Morgan was an important man, in the same sense that Brad Wesley’s grandfather was an important man: “He was an asshole.” Or as Carrie Ann put it, “Morgan was born an asshole and just grew bigger.” Here was a guy who was so temperamentally unsuited to the trade of bouncing that his presence actually made the old, hellhole version of the Double Deuce worse than it would have been had he not been there. Morgan had a great voice, a knack for off-kilter line readings (how can we forget “You’re a dead man“?), a penchant for tossing people through tables, and a thing for little moon boots. He’s gone now, murdered by Dalton, not even afforded the dignity of an onscreen death.

I can’t say he’ll be missed by many, because most of the people who might have missed him either are dead already or will be dead within minutes. One of those unfortunates is O’Connor, aka the Bleeder, the rumble-voiced dink who got his ass kicked by Dalton, then got his ass kicked by Brad Wesley for getting his ass kicked by Dalton, then got his ass kicked by Dalton and Wade Garrett in tandem. Then he, too, got killed by Dalton, offscreen, which—speaking as a general rule here—is not the place most movies want to kill their memorable goons. Road House is the exception that proves that particular rule.

And who is our guide through all this, our combination Charon and Virgil? It is Ketcham, the least memorable major goon, sneaking around Brad Wesley’s mansion looking for Dalton and finding only his handiwork. “Shit,” he says when he finds O’Connor slumped lifeless against the wall. That he was, Ketcham, that he was.

After three star turns in under five minutes, Dalton’s car finally has its first fight scene. First and last, sad to say. It barrels towards Brad Wesley’s mansion at breakneck speed, plowing right through a fence and over a hedge to its appointment with destiny. Arrayed against it are Wesley’s five core goons who are a) alive and b) not Karpis—Ketchum, O’Connor the Bleeder, Morgan, Tinker, and Pat McGurn. There’s no jaw-jacking involved here. It’s on sight. They open fire with an array of shotguns and handguns—all of which raise the question of why they bothered with the fistfighting and knife-fighting in the first place. They certainly don’t hesitate to shoot Dalton’s Benz, and (they assume) Dalton himself, full of lead. Was it Jimmy’s death that lifted the shibboleth against straight-up murder by gunfire? Did Dalton bring this fusillade upon himself? Or at the very least on his car?

Gary grins from ear to ear. Jimmy does a double fist-pump. O’Connor raises an arm aloft in triumph. Tinker yee-haws his hat off his head. Pat McGurn and Morgan? They literally embrace. (Jimmy and Tinker merely clasp hands.) The Goon in Blue (about whom more later) is just happy to be there. And Brad Wesley acts like a game show host. Truly, the destruction of Strodenmire Ford by the coward Gary Ketcham is the high-water mark of villainous delight for the Brad Wesley organization. For once in their miserable lives they managed to get one over on their enemies in a way that did not require any of them to get their asses kicked. They didn’t even need to throw a punch, much less take one. They just had to get behind the wheel of a monster truck—one of them did, anyway—and drive on through to the other side. The rest take a joy in this of the sort you see in bars when the home team wins the Super Bowl. They are thrilled, inordinately thrilled, “the director overdid it” thrilled, to have watched a monster truck run over a car dealership. Did I point out that Morgan and Pat, the two orneriest cusses in the whole gang, hug each other, like one just announced his wife is expecting? This is the rough beast they gave birth to instead, haulin’ ass towards Bethlehem to put a little something down on a new car.

The fox is in the henhouse. The rats are in the cellar. The weasels are in the corn. Using the conveniently timed explosion of Red Webster’s Auto Parts as cover, a large party led by Mr. Brad Wesley has infiltrated the Double Deuce. They expect the same things everyone does when they go to the bar: some drinks, some dancing, a little idle chatter. But they are arsonists and hired thugs, so naturally they’re not the sort of people who’d be allowed in the bar. Indeed, Morgan, Tinker, O’Connor, and Ketchum have all been expelled from the Double Deuce, bodily so in most cases. Only by distracting Dalton, Wade Garrett, and all the bouncers with the fireball outside could they even get in.

