WHY T-BONE DOESN’T HONKY-TONK (ANYMORE)
Ever been to a real, out-in-the-country, surrounded-by-cow-pastures, Texas two-steppin’ dance floor where the Western-wearing guys are actual cowboys and the Rocky-Mountain-jean-wrapped gals are more country than biscuits and gravy with a side of grits? If not, you’re missing out on some serious culture. Texas style. That’s beef barbecue, mister. No holds barred. Yee haw, y’all!
Living in a small town for a few years after college, and being near to even smaller towns, I got the taste of genuine honky-tonkin’ in my mouth as real as a wad of chaw. I’m talking tomato juice in your beer. Dudes who have two pairs of boots: one for work and then fancy ones for Saturday nights. Chicks whose thick drawls add syllables to their words. Here are a few of my memories, transcribed in list form so as to make it easier for the uninitiated to take notes:
1. Don’t ever dance with another guy’s gal. That is, unless you want to be the bullseye in a game I like to call “Broken-Beer-Bottle Fight” ... also known as “Sucker Punch” and “Hidden-Knife Bar Brawl”.
2. Don’t insult another man’s pickup truck, 10-gallon hat, roping style or mother. See No. 1 for the consequences.
3. Be prepared to pay some outrageous cover price so that you can smell like stale cigarette smoke, drink overpriced domestic beer from longneck bottles, listen to canned country music and see some fantabulous line dancing. Notice how the alterna-rock clubs you frequented in your college days had only a few differences.
4. Keep an eye (and maybe a hand) on your longneck beer at all times. You never know what will be put in there. Examples: cigarette butts, tobacco juice, used napkins, urine.
5. Know in advance that you will be affected by a combination of beer goggles, hazy atmosphere and deceptively dark lighting. This means if you are not careful, you’ll wake up the next morning beside a woman old enough to be your grandmother, except she’s dyed her hair blonde and likes her men young and energetic.
6. Beer before liquor, you’ve never been sicker. Liquor before beer, you’ve never been sicker. This is not only a Honky Tonk phenomenon. Write it down for future reference.
7. Don’t fall in love with a country girl who’s trying to escape that small town and then tell her you don’t make a lot of money. Before you know it, she’ll treat you like a brother and there’ll be no more riding the baloney pony in her hidden valley ranch. However, she will continue to dance with you, flaunt her cleavage and give you further schoolin’ on the ways of women.
8. If you convene at a 24-hour restaurant after honky tonking, expect normally slow service made slower by your fellow customers. Whether it’s the guy who staggered out of the corner booth to pee and inadvertently tackled the waitress carrying an overloaded tray of pancakes, or it’s the loudmouth giving everyone else an earful of purple words and hard time, your order will take hours to fill. Now you know why the secret slogan of such places is “Where America sobers up.”
9. When driving behind a couple of drunk girls (at their request, to make sure they get home safely), don’t follow too closely. Your car may fall victim to the Honky Tonk Pinstripe, created when the drunkest girl hangs her head out of an open passenger window and lets loose all she has consumed that evening. (This is not to be confused with the Texas Pinstripe, usually spawned by wayward tobacco juice).
10. Try not to get nostalgic about the whole mess and think it would be “fun” to relive any of it with your wife. Honky tonkin’ is exactly how you remember it, and these days you’re just too citified (a real Suburban Cowboy) to be good at fightin’ anymore. You might as well put on yer boots and git yerself to the opera.
