Home > Royer's Madcap Experiences > Royer’s Madcap Experiences: My Experiences with Dwight, Part III

Royer’s Madcap Experiences: My Experiences with Dwight, Part III

September 20, 2013 Leave a comment Go to comments

By Ric Royer
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You had to drive about seventy miles until you found a town with a reasonable selection of titty bars, Dwight opined. There’s always Lawrence but I find that to be bush league, he said, without irony. Never was Dwight so eloquent as when he talked of titty bars.

We stole a comfortable car, a ’78 Dodge if I remember and Dwight drove, making the town in about 40 minutes. It was a series of one-story brick structures, all painted black with opaque windows in their doors and garish color posters at street front. There was a hawker too, who idled on the concrete steps until he found a prospective customer.

Dwight parked on a dark side street. He had reasons for this, he said. I found the comment mysterious at the time. Later, I would come to the conclusion that that was the moment when Dwight began planning his own suicide.

We walked to the half-deserted main street. You could hear saxophone music from somewhere. We had a choice of four clubs– there was Skippers Go-Go, The Urban Tiger, Kitty Korner and Gelsinger’s French Toast.  Dwight leered at them, hands in his pockets, his hunter’s jacket covered with the stains of many a spreadable cheese luncheon. “One’s as good as any,” he said. Skippers Go-Go was first along the line.

The club was painted baby blue with a pole and a four-piece band off to one side. Dwight selected a table near the back and I followed.

Almost instantly a man with an enormous face and a ragged mane of hair grabbed Dwight by the shoulder. “My friend over there doesn’t like you. And I don’t like you neither.” I knew then there would be trouble and I bolted for the bathroom. I hid behind a locked stall door for what seemed like hours.

When I went back to the main room, the place had been partially burned to the ground. Only the simplest of architectural rudiments had been left. The floor had been cleared and a series of slop buckets had been placed to collect the blood. It was horrible.

I stumbled out onto an empty street. The rest of the clubs seemed still operating but there was nary a soul about. I tried desperately to find the old Dodge– I was convinced of the street but the car was gone. An old lady on a dilapidated shack porch, quite near where I felt the car to have been, smiled at me. Then she said, “Take a bus home. There ain’t no other way.”

I made the Greyhound station in just under an hour, despite having no sense of direction. It was painted the same baby blue as the club. I bought a ticket for Lawrence and the bus was near empty at that hour– there was a guy in the back wearing a t-shirt that read, I don’t need an encyclopedia, my wife knows everything. There was a browning Sunday paper all over the floor.

I never saw Dwight again.

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