The presence of Wesley and his cronies is all but an admission of guilt, but it’s more than that. It’s a sign that Dalton’s control is slipping. He couldn’t stop these goons from getting in. As we’ll soon see, he doesn’t succeed in getting them out, either. Brad Wesley is calling, ordering, and firing the shots here, in that order.

The time to not be nice is here.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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, in a quiet moment near the end of the film just prior to the situation coming to a head so to speak, we see the goon in his natural environment. O’Connor, Ketchum, Morgan, Tinker, Pat McGurn: All of them have tucked their favorite short-sleeved shirts into their favorite pairs of jeans and settled in on the front lawn of the mansion owned by the Peter Pan to their Lost Boys, Brad Wesley. As you can tell from the shooting irons, this is not a company picnic or a cookout with the boys; they’re here to protect Brad Wesley from Dalton, whom they rightfully assume is on his way to kill them all because they murdered his best friend. You’ll have cause to wonder why, given the predictability of and ease of access to Dalton’s whereabouts—he in fact receives a phone call taunting him about the impending murder in the very location where that murder eventually takes place in his absence—they did not simply cut out the middleman as it were and murder him instead. Perhaps, given their superior numbers and lack of compunction about bringing guns to a knife fight and so on down the fight escalation scale, they did not split up to murder them both. Just blue-skying here: One could even imagine a scenario in which the large quantity of explosives the Brad Wesley organization has used to destroy Red Webster’s place of business and Emmett’s cottage could instead have been employed to blow up the Double Deuce (across the street from Red Webster’s store) or Dalton’s barn apartment (approximately two hundred feet away from Emmett’s house). It’s almost as if the goal were to deliberately goad the best fighter in Jasper into a mano a mano with a demented old man who likes JC Penney, reckless operation of motor vehicles, and music with balls. And if that were the case—well then, one would wonder, wouldn’t one, whether the very orchestration of such a plan signals a wish on the part of Brad Wesley’s men, or Brad Wesley, or some other and still more nefarious figure working behind the scenes, the hole in things, the Enemy, the piece that can never fit, there since the beginning, that Brad Wesley and his men be removed from the playing field permanently, and that if Dalton himself should die in the process of that removal, well, so be it.

But that’s crazy talk, isn’t it.

<Swearengen voice>Anyways,</s> the goons and their paymaster are to be congratulated on the success of their plan, which does indeed lure Dalton into the Wesley estate, at full speed, no holds barred, no quarter asked and none given. Few things will get an experienced killer in a killing mood than killing one of the men who trained them in the techniques that allow them to kill, and once the experienced killer is in that killing mood, he needs must find the people he desires to kill, and a good place to check is if one of them owns a mansion, then it’s that mansion. So kudos are due in that respect.

Until Dalton drops by, however, the goons are left to their own devices. Their mixture of vigilance and utter disregard for firearm safety is the purest visual expression of the goonsmanship levels evidenced in this film. Ketchum and the Bleeder? Silent sentinels, eyes at nine and six, ready for anything. Morgan, Tinker, and the sister-son? Holding a pistol the way you hold your phone when you’re trying to check the text that just came in but you’re doing a million things and you grab it at kind of an awkward angle but now you’re stuck with it that way until you put something else down, eating a lolipop, and scratching his back with the butt of a shotgun while saying “Remember that blonde? Shhyew. She could suck-start a Harley.” Ruthless efficiency coupled with a generated sense of wonder that any of these men lived past high school: That is the Way of the Goon. Bask in it.

Bask in it while you can, anyway, since all but one of these men will be dead within two and a half minutes.

