Stomp

You knew you were in a honkytonk when you walked through the door, and those beer fumes and lonesome fiddles knocked your boots right off. The walls and ceiling glittered with cheap gold flecks, and their black paint was peeling. Near a pastel-splashed Wurlitzer, men in old jeans slowly circled the pool table. Above the table, smoke circled up a cone of light from the low lamp. Long tables, enough to seat forty or fifty people, partially surrounded the dance floor, and only one of the tables had any people, a dozen men and women who drank there nightly together. On the other tables, the candles in round red holders flickered to empty chairs.

A country band twanged out songs about being dead drunk, dirt poor, done wrong and real, real restless. The honkytonk seduced. The dark bar called. I climbed onto the high bar stool, and a woman eased up to take my order. She had a blowzy, downhome air. There was no pretense in that earthy glance, in that frayed straw hat shoved down on her tomato red hair. It was clear that this hat was frayed from good use and not careful orchestration.

Wonderful was the wall behind the bar, just below the gold-flecked mirror. Racks for cherry pies and beef sticks nudged close to a burrito microwave. Stuffed between the microwave and a coffee machine was a basket heaped high with hard-boiled eggs, and I remembered Texas bars with pickled pigs’ feet floating in huge glass jars, to go with those eggs. Used cowboy hats and working boots hung on nails on the wall, sharing cramped quarters with dollar bills in frames and a couple of Texas Longhorn horns. On the slope of one horn, a can of Lone Star beer perched, out of symmetry and purpose. Beneath all this, on a liquor cabinet, a profusion of bar bottles stood in disorderly rows.

The band twanged and whined, If You Don’t Change Your Way of Livin’, You’ll Get Honkytonkitis in Your Soul.
People at the long table whooped and tapped their feet, while I stared at that pale face that stared back at me from the honkytonk mirror. Oh, I have had honkytonkitis, and I have stared at that face in bar mirrors from Amarillo and San Angelo to Big Springs and Post. I have stomped and shitkicked to lonesome fiddles, and I can tell you tales of wild nights in VFW halls out on the Tahoka Highway or in roadhouses rising up out of nowhere on the Edwards Plateau. I know bootleg and how to get it in dry counties.

I know honkytonks.

I knew I was I one then, but it was a thousand miles away from West Texas, which I left for California years ago in the Sixties. I was at the Playtime on Sherman Way in North Hollywood, one of the most West Texas-type dives I ever set foot in. Outside were streets leading to Universal Studios, true, but to one inside, sucked into the heart of the honkytonk, they might have been windswept roads leading to the Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.

My dancing partner was a streetsmart native Hawaiian named Jimmy, who wore a high, wide grin and long bleached hair above his pink vest and plain boots, all the while chatting about his subterranean activities in and around Hollywood. He divided his nights, he said, between the Playtime and the Club Lingerie, which he pronounced Ling-a-Ray. He didn’t know the Texas two-step from the dirty bop, and he was a far cry from the trucker I met one time at the Velvet Club in Brownfield, Texas, who said he was hauling pipe up from Big Sprangs. But Jimmy and I shuffled around the dance floor among people who danced the two-step so purely and plainly, they looked like they had been lifted up from a shitkicker in Amarillo and set down in North Hollywood. The Playtime and all of us in it were truly drenched in the atmosphere of a hundred-proof honkytonk.

When I returned to the Playtime two months later, I found it had vanished into the sunset to make way for a topless dancing establishment (male dancers on Sundays, a la Chippendale’s), and though the name was the same, nothing else was, and the fiddles had given way to ka-vooms.

Was there someplace else in Los Angeles to go get that whiskey-soaked feeling?
The Palomino was famous, but it didn’t even pretend to be a country place anymore, though if you sat the picnic tables long enough, maybe two or three days, you’d hear good country, along with good rock, fusion, rockabilly, all served up with equal dollops and relish, a bit of Indian River Boys and Billy and the Beaters. No, the Palomino was out.

One night, as the lights of Los Angeles twinkled on, I began my quest armed with a tank of gas and a Thomas Brothers.
I immediately fell into good fortune, when I walked through the door of Little Nashville in North Hollywood and into a western club that was packed with hard-partying people who exuded a downhome congeniality edged with wildness, that I remembered from Texas clubs. They couldn’t sit still, men or women. They danced, they hollered, they jumped up and down from the two bars and wooden booths while they went about raising hell.

