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Show RTVER Caruthersville, Missouri, instead of Hollywood. Anyway, she was beautiful and she gave us free beers. Within the hour I was feeling all right and had acquired about twenty new and firm friends. The drummer and I slipped down to my boat and smoked a reefer. By now it was dark and Caruthersville was gearing up for a small town Saturday night. It was a Saturday night the likes of which I'd never seen in San Francisco or New Orleans or New York, places which had nothing on Caruthersville, where people were truly serious about their Saturday nights. I waited around the landing for a while, hoping Morrel would return (and I would have waited a lot longer if I'd known more about what goes on in graveyards the length and breadth of the South late in the night on Saturday) but it seemed hopeless and it was getting cold. I went back to the Climax Bar and Grill. There was now some serious honky tonkin' going down. The bar and the dance hall were filled with people. Beer can tops popped like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. I guzzled a few more beers and watched the place start to cook. By nine o'clock everybody in the building was plastered. The band started to play and the crowd started to boogie. I wound up at a table with two quiet countrymen and a very high-powered older woman. Pushing fifty, she was still very much a fox. We hit it off right away and started tossing lascivious remarks and plain old obscene propositions back and forth. We got looser and looser as the beer went down. She went off to powder her nose and I resolved to get her to a dark place as soon as she returned. "Man," I said to one of the guys at the table. "Thaf s a lot of woman." "Yeah," he said. "Thaf s my wife." -167- |