The Priceless Too is one of those shopping center bars with no real front and just a door on a stucco wall to let you in. It's really dark inside and what else could one say to describe it except that there's a lot of smokin' and drinkin' going on and it smells and sounds like that.

My brother first told me about this place in a phone call one Thursday afternoon at five o'clock. He said, "Hey, the Educator's Meeting is on the northeast corner of Elliot and Alma School roads. The place is called Priceless Too; that's T-O-O." Naturally, I dropped what I was doing and ran to my car to get over there and fraternize with the semi-alcoholic high school teachers who can't wait for Friday to drink.

They call their rummy rendezvous "The Educator's Meeting." That way, they can talk about it over the office phone without anyone knowing. For example, they'll say, "Hey, Mickey, if you're going to be at the.....er......Thursday Educator's Meeting .... we can discuss this matter there -- over a game of pool and a couple of pitchers of beer!" Like that, you see, and no one is the wiser.

That weird high school clique had been meeting for years at McCayo's every Thursday, but the place had grown too fancy for them I suppose. The knobby glasses there were too easy to break. There were stairs to climb up and try not to fall down. And worse, McCayo's was getting to look more and more like a family place and it just didn't suit them anymore.

Perhaps it was not McCayo's that was growing more civilized but the teachers themselves that were becoming more boorish. Whatever the reason, they really needed a rougher playhouse and the Priceless Too was perfect. It was a real blue collar dive with pool tables, and dart boards, and barmaids that cracked their gum and called you "honey." You always felt cool when they said that to you even though the shine wore off a little when you heard them say the same thing to some monstrous ogre with seven chins and five hundred bic-blue tattoos.

On this particular night I decided to head to the left around the bar to get to the back room where the teachers met. But suddenly, I looked and said to myself, Holy cow, it's Linda Dunlin. She was sitting at the bar with some guy and I would just as soon she didn't see me. I would just as soon that he didn't see me either. A few months before she and I had a little dalliance when we ran into each other at a friend's party. Afterwards, she'd left me a message on my machine inviting me over to one she was throwing at her house. I now found that I was kind of kicking myself for not showing up and wondering why the heck I hadn't. I went around the bar to the right where they'd be less likely to notice me, suddenly feeling kind of low too.

In the back room, the high school teachers sat amid a half dozen empty pitchers of beer. "Trail Boss!" they all yelled, referring to my Halloween stage name, "Trailboss Tom, Bronco Buster of the Rhythm Guitar and The King of the West." We'd all do musical acts at the yearly Halloween party and I was thinking of changing the name to Tumbleweed Tom because Trail Boss Tom took people too long to remember. Then, I thought, what the heck -- Trail Boss seems to have stuck so why bother?

I couldn't blame these people for learning the name so slowly; fact was, I didn't know half of their real names and I had been consorting with them every Thursday night for years. I knew Larry Simkins and George Denton rather well but the others blended into the scenery there. They talked shop and no power on earth could get them to move the conversation into the realm of public access. One of the top shop talkers was Ronnie Beekman and I knew his name only because he pissed me off every Thursday.

Ronnie always came with his wife, whose name eludes me at the moment. Truly devoted members of the Educator's Meeting, they never missed a Thursday. They also never bought a pitcher of beer. Not one. Never. You'd buy a nice cold pitcher of beer and give the barmaid a good tip and walk back to the table six or eight bucks poorer and you'd set that pitcher down only to see Ronnie's impossibly long -- almost elastic -- arm reach out across the table through a forest of dead glasses to snatch it up. He'd heft that pitcher high and pour himself a tall one giving it a fond look, a contented shake of his head, and a thirsty smile that seemed to christen the now full vessel. But he didn't stop there. Scrupulously generous with other people's beer, he'd get up from the table and walk that pitcher around, travel with it, man, filling everyone's glass clear to the top and getting a load of smiles and "Oh, thank-yous" as he went along. By the time he'd get back, the pitcher would be empty.

Occasionally my friend Larry would talk about birds and Ronnie would come out with, "You know those big blackbirds? Those big ones?"

"Yeah, " Larry and I would tell him. "Great-tailed grackles."

"What?" Ronnie would ask.

"GREAT-TAILED GRACKLES," we'd answer, quickly growing annoyed. We knew it was no use.

Ronnie would shake his head. "Well, those big ..... blackbirds -- You know the ones I mean -- those big blackbirds never get eaten by cats. Never."

Great-tailed Grackles, you dumb shit, I would think. And the hell they don't.