All these people were washed in the pure country music of the Johnny White band. The lead singers were Angel and Johnnie, who looked just right, like life had happened to them, like they had both been around the block several times, and each time their hearts of country gold growing bigger as they grew more tattered. They played and sang offkey with their whole hearts, and they were all the honkytonk bands singing out to rowdy audiences who were soaking themselves in good times and booze, who sang along, ahh-haa, to Your Cheatin’ Heart Will Tell On You, and, I Didn’t Know God Made Honkytonk Angels.

Little Nashville was a real shitkicker, and it was only a block away from the ghost of the Playtime, that dirty dive.

One after another, men and women sat next to me at the bar just long enough to buy a drink and cart it off someplace else. One woman stayed long enough to demolish in two gulps the whiskey she ordered, push the empty glass toward the bartender with her index finger and order another one. She knew I was watching her, and she stared at me until I glanced her way and into her lidded eyes, so she could look me over properly. She was a large, majestic woman in her fifties. She wore tight jeans, a black denim jacket and, above it all, the crowning glory, a diadem of bottle black curls, parted in the middle and with straight bangs.

“Like the band?” she asked, facing out and propping her elbows behind her on the bar. “I do,” she said. “Some people don’t think they’re very good, and maybe not, not if you’re particular about every little note being right where it’s supposed to be.” Without flinching, she downed more whiskey and swirled the glass, looking for a last drop. “I deserve this liquor,” she said. “It’s my reward for busting my ass everyday. I was so tired after work today, if an angel had come up and asked for change for a dollar, I’d of slapped her. I’m a handywoman. Paint houses, roof them, all that. Used to be an actress, and a damn good one. Came out here thirty years ago. Tried like a sonofabitch to make it and never did. Ever hear of Peg Entwhistle? She was an actress. Threw herself of the Hollywood sign fifty years ago. Couldn’t get recognition. She jumped off the “land” part somewhere. It used to say Hollywoodland. I came close to jumping of the “H.” Always an extra, that was me - - but good, like Peg Entwhistle. Hard when you have your heart set on something so.” She reached back to pick up her fresh drink and shrugged. “Just have to shift gears, that’s all. And I did. Hell, I always said if you can boil water, you can boil roof tar.” Laughing now, she rose and disappeared into the noisy crush of people, her whiskey in hand.

Angel, Johnnie and a cadaverous fiddle player stared and sang across the smoky, churning silhouettes mashed together on the dance floor, lost in their thoughts and their lovesick, homesick blues, like ghosts from old honkytonks and roadhouses.

I remembered twenty-five years back, back to the mid-fifties, to the ruddy blond tenor who didn’t make it in opera anymore than Peg Entwhistle and the handywoman did in movies, and he was good, too. He sang tenor every morning with the church choir and drank and danced at the VFW Hall shitkicker every Saturday night. We had a tacit agreement never to acknowledge each other, not even with a nod. I didn’t squeal on the prize tenor, and he didn’t squeal that he saw the preacher’s daughter out drunk and dancing at the same stomp.

He ended his silent, stoic conflict between whiskey and Jesus by shooting himself in the heart one cold, sleety Saturday. His body fell into a cotton irrigation ditch, crazy waters of redemption, while inside the VFW hall Hoyle Nix and his West Texas Playboys stood on stage and played Crazy Arms that Reach to Hold Somebody New. One time, I had overheard the tenor say that he was in awe of people who knew just what they wanted out of life, and just how to get it. To which a fatalistic and thread-thin good old girl replied from behind her cloud of cigarette smoke, “Lard, I’m in awe of ‘em, too. Sometimes I go stand at the Dairy Queen just to watch ‘em go I and order a hamburger and a malt - - just like that - - no stallin’, no beatin’ their brains, wham, here’s what I want, here’s how I get it. I have this friend, all she wants is a steady job and a good bowl of chili. Can you beat that? She don’t get too up or too down. Hums along, you know. Like that.” She motioned her hands evenly through the air. “Me, I sputter along, just trying to keep my head above water.”

She sputtered, like the tenor, like me, like my doubting preacher father, like a man named Jack, who swore that Elvis, upon his death, had entered into his body and meant for him to carry on his music. Jack always dressed like Elvis after that, but he was so fat he always split the sequins off his tight, shiny pants. Jack carried a guitar that he didn’t know how to play, but he trusted that Elvis would show him how. He’d go into the back bar at the Velvet Club and try to sing and swivel like Elvis, but instead of adoration, he only got whispers of, “Pitiful, pitiful”

The restroom at North Hollywood’s Little Nashville stunned the eye with red flock walls. From my stall, I stared down at the wet tile floor, strewn with soggy toilet paper.

I could almost hear the wind blowing the tumbleweeds down the street outside in a hard West Texas Blue Norther.

