A Texas Trap

I've fallen into two Texas traps, on purpose. I don't really regret either, though there were lessons to be learned from each. If you keep your eyes open, look at what's happening around you, and direct your behavior, you can stay out of the traps. There's no way out when you're trapped like an animal.

You know the kind of place you go drink a bit, a neighborhood bar, like "Cheers," only really located in your town, with people you know and call friends.

I had a place like that. I went to a place like that. These people were as important to me as life itself. They, and the bar, served as a source of life, living, and dying inside a little sometimes. Certainly these were the settings of the most intense passions of my life.

An old Indian proverb says, "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." So true .. . why can't we learn? I try to . . . to my almost demise at times. I'll do anything once. Anything.

In a way, each Texas Trap served as a high and a low point in my life.

The bar that was the "high" point was a tavern named "Rudyard's," on Kipling Street, in Houston, circa 1980-83.

The low point was a neighborhood bar in a dry area (no alcohol sold or drunk in public) of a suburb called Richardson, just north of Dallas.

I was a customer at Rudyard's. At first I was a customer at the Richardson club too. I was learning to play darts, I was playing on a team, and I spent a lot of time in front of the dart board tossing my feathered arrows at the dart board on the wall.

One particularly busy night, I appointed myself person in charge of making sure the used ash trays didn't get messy. People noticed, and the smokers and non-smokers alike appreciated a clean table. Finally the barkeeper noticed, and at the end of the night he offered me a job as a waitress.

I'd never been a cocktail waitress. I didn't have a job, so I became a cocktail waitress. I became a cocktail waitress who was encouraged to drink on the job. It was the bartender's idea. His name was Joe.

I've never run across another human being quite like Joe. He could pull off the bartender personality, but he didn't have it in his heart. I don't even know if he liked being there, because I never saw him throw darts. He was the bartender hired by the absent owner, and Joe worked for tips.

Ownership of tip money became an issue, Customers would put money in my jeans pockets instead of putting money in the tip bottler on the bar. Joe told me when he hired me that he expected a percentage of my tips. He expected me to give him half of everything I got, because that was Joe rule. But when customers, who were my dart playing friends, literally stuck money in my pockets, and specifically said, "Don't share this with Joe," what was I supposed to do.

I decided my first job was taking care of myself. Joe was an old, wrinkled, bent-over crabby man. He seldom talked because he was always unpleasant in conversation. Everyone knew Joe watered the drinks. I heard about it before I actually saw him do it. But Joe ran the bar nights. If Joe was quiet, and the darts were clicking into the cork dart boards, and people were drinking and smoking and creating irregular waves of auditory celebration and disappointment as time progressed, it was a good night at the bar called "The Trap Room".




more to come....





















The English tavern had several parlour rooms with plenty of pints and dart boards. I heard it later became "The Velvet Elvis."

I visited the place as an after the fact space oddity a few years later. It was cool then too, in a strange new way. Of course, then, it was no longer "Rudyard's on Kipling." I read "Gunga Din" there one evening, or maybe that was another flashback.

The best sex was with the bartender, on the bar, after hours. He was hot, accent, bod, and ALL! YIKES! more on that later . . .

Then there was this latest trap, in Dallas, one innocent Wednesday evening.

I need to work on some revision for this one. I received great expansion suggestions. Looking for a round tuit time.