We Are Not In Kansas Anymore

The Bull Riding event (Contest? Competition? Suicide Pact?) resumes and the crowd moves in to fill the stands surrounding the makeshift ring that doesn't look like it could contain a toddler let alone a raging bull. I stay on my feet next to Joy. Ready to make a break for it to avoid an inadvertent goring.

The crowd is really into it...the mood probably aided by inspiring music. Eye of the Tiger, for instance. The clowns are clearly half-wits. Taunting bulls that seemed to already be calm and wandering aimlessly. I hope they are paid well. The bulls are ridden. A very proud man in chaps is given a blingy belt to call his own. The crowd is pleased and orders rounds of shots in every direction.

The gals and I wander in to see the band. Tonight it is not a group of older men in cowboy gear playing melodramatic sappy cowboy songs. It is a younger band playing songs you might have actually heard had you dwelled for a song or two on the Country Cousin station. We are people watching and having a ball.

There is a middle aged Mom who barrels into the bar in what appears to be an outfit pulled from the laundry basket solely for the purpose of bombing over the desert to retrieve her underage daughter. Curlers bobbing in her Toni home permed hair, she is reading the kid the riot act. The kid is stammering some excuse about just wandering in through the bar on the way to her car following the bull riding competition finale (which apparently might have been an adequate story under other circumstances...go figure) But there is a telltale collection of beers on the table and a bejeweled and bedazzled tank top in full view now that the kid's denim jacket has been draped over the chair by the beers. She had clearly intended to stay. Totally busted. The mother is spitting mad. Hilarious.

We follow the the thrashing as it moves out the door and notice a couple of heavyweights looking miserable on a date. They give the appearance of being married and indifferent. They are in matchy matchy blingy belt buckles - every inch of the fabric of his jeans busting with the lard packed in them, and her belt buckle, thread on a tool worked belt through the loops of her high-waisted acid washed jeans, is barely visible having been jammed at a breath-halting position amid the tremendous rolls of fat. Both sporting spiffy cowboy hats. He has a goatee. A stunning pair for sure.

I get a text from Alejandro. He wants to know what we are doing. I tell him we are listening to great music with great crowd. He wants to know where. I tell him.

Could he be joining us?

I hear nothing.

The band plays a great Joe Cocker song. I text Alejandro that they are playing the song that I would make a fortune with if I were forced to go to work as a stripper some day.

He is either indifferent (what?) or has fainted at the notion. I hear nothing. Smooth move on my part.

Priscilla texts us that they are going to another location.

Alejandro texts that they are headed to another place altogether.

I ask for some direction...Kate and Jackie are fading at the bottom of the Viking beers. Joy and I need to know where we are going next.

I head to the ladies room and google cab companies in the area. I am surprised to find a weird girl we'd met on a prior trip who'd felt compelled to share her life philosophies with me in a ladies room. She is reading aloud to some other bathroom patron over the door of the stall. There is apparently plentiful graffiti about her on the walls. She seems flattered. Almost proud. I wash and rinse and dry on my jacket as I flee the scene before being recognized.

I get a text from Alejandro. They are headed to the Bad Dog.

I confirm with Priscilla who will be where. Satisfied that Joy and I will not be walking into a bar with a tenuous reputation all alone, I text Alejandro that we will join them but need an address for the cab driver.

I get an immediate reply with an address.

Then another. "Be careful. See you soon."

And Joy and I are on our way, with a Croation immigrant cabbie named Horea who has some pretty strong buzz-killing opinions about American politics that he seems driven to share on the way. I may as well be sharing a cab with my mother.

Between the appeal of the bar and the patrons we know are waiting there, and the aggravating cab driver, the cab ride is endless.