Reentering the main room, it reassured me to catch a glimpse of the traffic driving along Sherman Way, for I would not have been in the Texas Panhandle again for all the oil in the Permian Basin. Would not be at the VFW Hall again, with Guy and me throwing money into Hoyle Nix’s kitty so he’d play Lady in Red on his fiddle while we dipped and turned around the dance floor. Would not be seventeen again and gingerly placing my Lone Star beer can on my Bible, daring God to strike me with lightning.

As one of many in this roistering crowd, I was serenaded by musicians with hard-bitten faces, real boots and hats, beer bellies, who were entranced with their own hit-and- miss music. But the youngest musician was wearing Nikes. Good. I was at Little Nashville, a real shitkicker, but I was in Southern California in the 1980s and not the Texas High Plains in the 1950s.

So this was the Rawhide. Sawdust on the floor, plain jeans, no gimmicks. But the music, the dancing! Last time I was here, they had real Western music and real Western records and real country band. With luck they would again, but for now, no luck.

Something had happened. The 80s? A woman DJ played records, lots of Anne Murray and anything similar. I waited for the western music that teetered on the verge of happening but never did. A line of gay men moved in unison along the raised, fenced-in dance floor, strutting, with thumbs in belts, in a dance routine meant to turn the heads of Broadway choreographers. It looked like fun, and the guys looked great, but about as country/western as a stuffed avocado.

I tried to teach the two-step to a woman named Deb, but she, accustomed to standing in place and waving her arms at her dance partner instead of touching her and moving somewhere,, couldn’t grasp the concept. We ended up walking around in a circle, well, walking really. I noticed two men next to us doing an honest two-step pointed them out to Deb. “That’s the way. That’s it.”

Deb, full of beans and relaxed good will, popped her words out, said she had to leave her girlfriend, Shirley, in St. Louis because Shirley wouldn’t budge from the couch. She’d sit on the couch and say she was always waiting for something to happen, even though she knew it never would. “Now I couldn’t live like that - - can’t live like that,” Deb said, “so here I am, new actress sizzles into Hollywood! Oh, was that your foot? I’m sorry.”

We saw them coming, a herd of line-dancing, eager urban cowboys sweeping across the dance floor, crushing everyone who could not get out of their way over the indoor fence.

Even as Deb and I hung over the fence like noodles, Deb continued, “Shirley thinks she’s an evolved soul who didn’t want to come back this time but who knew she had to and finally said to the cosmos, ‘Oh, shit, all right then!’”

When the line of cowboys had passed and it was safe to move, I squeezed my way to the bar to one of the bartenders. He was wearing a bandana tied around his neck, and on his head was a straw hat. Unlike that of the blowzy woman bartender at the Playtime, his hat had been carefully frayed and molded.
“Do you ever play country music?” I asked hopefully.
“What? Why, this is country,” he said, indicating Shrimp Boats being played at that very minute.
“No, do you ever play anything twangy?”
He drew back as though I’d spit in his eye, and he gasped, “We never play anything twangy!”

I plunged back into the night, searching for more honkytonks, real shitkickers, looming up out of the mall lights.

Where did all these yuppies come from? Why were they here at the Whiskey Bend in Burbank? Perhaps to listen as the band played Top 40s, a pop rock tune or two, a sprinkling of rockabilly, lots of Wayne Newton songs. Wayne Newton?

When I first entered the Whiskey Bend and fell into this vat of white bread and bad vibes, I thought I heard the jukebox playing Patsy Cline’s I Fall to Pieces, and my Texas roadhouse heart thumped with a long-forgotten excitement, but I must have been dreaming.

Why was everyone staring at me so blatantly? Oh, I got it. I was fresh meat. The men were checking my flesh. The women were checking the competition. They were all staring at each other, too. Everyone a predator, everyone prey. Fair’s fair, I reckon.

No one was sloshed enough to dance. I stood to the side, checking the place out. Now look at that. That mirror alongside the dance floor was outlined with white, flashing lights, and they all worked. Wasn’t that nice? And I did declare, what a tidy-looking bar - - all those bottles lined up like a marching band, those little packages of peanuts hanging so dainty-like by themselves in a corner, almost as if a decorator had arranged them. Better not take one. Looked real neat, like an orderly wind blew through, taking everything inessential. No corny bills in frames here, no sirree.

Could it be this was not a western bar at all, even though that’s what it liked to call itself? Looked like a cocktail lounge to me. What was the memory nagging at me? Bless my soul, I remembered. This place, choked by a heterosexuality so excessive it gave off fumes, reminded me of le Boeuf sur le Toit, a gay and lesbian bar that thrived in Dallas in the 50s and early 60s, except le Boeuf was less frigid than Whiskey Bend. It was also more posh, because it was meant to be, never dreaming for a minute to pass itself off as a western bar when it wasn’t.

