The Carnival Papers

Folksinger's Blues

After eighteen years of touring the United States, I’ve developed a sixth sense about how a gig will go the instant I see our destination.  The Black Hat Saloon, with its buzzing red neon sign in the shape of a cowboy hat and gravel parking lot inhabited by an equal mix of motorcycles, pick-up trucks, and big rigs, will be a disaster.  We’ll be lucky to escape without a police escort.

“This is the place?” Cathy says next to me.  She’s been with me for the last eight years, long enough to develop a sixth sense of her own.

“Maybe it’s not so bad on the inside,” I say, trying to sound optimistic while I think back to that scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake, Elwood, and The Band are accosted with beer bottles at a similar redneck bar.

I cut the van’s engine, waiting until it stops clunking and shuddering to turn around.  “We’re here,” I shout back to my bandmates.  “I’ll go in to check it out.”

On the old mattress in the back, salvaged from alongside Interstate 40 in New Mexico, Clint and Darren stir like a pair of children at the end of a cross-country vacation.  The side door opens with a banshee screech in Clint’s hand.  His reaction mirrors Cathy’s, only with more profanity.  “Shit, this fucking dump is it?” he says.

“Come on, we’ve been to worse places,” Cathy says, trying on that bright smile of hers to defuse the time bomb that is Clint’s temper.  “Remember that place in Seattle with the leaky roof?”

“I should have brought a bathing suit for that one,” Clint says.  “But just so you know, I can’t play the theme to Rawhide.”  Between us, Clint and I must have watched The Blues Brothers twelve hundred times. 

“What are you guys talking about?” Darren asks.  He’s the baby of our outfit, a newly-minted college dropout we found in Athens, Georgia.  In a rare moment of Providence, our last bass player quit after a food-poisoning scare in Raleigh-Durham.

“We were just discussing how bass players have such strong hands because they’re always jerking off,” Clint says, still breaking in the new guy.

“Fuck you.”

“You wish.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who picked up that midget transvestite in New Orleans,” Darren says, scoring a direct hit when Clint’s face turns ketchup-red.

“I thought it was a lost kid—”

As much as I would love to hear the rest of this exchange, I still have to go in and make sure the owner knows we’re supposed to be here.  I leave Cathy in charge of our two grown children and cross the gravel parking lot to a front door that’s one solid piece of metal.  It could survive a nuclear holocaust, leaving a hive of scum and villainy intact to repopulate the world.  Opening this bomb shelter door requires me to use both hands and to grunt like a female tennis player.

If I walked into the place naked I couldn’t be more conspicuous.  My Elvis Costello-style glasses and paisley button-down shirt mark me as an outsider among the crowd of black leather and cowboy hats.  Still, I make sure to keep my distance from the dark expanse of the bar with its cluster of neon advertisements for Budweiser and Miller Lite.  The various bikers, cowboys, and truckers are either too uninterested or too drunk to hassle me.  I slink past dusty cabinets for pool cues that have gone missing, to a door marked ‘Varmints’ in gold text like you’d see on an old wanted poster.  I have no idea if this indicates the men’s room or women’s room, but the only women I see are waitresses in a rainbow variety of tube tops.

The stage is about twenty feet from the bathroom—convenient if we have another food poisoning incident—although calling it a stage is exaggerating.  It’s really a dozen two-by-fours resting on top of cinderblocks.  At least it’s dry, I’m sure Cathy would remind me.