ROLLING BLUNDER

Everybody has stories about how wild they were “back in the day” and about how they used to run with the “craziest group of friends” and how all it all centered around “this great bar” and blah blah blah.

And that’s cool, I guess. I mean, who doesn’t want to see their own lives reflected in “Cheers” or “Roadhouse” or (gag) “Cocktail”? Or maybe that Boston pub where Matt Damon totally burned that Harvard snob after he ran his mouth about the socioeconomic/geographic origins of the Civil War. That looked like a fun place.

But believe me when I tell you that if Sam Malone or James Dalton or Maverick (I can’t bring myself to google Tom Cruise’s character’s name from that movie) or Will “How about them apples?” Hunting had ever set foot in Three Guys Bar & Grill in Duncan, Oklahoma, between 1989 and 1992, they would have immediately HATED THEMSELVES FOREVER for living such dull and meaningless lives up to that point.

In other words, your argument is invalid. Let’s move on.

Seriously, shit went down on a regular basis at Three Guys. But, by far, the most can-you-believe-that-shit episode was the time the guy in the wheelchair beat up the guy NOT in the wheelchair.

Yeah. That happened. I could drop the mic right now and call it a day if I wanted to, assuming I were a “mic drop” kind of guy, which I am not. I care too much. So, here’s how it all went down:

It was a crazy-hot summer night. The bar was packed beyond capacity. The A/C was either overwhelmed or not working at all. Either way, it was easily 90 degrees inside the building. The dance floor – a 12-by-12 patch of worn tile – was filled with drunk, sweaty people. The band had come from out of town and was actually filming a video for the MTV.

The night didn’t need a wheelchair fight to be memorable. Heck, it didn’t even need a girl on the dance floor named Tasha wearing only a bra.

But it had one of each anyway.

First, a little back story about Tasha and the guy in the wheelchair, gleaned from folks I talked to in the days following the fracas.

Tasha and the wheelchair guy were a romantic couple. At some point after they started dating, he was injured and paralyzed from the waist down. As a result of his condition, there were certain, um, personal functions he could no longer perform for his girlfriend. So…the couple had for some time engaged the services of a…third party to facilitate their amorous relations.

[Please note that I am fully aware of the grotesque insensitivity of certain aspects of this story. And it breaks my liberal, PC heart to be committing such transgressions. I only ask that you trust that every detail is included for a reason and that I’m not being gratuitous. Everyone involved in this story – disabled or otherwise – was, literally, begging to be lampooned 20-plus years later, a point I hope to prove in the remaining passages.]

Anyway, even though this couple’s private business was certainly their business, it was not secret business, mostly because the third party was in the habit of telling everyone he met how he was banging this guy’s girlfriend.

Adding even greater instability to their relationship was the fact that the third party was Tasha’s supervisor at Sears, an error in sexual-surrogate-planning of such monstrous proportions it’s hard to believe the end result was only a one-sided bar fight between the boyfriend and the boss.

All that said, it came to pass that the boss decided to, shall we say, expand his jurisdiction and insisted upon coupling with Tasha outside the original surrogate-based environment – specifically, in the softlines department at Sears. Tasha at first thought this was a great idea, but then decided it wasn’t – a change of heart which, apparently, sent the boss off the emotional deep end. (Hence the first rule of sexual surrogacy: Don’t get emotionally involved.)

Which brings us to the night in question. All three of them were at the bar. Tasha was wearing an outfit that was in fashion at the time: a double-breasted jacket with only a black, lacy, bra underneath. To be sure, had she left the jacket buttoned, nobody would have known she was wearing only a bra underneath. But then, if she’d left the jacket buttoned, I wouldn’t be telling you this story today.

But like I said, it was really hot in that bar. Crazy hot. So… Tasha unbuttoned her jacket and revealed her blouseless condition. And while I know it doesn’t seem like it, I really am trying to maintain some decorum in this story. So please understand that I do not say it casually when I say that Tasha’s decision to wear a bra was not driven entirely by her choice of outfit. The girl needed to wear a bra. Every day. A reality which was made apparent to all once she opened her jacket.

So, yeah. Basically it was a riot – and I’m not even talking about the fight. Rather, I’m talking about the run-of-the-mill male discombobulation (discomboobulation?) which accompanies any boob-based anomaly.

