It's 10:45pm, but I've got that 2am feeling. I'm slugging from a bottle of Sam Adams that I bought in a State Liquor Store. Anywhere else, it's low-alcohol beer, so adopting a Liquor Store-based procurement policy is the only way you can be sure that the contents of your beer bottle aren't promising maudlin, Wednesday evening good times while surreptitiously trying to keep you sober enough to praise the Lord and love Uncle Sam. I had intended to have just one before bed, but then Spotify threw John Martyn and Jerry Douglas at me and now those bottles seem awfully small. Too tired to raise hell, but just lonely enough to try to pull heaven down by the tail to join me here on the couch in this little piece of the American Dream.
I went to a Rodeo this evening in all its dusty glory. Hot dogs and ten gallon hats and giant turkey drumsticks with honey sauce that they wrap up in tinfoil and let you eat like some sort of medieval lord. Skinny cowboys spit and mosey back to their gate whether they have an eighty-four or a no-score and mud on their chaps.
After the broncs come the bulls. No cowboy hats - they wear helmets for this one. They sit in their traps, seven, eight, nine men making unseen, arcane, vital adjusments while the cowboy hauls at something out of sight as if he were trying to start a lawnmower. Got to wait till the bull stands up, the barker says, and the cowboy's leaning back as if he's on a sun lounger. The trap opens and a tasseled, bechapped body is immediately rag-dolled into the dust, bashing his head off a horn on the way down. He sits up and, for a second, a very long second, he's face to face with the bull, noses inches apart. The clowns wave and jump, distracting the bull as the cowboy gets up and saunters back; moseys, even. Didn't manage to score, ladies and gents, but he sure put it up to that bull.
The cowgirls arrive and do a kind of slalom around tar barrels, sprinting from one end of the ground to the other, all long legs and denim, silky hair flowing out from under their Stetsons. Each one of them looks hand-picked to be willowy and talented and wholesome. The crowd is mostly families, munching away and keeping half an eye on their mini cowboys clambering over the bleachers and peering out from under wide brims. There's a hard core of locals standing over the corrals at the ends, one boot each up on the concrete ledge below the rail stanchions, all wearing blue jeans and boots and white, straw hats. From where I'm sitting, they're part silhouetted as the sun goes down behind them and I just know they wouldn't be much for talking.
I meet a girl from Kansas and tell her I don't think we're there anymore. She asks me where I'm from.
'Iowa?', she asks.
'Ireland', I reply.
'Oh.'
She smiles politely, coquettishly, holds my gaze just longer than necessary before turning away.
It's Slack at the moment. That's the qualifying round. Nobody's too interested. Not in the show, anyway, though the food sellers are doing stiff business. The sun is going down over a sea of cars, mostly pickups, and the car park, the parking lot, is spattered with yellow pinpoints of stellar glass and chrome. Some of the Dodge trucks have wheels up to my waist and one of them, parked just below where I'm sitting, is painted with green flames stretching back along the side panels. The front windscreen has day-glo green lettering across the top: Michael Jackson 1958 - 2009.
There's a ten year old girl in full cowgirl regalia riding what may or may not be a Shetland pony at full speed to the delight of the crowd. Kansas is wandering back toward her seat with a giant blob of candy floss. I look down and notice that my cowboy boots are beginning to look broken in. We're not in Kansas anymore.
