Meeting Lyle

“God damn it!” Shelby the bartender yelled at no one, but definitely at me. “Those fucktards have been playing Puddle of Mudd and Slipknot for over an hour now.”

“So why don’t you tell them to stop? Or better yet, take those God awful bands off of your jukebox?” I retorted.

She glared at me. I think she was expecting sympathy. But I’m the guy who comes in and selects and entire twenty bucks worth of sad Lucero songs, back-to-back-to-motherfucking-back as she some of the patrons have taken to noticing out loud.

At that very moment an elderly chap walked in to the bar. He winced at the sound of Wes Scantlin’s voice. He walked over to the bar and looked at Shelby disapprovingly. I smiled and attempted to give the same look, but failed.

“You like this … this …”

“Music?” I interrupted.

“This is not music!” the old guy exclaimed. “I’m going to put a stop to this!”

He looked at the two guys, each wearing black wife beaters with some kind of skull logos emblazoned on them. The also had visors on. If they had been wearing Birkenstocks they would have needed to beat each other up, repeatedly. On principle alone.

“Oh, hell,” he said. “I need a drink first.”

The old timer sat down next to me. There were 27 other empty stools at the bar, but he plopped down in the once closest to me. This, of course, made me interested in what this old guy was selling.

“Hey, there old-timer,” I said, hoping that he wasn’t one of those old guys who hated to be told he was old. “What’s shaking?”

“I’ll tell ya what’s shaking, kid,” the old guy said. “My balls around my ankles when I don’t have my underwear on.”

We laughed and clinks whiskey glasses.

“And damn, you’d run away from my penis!” he snorted after downing his glass. “Right, Kylie?”

Kyle was the local whore. I didn’t know that yet, as I’d only been coming to the bar for about two weeks now. After getting my advance for a magazine piece, I drove 1,107 miles exactly – the amount of the check – and decided to write the story wherever that was. And that was here, at Sam’s Pub. In Kermit, Texas – just outside of Odessa, if you’re keeping track.

“You’re drinking some RedBreast there I see,” the old man said looking at my glass. “Damn good stuff. Can’t afford it much anymore. Except when Samantha’s working. She’s got a soft spot for me.”

We looked at Sam, the owner and most of the time barkeep. He was reading the local newspaper and sipping on a cup of coffee. Sam, I’d find out later, hadn’t had a drink since the night before he opened the joint. Made a promise to his now-ex-wife that he’d never hit the sauce if he actually opened the bar.

He lived up to his promise. Only problem being his wife didn’t like the Sam who didn’t drink. She ended up fucking one of the dishwashers one night by the old Donkey Kong machine. Sam walked in on them and nearly killed the two of them. Luckily, Odell, a local janitor from the nearby factory was on his lunch break and stopped Sam cold in his tracks with just these words “Sam, you won’t like getting fucked in the ass by a guy like me.”

Sam laughed at Odell’s comment, then put his shotgun back under the bar. Instead, he walked in to his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s little trist with his soon-to-be-ex-dishwasher And right before the guy came, he punched him right in the taint.

They have a still from the surveillance video of that exact moment poster sized above the bar. The video made YouTube, last time it was checked it had over 11 million views. Eventually, it made Tosh.0 once. But Sam wouldn’t allow for the dishwasher’s redemption.

As for his wife – Janet – she ended up going back home to Llano and living with her mom and her aunt.

“The bitch always deserved to live with her mom,” Sam said the day he heard that news.

Meanwhile, Slipknot’s third time singing “Butcher’s Hook” finally got me riled up enough to spend some of my ever dwindling advance.

I walked over to the jukebox, the two hogs were busy air-guitaring and singing the awesomeness that is “Go Ahead and Disagree … I’m giving up again!” I slipped in two twenty dollar bills and selected two albums. First up was Neil Young’s “Arc”. Thirty-plus minutes of noise and distortion. Followed of course by Mr. Young’s “Weld”, just another in the long line of fine live albums by the Canadian-turned-American.

As Slipknot ended, there was a brief period of silence. I asked Sam to put a pause before my songs started. This way the surprise would be better. The two lads, as they became known, went to pick some new songs by the same two bands. Putting their money to good use. But, suddenly Neil Young’s guitar started blasting.

Lad No. 1 stared at No. 2.

“What the fuck, Bart! You picked this shit?”

“Hell no, man,” No. 2 yelled back. “I picked ‘People equal Shit’, man.”

The old guy watched them arguing. He looked and me and patted me on the back.

“Those guys gotta learn to let it go, kid. They really do.”

This was the day I met Lyle.

Kid, just let it go

“Listen kid, you can’t go home every night, take off your pants and pop open a beer,” Lyle said. I looked into his eyes to see if he was going off on some tangent like he does sometimes. But those were the only words coming out of his mouth. For the moment.

