This was to be a long weekend.

Longshot had played Cle Elum before. We had brought our brand of energetic country-rock to a joint called The Keg Cellar. Oh what fun we had at The Keg Cellar, with everyone from patrons to staff singing and dancing along with us. We played a little longer that night too. They asked and we obliged. There was much joy to be had that night.

The Longhorn couldn’t have been more than a couple blocks away from The Keg Cellar, but what it lacked in distance, the Longhorn made up for in despair. On the map of human emotion, The Longhorn was located a stone’s throw from the edge of depression.

So there we were, between our first and second song, sucking. I looked at Toby, our lead guitar and singer; the guy who booked the gig. He looked at Mike the guitarist and Erik the bass player and got kind of a nervous, panicked expression in return.

“Wow! Well I guess that song… wasn’t a hit,” said Toby. To be clear, the song was a hit. All the songs were. Cover bands that don’t play hits are either unemployed or tribute bands. We were neither. What Toby meant, was that our version of the song wasn’t well received. He wasted no time in starting off our go-to crowd pleaser to bring our employer around to enjoying our music. She and the desperate dozen patrons the saloon had holding down barstools.

The thing is, we didn’t suck. We were good. By that time in my life, I had cringed my way through several bands that were far below the standards set by Longshot. Longshot had its weak spots but nothing I would cancel a show over. I would have put the performances of Longshot up against most any other cover band in the region and we would have been a favorite. It’s how we got gigs in the first place, word of mouth.

Halfway through our “crowd pleaser” song, the owner of the bar walked up to the front of the bandstand wagging a finger at us and speaking as if a performing rock band could hear someone over the guitars and drums as they walked slurred and staggered seventy feet from bar to stage. Her body language said plenty though, none of it pleasant.

Between verses, Toby leaned down to better understand the owner’s urgent words. I could tell he was getting an earful of angry ass-chewing and none of us appreciated it one bit.

As I kept time through the rest of the song, I wondered if the next two nights were even worth this grief. I came to play and set up my drums to do so, but if the owner wasn’t having it or I thought we were going to get stiffed for our fee, I certainly didn’t want to be there. A gig is a gig and I liked playing with the guys but not if we were going to be abused all night and certainly not for free.

Then I wondered about the legality of leaving the contract. It was verbal and for $350 for both nights, which I had just learned in my business law class was an enforceable contract. That meant we could renegotiate on the spot if we had to, but I had also learned another piece of contractual law that came into play. Contracts could not be finalized or renegotiated if one or both parties were inebriated or under the influence of drugs. The owner of the bar was drunk, our contract was verbal, so even if she told us to stop and leave, we technically would be on the hook for the contract. There was no real way out for either of us, barring fire or stampede. So we were there at least until she sobered up, which at the time looked to be a while off.

That, my friends, is a conundrum: having to play for a person that you don’t want to play for when they don’t want you to play either.

The night oozed on.

Although parts of the bar were indeed dark, it is worth mentioning that outside, it was still very bright. The sun had not gone down because we had just begun our summer and that meant it stayed light outside until almost 9:30. We were a ways away from sundown and we were already dreading the rest of the weekend.

The bar had gone to certain lengths to shield out the harsh sunlight, as bars sometimes do, to create a certain atmosphere more conducive to drinking. But that meant that whenever a door was opened, a harsh portal of unfiltered star refraction would wreak havoc on any eyes that were unlucky enough to be looking in that direction. When someone walked inside that door, it had the effect of someone coming out of Heaven to fetch a poor soul who had just breathed their last. Though in this case, the figure coming through the door was more likely to be fetching the second-least-expensive draft beer, the least-expensive having run out days before.

It was a harsh light, that had anyone in the place been nursing a hangover, their head would have exploded if they looked directly at it. But these folks were imbibing the hair of the dog that bit them, and therefore immune to such cranial fireworks.

Ah yes, the dog. Not the dog from the colloquialism, but an actual four-legged canine of the un-papered “mutt” variety was there. Although dogs are usually unwelcomed in eating and drinking establishments, this one didn’t seem to mind, and wandered freely about the place. I don’t know what the particular legalities were at the time, but that dog was definitely not a service animal. It seemed friendly though, and I’m a dog lover, plus it may have been the only friendly face in the joint. I was happy the dog was there…until what happened next.

A bar hires a band to keep patrons around and to make sure those patrons buy beer. The idea is, the longer a person stays, the more beer they buy and the bar does better. In this case, I really don’t think we mattered in that equation. The people at the bar were going to be at the bar whether we played what they wanted, didn’t play a note, or were the Beatles. There were a few folks scattered about the bar, and a few means three, remember. But there was one lively table of about eight rough looking guys and gals who for some reason kept going out the magic, irradiated portal in the back and coming back inside, blinding us all for thirty-second intervals.

They were rowdy and loud, occasionally yelling at each other and us up on stage. Several of them belonged to the motorcycles outside, and I didn’t get that wrong. The motorcycles clearly ran the relationships between these people. Their denim vests probably held dirt from the front lines of Altamont Speedway, and the dried dust and clay aided at keeping the fabric together.

I would like to be clear: I did not see what provoked the happening, but I did witness the happening.

The provocation began as a careless act of flirtation and erupted into an irrational display of jealousy. Simply speaking, a woman, sans undergarments, made available her uncovered nether regions for public viewing. Specifically they were shown to one member of the public that sat across from her in the bar. Unfortunately this person was not the man who had already professed his love to her. THAT unfortunate man sat heartbroken next to his false-love flasher. I also believe the eyeful was unsolicited by the party across from the woman. That’s as clean as I can make this dirty, dirty paragraph.

