12/10/2023
There is something melodic about the sound of a blond-ish/green-ish haired lady making her way across a graveled h***y tonk parking lot.
She has a lit cigarette in the right corner of her mouth, her right eye is squinting to keep the smoke out. The last thing she needs is a Marlboro-induced tear deluting her eye liner.
She’s wearing an over-washed shirt with a faded picture of Porter Wagoner and Dolly Pardon on the front.
The caption reads, “A Couple Of Big’uns.
She’s walking across that graveled lot heading for the front door of an American Legion Hall just across the Georgia line.
It’s a steamy summer night where the air is so thick and damp that you could almost catch it in a jug and use it to make sweet tea.
She’s in a pair of hot-red, high-heeled stilts she bought on sale somewhere inside somebody’s garage.
The spikes on her heels are taking turns bogging and grinding through the gravel.
As she opens the dance hall door, a George Jones song falls out and hits the ground in a cloud of red clay dust mingled with grey, high-mileage cigarette smoke.
She has on a white “Gus Crease” cowboy hat. The hatband is made from a bolo tie her fourth husband told her he bought at a Roy Rogers estate sale in 1995. She took him at his word.
If she had Googled it, she would have found out that Roy Rogers didn’t die until 1998. But to her, Google was just the past tense of giggle.
In the hatband one feather stuck up toward Heaven. She said it’s from an exotic bird.
“I think that feather came from a guinea,” one lady whispers to another.
“Uh huh,” came the reply.
The H***y Tonk Queen is wearing a pair of red britches so tight that they look like they were painted on with a cheap brush bought at the dollar store.
A fresh coat of matching red paint reflects from her toenails, her fingernails, her lips and her sashaying hips.
She saunters past the bar.
Men suffering from a fe**sh for Pentecostal-proof hairdos gawk.
As she pulls up a barstool, a moaning, haunting song originates from a stage held together with red carpet, dried beer and duct tape.
The singer who’s built like a mic stand is drunk again—forgetting again, too.
“I see the bathroom on the right.”
He still can’t remember the words of that Credience song.
“I see trouble on the way.”
At least he got that part right as he sees her walking by the bar.
The singer was once born again, but now he’s back again, tip-toeing through guitar cases in boots with no laces, passing out souvenir guitar picks full of country licks. You had to squint to read what was printed on them. “Pick a Fender” was on one side. “Not your nose” was printed on the other side. Classy, huh?
The dance floor has two former church ladies doing a jig they invented. They call it “The Backsliding.” But it looked more like a nightmare you might have while sleeping off a dose of Black Draught.
The H***y Tonk Queen in the white hat and red britches always winks at the cowboy taking up money at the door. She is flurting because he alway compliments her Roy Rogers hatband.
Then he says those magic words that every woman likes to hear.
“I need to see your ID young lady.”
Some guys just know the right things to say.
Mike Keel
I think that I dated her mother who I met on a Saturday nite at the VFW in Tallahassee in the late 60s
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