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Back to watching womens curling for another 8 months. Talk about suspense. That shit'll have you hangin' right to the front of your chair for what seems like forever. Some of these gals just seem to make those brooms fly:-) Good times.
This afternoon I'll go play for the residents at the nursing care facility in Palisade. It's an odd gig in that I'm starin' down the barrel at what the future is sure to hold at some point, and it's downright sobering, if not a little alarming. I hope I can still get wood when I'm 80. They're gonna love me at the puppet shows.
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He stands up and dusts off the seat of his Levis
Waves back the gate-hands, bends to the ground
cursin' a foul-tempered Dunn they call "Twister"
He picks up his Stetson, and straightens the crown
Tonight it's a bedroll in the back of his pickup
warm beer and visions of rodeo girls
Yo-Da-Lay...Yo Da Lay
Draw me a good one
hand me the reins and open the stall
If this ride's a good ride, the first round's on me tonight
and if I go down,
it's the Lonesome Cowboy Waltz
It's from a song I wrote 20 some years ago in Nashville about a cowboy I knew from back home. John Buttle. Tough little booger. Darn fine Bronc-rider and crazy to boot. He'd been busted up from top to bottom and kicked and bucked by every wild horse worth ridin' from Calgary to Dallas. Drove an old white club-cab Ford that looked more beat up than he did. The bed of that truck was a mess of baling twine, drywall tools, saddles and beer cans, with a gnarly little blue-heeler laying hidden in the carnage just waiting for any hand that wasn't her masters to present itself for a chompin'.
John would show up around town every September like clockwork broke, tired, and busted up- swearing he was done forever with ridin' that damn rodeo, and he'd be gone again by June. My Uncle/ Cousin twice removed on my Moms side, Larry Segelke would hire him to hang sheetrock with Brother Richard (The finest man I ever knew- but I'll tell ya about him later) and myself.
Uncle Larry owned a drywall business and he felt sorry for me when everybody in town realized how potentially dangerous I was to the farming industry . He knew that chimpanzees had actually been trained to hang drywall. He also figured I was at least half that smart. He was about half right.
When I graduated from high school I strapped on a tool-belt and would spend the next 3 sweat-soaked beer-drenched years hangin' sheetrock off the top of my rock-hard noggin, drinking warm Blue Ribbon and cold Budweiser, listening to rodeo stories, outright lies, and other half-truths about dallyin' up, cinchin' down, and leavin' town in a hurry, and developing an outright thirst for travel.
John Buttles took me under his wing as a project of sorts. Like training a young mule to pull a plow. The man was rock solid but he did have a weakness that proved his undoing so very often.
He would generally stop after work each day, and have a few drinks with the rest of us, and with some regularity he would often wander home knee-walkin' turtled-up from Jack Daniels and Budweiser, with his sweaty brown Stetson screwed down around his ears like a safe fell on his head. His wife would yell every name in the book at him through the front door and lock his sorry good-fer-nothin' ass outside, after which he'd just crawl in the back of his truck and go to sleep under a saddle blanket till the sun came up.
He'd come to work that day hungover and quiet, covered in pieces of old straw and smelling like a urinal biscuit. He'd work all day and then go back home with his hat in his hand, and the Mrs. would let him in. She'd cook him a nice dinner and they'd act like nothing ever happened , and then they'd start all over again.
"In retrospect, I see now that I couldn't help but imitate the art laid so gloriously before me."
. In the spring, when the rodeo posters would start to appear around the county, John would start to get restless. All of a sudden that wife of his had grown surly and unbearable by his account, He wasn't making enough money all of a sudden. The weather was off, his skin was too tight.etc.....
He'd complain enough and act up the fool enough to get himself fired. By the end of May he'd be gone, running that beat up Ford of his, "White Cloud", down some stretch of blacktop to any county fair or Indian rodeo he could find offering a $500 purse or better , pulling a trailer full of horse, a saddle, and big plans to make 'er all the way this year.
I think about him sometimes . When I'm out there trying to "make 'er all the way this year" Usually when it's 3 a.m. and I'm bleary-eyed from the road, and trying to catch a little snooze in the back of my van in some rest stop, on some stretch of highway, on the way home from some honky-tonk somewhere. I wonder if he's in the house tonight or in the back of his pickup.
Eventually I left home and I don't know if John ever came home that next fall. I hope he made it to wherever he wanted to be. I hope he still rides. I wish him well and I'd love to thank him for everything I learned and everything I shouldn't of. God Bless ya Buttles" "Screw down on 'er Newt - She's a twister"
Peace Out
"Don't take any wooden nickels"
Until manyana
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