"Cats get pigeons," he'd go on. "I've seen it. But I've never seen them get a single one of those big blackbirds." He would lower his head, look us in the eye and raise and shake an almost accusatory finger at us. "Not once!"

Yeah and you've never bought a single pitcher, you mooching bastard. Not once! I'd think to myself.

Ronnie, like Larry, is a history teacher but unlike Larry he never uses his historical knowledge to add anything interesting to the conversation. One would think that he could come up with something like, "Friends, here's an interesting fact. Alexander the great killed Cleitus in a drunken brawl. You see, it was the custom of the Macedonian court to engage in exorbitant twizzling much as we see it practiced here today in the Priceless Too." Instead he'd mumble on about some past event in his own life that you couldn't care less about and repeat endlessly, "Yeah, those were the days, those were the days."

I'd look at him and say, "Oh, I don't know. Times are pretty fat now as well. What with the free beer and all!" And he'd just look at me and blink and go back to what he was saying. But I have to forgive Beekman. He is a big fan of my guitar playing and and always paints me in the best light whenever introductions are made. "This is the best picker around!" he always says. (Actually, I'm a strummer more than a picker, but why quibble?)

Now George Denton was quite a bit different. It was my custom at one time to bring in a different fossil to each Educator's Meeting. I'd come in and Denton would say, "Hey Cole, where's my fossil?" And I'd whip one out and hand it to him. He'd look at it a moment and hand it back saying, "Bryozoan. Genus Archimedes.

That wasn't the feat it sounds; Denton is a biology teacher and the ancient bryozoan fossil was shaped like the famous screw that Archimedes himself invented. Other bryozoan fossils look like tiny chicken wire imprints across the rock, but Denton would identify them as bryozoans too.

 

 

But come to think of it, I did stump George Denton once. I brought in a Cretaceous Del Rio limestone pelecypod that I found in Austin and he thought it was a gastropod. Well, it sure looked like one; it was all curly cued and looked like a snail, but in truth it was a real weird, weird clam, an oyster actually, and not a snail and I still wonder about the taxonomy. That thing didn't even have bilateral symmetry (That is to say, you couldn't make one clean knife cut and get two mirror-image halves because it was so contorted.), but it was still a clam. Well, nothing is perfect. Humans are supposed to have bilateral symmetry, but try getting equal halves with one slice between the eyes; you won't get the whole stomach in the right half and most of the heart will be in the left half along with it. And in Beekman's case you'd get a quarter of a brain in each of the two halves. Where the other two quarters disappeared to is a perplexing mystery -- but there's no poser to the puddle of beer that would appear between the two halves; it's yours, pal!

Lenny Harris is another regular at the Educator's meeting and I like him very much. It's impossible not to like a guy who runs up and says, "Not only do you have talent but you're a handsome fucker too!" (They're a vulgar group, these. Charming, but vulgar.) Harris, and all the others there smoke like fiends. Harris always lights up a smoke and says, "I hate to offend you pink lungers!" and then takes a huge drag and blows a blissful blue cloud of smoke into the air. You have to envy his absolute disregard for health -- the clear and obvious choice for him is pleasure. What else matters? I wish a "pink lunger" like me could live like that. Without dying, of course.

Harris also always says, "Yeah, I drinks a bit." and he will tell you stories about how he "maintains" though seriously drunk while the policeman who pulls him over questions him and tries to decide what to do. The policeman in the story always lets him go because of his finely honed ability to act sober. I'm not impressed by this purported skill of his or by his stories and I hope no harm comes of his drinking and driving. On the way home from an Educator's Meeting he once hit a kid on a bike. The kid jumped up and yelled, "I'm sorry! I ran right into you!" and Harris said, "It's okay kid. Just be careful next time." and got the hell out of there while the getting was good.

Harris has a brother who is kind of a hardened criminal and he often jokes about it. One night his brother showed up at the saloon and the two of them got completely schnockered to the point where even the high school teachers were concerned. When they tried to leave, the crowd rushed out the door and stopped them from getting in their trucks and conscripted Larry Simkins to drive them home. Later, Larry would confide in me, "You know, I thought I was doing a good deed, but since I was really just as plastered as they were, it was kind of like the blind leading the blind." Well, everyone's intentions were good anyway and that counts for something.

