Peenie Wallie

I don’t know what I was doing before I was hanging out at the Little Bear. Maybe because the days started getting shorter…maybe I’ve been on the road…I don’t know. But I’m here now. And it feels more like home than my house does. I don’t feel like rushing back to my house after work. The snow and the wind have been brutal. So now, I spend my evenings at the Little Bear after work, listening to the sound check…check check check one two check.. one two three…check six four nine zero…check..check..check..one two there.

The Little Bear is the quintessential mountain bar. It’s not a yuppiefied, pretentious, coffeeshop for the pseudo intellectuals. It’s more like a turn of the last century mountain tavern. The bars are deeply carved with meaningless graffiti and initials. Bras hang from the lights over the stage. Live bands play every night of the week. When the weather is nice, Harleys line the street in front of the store.

The women age hard in the hills. The winters are long two miles above sea level on the back side of Shadow Mountain. The women are hardened by tight narrow canyons, short days, and cold nights. They suffer silently on the couch in Clear Creek county, waiting for a break in the weather. They put on fat like trees put on growth rings every year. You can tell their age by the caliper of their thighs. A good liposuction surgeon can read the weather in the fat off the backside of a common mountain woman.

And when the sun breaks out, they paint their faces, don lumberjack shirts and their loosest clothes to hide the sins of winter. They bleach their hair and put on their pink bras and thongs and they migrate down to the Little Bear to breed.

The women come down from the canyons, sex-starved and decadent. They’re ready to lie with dogs. They wear snakeskin pants gyrate on the dance floor as only poor white people can. Not like the night clubs in Miami where you’d better know how to dance or you’ll be embarrassed on the dance floor.

They wrap themselves around the men like an Octopus and massage their own breasts. Take off their bras and fling them onto the stage in an arctic frenzy.

People are smoking pot across the street from the place. The people are all drunk or high or else they’re on Prozac.

This is the place where Willie Nelson used to live before the IRS broke him like the family mule. His daughter went to the local high school and used to drive around in a little Blue Maserati. He used to drop into the Little Bear and get up on stage and sing and play his guitar.

Upstairs, they’re moving weed in the bar. Passing ounce bags back and forth like it they’re selling hot dogs at a ballgame. And I’m sitting up by the sound mixer, freezing my ass off. Even inside, with my jacket on, I’m shaking like a mule deer with CWD.

At the bar, a guy walked up and leaned toward the bartender. Over the background of the live music, he shouted “Have you got a ‘bar cigarette’ back there?”

‘Not really…’ the bartender trails off.

I turned to the guy to clarify what he was looking for. I knew what he had said. I’d wanted to make sure I had understood what he wanted.

“You lookin’ for matches?” I asked him.

“Nah. There’s tons of matches….I’m looking for a cigarette.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.”

The guy walked away. A minute later the bartender returned with a cigarette in his hand.

“Where’d that guy go?”

“I’m not sure.”

I spotted the guy in the crowd. “Hey…the bartender found you a cigarette.” As I was telling him this, he slid a cigarette discretely behind his right ear, but it didn’t escape the bartender’s attention.

“Well…here’s another one anyway” the bartender offered.

“You gave him one of your cigarettes? That was a pretty cool thing to do.”

“Well..it’s one less I’ll smoke anyway.

The black lead singer called out “Hey y’all. That’s Paul on the trumpet. Give it up!”

But there was no one playing a trumpet. Just a middle aged Bernie Ebbers looking guy on a synthesizer. He was keying a “trumpet” with his right hand and a “piano” with his left.

The band took a break, and the people upstairs went downstairs to get drinks. The people downstairs moved upstairs to play pool.

I went downstairs to get another drink. I wandered over to the doorman.

“Why did you only charge me a dollar when you charged everyone else three?”

“You’re a local. I charge them more because they’re from down the hill.”

“That’s cool. I appreciate. There’s a good crowd tonight. Why do you figure that is?”

“People get cabin fever…they’ve been snowed in for a week. They want to get out and cut loose.”

The band started up, and I returned to the balcony.

On the dance floor, the fat and the balding critically white courted each other in lewd, lascivious dances that would get you arrested in the South. They danced, cigarettes in hand, and burned each other accidentally, barking at each other in that peculiar harsh, slurred language of the drunken loser.

In the balcony, I observed the human aquarium spawning on the dance floor below.

The members of Fat Daddy closed their eyes…partly to focus on the songs they covered. Partly to avoid being distracted by the debacle unfolding on the dance floor.

Slowly, my beer googles began to come into focus. Women who had seemed homely when I walked in, suddenly appeared ravishing. Women who looked ridiculous on the dance floor 30 minutes ago, now seemed hypnotic and mesmerizing.

And when the band played the last song of the night, the lesbians in the balcony began to hug each other more closely…shedding all pretense…they carved their initials in the wooden railing with a fingernail clipper.