Why was I in a cold sweat? Why did I tremble? Could it be that vacuousness was not only noxious but catching? Was what lurked here death by tidiness, the kiss of blandness, where one was choked on the vapors of a norm so pumped-up on itself that it was auto-intoxicating? If I stayed one more minute would I turn into white bread - - or even a yuppie heterosexual?

I figured I’d get fixed to mosey on out, past those wranglers holding the bar up with their Reeboks, and skedaddle.

In the heart of the Gardena gambling district sprawled a cavernous, noisy western Stomp, a real Stomp with a capital S. Over the dance floor, colored lights revolved, throwing specks and dabs over the dancers as they stayed one step ahead of their own stampede, which is what you do at a Stomp, and they did it up right in the Golden West.

You don’t stay I one place when you two-step or slide. You don’t undulate along. You move. You hang on to your partner and go someplace, and you go there counterclockwise around the dance floor, like a wild herd of cattle barely kept in check, not just you and your partner, but the whole bunch of you on the dance floor, and you’d better keep moving.

The Golden West dance floor was huge, and since it was always crammed with dancers and since many of the dance numbers were fast, the Golden West Stomp was particularly dramatic. I’d dance and get that wild and crazy feeling that if I stopped, I’d be run down like a poor jackrabbit by a convoy of pickup trucks.

The whole place, not just the dance floor, assailed the senses. The Golden West was like a five-ring circus, a colorful, confounding cavern of contrasts, packed with both authentic and contrived western flavors. The great dance floor adjoined tables full of noisy people, and adjoining the tables, a bar full of just as noisy people. Crossing an alcove, a crowded path led o a smaller, even noisier bar where folks buzzed around each other like hives of bees with a purpose. Across from that, on the far side of the enormous, hangar-like room, was an area fille with fifty-gallon drum tables and a third bar.

To enter this area was like diving underwater, it was so suddenly quiet and muted. Here there was a giant TV screen, where you could watch movies with the sound turned off. Tonight Rommel advanced across the desert in a World War II movie to the music of the Orange Blossom Special that drifted in from the country band in the big room.

In the entrance of the Golden West was a show shine stand, where a young woman dressed like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader polished the boots of a sullen cowboy who looked like he just drove in from Turkey, Texas. The Golden West resembled, in its gimmicks, Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth. Even Texans parody the West, which is as much fun, and as real in its own way.

The man sitting next to me at the bar looked like my uncle Marvin in Fort Worth, only Uncle Marvin was a three-piece suit type, and this one was a scruffed-boot trucker from Bakersfield, where, he said, he cut his teeth on Buck Owens. His eighteen-wheeler was parked outside, and, like a cowboy with his horse, he wouldn’t leave it to go sample other clubs in a taxi. He said, since he had to stay at the Golden West, he was lucky it was so satisfying, even if it was a little fanciful in spots, like the shoe shine and the big TV.

The man, whose name was Pete, said he hauled goods back and forth across California, Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas, and, like a one-shot in a hundred, we learned that we were both familiar with a little town named Bronco, New Mexico, which one filling station and two bars, where my pals and I once bought bootleg and brought it back to dry Terry County, Texas. Bronco was so smack on the state line that Pete informed me that it was now, after some interstate wrangling, Bronco, Texas and dry as a bone.

Pete and I laughed. The music rollicked. The herd of dancers surged. The stomp stampeded. The shitkicker kicked. In the hall and in my blood. I even forgave the cocktail waitress or wearing legwarmers over her boots.

My last stop on the honkytonk trail took me to the Forge in Glendale, which was entered through a long corridor lined with photographs of people in western garb and with lessons announcing two-step lessons, a good sign. At one end, the corridor emptied into a smoky, lowlit back bar that was like stepping a thousand miles and thirty years back to some dive on the High Plains, though I wasn’t rundown enough to be classed as a lowdown dive. The pure country music playing from the jukebox regulated the mood of the room. At the bar, two good old boys in Caterpillar caps hunched over longneck beer bottles. Two good old girls cracked out a game of pool. No one smiled.

The corridor empties at the other end into a main room, past the restrooms with Cowboys and Cowgirls decaled on the doors. In this room, a band played authentic country and country swing for couple who danced an authentic two-step. They dressed unpretentiously in boots and jeans. Looked almost like a shitkicker, but on the tame side, without the wild edge of Little Nashville in North Hollywood, the stompiness of the Golden West in Gardena.