Harris' wife Diane is pretty and she is also a free spirit. On this evening, she says, "Trail Boss Tom, you are going to play at our party, aren't you?" and I say well... I might and she says "PLEASE? PLEASE?" and "PLEASE?" again and suddenly lifts up her blouse up showing her brassiere and making my eyeballs bug out a little and everyone laughs and then I know I have to bring my guitar to the party and play some cowboy songs. Sheesh! I was going to anyway.
Her husband built his own guitar at one of those guitar shops -- the result was really good -- and he plays okay. Harris loves Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl" and so whenever I go to a party he's at, I brush up on the lead guitar parts beforehand so I can hop in and make it sound really good. Like most of us, Harris has only a fair voice, but he sings with such overwhelming joy, his head held high and his crooked, cigarette-stained teeth beaming!

Harris isn't the only one who sings in this crowd -- they all do except for Beekman, of course. He couldn't sing "Come to Jesus" in the key of C. But Peggy Denton has a wonderful set of pipes and so does her friend Rita. George can't sing in tune and has no voice, but that doesn't stop him from belting out "Blue Suede Shoes" whenever he gets one of the Halloween bands behind him. Peggy and I have occasionally sung that Lennon/McCartney favorite "If I Fell" around the campfire and at parties. I've got the low harmony down and she can hit the high notes. George Denton, however, always chides, "You've been practicing with my wife!" I always find it a strange reaction on his part and I don't know what he means. Perhaps he is just saying it sounds as good as if we had practiced together when he knows we haven't. Once, I met Peggy over at the university to give her a Datura plant that I dug up next to the canal behind the zoo. Datura is the famous "Devil's Weed" from the Carlos Castaneda books. She needed it for some biology project. When I next saw Denton he said, "I hear you've been meeting my wife in secret!" I guess he's just joking, but somehow it sounds strange to me and makes me vaguely nervous.

While we're on the subject, the Priceless Too is no place to look for girls. The only decent-looking ones are already taken and not many others come walking in the joint unescorted. This is a loser's paradise, friends. One time, there was this apparently available single girl in there and George Denton kept shoving me at her and when she left he said, "What's the matter with you?" And I said, "You've been in the Priceless Too too long, pal. Just because she's female doesn't mean I'm interested. If you didn't notice, she wasn't very dreamy." Yes, the pickings are mighty slim at the Priceless Too Saloon.

But this night Linda Dunlin sits not fifty feet from me in the other room. I am painfully aware of it and at one point there seems to be a strange exodus to the bathroom or somewhere and most of the guys around me mosey off and suddenly there she is in front of me. She's wearing a white blouse and white shorts and white tennis shoes and she's come back to say hello.

Linda takes a lot of pride in her appearance and has a really classy look with that expensive frosted blond hair and all. Her date must have joined the crowd that left for the rest room. I can't remember all of what we said, but part of it had to do with the shirt I had worn to the party a couple of months back. She wondered where it was. She said the shirt was what had first attracted her to me at the party. She asks me what first attracted me to her and I quote John Lennon and say in a Liverpudlian accent, "Well, you're very polite, aren't you?" Clearly, I could have done better. I'm not half as charming as I want to be, but it gets a laugh. I tell her I've still got the shirt. It is a mustard yellow T-shirt with a gigantic, wicked-looking marine crustacean painted on it in dark red. The shirt reads: "Help Save the Socorro Isopod."


She hasn't got long to talk because Lover Boy will soon be coming out of the piss hall, so she smiles, says good-bye, and bounces back to the bar.

"Sheesh," I think.

About two months later I was talking to my friend Jan and he said, "You know, Linda Dunlin got married." Jan was the only one I confided in about me and her.

I said, "No kidding?"

"She was after you, man," Jan said.

"She could do worse, Puto,"  I told him.

Then Jan told me that Linda had had a settlement in some law suit and was a millionaire.

"What?" I said.

"I thought you knew that," he said, "A multimillionaire."

"Sheesh!" I said.

I don't often go to the Priceless Too anymore. I took a professional writing class on Thursday nights last fall and got in the habit of going there instead. Larry retired and doesn't show up at the saloon much either and I've given up fossil collecting in favor of my old bird watching hobby. There's no support group for the fossils and when you crack open a rock, you don't know what the heck you're looking at half the time and you don't wind up learning anything. So now I can't bring in any new fossils to the saloon. I suppose I could bring in a bird -- perhaps one of those big blackbirds and hold it in front of Beekman and say, "Repeat after me, dumb-dumb, Graaackle... Great-tailed Graaaaackle." But he wouldn't learn and then he'd go for my beer.