I knocked on Josh’s door at 9:30.
After exchaning the usual insults, we jumped in Josh’s trusty convertable Benz and sped off into the night. Amazing how a mere sixteen thousand dollar per month payment can put you into such a fine automobile. After a couple of minutes on the road, I noticed that our leather jackets are starting to smell like ash trays. If either of us smoked, I might be more OK with that.
We hit McCallon’s at about ten and were both surprised by the size of the crowd. When we got to the front door there was a guy carding people, which I don’t normally expect at this place, but there he was carding up a storm. I reached for my back pocket when a sudden and paralyzing reality dawned on me… I had forgotten both my wallet and my cell phone. They were in my other pants. Don’t you hate it when stuff is in your other pants. This meant that not only would I have to charm my way past the card man, but I’d have to bum beers off Josh all night.
Cheap bastard that I am, you might think I’d be pleased to swill gratis booze all night, but you’d only think that if you didn’t know that I like my beer to flow like a river: fast and without alot of question-asking.
So we get inside and sit down and next thing I know we’re smack dab in the middle of a karaoke competition. The first couple of girls I heard were so good that I kind of felt sorry for them. I don’t know what it is about karaoke, but for some reason when I see people who really can’t sing, it seems to me like they’re having a good time and I’m happy for them. But when I see people who can sing like the devil, I feel really bad for them, like, I just know that they always had dreams of being a big singer and now this is what it’s come to…
Being without my cell phone to harrass people unfortunate enough to have given me their numbers, and feeling like I had to curtail the beer parade on account of it all landing on Josh’s credit card, I quickly became annoyed and judgemental. That’s usually how I get when things don’t go my way.
A guy got up and did the worst, most pathetic Jim Morrison impression I’ve ever seen in my life. Then a sixty year old woman got up and sang Bohemian Rhapsody, and you could barely hear her voice, but the song got people going pretty well. Then a guy who kind of reminded me of that dipshit pickup artist, I can’t remember his name but he has a show on VH1 or something about how to pickup girls even though he’s obviously not very good at it, anyway a guy who looked like him got up onstage and sang that song by Eminem, the one where Eminem repeatedly threatens his mother that he’s going to clean up his closet.
Which always struck me as a funny song, because don’t mothers WANT you to clean up your closet? Then a short, heavyset Mexican girl got up and sang that song by Gwen Stefani where she spells banana over and over again. Josh and I opined that if you’re going to make a song where spelling out a word is the chorus, at least she picked kind of a hard word. BANANAS. Then we thought it would have been even cooler if she had spelled out MISSISSIPPI, because that one’s even harder.
Then the competition broke, and for some reason the judges had to go outside and the audience members had to go and talk to the singers to decide if they liked them. I thought that was a pretty weird way of running the competition. In fact, I still think it. Next thing I knew, someone had been voted off. So I guess they’re kind of running the thing like American Idol, where someone gets voted off until there’s only one person left standing. Which is not a great way of picking a winner, if you think about it. In my opinion, which is informed by my dim (but accurate) view of humanity, when running an entertainment competition this way the winner is not the person who has the most fans, but rather the person who offends the least amount of listeners. So the winner is not someone anyone really wants to listen to, just someone people aren’t completely disgusted by. I’m not sure who was voted off today, but I hope the bad Jim Morrison isn’t there next week in any case.
Then we went out on the patio. Josh and I think of the patio at McCallons this way: People who vacation in Vegas by getting an overpriced room on the strip so they can take pictures of their bathroom and put the pictures on myspace and then go out to some stupid club to pay too much for champagne and take more pictures with captions that say things like “WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS… LOL”, those are the people who stay inside the bar.
People who vacation at Lake Havasu with jetskis and ice chests, whose idea of a good time is listening to police scanners to avoid DUIs… those are the people who hang out on the patio. So we went out to the patio to kick back for a while and get some fresh air like we always do.
You always run into some interesting people out there. Josh knows most of them from some of our previous visits. I know most of their faces and can remember the first letter of some of their names, but I can never remember who is who or when we met them or why we talked to them or why I shouldn’t beat them up. Josh is in charge of keeping all that straight.
He found a couple of wrought iron chairs in the middle of the pack and we sat down. To our right was a group of girls being entertained by a black girl who kept pulling down her pants (seriously), and to our left was a different group of people whose dignity I once salvaged by defeating the local armwrestling champion (Again, seriously.) I remembered the arm wrestling people by their occupations… one was a teacher, one was some kind of carpet layer, and one was a student who was clearly too old to be a student and did not seem to enjoy direct questioning as to what exactly it was he was studying or why he was studying it.
Directly accross from me in front of the door was a girl in really, really tight jeans with a super tight black tank top (and it was super January on the patio). She had really, really big fake boobs and a pair of boots on with abnormally long heels. Josh and I were both astonished at the sharpness and length of the heels. Josh made a comment about the heels, and a girl from the party of girls who were watching the black girl pull down her pants heard him, so she mentioned the fact to the girl in the heels. She seemed to think that was her cue to talk to us. She asked us if we liked her boots. We said we did. Josh asked her how she got them on, and then she relayed a story about it having been really hard to get them on. Then I suggested that the best plan would be boots first, then the jeans, and her face lit up and she said I was RIGHT, that WAS how she had finally gotten them on.