Without warning, those of us standing near the entrance were infiltrated by twelve or so couples who swarmed out of the restrooms and spread out among us, like chemicals getting into the water supply. They were dressed in parodies of the West. Men wearing silk bandanas and gold-braided shirts stood waiting expectantly at the edge of the dance floor with women dressed in mini-skirts edged with sequined fringe. They reminded me of a chorus line looking for a musical.

They soon had it. Lucky me - - this was Dance Contest night. The crowd cleared the floor. Each contestant couple danced to a tune of its own choosing, which the live band played. Fast, slow, what did it matter? Such choreography and prancing like ponies, such expensive bandanas fluttering to the tap-tapping of such non-functional boots. The blatant hat-waving, high slapping, boot thwacking with the flat of the hand.

Such thumbs in belts. What decorous little whoops, dropping, on occasion, from the dancers’ lips. And - - could it really be? Yes. Dancers, with knees bent outward, standing I place and bouncing up and down from the knees like so many pistons who came to the wrong party.
This was the kind of western night le Boeuf sur le Toit might have put on if it had done them.

But maybe I wasn’t being fair. In Los Angeles, as in Dallas, stepped out of the bars into urban diversity. In Brownfield, Texas, population 8000, they stepped into a town of cotton gins and feed stores. In Brownfield, they never said they were going to the western bar. They said they were going to the bar.

Were the choreographed dance contests at the Forge in Glendale real? Was the shoe shine at the Golden West in Gardena? Being particular about it spoiled the fun.

What if the Velvet Club in Brownfield decided to have a Hollywood Night? Could it be anything other than a presentation of Southern California clichés? Could anyone seriously expect Hollywood Night at the Velvet Club to resemble the real Hollywood, which is hard enough to pinpoint for those of us who live here. Even in West Texas, not everyone living there thinks Jesus is the best thing since ice cream.

What’s left in the end but clichés, based on indigenous but slippery truths? Sometimes to exaggerate stereotypes is the only way to make the exotic be exotic. It is not exotic if, on Hollywood Night, that Texans, like Angelinos and Kansans and Bostonians, drink gin and tonic. No, the gin and tonic must be renamed Tinsel Town Tonic.

So just step right on in, all you good old gals and boys, into the Hollywood Club here in Brownfield. You can see by the pictures we hung on the wall that the surf’s up. Amble up to this bar and order yourself a Bentley Brandy and a Karmaburger. Here - - dive into these Designer Pig’s Feet - - I mean, Pinkies. I declare. those sure are real nice butterfly sunglasses you have on. I like all those rhinestones all over ‘em. Too bad you can’t see where you’re going. Here, you can hang onto me while we mosey into the back bar, er, the Flaming Hot Tub. Oh, if you want to relieve yourself first, the restrooms are over there - - just follow that little old Walk ‘a Stars. They have Starlets and Hunks painted on ‘em. You’ll know which one to go to. Well, maybe not, since this is Hollywood Night. Get it? Vava-voom.

Want some amyl nitrate? Don’t have a conniption fit! It’s not really amyl nitrate, just my Vix inhaler with the label rubbed out. You just mellow out now and have a good day – hear?

This sure is a nice dance. I’m glad I thought to wear my love beads and pull these leg warmers up over my boots. Say, I need water in this Moonbeam Jim Beam. Let me look at the menu here. I guess I want a Neon Perrier. ‘Course you and I know it’s not really Perrier, just the hard tap water of the Plains processed through Culligan Soft Water Service.

Oops, I wasn’t supposed to say that. I’m afraid my West Texas is starting to show through my Hollywoodland cleavage that I pushed up so nice with this old corset. My head sure feels funny, like this Marilyn Monroe wig is turning into a pumpkin. Is it midnight or something?

Looks like the exotic is melting like a wax mask. Down comes Starlets and Hunks. Back goes Ladies and Men. The Designer Pinkies are pickled pig’s feet again. Hollywood Night, like a formal garden, will soon be overrun by its weedy, natural flora, by plain shirts and talk, by used boots and whiskey called whiskey.

It’s all in a night’s pretend. In its own way, it’s all real, too, the way quantum physics is - - always real but always new and different, according to who’s doing what to which quarks where.
END

Author’s Note: Carolyn Weathers is an Adult Librarian at the San Pedro Branch. The story Shitkickers was originally published, in a somewhat different form, by Clothespin Fever Press in 1986, in the book SHITKICKERS AND OTHER TEXAS STORIES. It was written at the request of James Vowell, then editor of the L.A. Reader, a fellow Texan, but Carolyn missed her deadline, and the Reader subsequently went out of business. It also appeared in 2007 in the Librarians Guild “Communicator.”