I hate to do this to Terry Funk of all people—it’s still real to me, dammit!—but Sam Elliott is here to take the Mispronunciation Title right out of his hands. Watching and hearing Wade Garrett talk to Dalton is fascinating for at least six posts’ worth of reasons, but the adventure of listening to him go to work on the English language is right there at the top. When Dalton asks him how he’s doing, he replies “Aw Shit Hell Kid I’m in Hog Heaven,” and it sounds like it reads there—like he’s reciting a song title he’s never come across before but thinks is pretty funny now that he’s seeing it for the first time. He closes out the call by telling Dalton “I’ll see ya later,” but not as one sentence, no, that would be the easy way out, and Wade Garrett is made of sterner stuff. “I’ll see ya,” he says, then pauses, then adds, “Later.” I’ve told people “See ya,” and I’ve told people “Later,” but never have I done so back to back. No one has done so back to back, until now. Sam Elliott decided he was gonna have some fun with the line “I’ll see ya later” and Rowdy Herrington had the good sense to let him, just as he did when Terry Funk got creative with “You’re a dead man.” People talk about Scorsese and De Niro and “You talkin’ to me?” or the tears in rain speech from Blade Runner, but real heads know.

Nine quarters, says the sign that appears in the middle of Dalton’s pivotal conversation with Wade Garrett, right after he blows off the threat presented by Brad Wesley. Right away we can see that reality has warped a little, that a glitch in the matrix has appeared. As well it might: Dalton has just underestimated his opponent and failed to expect the unexpected, a violation of his own First Rule. And for that, a price must be paid.

But what if there’s more to it than that?

It was not I who set myself on this path, but reader @RoddySwears. It was he who noted the numerological significance of the established price. Nine quarters. Two dollars and twenty-five cents. $2.25. 2 + 2 = 9.

What could such a specific prophecy mean?

Then I realized.

The Nine are abroad.

One hundred essays into a year-long Road House writing project, I feel about the film’s attempts to coin catchphrases and aphorisms exactly the way I felt when I’d written no essays at all: yikes. I mean, Does a hobbyhorse have a wooden dick, folks. Balls big enough to come in a dump truck. The writers have a relationship with the English language only slightly less estranged than their relationship to male sex organs.

But they can’t all be losers.

Just after the dump truck incident, a grumpy Morgan (there is no other kind of course) stomps over to Cody, whom he knows has a preexisting relationship with their mysterious new colleague. “This Dalton character,” he grumbles, “what’s his story?”

“His story is, you fuck with him and he’ll seal your fate,” Cody replies.

Now that’s how it’s done.

It’s a marvelous exchange insofar as it’s a rare moment when two characters have a conversation during which Dalton is neither a participant nor present. These are few and far between in this film, to the point where they stand out like sore thumbs each and every time. Off the top of my head, there’s this conversation, there’s Brad Wesley beating up the bleeder, Wesley and Jimmy talking to Red briefly after Dalton departs his store, and Jimmy and Ketchum spying on Dalton and Elizabeth from afar. Unless you count Wade Garrett breaking up shenanigans at a strip joint prior to receiving a call from Dalton, or Wade Garrett asking for Dalton’s whereabouts when he arrives at the Double Deuce, or Wesley’s goons making small talk prior to Dalton’s final assault on the Wesley compound, or Steve and Agnes doing their regular Saturday night thing before Dalton pops in and fires him—all of them scenes that exist so that Dalton can join them in progress—that is it. This is Dalton’s world, and what a treat to see other people live in it.

And who are the people in question this time around? Blind white blues musician Jeff Healey and hardcore wrestling legend Terry Funk. For Road House fanatics this is like the De Niro/Pacino diner scene in Heat.

But don’t think it’s just some goofy novelty act. (I didn’t say “Don’t think it’s some goofy novelty act,” mind you, I said “Don’t think it’s just some goofy novelty act.) Throughout this project I’ve been impressed by what the…let’s say non-traditional actors bring to the table. The naturalism Terry Funk brings to his role as an enormous man who gets paid to get angry and beat the shit out of people with tables is obvious. But spare a thought for Jeff Healey, too, who sounds like exactly what he is supposed to be: a guitar player chatting with dudes in bars. It works when he’s serving as a welcoming presence for Dalton, the one character he neither needs to intimidate nor impress, and it works when he drops the “hey man lemme put this here guitar down and buy you a beer” schtick and describes his friend like he’s the fucking Shogun Assassin.