We both took a long, deliberate swig of beer. They were so much better when the bottle was just opened. It still had that little bit of steam rising out of it and the rim was still wet. Lyle used to say he likened it to licking a pussy right after you’d pulled your fingers out. I always countered with the penis followed ejaculation statement. And he always winced and called me a fag. He was 73 years old and didn’t have much use for politically correct speak. “To hell with that,” he’d always say. “You and your God damn penis jokes. I really wish you’d stop it. You sure you ain’t one of ‘em?”

To that, I always replied “So, I spend all my time, here with you, talking about a redheaded woman who stole the life out of me, and you still think I might be a fag?”

Lyle always smiled at that. Then frowned. He was predictable. Like a hack sportswriter using clichés or quotes from coaches that included “giving 100 percent” or “one game at a time.” When they’re spoken by other people, they’re still clichés I’d tell writers under my wing. A few got it. One was a gal. She was way too sexy to be working at the small town rag we were at. And eventually, she got out. But she was trouble. By the end of her stay in that part of the state, she’d fucked every single sportswriter who had anything to offer by way of expertise or networking. Ended up marrying the one who hated all of us others. If only he knew we’d all been there, done that. He’d probably disgorge – which was the fourth entry under vomit in my dictionary/thesaurus. Which were usually the words he’d choose, just to feel superior.

“I know kid, you’re not a fag,” Lyle said after that. “But damn it, you just need to let it go.”

“It ain’t that easy,” I’d always say.

“Fuck you, kid,” he always replied. “You don’t know how to, that’s all.”

He was right. There were a lot of things I didn’t know how to. And usually, somehow he found out what those things were. I think it’s just because we spent so much time together. Sitting on those rotten old barstools just talking.

Lyle had three kids. One was dead. Shot in the head during a bank robbery of all things. He was just there to withdraw $50 to give to Lyle so he could get a tire fixed. Lyle never drove his car again after that happened. His other two – one boy and one girl – were in prison. They were both heavy drug users. Started selling it to pay for their habits and got nabbed.

His wife died of cancer when he was 45. Never even went on another date after that. However, he was quick to point out that he’d fucked at least 100 women in the last 28 years. But he couldn’t see himself marrying any of them. Why, I asked him a while back. He answered simply: “Any woman that’ll fuck me before she gets to know me, ain’t worth marrying.”

I tried to bring up how polar opposite all the advice he tried to give me about redheads, booze and kitchen sinks was to the way he lived his life, and he poo-pooed it by simply saying “Do as I say, kid, not as I do.”

“Like a cop, huh?”

“Yeah, fucking police.”

That was one of my favorite running jokes with Lyle. He hated cops almost as much as he hated Budweiser. Almost. I once saw him hit a waitress over the head with a full bottle of Bud. Simply because she accidentally placed it in front of him instead of Heineken. “If I’d ordered a Bud, I wouldn’t have done it,” he told the police after the incident. Lyle was gone for two weeks in jail after that. I missed him. But I kept drinking in the same spot. Whenever someone else sat in Lyle’s seat, I’d talk to them. But not once did anyone keep me interested for more than 23 minutes. I had Sam, the owner of the bar, keep a stopwatch on me and my new barstool friends.

“You’re a tough nut, Jones,” Sam said after a particularly short three-minute conversation with some guy in a suit and tie.

“All I said was how’s it going ‘Suit-and-tie guy!’ And he started going off on welfare and bums and such things,” I said. “I was hurt by that. I’m not a bum. I write. It’s worse than being a bum.”

“You got that right,” Kylie, the local whore, said. “Writers never have any God damn money. Until they’re gone.”

I chuckled and wished Lyle had been there to hear it. He got a blowjob from Kylie in 2004 I think he said. Said she wasn’t very good at it … “for a pro.”

Then, one day, Lyle showed up again. And we got right back to it.

“Don’t ever go to jail, kid,” he told me. “You’ll see people you never thought you’d see in your life.”

“Like who?” I replied, knowing exactly what he was going to say.

“My God damn drug-addict of a son,” he yelled.

“Quiet it down there Lyle, you just got here,” Sam implored.

“Eat shit and die, Sammy boy!” he responded with.

“One of these days, Lyle. One of these days…”

I took a sip of my beer and looked at Lyle. Over the past few years he’d become the father figure I never had growing up. Yeah, I had a dad. And yeah, he was around. But he didn’t talk to me much. And if he did, he was usually yelling or complaining. It’s where I got my great personality, I do believe. He also didn’t teach me things. I still to this day do not know how to shave with a blade. My pops never taught me. I didn’t drive until I was 18. My mom taught me how to ride a bike after I cried the first time and dad gave up.

Lyle never gave up. No matter how pathetic the story got.

He patted me on the back, every time, and said “Kid, just let it go.”