Part Five of “The Agreement,” a special Valentine’s Week series
I’m sitting in a bar writing this. The bar’s name is Duggan’s. Duggan’s is one of five Irish pubs within a one block radius of my apartment. (Jameson’s, McCarthy’s, Cork & Kerry, and Fallon’s are the others. Arps Tavern too, if you wanna get a little creative with your geography. This does not include the five non-Irish non-pub restaurants with a liquor license in the same area.) What you’re seeing above is not a scene that takes place at Duggan’s, young and dumb and full of cum as its clientele often is. On the kinds of nights when people who are young and dumb and full of cum go out and socialize, anyway. It’s otherwise the province of the shrieking Irish-American racists whose every breath is a betrayal of the Irish liberationary socialist tradition they all believe they support, sans the socialism. Anyway. Duggan’s boasts a relatively genteel crowd even at its most raucous compared to McCarthy’s, the bar whose parking lot abuts my apartment building. I’ve stepped inside there a grand total of once, to see if anyone belonged to the car in the lot with its headlights on. (They did not. At least not that they could remember.) McCarthy’s produces a nightly brawl like Kander & Ebb. I wish I were kidding. Every single night there’s some…what is the Long Island Irish equivalent of the word “guido”? because there really should be one, and “paddy” doesn’t quite cover it. Anyway—every single night there’s some moronic Hibernian, some bog person whose great-great-great-grandma snuck past Ellis Island despite Thomas Nast’s best efforts, screaming “HOLD ME BACK BRO, HOLD ME BACK BRO” or “MY FUCKING SISTER BRO, MY FUCKING SISTER” or “COME BACK COLLEEN, COME BACK COLLEEN” at the top of his lungs about fifteen away from MY HOME where my wife-to-be sleeps and my children play with their toys. McCarthy’s is the kinda place that they sweep up the eyeballs after closing. That’s not where I’m, currently, at. The distinction I’m attempting to draw is that what goes on at the Double Deuce during our first visit to the Double Deuce is intended to be unique to and representative of the Double Deuce. So let’s revisit the image above, and let’s do it from right to left, like we’re reading manga or the Torah. You have Well-Endowed Wife, eyes closed and smiling, thrilling to the sensation of a gormless stranger’s hands on her tits and her husband’s attention and affection resulting from same, I mean she’s transported by it. You have Sharing Husband, cackling with glee, simply could not be happier and more entertained by the spectacle of other men enjoying his wife’s body and his wife’s body enjoying other men. You have Gawker, now and forever Groper just like Donald Merwin Elbert became now and forever The Trashcan Man when he blew those oil tankers in Powtanville (Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?), as riveted by this woman’s tits as the first men on the moon were by the earthrise. And—and this is key—you have Heckler, played by Charles Hawke, previously remarkable in this film for hollering “HEY YA PAID TA PLAY PLAY!” AND THROWING A excuse me and throwing a beer bottle at the Jeff Healey Band for the crime of announcing they’re going to take a brief break to urinate in the bathroom rather than piss themselves on stage, and throwing it with sufficient force to shatter it against chickenwire looser than Steve the bouncer’s ID requirements, and saying this with Noo Yawk accent that makes about as much sense in its Jasper, Missouri setting as the idea of famous bouncers, and I’m sure we’ll return to him eventually, but for now let’s look at this miserable bastard, transformed by the spectacle of the tripartite Agreement between Sharing Husband, Well-Endowed Wife, and Gawker/Groper from a belligerent cut-up to fucking Saul on the road to Damascus, transfixed by the sight, blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce another runner in the night, just completely fucking poleaxed by watching one idiot feel up another idiot’s wife. You don’t see that—you might still see it in the desert—but you don’t see it at Duggan’s, and you don’t see it where Dalton is at work. Beautiful in its idiocy as it is, the world Tilghman is building has no room for it. The Elves sail West and the Gawker and Heckler and Sharing Husband and Well-Endowed Wife disappear and so help me god the bar as I sit here writing this the bar is playing “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” by Dropkick Murphys and where is Dalton and Thomas Nast when you need them.
Tags: barflies, gawker, heckler, road house, sharing husband, the double deuce, well-endowed wife