Whether they were married or boyfriend/girlfriend and/or cousins is still unknown to me. What I do know is that this man cared deeply for the woman that had given another man a free peep show and that kind of heart wrenching realization mixed with a shot of disrespect and several shots of alcohol can build quite a fire of jealousy.

“Dear, can we talk about this? I was under the impression that as a couple, you and I were happy and content with only loving each other and respecting our years of commitment. Did I perhaps do or say something that has made you feel different about our relationship? Do you feel you need to explore your feelings with the gentleman seated across from us? If you do, I understand, because you are your own person and I’m obviously not meeting your emotional needs. I would, however, very much like to know how I have fallen short of your expectations so that I might take action and correct any hurtful behavior I may be unaware of,” is not what this man said.

Instead, this skinny, mullet wearing, Schmidt repository stood up and walked to the middle of the wide-open dance floor, cussing and hollering a storm only translatable in the county drunk tank. I saw him do this from behind my drum set. I could not understand the diatribe but could tell by the facial expressions and the pointing of various fingers that this man was unhappy with something or someone over at the large table.

I’ve never found myself in a situation where I’m so drunk I was out of control with rage and crazy. But I have been in love and hurt by it. I cannot say if alcohol would push me to the point of this kind of desperation and sadness, but I can say that love will get you most of the way. The alcohol just takes it over the hump. Sometimes you yell, sometimes you make a ton of sad phone calls, sometimes you drive by houses at all hours of the night. This guy dropped his pants on a barroom dance floor.

To his knees went his pants and undies with no coverage of his wedding tackle by his tiny t-shirt. He was aimed at the offending party sitting at the table about 20 feet away. I had the best angle in the house because I couldn’t see any genitalia. I don’t think the rest of the band was as lucky. All I could see was a pasty white thigh and butt cheek all the way down to the harsh tan line that had been hidden by the denim pants scrunched up mid-leg.

The table reacted but most didn’t move. Some of them laughed and some were shocked. I believe the woman he was truly trying to connect with was either disgusted or unimpressed. Like I said, the lighting wasn’t great.

It’s times like these that really test you as a musician. Situations like this would usually be a hard-stop for the band. I can say with confidence that although there may have been an audible dip in quality at the moment just after the exposure of the man’s junk, the band played on.

I’m not a crisis counselor or psychologist so I don’t know what the proper procedure is when a man is screaming his heart out with his pants down, but my inclination would be to just look away, let him say his piece and hope he decides to pull his pants up eventually. It wouldn’t be until my seventh or even eighth idea to approach this man and tell him to pull his pants up. Most of the folks in the bar must have felt the same way.

So I did look away. I looked at the nice dog that had been walking around the bar and tried to dream of a life that was simpler than bikers, flashing and pasty-white bottoms. I watched the mid-sized pooch casually saunter up behind the wailing, exposed biker.

The entire band took turns giving each other the look of impending disgust. Toby looked at Erik, then at Mike and back at me. Erik looked at me, then Mike and then Toby. Mike looked at Toby, then me and finally Erik. Then we continued to play as we simultaneously turned to watch what we had already begrudgingly had seen in our mind’s eye.

The dog stopped behind the bare bottomed man and took a moment to investigate what it saw, first with its eyes. It paused there, inches away from the pale flesh, long enough for us to think, “Maybe he won’t…”

He did it. The dog totally licked the guy’s butt.

When your mind sees something like that, you’re immediately trying to find excuses for the dog. Maybe the biker had sat in some ice cream. Maybe the dog was salt deficient. Perhaps the man was delicious. But I knew, deep down, that none of this was true.

So now I’m watching a dog lick a guy’s bottom. I thought that just seeing something like that had to be illegal. Seeing something like that changes you on a DNA level. I was now going to pass on that genetic information to my offspring. One day, when my kid happens to see a dog licking a guy’s butt—we all want our children to have better lives than we had—it isn’t going to seem that weird because it’s something his genes tell him is natural.

I felt so bad for that dog.

He kept on licking and licking, leading me to understand that he had either definitely found something or he was just persistently probing. Neither of those scenarios was really better than the other.

The inebriated man had a delayed reaction to the dog tongue lapping relentlessly at his hind-quarters. It took him a few seconds to realize what was going on—like seven or eight long dog-tongue licks. Had standing up straight not required the majority of the non-beer soaked parts of his brain to function, he may have been able to turn more than just his head slightly from side to side to see what was going on behind him.

We were able to watch the drunken delayed emotions flash across the biker’s face. First, he was confused, then he wondered what the sensation was, then he knew what the sensation was, and was okay with it for a few seconds. When everyone saw the “okay-with-it” face, that’s when people leapt into action.

The drunken people at the table started to come at the biker like some kind of slurring, tired, walking dead. The lady the biker was trying to win back with his jealous act of public nudity was screaming at him and trying to yank his pants up to cover him. A couple people tried to shoo the dog away, who avoided their flapping hands to get just a few more meaningful tastes of the exposed buttocks. His eyes wide with excitement as they flew around the room while his snout was steadfast and his tongue worked double-time.

The drunken bartender lady came walking up quickly with a “HEY! HEEEEEYYYY! HEY! You can’t do that!” To be clear, what she meant was that you can’t let a dog lick your bare butt while exposing your sad little genitals in a public place. That’s what she was reminding this man of.

Either the song ended, or the entire band lost the music from our hearts at the same moment, but we all found ourselves not playing and watching the scene get broken up. Toby addressed the crowd in a diplomatic fashion with something to the effect of, “never seen anything like that before!”

“I never want to come back here again,” I told the band. They all nodded in agreement.

Unfortunately, we were back again the next night, and that’s the Damm truth.