Because that’s the message of “you fuck with him and he’ll seal your fate,” isn’t it. He won’t just kick your ass, or kill you, or make you wish you were never born or blah blah blah. Like a Norn with a mullet, he’s got the thread of your life in his hands, and if you step to him you’re going to find out exactly where that thread ends.

There’s another implication here that must be considered: Fate is predestined. Cody’s description of Dalton, then, is of one who will mete out the appropriate and appointed sanction to those who cross him, no more and no less. Perhaps it will be your fate to disappear from the movie a third of the way through and never return, like Karpis. Perhaps it will be your fate to pass out from terror when a stuffed polar bear is dropped on you and then emerge reborn, your sins forgiven, like Tinker. Perhaps it will be your fate to be murdered offscreen while wearing moonboots, like Morgan. Whatever the case, Dalton is not making the news, he’s simply delivering it to your doorstep.

It’s precisely the right description for the Dalton Path. Remember Rule Three, Verse Four: “It’s a job. It’s nothing personal.” What can be more impersonal than fate? And who better to do the job of sealing it?

This much, at least, is not in dispute: When Dalton’s first night at the Double Deuce is winding to a close, Morgan, who is skeptical about the man’s physical prowess, tells him the following.

“You know, I heard you had balls big enough to come in a dump truck, but uh…you don’t look like much to me.”

“Opinions vary,” Dalton replies, and Morgan is temporarily bested.

But while that may settle the issue for the involved parties, we are left with unanswered questions. To wit: When Morgan says he’s heard Dalton’s balls are big enough to come in a dump truck, does he mean A) a dump truck is required to carry them on account of their large physical size, or B) a dump truck is required to receive Dalton’s ejaculate load due to the copious amounts of semen his big balls produce? “Come” as in “arrive,” or “come” as in “cum” as in “ahh skeet skeet motherfucker”? As Dalton himself might say, opinions vary.

Below you’ll find the best cases I can make for and against the two competing interpretations.

Morgan means “come” as in “travel”

PRO:

• Saying someone has “big balls” is a way of saying they’re unusually gutsy or tough, traditional characteristics, one would think, of a famous bouncer
• Dump trucks are known for carrying things placed in them and can accommodate substantial size and weight, making for a strong metaphor

CON:

• Placing his gargantuan sack in a dump truck would leave the rest of Dalton’s body at something of a loss were the truck to go anywhere, the Double Deuce’s parking lot for example
• Dump trucks typically transport dirt, rubble, or refuse, none of which describe Dalton’s testicles

Morgan means “cum” as in “bust a nut”

PRO:

• The measure of a man’s balls could in theory be taken by the size of the receptacle required to contain a full emission of his seminal fluid; from this we can infer that were the bed of a dump truck required to catch all of Dalton’s ropes in their entirety, his yarbles must needs be very big indeed
• Simply weighing or determining the circumference of Dalton’s ballbag implies passivity on his part, while the thought of Dalton milking, or causing a third party to milk, his dick into the back of a construction vehicle demonstrates the activity and agency becoming of a bouncer

CON:

• Dump trucks are not recommended vehicles of liquid waste; absent a watertight truck bed Dalton’s jism could seep through the seams and on to the road surface below, causing a potential traffic hazard and thus negating the central idea of the metaphor as a means to convey his professional clout and skill
• The size of Dalton’s cock, which due to the nature of the orgasmic process would play an indispensable part in the process of cumming into a dump but not in the process of simply transporting Dalton’s huevos in one, goes conspicuously unremarked upon

CONCLUSION:

Occam’s razor suggests Morgan means he’s heard that Dalton’s balls are so big he would not be surprised to see them being carried by a dump truck, not squeezed like lemons into one. However, the imagistic approach of the latter interpretation has much to recommend it as a hypothetical alternative.

