long before it meant "fair and balanced" (continued)

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[part 2 (of probably 3 but maybe 4 or, hell, 5--fuck, i dunno), in which not a lot happens, but important elements of the story are fleshed out. feel free to skim, but make sure you've at least looked at part 1 first]


"a...discotheque, you say?"

yeah, a discotheque--turns out the failed blue fox inn was gonna reopen as a discotheque, whatever the fuck that was.

"you mean," i asked, "like, with girls in miniskirts and white patent-leather boots doing the hully-gully and the watusi in little cages like on tv back in the '60s?"

skilsaw in one hand, dripping in sweat and covered in sawdust--and impossibly removed from the smooth, polished restaurateur i'd always known--beau patiently explained that, no, it was gonna be something quite different--a new-style disco for the '70s.

we were having this conversation in the middle of the inn's formerly elegant dining room, a space that had been transformed beyond all recognition since i had last seen it. gone were the tables and chairs and waitstations of old; in their place were an elevated dj stand against the left wall overlooking a parquet dance floor which dominated the center of the room; and on the right wall, a massive bar (this is what beau and his crew were in the process of building when i walked in the door).

wow, what a difference a few weeks had made.

see, like almost everybody else, i had taken my last paycheck when the inn closed its doors and the downstairs fox's lair was reduced to a skeleton crew, and had gone out and found other employment. but my heart really wasn't in it, and i had swung by that day after school to see if, as he had vowed to do, beau had somehow found a way to rise from the ashes--and damned if he hadn't.

"so how the hell'd you pull this off?" i demanded.

long story short, he had convinced his backers that, rather than liquidate the operation for pennies on the dollars they had invested, they should give him a little more rope--and a little more cash--let him try something new and maybe get all their money back, and maybe even a little more.

"it was something i pulled outta my ass and made up as i went along," he said, flashing his big, toothy grin. he reminded that roomful of grim old men of two facts: first, that the drinking age in texas had just been lowered from 21 to 18 (which was true); and, second, that the restaurant was right down the street from tyler junior college and all of its associated dorms and student housing.

what could be better, he argued--or more lucrative--than providing all those rich, newly-emancipated kids with a place to drink, dance and party til they puked?

what, indeed--his backers recognized the brilliance of the idea immediately, and beau walked outta that meeting of doom with not only a reprieve, but a check.

understand, it was only a sixty-day reprieve and a tiny check--not nearly enough time or money to do what he'd promised 'em he could do--but he wasn't worried, because (a) he had done far more with far less in his life; and (b) what did he have to lose?

but even for beau the bullshitter extraordinaire, this one was gonna require all his ingenuity to pull off.

see, here's the problem with this dream scenario (because you know there had to be one): tyler was smack-dab in the middle of one of the driest, most holy-rolling counties in texas, and, while beau had found a way around this obstacle once, i wasn't sure the baptists would let him get away with it twice.

to understand what i'm talking about requires a little background into an america that most of you probably don't know even exists--bear with me a minute.

if you've never lived in a dry county, allow me to explain how things were in tyler then: there were no liquor stores anywhere, nor was there even beer or wine available in grocery or convenience stores. basically, if you wanted a drink, a beer or a glass of wine, you had two choices: (a) drive to the nearest wet county (in our case, a 70-mile round trip); or (b) go to a private club.

except if you wanted a drink at a private club, you had damn well better have planned ahead. here's how it worked: you'd buy a membership and be given a numbered locker. you would then place your order--so many bottles and/or cans of whatever you liked to drink--pay for it, and the club would, on its next liquor run, purchase your requested items, number each bottle and can with your membership number, and place same in your locker. then, next time you came in (but only then) they would serve you and your guests from the stock--and only from the stock--in your numbered locker. and if you forgot to order or ran out, you were just shit outta luck.

as you can imagine, there were only a tiny handful of such private clubs in town because the baptists had succeeded in making it just too big a motherfucking pain in the ass to try and drink in tyler--easier to just drive to the county line, get smashed in one of the dives there, and then try not to get killed driving home, either by some drunk coming from kilgore trying to pass you on a curve, or in a head-on with some drunk coming the other way trying to make it to kilgore before the liquor stores closed (trust me, that stretch of highway wasn't called 'bloody 31' for nothin)

well, beau was the one who changed all that forever, with a solution ingenious in its simplicity, bulletproof in its legality and totally infuriating to the baptists and the local liquor control board.

see, when he hit town, planned his little millionaire's club, lined up his backers and was then informed of all the hoops he'd have to jump through just to serve folks liquor, he looked at the letter of the law, thought about it a minute, and said, "how about this: i'm member no. 1, the whole bar is my locker, any patron who walks in the door is my guest, i'm giving the alcohol away for free and charging only for the setups and service. anybody punch holes in that?"

well, try as they might, turns out nobody could. and with that, the gordian knot of archaic regulation was cut--every can, bottle and keg of liquor that came in the door of the fox's lair was marked with a big, black "1" in order to comply with the law, and business went on just as if our bar was any other bar in any sane, rational part of the country.

nice, huh? yeah, but here's what concerned me: i knew old-guard tyler a lot better than beau did. and it was one thing to skirt the intent of the law when it came to serving liquor to a bunch of rich, old, mostly-jewish people in a tiny little hole-in-the-wall, but this was something entirely different--now we're talking about the corruption of the town's youth on an unprecedentedly epic scale.

would the baptists let him skate under cover of this loophole when they found out about this little operation to pervert the souls of their kids, or would they launch a holy war?

and at that point, nobody knew. it was a gamble, but it was a gamble beau and his investors were willing to take--and it was one i was willing to take, too.

"is there a place here for me?" i asked.

turns out there was. and with no more thought than that, i walked away from my new burger-flipping job without a backward glance (like that was a wrenching, soul-searching dilemma), and straight into--well, it's hard to describe, really, but i'll give it my best shot next time.