“Bad element over there,” says Brad Wesley of the Double Deuce when he and Dalton first meet. Brad Wesley should know, of course, because Brad Wesley has several of the protons and electrons comprising that bad element on his payroll. That’s the way we tend to think of the Double Deuce’s lowlife patrons, the people Frank Tilghman hired Dalton to clear out. Pat McGurn and Morgan, members in good standing of Wesley’s goon squad, in Pat’s case a thief and in Morgan’s case a rageaholic sadist. Stella, the coke-dealer waitress, and Steve, the bouncer who likes the bar’s patrons and his sexual partners the way Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen like giant gorillas named Mighty Joe: young. Sharing Husband and Well-Endowed Wife, who’ve decided to turn the Double Deuce into a theater for their loveplay. Gawker, who ain’t got twenty bucks. Foxworthy, who sexually harasses Carrie Ann. Nipple to Nipple Guy, who sexually harasses Denise. Men who throw bottles at the faces of blind guitar players when they announce they’re taking a break from the set to use the bathroom. A Knife Nerd in a Hawaiian shirt. Mr. Clean. The Fuckemtheyre Brothers. Tinker. You get the picture.
But look at these two lost souls. No, not Younger and Jack, though I can’t imagine they’re feeling like they’ve found their calling at this particular moment in time. The woman in the upper left is seated alone at a relatively isolated table, where she is having an agitated conversation with no one. She’s screwed up her face angrily, and makes the occasional wild gesticulation. Is she drunk? Yes, probably. Is she also severely mentally ill? Almost certainly. She’s one of Dalton’s infamous “trustees of modern chemistry” insofar as the chemistry in question is lithium.
And that old man passed out on the floor? He’s the one person we see Frank Tilghman involve himself personally in ejecting from the bar, when he orders Younger to give the guy the heave-ho. He’s not propositioning women with his hands, or stabbing anyone, or throwing anyone through a table. He’s an elderly alcoholic who, if he doesn’t sleep there, is going to sleep on the street. “Get him outta here,” Tilghman says. Tilghman, who employs Pat and Morgan and Stella and Steve and has a bar full of the worst motherfuckers on the planet, is effectively installing one of those benches rich areas of big cities use where there’s curves or bars or jagged spikes at regular intervals to prevent any homeless people from getting too comfortable.
What we’re seeing here is the Reagan/Bush-era destruction of the social safety net in microcosm. With mental institutions shuttered due to lack of funds, people wind up out on their own with no one and nothing to help them. Some wind up in the Double Deuce, waving off imaginary interlocutors underneath Tilghman’s office window, or passed out on the steps along the way. Later on in the film Dalton will spare a similar old man—the same old man, quite possibly, though it will require further review—the fate of expulsion from a diner whose owner is pissed that he’s nodding off at the counter. But no such luck here. No one takes this woman or this man and powerbombs them through a table, but they’ve fallen through the cracks nonetheless.
Tags: barflies, mentally ill woman, old man, patrons, road house, ronald reagan, the double deuce, trustees of modern chemistry