Let me explain. We guys accept the fact that boobs are everywhere. And we want to behave around them. We really do. And as long as they – the boobs, not us men – are kept within their normal confines and contexts, most of us are housebroken enough to keep our lustful thoughts, sort of, to ourselves. Sort of.

This is not the case when boobs go rogue.

When boobs – or parts of boobs – or the space between boobs – or I think you get the point – show up when or where they are not expected, all bets are off. Boobs on the loose make men jump on the furniture and pee all over the carpet. Add alcohol to the mix and it’s the scene from Turner & Hooch where the giant French Mastiff wrecks Tom Hanks’ house. Except not as cute and with a lot more slobber.

Such was the case when Tasha went public with her upstairs lady parts. It was pandemonium. As manager (Did I mention I was the manager? Well, I was. I was the manager.) Anyway, as manager, the duty fell to me to go over and ask her to put her girls back under wraps. At that same moment, unbeknownst to me, the boyfriend and the boss were at a nearby table in the early stages of their fateful encounter.

The table was actually a picnic table, with benches connected to either side. The boss was seated at the end of one bench, while the boyfriend had rolled his chair up to the open end, placing him at a right angle to the boss. I could see that they were having a heated conversation, but because of all the noise I could not hear what they were saying. I found out later from people who were at the table that the boss was basically making lewd comments about Tasha’s dance floor striptease and bragging about their workplace sexploits.

This is the part where their encounter transitioned from verbal to nonverbal. And I watched it all happen – in super-drunk-bar-manager-slo-motion. (Did I mention that the best part about being manager was that I got to drink the entire time I was at work? I didn’t? Well, now you know.) Anyway, as is sometimes the case with persons in wheelchairs, the boyfriend’s upper body and arms were extremely well-developed, in the sense of having enormous, muscly arms. So when the boyfriend snapped out his left fist, making contact with the boss’s chin, the impact was considerable. The boss’s head rocked back, his eyes briefly rolled back in their sockets, and his entire body convulsed.

As for me, I pretty much did the same thing out of shock and disbelief. As such – plus, drunk – my immediate response was to stand there and do nothing. And as a result of this inaction, I had an unobstructed view of the boyfriend’s second punch, which was an exact carbon copy of the first, except this one produced a bloody lip.

At this point, a question began to form inside my alcohol-impaired brain. At first it was just a flicker, a flash of curiosity-based light which flared and then faded. But it quickly reignited, blinding and brilliant, filling my head with a white, hot, light and searing my conscious mind with eight simple words.

Is he really going to keep sitting there?

I mean, seriously. The boss was sitting in, literally, the only spot in the bar which was within the punch radius of the boyfriend. He didn’t even have to leave the bench to be out of harm’s way. He could have just leaned back six inches. Or scooched to his left a tad, perhaps one buttcheek’s worth. If he was embarrassed by the thought of “running away,” he could have just pretended to reach for an ashtray or a coaster and been completely out of range. Forever.

God only knows what the guy was thinking. Or not thinking. Boobs are a powerful and dimly understood force. Science may one day provide an answer. But before that could happen, the boyfriend delivered a third identical jab. And then all hell broke loose for real.

In addition to the usual bar-fight mayhem of people crowding to watch and bar security rushing to bust it up, Tasha had somehow teleported from the dance floor to the fight scene – losing her jacket en route – and proceeded to CLIMB HER BOSS LIKE A LADDER USING HIS EYESOCKETS AS RUNGS.

It was the most violent thing I’ve ever seen. Had she not been stopped, she would certainly have clawed his eyes out of his head, peeled his skull open like a soup can, and started feeding on his brains.   

Security managed to gain the upper hand and was pushing the boss and his Tasha appendage toward the exit, leaving the boyfriend unattended. I was doing my part by remaining in the exact same spot and continuing to wonder why that guy would just sit there and take a beating like that. But then I saw that boyfriend was trying to push through the crowd, toward the exit, no doubt wanting another shot at his tormentor.

I had to do something.

So I took two steps forward, reached down, and set his park brake.

After a brief, tantalizing, front-wheel stand – and nearly being ejected from his chair – the guy settled back down on all four wheels and looked around in great confusion and even greater anger.

I’m not exactly sure what I did next, but I know for a fact I didn’t sit down next to him and brag about it.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver