Gossip is a cruel mistress. Here’s Dalton, jauntily strutting into the Double Deuce for another night’s work at what has become the ideal bar. He knows his pal Wade Garrett is on the way (though of that day and hour knoweth no man). He’s just had a night of romance with Dr. Elizabeth Clay. Here he thinks he’s just sitting down for the usual chit-chat with Cody. But Cody keeps his ears to the ground in addition to those white-hot blues licks, and he feels obligated to inform his friend that Brad Wesley had a thing for the Doc once upon a time too.

Here’s how he puts it: “As I hear it, she left town and he went nuts. Heh. Small town, huh, Dalton? ‘Course, that’s just the word.” Hitchcock himself couldn’t have conceived of a crueler and more confounding open ending than that final sentence. Now instead of clearing things up for his pal, Cody has muddied them further. How can he discover for certain what the truth is?

Well, by asking Elizabeth directly, that’s how. Knowing Dalton, that’s something he’s unlikely to do. He keeps himself buttoned up, allowing others in when necessary and desirable, keeping other problems at arms’ length unless and until they make themselves impossible to ignore. A man like that would go right on ignoring his girlfriend’s failed marriage to his nemesis unless pushed—pushed, perhaps, by a friend who phrases his revelation of this information in a deliberately ambiguous way, so as to force his buddy’s hand and force him to address uncomfortable truths rather than letting them fester. A good friend, in other words.

Fortunately for Dalton, Wesley almost immediately starts attempting to kill all of his friends and associates, so the motion is tabled. There’ll be time enough for rehashing the past after a bunch of old men shoot Brad Wesley to death.

“Hither came Wade, the Garrett, gray-haired, stubble-chinned, beer in hand, a sage, a bouncer, a cooler, with gigantic mirth and additional gigantic mirth, to tread the Double Douches of the Earth under his exposed happy trail.”

Wade Garrett is not the only miscreant to grace the dirt lot of the Double Deuce with his presence on this fateful day. Right behind him apparently—I wonder if they were stopped behind him at a stoplight at some point, not realizing what was to come—is a pickup truck full of Brad Wesleyans. There’s O’Connor and Tinker of course, who I guess haven’t gotten their asses kicked recently enough and need that sweet chin music. There’s Mountain, the gigantically tall guy last seen cavorting poolside at Wesley’s mansion; he’ll accomplish approximately that much in the fight that ensues.

Finally, there’s Morgan, the inveterate hothead tough guy played by wrestling god Terry Funk, returning to the Double Deuce for the first time since he collected his severance and was told to consider barber college and pronounced Dalton “a dead man.” (He too was last seen cavorting poolside, with his pants around his ankles no less, but he acquits himself a bit better than his towering counterpart.) You’ll recall him scoffing at the idea that Dalton has “balls big enough to come in a dump truck”; I don’t know if irony is the right word for him being a goon big enough to come in a pickup truck, but there’s something there. I dunno, we’ll workshop it.

Anyway the highlight of the moment isn’t the hero shot of all four goons rolling deep towards Dalton as he stands at the service entrance, supervising the delivery of liquor from a distributor he apparently convinced to run Wesley’s blockade. It’s Dalton’s reaction to said goons.

No confident smile this time. No squaring up, either. He looks at them through sun-squinted eyes, his shoulders rise as he inhales deeply, and then he just…sighs, silently. If you ran his body language through Google Translate you’d get Welp, here we go again, I guess.

It’s the most noncommittal thing he does in the whole film, which otherwise invests his every word and deed with energy and purpose. All his energy and purpose is directed elsewhere at the moment—at Doc, his lover, whose scent probably lingers on his body, and at Wade Garrett, his mentor, whom he called to take care of this whole liquor-blockade thing. These clowns? He’ll fight them, sure, but only because they leave him no choice. He’d just as soon they turn around and drive away. There’s only one way this is gonna end, and until then it’s just workaday drudgery. Sigh. Okay, fellas, whose face do I break first.

Here come the goons again
Pounding on my head like a memory
Pounding on my head like a new emotion
I want a shirt with an open chest
I want to talk like bleeders do
I want to dive clear of your boot knife
Do you bleed too much too?

O’Connor talk to me
Like bleeders do
Walk with me
Like bleeders do
Talk to me
Like bleeders do

Here come the goons again
Kick me in my head like a tragedy
Tearing out my throat like a new emotion
I want to bleed in the open wind
I want to kiss like coolers do
I want to dive clear of your knife boot
Do you bleed too much too?

O’Connor talk to me
Like bleeders do
Walk with me
Like bleeders do
Talk to me
Like bleeders do

Ooooooh
Ooooooh yeah
Here they come again
Ooooooh
Hey hey hey hey hey hey hey

Here come the goons again
Pounding on my head like a memory
Pounding on my head like a new emotion
(Here they again, here they comes again)
I want a shirt with an open chest
I want to talk like bleeders do
I want dive clear of your boot knife
Do you bleed too much too?

Irony is a valuable weapon in the arsenal of any cooler. Take Dalton, for example. When Tinker, O’Connor, Mountain, and Morgan roll up and force the liquor delivery guy to stop wheeling out crates of booze—”This bar is closed for business!” booms the Bleeder, proud to pick a fight he can win for once—Dalton hits them with all the faux-graciousness he can muster. “Can I buy you guys a drink?” he asks, expecting the answer no. Morgan, who has clearly been spoiling for a tantrum ever since Dalton gave him the boot, responds by petulantly smashing a bottle on the ground. “Guess not,” Dalton replies, and the fight is joined.

Both Morgan’s toddler destructiveness and the savagery of Dalton’s initial fusillade against his assailants—he makes mincemeat out of all of them until Morgan smashes a bottle against his head rather than the ground—go to show how much energy and emotion can be hidden under the veil of wordplay. The fig leaf of sarcasm allows a man to interact with other men despite the fact that they will soon attempt to beat one another unconscious with their bare hands, wound each other with shattering glass, and generally wreak havoc on one another’s bodies until one side or the other is unable to do any further damage. “Can I buy you guys a drink?” is one last sardonic attempt to conceal violence beneath civilization’s veneer, but the eternal struggle between cooler and goon cannot be contained forever.

Look at this beautiful shot of Wade Garrett and Dalton, embracing after a long separation. The late afternoon light gleaming off Wade’s silver hair and hugging the sculpted contours of Dalton’s grinning face. Smiles as wide as the day is long. Each with one approving hand on the other’s shoulders, their other hands clasped in merry meeting.

From the looks of them you’d never know they just beat four men unconscious.

But that is the Dalton Path, that is the Way of Wade Garrett, that is the tao of all coolers. The Time to Not Be Nice passed when their last enemy collapsed to the ground in a bloody heap. The Time to Be Nice has come, and they welcome this as readily and naturally as they responded to an attack with superior force of their own.

A crowd of Double Deuce employees has gathered at this point, to gaze in wide-eyed wonder on these two knights errant, these sworn swords, and on those they cut down. To walk the Dalton Path, a gray ribbon that runs to either horizon, the lines on the road alternating streaks of white and red.

I kid, I kid the goons, and why not—they’re constantly getting their asses kicked. But look at our man Mountain here. Mountain knows that he and his comrades-in-arms have been sent to the Double Deuce with a very specific mission: Stop any and all liquor shipments. Mountain does not abandon this mission the moment Dalton throws hands. No, Mountain picks up a case of Tia Maria, throws it to the ground, turns, picks up a second case of Tia Maria, and throws it to the ground. Then and only then, after Dalton has rung the bells of Morgan and Tinker and O’Connor singlehandedly, does he turn his attention to Dalton.

Granted, once you’ve see what happens to him when he does attack Dalton—he lifts him clean off the ground in a bear hug, only to have his face bashed in by a pair of reverse headbutts—you’ll start wondering if maybe there wasn’t a third case of Tia Maria that wanted smashing. And if you pay close attention you’ll notice that by decking Morgan right into the back of the truck, toppling pretty much every remaining case of booze it contains, Dalton himself did more damage to the shipment than Mountain. But I’d consider that last bit a loss leader. Better to lose a few bottles in the process of leveling men who’d present a constant threat than to spare them but also spare the saboteurs. To flip that logic around, perhaps Mountain should have worried about the cooler first and the wine coolers second.

Be that as it may. Brad Wesley so rarely gets his money’s worth out of his “boys,” not that this dissuades him from sending the same clowns out to get got over and over again. This is Mountain’s one and only mission, and I think he acquits himself admirably, to a point. A good goon is hard to find, and he would have been a good goon, if it had been somebody there to beat the shit out of him and his buddies every minute of his life.

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.

When Wade Garrett walks—actually it’s more of a mosey/saunter hybrid—through the back door of the Double Deuce, he’s greeted by quite a scene. On a concrete loading area surrounded by smashed cases of liquor, he finds two large men holding Dalton still so a third large man can pound his stomach like a punching bag with intestines inside, overseen by the largest (and at this point bloodiest) man of all. “How’s it goin’, mijo?” he asks with characteristic cool. Then Morgan, the fellow doing the punching, turns to him and absolutely snarls “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS, DAD!”

As my partner Julia Gfrörer once put it, “You know he’s been working up to that line for a few decades.”

That really is the only way to interpret the ferocious hostility with which Morgan imbues that paternal sobriquet, and the alacrity with which he selects it as the proper label for the older gentleman who’s just made his presence known to him. Hearing “Dad” used as an insult by a teenager is one thing, like “What are you, my dad?” when a friend objects to you trying to huff Pequa drain opener or something. From an adult, to another slightly but not really significantly older adult, it’s just…well, it raises certain questions, is what it does.

For the record, actor Terry Funk is actually a month older than actor Sam Elliott; they were both born in the summer of 1944, Terry on June 30, Sam on August 9. Perhaps, then, Dadness is merely a state of mind. A miscreant like Morgan would naturally chafe at the suggestion of supervision, as indeed he did when Dalton fired him. And a cooler like Wade Garrett, whatever his aversion to living a normal rule-bound life might be, sometimes needs must embrace his role as the enforcer, the stickler, the cooler head that must prevail. The kind of people who tell dads to mind their own business? They are his business. Morgan will soon learn this, to his dismay.

DALTON: I want you to be nice…until it’s time to not be nice.

YOUNGER: Well, how are we supposed to know when that is?

DALTON: You won’t. I’ll let you know. You are the bouncers. I am the cooler. All you have to do is watch my back—and each other’s…Take out the trash.

Submitted for your approval: O’Connor, beaten senseless by Wade Garrett, collapsing unconscious into a dumpster full of garbage. Essentially literally, Wade and Dalton watched each other’s backs and took out the trash. No more evidence of the efficacy of the Dalton Path’s Three Simple Rules need be presented. Everything is proceeding as he has foreseen.

MOUNTAIN: Are you gonna fight, dickless?

WADE GARRETT: I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick.

MIKE NELSON, RIFFTRAX: I don’t think that was even on the table! I…It wasn’t one of the options!

This brief exchange between Mountain (Tiny Ron) and Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), and the response to it by Michael J. Nelson (Mystery Science Theater 3000), can’t be improved upon. In two lines you have all the hallmarks of Road House‘s bad-good writing style: hostility so severe it reads as a non sequitur, pointlessly escalated profanity, disconnected logic, attempted aphorisms that have never before or since been uttered by human beings. This exchange is Road House.

But to boil it down to dialogue is to miss what makes it even more Road House. Immediately after telling Mountain he is not going to show him his penis, Wade Garrett punches Mountain, you guessed it, right in the nuts. He then kicks him hard in his right knee, sending the giant tumbling to the ground with an oddly subdued “Oh, shit!””Goddamn, that hurts, dudn’t it?” Wade asks rhetorically, smirking while running his hand back over his hair. He’s not going to prove he isn’t dickless, but he’s sure as hell gonna make Mountain wish he was.

But wait, there’s more! Remember earlier in the film when Dalton told Jack “Gimme the biggest guy in the world: You smash his knee, he’ll drop like a stone?” QE motherfucking D.

So: needless profanity, needless hostility, gibberish idiom, illogic, dick joke, violence, cooler technique. Truly, this moment has it all.

The staff of the Double Deuce react to the Coming of Wade in a variety of ways. Tilghman leers, of course. The Nameless Bartender’s eyes get a little wide, his mouth goes a little slack. Jack, baffled, asks “Who is this guy?” Hank mutters an awestruck “Holy shit.” “Exactly right,” Wade replies, as if his name were in fact Holy Shit.

In the middle of it all there’s Cody, who whether by the rasp of his voice or the scent of his musk recognizes who the mysterious stranger is and fills in Jack and the assembled gawkers accordingly. “Gentlemen,” he says, “Wade Garrett.” This is a callback to the moment he told the patrons of the Double Deuce that “The name…is Dalton,” obviously; It is Cody’s fate to be the standard bearer for the coolers of the world, the voice announcing their presence.

But does he have to be such a damn sexist about it? He was led out the back door to the scene of the fight by Carrie Ann. When he tells everyone it’s Wade, Stella literally has her hand on his shoulder. “Gentlemen” is what they get in response? “Ladies and gentlemen” and people of every gender identity deserve to know they are in the presence of Wade Garrett when this is in fact so. If Cody has the time to spill the tea on Doc and Brad Wesley, he can throw in a few extra syllables for the sake of inclusivity. They deserve it. Wade deserves it.

DOC: Hi.

DALTON: Hey.

ALL THREE: [giddy nervous laughter]

Never before and never since has so much sexual energy been packed into two syllables as in this moment. Dalton, driving with his windshield busted, has told Wade there’s someone he wants him to meet, and assured him he really isn’t in trouble. The moment Wade sees a woman walking toward their car outside the Jasper Community Hospital, he says “I fuckin’ knew it.” Women are trouble, the evidence is carved into his body. But it’s the kind of trouble ol’ Wade doesn’t mind getting himself into. The way he looks at Dr. Elizabeth Clay—and the way she looks at him, and at Dalton, and the way Dalton looks at them looking at each other, and the way all three of them laugh as if sharing some delicious and delightful unspoken secret—sure makes it seem like he wants to literally get himself into this particular trouble. And he’s not alone: There are more volumes of smut in Doc’s “Hi” and in Dalton’s responsorial “Hey” than in the Vatican’s Black Library.

What I’m trying to say here is that just as Kevin Tighe’s performance at the start of the film leaves you with zero doubt he’s the villain of the piece, however quickly the film disabuses you of that notion, the performances of Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, and Patrick Swayze in this scene leave no doubt in your mind whatsoever that there’s an MMF threesome in the offing and that they’re all as pleased as punch and as randy as goats about it. I triple dog dare you to watch this scene and gainsay me. It can’t be done. The sexual tension in the air is so thick you could get together with your girlfriend and your best friend and fuck it.

It takes a bold film to remake the Jaws scar comparison/USS Indianapolis story scene as an excuse for Sam Elliott to expose his pubic hair to the viewing public. Road House is a bold film. We’re less than a minute into Wade Garrett reminiscing about a time in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1975, when he and Dalton got jumped by a guy with a bottle of Jack Daniels aimed at their heads. All it takes is for Dalton to mention the word “scar,” and before you can say Jack Robinson Wade is unbuttoning his jeans. “Oh, I’ll show you a scar,” he says, looking at Dr. Elizabeth Clay, whom he met a couple of hours ago. “I’ll show you one I’m real sentimental about, Doc.” Pop, zip, pull, push push in the bush. It happens as fast as a throat rip. Now even that bottle of Miller seems lewd.

What does the good Doctor think of all this?

You tell me.

I mean Jesus, her attraction to this man could not be more obvious if she stood up and unbuttoned her jeans. If I were Dalton I would not leave these two alone for a minute. If I were Dalton I’d reconsider introducing the two of them in the first place. Even when she asks about the origin of the scar—Her: “A woman?” Him: “Boy, was she.”—her mind is clearly and necessarily on the thought of a woman touching him mere inches away from his penis. Something tells me she’s mentally covered that gap once or twice already.

Kelly Lynch has spoken sweetly about her romantic chemistry with both Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott in this film, and the highest compliment I can pay her is that I didn’t need to hear her explain it. It’s right there on the screen. She looks at Sam Elliott’s pubic hair the same way most women I’ve watched this movie with do. A man? Boy, was he.

It’s morning, and Dalton, Wade, and Elizabeth are drinking beer and coffee at their second dive of the…night? Because they’ve stayed up drinking till dawn at at least two establishments that we know of, three if you count Dalton and Wade’s initial meeting at the Double Deuce. None of these three dives, it should be noted, are the dive to which Dalton took Doc on their earlier date. Jasper is a town consisting solely of auto dealerships and greasy spoons. I wonder what their Chamber of Commerce meetings are like.

Anyway it’s morning, because seconds after exposing his bush to Elizabeth, Wade insists on going someplace “more romantic” to dance, and everyone likes dancing up and down the aisle at a diner, ordering beers at like 7am amid the breakfast crowd, right?

Wade and Elizabeth do, that’s for goddamn sure. They do a jaunty two-step to George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” complete with a reedy little singalong of the title phrase from Wade. He spends pretty much the entire time purring at the Doc. No, he won’t be telling her how great a guy Dalton is, he’ll tell her “how I want you for myself” instead. He’ll make fun of his yawning protégé’s staying power: “He’s great comin’ out of the gate, but not much for stamina.” He’ll put his hand in Doc’s golden hair, the other on her back, and they’re real close together now, no room for the Holy Spirit between these two. And in the end they press their hips together, hips being used euphemistically here, as he dips her so low she’s upside down, and they look at Dalton and they laugh, because it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s funny to just really really really clearly want to fuck your best friend’s girlfriend, and funnier still that she clearly wants to fuck you, and funniest of all that neither of you give a fuck that your best friend/boyfriend sees it all. You have to make your own fun in this town.