[Chorus: Pat McGurn and Morgan]
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
He’s firing somebody real, fired by fuckin’ Dalton
Send your goons to the bar, maybe he’ll assault them

[Verse 1: Tilghman]
Hold up, Jasper simmer down
Hiring the best, bitch, now he’s here in town
Flew to New York, saw him shirtless, lookin’ fine
Ooh, baby check him out, you’ll go Jeffrey Healey blind
(Uhh)
Hey Pat, black coffee
Serve this motherfucker cuz he drinks for free
Tell these motherfuckers who they think they see
Put his feet through your teeth then he’ll break your knee
Cuz he’s the cooler, the cooler cooler, like he’s your ruler
Teaching rules too, he’s gonna school you, don’t suffer fools too
He should carpool, like many fools do he searched for faith down at NYU
Hospitalize you, that’s what he will do
Here’s my money, gonna give you six figures, man
I thought you would be bigger, man
Wesley’s fuckin’ parties make too much fuckin’ noise
Break into Brad’s house, kill his fuckin’ boys
Beast

[Chorus: Pat McGurn and Morgan]
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
He’s firing somebody real, fired by fuckin’ Dalton
Send your goons to the bar, maybe he’ll assault them

[Verse 2: Morgan]
Ooh, I know you love it when I bounce a guy
Make you think about all of the incidents I trounced a guy
Go into the bathroom and ask Judy for an ounce to buy
Think I’ll tell him “You’re a dead man,” mispronounce a guy
Oh word? Ain’t heard of Wesley? He’ll denounce this guy
Beating up O’Connor, make him bleed some fluid ounces guy
Carrie Ann announced this guy, see his mullet flounces guy
Then ju—okay, I got it
Then just watch Jimmy as he pounds this guy
It will get awkward when we watch as Jimmy mounts this guy
I heard that his testes were sufficient for a dump truck
Then he said “Opinions vary” and I felt like such a dumbfuck
Gonna call Wade Garrett “Dad,” comparatively I’m a young buck
Then I’m gonna die offscreen while wearing moonboots, just my dumb luck
Yes, Lord, but for now I’m fit and able
Gonna pick some guy up, throw him through a table
I’m beast

[Chorus: Pat McGurn and Morgan]
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
He’s firing somebody real, fired by fuckin’ Dalton
Send your goons to the bar, maybe he’ll assault them

[Verse 3: Pat McGurn]
Uhh
I’m Pat, this the finale
A big truck at the Wagon Days rally
I’m behind the bar, taking money from the tally now
Told me take the train and told me not to dilly-dally
Mmm
Uncle Brad on the line, mad on the line
He’s opening two Dillard’s at the same damn time
Frank’s eyeing me like he still wants to have sex
Girl, I am John Doe from X
Girl, I’m Patrick McGurn
AKA Brad looks at me with concern
He gives me money that I do not earn
Lists me as a dependent on his tax return
Mmm
Kill ’em all, dead bodies in the hallway
Dalton’s involved, and my chest got in his knife’s way
Mustache thin, Morgan thicker
Sister-son, chickendicker
Beast

[Chorus: Pat McGurn and Morgan]
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
I heard Frank Tilghman hired fuckin’ Dalton
And yeah we’re fuckin’ fucked, that guy is fuckin’ Dalton
He’s firing somebody real, fired by fuckin’ Dalton
Send your goons to the bar, maybe he’ll assault them

By this point in the evening the word has begun to spread. Dalton has told Carrie Ann, and she’s made a huge fuss, at least partially within Pat McGurn’s earshot. She’s since gone on to report it to Hank, like a little girl telling her brother on Christmas morning that Santa came. Hank is about to tell Steve the story of the throat-ripping incident, and Steve will pronounce it “bull shit.” For now, Pat must report the news to his partner in Brad Wesley Enterprises, Morgan. He does it in low tones, as befits a bearer of ill news:

“That guy at the end of the bar is fuckin’ Dalton, man.”

Pat’s whisper is as the footsteps of doom: He’s just introduced Morgan to the man who will murder them both, so that Red’s Auto Parts and Stroudenmire Ford might live anew.

