long before it meant "fair and balanced" (part 3)

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[if you're lost, it's because you haven't read part 1 and part 2 yet]

as cute and clever as it ended up being, beau's finished discotheque was all wrong--way too small, tiny dance floor, laughable sound system, no air conditioning or ventilation to speak of, virtually-inaccessible bathrooms (for drunks, anyway) and an inadequate, unpaved parking lot that turned to mud at the slightest sign of rain.

and the place wasn't even a discotheque in the proper sense--there were no turntables or mixing board--the sound, such as it was, came from eight-track tapes played through cheesy radio shack equipment (because by the time it came to select the sound system, beau was out of money and that was the only place that'd extend him credit).

place was a joke, right?

yeah, like any of that mattered--from the night it opened its doors, the fox's lair (a name that now encompassed both the disco and the downstairs club) was an instant, unqualified and runaway success beyond the wildest dreams of not only its creator, but anybody else who happened to be keeping score.

weeks prior to opening, beau had put the word out to all the tjc (tyler junior college, to the uninitiated) fraternities about the new club that was preparing to open in their midst, and word had quickly filtered out to the campus at large--but nobody expected what happened to actually happen.

opening night: would anybody show up, we wondered?

we needn't have worried--picture, if you will, total fuckin' pandemonium as hundreds of kids waving their id's shoved their way past a door staff totally unprepared for such an onslaught, into the first liquor-serving establishment most of 'em had ever entered in their short, sheltered lives.

i wish i could give you, my readers, a full sense of what those early, heady animal-house days were like; problem is, as the operation's only minor (in more than one sense of the word) employee, i was limited by law in terms of where i could be and when, so i missed out on a lot. lemme just say this: the raw magic that was the fox's lair of 35 years ago couldn't even come close to happening in the scared-rabbit america of today.

consider:

we're talking a couple hundred 18-21 year-old kids piling into the parking lot 3-4 nights a week--and, when it was full (which didn't take much, trust me), leaving their cars in jagged lines up and down fifth street, packing into an airless, overheated club, drinking and dancing until the place closed, and then, pretty much en masse, weaving their collectively drunken way home mostly unmolested by the police.

fire-code compliance? occupancy limits? wheelchair ramps? handicapped-accessible bathrooms? emergency exits? fuck all that pansy-ass shit: in the eighteen months of the club's operation--and despite the conspicuous lack of all of the above--nobody on the premises ever got hurt, arrested, killed or sued, a small miracle in and of itself.

and where were the hordes of religious protesters we expected? surprisingly, they never materialized--i dunno, maybe they figured that if their kids were old enough to fight and die in vietnam, they were old enough to make their own decisions about alcohol.

[i have to tell you the truth: this post (hell, this thread) has kind of gotten the better of me. were i a better writer, i would weave together a narrative that would encompass my myriad memories of this time and place in a seamless tapestry of words--but i'm not (at least, not yet), so instead, in my subsequent posts i'm gonna throw out some of my disjointed recollections of a wild period in my life and let you try to make some sense of it all.

and if you manage to pull that off, you'll be light-years ahead of me.]

part 4 follows here.