“That gal’s got entirely too many brains to have an ass like that.” That would be Wade Garrett speaking, developing the science of the brains/ass ratio before our very eyes, and behind Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s ahem let’s say behind her back. He’s hardly being subtle about it either, tilting his head almost 90 degrees to get a better look at whatever’s swishing around under that loose-fitting floral-print skirt. Just, ogling her right out there in the open, the diner staff and the diner patrons and Dalton can all get a good long look at Wade getting a good long look at the Doc’s impeccable hinder. And I don’t understand why he’s checking her ass out with his head tilted sideways anyway, unless asses work radically differently in Jasper, which we know having seen two of them including Doc’s they do not.

Crude? Yes, but knowing Wade we’re lucky he didn’t say it right to her face. What’s a little good-natured objectification from a guy who’s already shown you his pubic hair? Look, I won’t pretend to understand the Way of Wade Garrett in every particular—the Dalton Path is more my field—but the bottom line (wink so hard my eyelids fuse) is that he is a man who enjoys brains, and ass, and the to him unlikely combination of the two. He’s saying Elizabeth is as good as it gets, and based on that metric it’s a hard point to argue with.

As if he’s conducting a stress test of his own sexiness in order to locate the precise point at which he goes from “Ooh, who’s that guy?” to “Ugh, it’s that guy,” Wade Garrett lets out a teensy little “Yee-haw!” while dancing with Dr. Elizabeth Clay. They’re doing a country-western two-step (the actors took lessons of their own volition), and Wade is singing along to the chorus of George Strait’s throwback classic “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” and then out it comes, an airy falsetto version of the signature yokel yodel. It sounds like the kind of voice you use when you make one of your pets talk. It sounds like Mr. Hanky from South Park. It sounds like the polar opposite of the gravelly baritone we’ve come to know and love from Mr. Sam Elliott, everybody’s cowboy daddy. But note the reaction from the Doc: a breathy laugh, probably imperceptible if you’re more than a couple feet away from her, but eminently perceptible if you’re her gentleman dance partner. Congratulations: You’ve done the dorkiest thing imaginable, and made a woman laugh the way she might if she were particularly delighted by the way you kiss her neck. The Way of Wade Garrett is circuitous, but you can bet there’s a cold beer and a satisfied woman at the end of it every time.

Right after Wade Garrett establishes that Dr. Elizabeth Clay has a level of intelligence too lofty to support a kiester of such magnificence, he slides back to a full upright and locked position and says to Dalton, “You’ve got your hands full, kid.” In any other movie I might not assume this was a deliberate double entendre, but in any other movie I wouldn’t have heard the phrase “balls big enough to come in a dump truck.” At the very least Wade is speaking both metaphorically and literally about what Dalton’s hands are full of.

So let us assume this is crude wordplay. What does Wade mean by connecting the mind with the body in this fashion? Might not the meaning of the phrase derive from implication rather than connection? Somewhere in the combination of the Doc’s sparkling intelligence and surpassing beauty there lies what we might call her soul, her chi, her life force, the thing that makes her her. More than being outwitted or banged into oblivion, Dalton is at risk of being trampled by the wild horse energy Wade himself has been attempting to gentle all night. In his own macho way he’s saying the whole is greater than the sum of her parts.

“You’re a long way from Memphis.”

“Memphis has nothing to do with it.”

“Bullshit. That dog won’t hunt.”

Wade Garrett does not understand why Dalton cannot forgive himself for killing the husband of the woman he was dating in Memphis, and from hunting dogs on down he tries every rhetorical trick in the book to convince Dalton to, as he puts it, “cut it the fuck loose.” He peremptorily dismisses Dalton’s denialism, for starters. He says he’s living in the past. He makes a tongue-in-cheek appeal to Dalton’s schooling and wonders why he isn’t “a little more…philosophical about it.” He cajoles, he rages. He points out the facts—that “that fucking c…that girl never told you she was married”—so emphatically that it takes visible force of will for him not to call the woman involved a cunt in a family restaurant.

Then it all comes down to the way of the warrior, the knight errant, the cooler. “When a man sticks a gun in your face, you got two choices: You can die or you can kill the motherfucker!” The oath springs from his mouth so fast there’s practically a recoil.

Wade Garrett wants his mijo to be happy, with his job, his town, his new c…his new girl. Seeing him conflicted, unhappy even, makes Wade feel awful. His own best friend is being his own worst enemy. What do you do under those circumstances? Is it time to be nice or is it time to not be nice? Wade Garrett chooses both approaches, though the latter wins out in the end, as it so often does.

“I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick.” —Wade Garret

The letter of the law more so perhaps than the spirit, but still, Wade Garrett’s word is bond.