But it’s not foreknowledge of their fate that has knit lines of worry across Pat’s brow, or rendered Morgan’s strangely adorable face a soft Winnie-the-Pooh mask of concern. Dalton’s reputation precedes him. Like nearly all of the Double Deuce’s barfolk, they’ve heard the legends; even the slackasses and shitkickers on Frank Tilghman’s payroll would have a hard time looking themselves in the mirror (okay, maybe not Steve) if they had not kept abreast enough with the trade to be aware of the second most famous bouncer in these United States. If your role at an establishment that has hired Dalton is to practice throwing human beings through furniture (as is Morgan’s) or draw a bartender’s paycheck at your uncle’s insistence while stealing, in 2019 dollars, over $300 a night (as is Pat’s), this is bad news indeed.

Pat, at least, has the good sense to brown up a bit, calling Dalton “buddy” and asking his name, though he already knows it, and though Dalton only says “coffee, black” in response because he’s a bit of a prick, at least before he’s officially being paid not to be. Morgan, you’ll recall, barely manages to titter his way through an icebreaker involving the size of Dalton’s balls, which is saying the quiet part loud if you ask me.

These guys are desperate to be noticed, and desperate to not be noticed. They want to make themselves seem too pliant or too tough to actually be crooked, and hope Dalton doesn’t look any closer. Which is to say they may know who Dalton is, but they have no idea who Dalton is. This is the (second) best damn cooler in the business, you fools. You’re already dead.

DALTON: Morgan, you’re outta here.

MORGAN: …what the fuck you talking about?

DALTON: You don’t have the right temperament for the trade.

Hard to argue with that, huh? As a bouncer, Morgan does not seem to have specialized or differentiated his skill set from that which he applies to his parallel career as a Brad Wesley goon. The nominal purpose shifts from “protect the business interests of Brad Wesley” to “protect the peaceful atmosphere of the Double Deuce,” but insfoar as he simply ports the methods of the former to the latter, he’s doing far more harm than good. The table we see him shatter with another human beings body by throwing that body through that table from a height isn’t even the first table we’ve seen him fuck up in this basic way that evening, having ejected the Nipple to Nipple guy by wallopping him into a bunch of paying customers seated around one a few minutes earlier. (One of those customers was Foxworthy, so it’s hard to feel too bad about it, but still.) Not only is Morgan likely the most dangerous person in the bar to patrons of the bar, he’s also one of the most destructive to its property—and to their drink orders, at least one of which the guy above plummets through on his way to the ground. If Morgan’s job truly is to keep the peace in the Double Deuce, he really should start by bouncing himself.

That said, there is a pot/kettle element to Dalton’s callout of Morgan’s mien and methods. You’ll recall, of course, that Dalton’s first order of business upon officially assuming the position of cooler is firing Morgan during an all-hands meeting, as quoted above. But what is his first order of business upon officially assuming the position of cooler once the bar opens for business later that day? Breaking a table with a human face. Hypocrisy much?!?!?!

I doubt it. That’s not really Dalton’s style. As our examination of the Rules has made clear, apparent paradox and contradiction is virtually always a method of education via self-enlightenment. From this we can conclude that Dalton’s objection is not to breaking tables with human beings per se, but the mindset, method, and result of same. The Rules are instructive here, as they always are. “Never underestimate your opponent—expect the unexpected”? Look at Morgan’s face and tell me he’s not feeling the outrage of man who cannot believe what others have dared to do to him. “Take it outside—never start anything inside the bar unless it’s absolutely necessary”? Morgan is deeply inside his feelings; he has the object permanence of a furious toddler and fails to understand that no problem truly starts inside the bar, and thus can not properly assess the necessity of responding inside the bar in turn. “Be nice—until it’s time to not be nice”? I feel it’s safe to say that if you materially contributed to escalating a couple of punches thrown at Gawker by Sharing Husband into a rumble involving two dozen combatants capable of leveling the entire seating area, the time to not be nice had not yet arrived. Only the mind of a cooler knows the day and the hour. Morgan, you’re outta here.

Morgan: “You know, I heard you had balls big enough to come in a dump truck, but uhh…you don’t look like much to me.”

Dalton: “Opinions vary.”