Then Josh made a comment about how the heels were quite long, and she asked us agian if we liked them. We said we did. Then Josh asked her why she wore such long heels, and her face screwed up in confusion. Then I suggested it was because they were the AWESOMEST BOOTS EVER, and again her face lit up and she agreed that this was the precise reason indeed for such long heels.
She must have decided I was her friend now, because she popped one of them up on my leg for my inspection. That was when I wondered for the first (but not last) time where those boots had been in the last few minutes.
Then a shortish guy with a stockyish build with a face that kind of reminded me of Luke Duke came up and started chatting up Boots. That was my new name for her. They talked about how the cops in Rancho are real bastards, and how the guy had three DUIs, and what bastards the cops are for continually arresting him for driving drunk in Rancho.
One time, he hadn’t even been that drunk, but they arrested him anyway, he suspects it was because although he had only consumed about five alcoholic beverages that night, all five beverages were at that point sitting in his backseat without bottle caps or beer in them. Boots was really enjoying his witty banter.
Then a really tall, skinnyish guy with a pot belly started trying to get Boots and the black girl who pulled down her pants to kiss. I reflected at that point that she hadn’t pulled them down in at least five minutes. The skinnyish guy with the pot belly was winning Boots over, and Mr. Triple DUI was desperately trying to win back her attention with his rapier wit. In a final act of desperation, he told her a detailed story about the directions to his trailer. It was a story that involved having to go over a hill where it doesn’t look like there should be a road, but there is one. Shockingly enough, Boots was not won over by this mesmerizing tale, and she moved over toward the tall potbelly guy, who now seemed like the clear winner.
At some point during this era of the evening, a Mexican guy came up and told Josh that he was in a good mood, then I asked him why he was in a good mood, then he started singing I Want You Just The Way You Are by Billy Joel. He sang it really loud, really badly, and like he meant every word. He finished the entire first verse and broke into the chorus, about taking the good times and taking the bad times, and then he trailed off and stared at his shoes. Josh told him it was horrible. Josh (who is not unlike Simon, in many respects) will tell you if something you did was horrible, and he will detail your failure for you and everyone else in earshot. This seemed to anger the Mexican troubador, and he stood between the two of us and made a couple of incomprehensible comments about letting people have fun, and then he left.
By this time Potbelly had realized he was not going to get Boots and Pantpuller to kiss, so he was now in the middle of a story about how he had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer while in prison, and was now retired at the age of 33. It bugged me a little bit to know that 33 year old guys can have thyroid cancer. He mentioned that the doctor visit in prison had cost him two dollars and fifty cents, and that the state was still paying for his care. His condition became a source of worry for the prision officials when his weight dropped from 225 to 125 in the course of a year. He said he was put on a medication that “cleared me up” and that because of the medication, his eyes did not fall out.
By this point, Boots was gone and Pantpuller was talking to someone else, so Potbelly was pretty much just talking to Josh and I, although we were not pointing our heads at him or making any overt signs of listening. Potbelly went on to explain that one of his eyes had nearly popped out in prison, and this worried him greatly, because it would have meant he’d have had to chose between a glass eye or a pirate patch. I suggested that a pirate patch could be quite a fetching look, but Josh won the day with the suggestion of wearing a glass eye UNDER the patch, that way Potbelly would win no matter what. (I did wonder skepticly if this guy hadn’t just seen the movie Valkyrie, like I had.)
Then Josh leaned over and asked me if I had been as frightened of the Mexican troubador as he had. I said that yes, I had been. Then Josh pointed at a dark figure, his arms spread in front of him like a big V, holding him up above the railing. Sweat was pouring from his forhead. I asked him if he was allright, and when I did, he got up from the fence and started talking to us again. I have no idea what he was saying. It was not English or Spanish, but there were elements of both to it, along some special words that I’m pretty sure only he will ever understand.
Josh had grown tired of the festivities, so he went to take a piss and close out his tab. While he was gone, some guys inside the bar who could see out the window were whistling and catcalling at Boots. She responded to them coyly, by banging her ass against the window so hard that it sounded like an earthquake. They made their mating noises again, and she did the ass slamming into the window thing again. I thought it might happen a third time, so I mentioned to her that if the glass broke, her ass would be cut. This longshot of a possibility must have frightened her, because she stopped. Then she looked around and realized she no longer had an audience besides myself and the carpet laying guy and the professional student, so she went back inside.
A moment later Josh emerged and made a slashing motion over his throat, indicating it was time to go.
On our way out, Boots saw that we were leaving and said that it was nice to have met us. Josh said well yeah, sort of. What he meant was that it had been nice, but that we had only sort of met. She took it to mean that it was only sort of nice to have met. She turned from him and looked to me, and when she saw my friendly smile, she said this…
“He’s my friend, John, John was like, Oh it was OH to meet you, and Josh was all, sort of SHIT!”
I did not know what that meant. I didn’t know how to respond to it, so I just smiled sheepishly and kept walking. The sheepish smile and walking away gets you out of lots of barroom trouble. I was still confused on the car ride home. (This was when Josh explained that she had taken his sort of comment the wrong way, for some reason the thought hadn’t occured to me.)
Then we drove home.
