People have been placed on FBI watchlists for less than the way Frank Tilghman greets Wade Garrett upon the aging cooler’s entrance into the Double Deuce. “I know you,” he says, wielding the words like a tongue across Wade’s stubble, like Ramsay Bolton bidding farewell to Sansa Stark before she feeds him to his own dogs, like a flea leaping from a rat to the roughspun tunic of a fourteenth-century European peasant. If I were Wade Garrett I’d have turned around, gotten on my motorcycle, and driven right back to the topless joint with the “DON’T EAT THE BIG WHITE MINT” sign above the urinal. Fortunately for Dalton (busy getting pounded into hamburger out back) and Tilghman (Cui bono) and unfortunately for Wade Garrett himself (“IT WAS TAILS”), Wade Garrett is a braver man than I. He decides that helping his mijo out of a jam is worth braving whatever Gary Heidnik chamber of horrors Tilghman has hidden in the Double Deuce’s expensive redesign and heads to the service entrance to whip the shit out of some goons, and the rest is Road History.
What this makes me wonder, as did Tilghman’s thoroughly sinister introduction of himself to Dalton way back at the beginning of the film a couple hundred days ago, is how many coolers Tilghman went through before finding people who could stand to look and listen to him long enough even to entertain an offer. Maybe at some other bar in New York there’s some other NYU-graduate warrior-poet with some other grizzled graybeard of a mentor, who took one look at the corpse rictus Tilghman calls a smile and had him ejected from the premises immediately. Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, who knows, there could be master-and-apprentice pairs of coolers scattered across these United States, all of whom told Tilghman “My eyes are up here, pal” and then sent him on his creepy way.
As with so much about Tilghman, we’ll never know the rest of the story. Perhaps that’s for the best. In elementary school my gifted class went to see an assembly on UFO encounters in which the speaker wondered if the sudden movements and disappearances attributed to alien spacecraft were not unlike what our own trips to the grocery store must read like to our housepets: We know where we went, but they don’t. I’ve seen this basic phenomenon described also with the metaphor of trying to describe a fork stuck through a paper plate from the perspective of one who can only see the tines poking out of one side, not the whole fork jammed into the other, let alone the human being holding it on the other. Tilghman is as Tilghman does, and any speculation as to what else he might be and do beyond the four walls of this movie must remain speculation. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen; whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Tags: road house, the double deuce, tilghman, wade garrett, wittgenstein