Morgan: […]

Morgan does not have the right temperament for the trade, but he does know a threat when he sees one. To a fault, perhaps. His biggest fault as a bouncer, aside from working for the local crimelord, is that he exists in a permanent state of bouncing. To Morgan, every customer is a peckerhead who’s been slugged in the gut and physically thrown through the front doors into the parking lot—they just don’t know it yet. Morgan’s great task in life is to be the one to inform them, with his fists. Witness the first thing he says to Dalton: “And if you’re not drinkin’, you’re outta here.” This is just after he ejected Mister Nipple to Nipple, and in the process upended a table and sent several perfectly pliant patrons of the establishment ass over elbows to the ground. You’d think he’d have bigger fish to fry, but no: The silent stranger with the magnificent head of hair is another threat waiting to be neutralized. Morgan is a preemptive strike in a sleeveless green t-shirt. Existing in this state of constant certitude—that everyone’s an asshole but you, and that it’s your job to pound that knowledge into them—makes Morgan ill-prepared to brook even the slightest dissent.

Witness the above exchange after Dalton’s first night visiting the Double Deuce. Morgan has just participated in a bar-wide fight that leveled nearly everyone and everything in its path; Dalton sat the whole thing out, observing from a distance and then meeting in Tilghman’s office for an off-screen tête-à-tête. So perhaps Morgan’s skepticism about Dalton’s martial prowess is warranted, though expressed it a needlessly condescending way.

To his credit, Dalton doesn’t even disagree with him, not explicitly. He neither confirms nor denies whether his balls are big enough to come in a dump truck, or whether he looks like much, or whether he is much. All he says is “Opinions vary,” and that’s enough to transform Morgan’s whole affect to a comical degree. (Terry Funk is a perform accustomed to playing to the cheap seats, after all.) He goes from a smirking prick to a puppy who just heard “Bad dog!” within about one second, all because Dalton suggested that points of view exist besides Morgan’s own. That’s it, that’s all it takes. If Dalton had walked right up and cold-cocked him it would have had less of an impact.

Aside from Dalton and Wade Garrett themselves, Morgan is by all appearances the most experienced bouncer in the film. Not for him, the Dalton Path. Not for Morgan, the Way of Wade Garrett. The Morgan Idea holds that Morgan is the master of everything and decides everything. Dalton’s simple statement that this is not so strikes at the man’s very soul; by resisting he has signed his own death warrant. That dump truck is barreling down the road toward him at 100 miles an hour, loaded for bear with Dalton’s balls, and he is constitutionally incapable of getting out of the way until he kisses the grill.

Here in the Double Deuce, after Dalton’s arrival, prior to The Agreement and the subsequent bar-destroying brawl, things are proceeding as one assumes they always proceed. Denise, Jasper’s sole indication that there is a non-Jasper culture out there to which one can aspire, glides up to the bar to ask Pat McGurn (John Doe, cofounder of X, lest we forget) for a “vodka rocks.” Enter the Barfly, and this is actually how he’s credited, “Barfly,” played by Frank Noon. In a film teeming with barflies he is selected as the representative specimen. This absolute slob, I mean maybe the most gormless motherfucker in the whole film, this asshole sidles up to her and says “Hey, Vodka Rocks, what do you say you and me get nipple to nipple.” I hesitate to call this pickup line a euphemism, because it’s actually much more vulgar than describing the sex act outright. Getting nipple to nipple is a phrase that can only make one feel bad about having sex, or wanting to have sex, or being capable of having sex, or being part of a species that propagates itself by having sex. It embarrasses me anew every time I hear it. Goof coming out of his well armed with his quip to slutshame mankind. Point is it’s not happening for this turkey. Denise looks down in contempt, unconsciously mirroring the way Dalton, whose hair is only slightly less magnificent than hers, looks down in disapproval. Then she looks up and, this being Road House, shoots the guy down in the strangest possible way. “I can do that without you,” she says, before turning away and giving Dalton an appreciative once-over (more like a thrice-over actually, she is hot to trot for our hero) in the process. The reasonable interpretation of this rejoinder is that Denise can somehow aim her breasts at one another so that her nipples can touch, a pincer movement if you will. I choose to believe she thought fast and decided to shoot this goofy down by saying something even weirder than he did. Either way, and I hope you’re sitting down for this, he does not take rejection well. See Morgan back there? He’d been leaning on the bar in the background unseen until the dirtball mooselipped chickendick made a pass at Denise. (Do people make passes at other people anymore? When I was a kid Three’s Company and The Golden Girls had me believing that’s all anyone did as an adult. “He made a pass at me” is something I’ve never heard a human being say outside of a multi-camera sitcom. Anyway) The moment after “nipple to nipple” dribbles out of his mouth, Morgan pops into the frame from behind, like a fucking jack-in-the-box. It’s one of my favorite little moments of abject stupidity in the movie. On his worst day in the ring, Terry Funk couldn’t oversell a bump half as hard as he oversells Morgan overhearing someone hit on his secret boss’s girlfriend and getting mad about it. Of course Morgan is always mad. He’s an orneriness elemental. And he puts it to good use when Mr. Nipple angrily grabs Denise by the shoulder. Morgan grabs him by the shoulder, punches him in the gut, and tosses him into a table full of patrons, spilling him and them and the table and the drinks on it and several bystanders to the ground in the process. Why this doesn’t lead to an apocalyptic bar-wide battle royale is beyond me given that The Agreement ends in a nearly identical fashion, but at the very least it gives Dalton, serene and detached, an eyefull of Morgan’s modus operandi. This is clearly a bouncer who will need to be bounced. So! Beautiful, slightly weird woman. Ugly, very weird man. Angry, very angry bouncer. Knocked-over tables. Knocked-over patrons. Pat McGurn. The malign influence of Brad Wesley behind it all. Dalton has just gotten nipple to nipple with the Double Deuce. It’s not pretty.

When Dalton fires Morgan, the irascible bouncer played by pro wrestling legend Terry Funk, from the Double Deuce because he doesn’t have “the right temperament for the trade,” Morgan reacts as if determined to prove this was the right decision. “You asshole,” he growls. “What am I supposed to do?” “There’s always barber college,” Dalton deadpans in reply. The rest of the staff laugh at Morgan then, openly and for what I’d imagine is the first time. Dalton has defanged him.

Pointing his finger in Dalton’s face, Morgan delivers his farewell prediction: “You’re a dead man.” He nearly smacks his severance check out of Tilghman’s hand as he grabs it, then storms away.

Road House fans—Roadies—enjoy this interaction a great deal. It’s at least partially obvious why: How often do you get to see Patrick Swayze (Dirty Dancing) and Terry Funk (Halloween Havoc ‘89) tread the boards together? But it’s Funk’s innovative line readings that make this a standout scene.

He previews the direction he’s headed when he calls Dalton an asshole, which he pronounces “asshole,” emphasis very much on the second syllable and, one assumes, that particular aspect of the anatomy. Two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response, right? For Morgan—and he’s not the only person in the film to pronounce the word in this way—”hole” is the lead noun, not “ass.” In his eyes, Dalton is less the cheeks than the evacuating void between.

Still, this might have escaped notice were it not for the coup de grace: not “You’re a dead man,” as every other person in the history of the English language has pronounced it, but “You’re a dead man.” Here, the rationale is a bit harder to parse. Surely no matter what spin you put on this, dead is the most important, and insulting, aspect of the phrase, right? Dalton already knows he’s a man. Dead is the newsworthy part. And in making himself the bearer of this bad news, Morgan is issuing a threat. (This is all obvious, I know, but we’re being methodical.)

So why emphasize “man”? Not to praise Dalton, that’s for sure, despite the rubric established by asshole. He’s putting man front and center in the Shakespearean, “What a piece of work is” way. If we think of Dalton as a man, a human, we imagine all that entails: his infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood; his need to breathe, eat, drink, sleep, excrete; his social and biological drives to form community and find a mate; his hopes and fears and lusts; his prodigious skill and significant renown as a bouncer-philosopher; his future in all its possibility and inevitability. One pissed-off ex-coworker later and this could all be gone, a man reduced to meat and thence to nothing at all. In his own dimwitted way, from a brain that processes only rage and schadenfreude, Morgan is driving home what Dalton stands to lose, and what he plans to take away.