Technically speaking, Dalton is not the man who murders Ketcham, in the sense that he does not die instantly from being stabbed and carved in the guts. No, he’s still alive when Pat McGurn accidentally blows a hole in his back when Dalton pivots and uses Ketcham to block Pat’s incoming shot. Dalton then withdraws the knife from his dead foe’s belly and lobs it perfectly at Pat, where it lodges in his solar plexus, causing him to misfire his gun one last time before plummeting to the floor one story below and presumably breaking his neck, killing him. So ends the saga of the Sister-Son, the shiftless ex-lover of Frank Tilghman, the Man with the Weak Constitution, Patrick McGurn. And with him dies the instigating incident for the entire Dalton/Wesley War, the firing of Pat McGurn from his job of stealing from the register at the Double Deuce. He won’t be robbing registers ever again. Never again, the dulcet tones of Pat McGurn calling someone “chicken-dick.” Alas, alas, alas.

Pat McGurn is weak. His uncle, his only mother’s brother, Brad Wesley, says so himself: “Pat’s got a weak constitution, you boys know that. That’s why he’s working as a bartender. He’s my only sister’s son, and if he doesn’t have me who’s he got? And if I’m not there, you’re there.” An entire ecosystem of goonsmanship, formed to protect Pat McGurn from the vicissitudes of the mad mad mad mad world outside Brad Wesley’s mansion. Pat may show some sand every once in a while, like when he pulled a knife the size of a newborn baby on Dalton and tried to murder him in front of several witnesses while calling him “chicken-dick,” but in general he’s just the loser who got fired for skimming the till. It’s enough to make you wonder what his former lover Frank Tilghman saw in the guy.

But not here, not now, not with Dalton’s car barreling down on him. Here we see a whole new side of Pat McGurn, a gangly grinning gun-toting side. Look at that shit-eating smile! He pumps that shotgun with a boogie-woogie rhythm in his hips, like he’s mentally saying “yee-haw!” or playing “Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats. Maybe this is just the default setting for actor John Doe, who after all was the frontman for the Los Angeles punk act X. This is Pat McGurn taking the stage and rocking Dalton’s car’s face off. Sadly—sadly for Pat, at least—his performance is about to be cut short.

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.

One of the several hypotheticals Pain Don’t Hurt has entertained at length is my belief that Frank Tilghman is the Emperor Palpatine figure of the story, the secret puppet master behind Brad Wesley who engineered the conflict with Dalton and brought it to a head by orchestrating the murder of Wesley and his associates when they were no longer of any use. Another theory Pain Don’t Hurt has espoused is that Frank Tilghman and Pat McGurn, Brad Wesley’s nephew and Double Deuce bartender, were once romantically involved and that he is therefore and visibly upset about having to fire him. They seem mutually exclusive propositions.

But this is true only if you believe that Tilghman is not just sinister but supernatural. No one can control for all variables, and it’s entirely possible that Frank’s Pat-shaped blind spot prevented him from thinking through the consequences of hiring a man to keep everything on the straight and narrow when your ex-lover is a transparent thief and ringer for the very stooge whose downfall you’re plotting. It’s also possible that Frank knew full well that Dalton would exile Pat from the Double Deuce, and that he deemed this an acceptable loss in service of the larger plan. Indeed, he could have considered it a form of alibi—after all, what kind of man would fire his own ex, for whom he clearly still had feelings, if he himself weren’t morally unimpeachable?

What kind of man, indeed.

As a visual text, Road House is a chest of wonders. Look at this shot from early on in the film, on the night when Dalton first visits the Double Deuce. There he is at his familiar post, in his familiar shapeless beige jacket. There’s Pat McGurn and The Bartender Who Must Not Be Named behind him, conferring about whatever a sister-son and a working stiff who both happen to have the same job at the same place might confer about. (“So what’s it like working with Exene after the divorce? And this Mortensen kid she’s with, is he cool? Because he seems cool.”)

To the left is a power drinker, passed out on the bar; from this we can infer that Pat, ever conscious of the needs of his uncles liquor distributorship, refuses to cut off even the most obviously inebriated patrons, and most likely pressures the Nameless One into doing the same. Given the behavior of the comparatively sober customers, what does he have to lose, really.

To the right is a detail I’m just now noticing: the dry spongy exposed foam of the bar’s padding, chipped and peeled and torn away by the half-hearted vandalism of the drunk and the fixated. Back in the “everything is padded” days of restaurateurship, such artifacts of idle destructiveness were visible everywhere. I haven’t sat on an upholstered seat at an upholstered table in many a long year, but I can feel the satisfaction of ripping away a chip of covering and pulling at the porous brown stuffing underneath like my hands are doing it right now instead of typing this sentence. For all that Road House is rightfully dinged about its lack of realism, even as regards bar furniture specifically (the price of replacement tables alone from the fight about to ensue would put a normal establishment out of business), that’s some real shit.

And to the right of that? Why, that familiar fellow is none other than Brad Welsey’s own Tinker. Has he come to chat with fellow Wesleyans Pat and Morgan about the art of the goon over a few drinks when they have a moment to spare during their busy evenings of stealing from the cash register and erupting into violence over the slightest provocation? Is he additional muscle to make sure Mr. Wesley’s liquor flows without impediment? Is he simply a fan of the Jeff Healey Band? At another time during this sequence he’s seen chatting up some lovely lady; is the Double Deuce his fern bar, his Regal Beagle? Is this Tinker Tinder?

I’m reminded here of the extensive making-of documentaries included in the Lord of the Rings extended edition sets. I don’t remember the exact wording offered by the heads of the various costume and design and set departments regarding their lunatic attention to detail. I do remember the gist of it, though: They would produce intricate designs for the insides of garments and scabbards or for swords that would only be seen from a distance or for rooms no one would even enter or what have you not because the audience would see them, which they knew they wouldn’t. They did so because they were creating a world for the entire production to inhabit, not just the viewer. A cast or crew member who spent a few seconds admiring the embroidery of their breeches would be that much closer to convincingly conveying the reality of a world of orcs and elves and hobbits and magic rings. Look at the shot above, really look at it, and tell me if he war between the world’s most famous bouncers and the maniac mall devleoper who keeps their bar in Jim Beam seems as much of a stretch as it did before.

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.

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.

This, as you know, is Tinker. Broadly speaking he is the comic relief in Brad Wesley’s brute squad, which if you’re familiar with people like Pat McGurn and O’Connor is really saying something. He lurks in the margins of Dalton’s first visit to the Double Deuce, making time with some lady while sitting next to where Morgan’s posted up at the bar. We get our first good look at him approximately five seconds before the Bleeder reads him to filth, to the point where it would probably be better for him if he hadn’t show up at all. His goonsmanship after this scene is largely undistinguished; like most Wesleyans he exists primarily to get his ass kicked, but unlike, say, Jimmy or Ketchum or Morgan you never see him wreck shop in any way. He is the sole survivor among the goons, that’s how little Dalton considers him to be a threat. He gets knocked out of the final fight when Dalton dumps a stuffed polar bear on top of him, during which maneuver Tinker carries on like he thinks the bear has come to life and is about to maul him, like Tuunbaq has come to Jasper to exact further revenge against the colonizers. He is even granted a sort of clemency by the cabal of old men who show up to save Dalton’s ass by Sonny Corleone-ing Brad Wesley: Instead of killing him too, they ask him to participate in the cover-up, which in his own moronic way he does.

But look at this shit up above. Look at it! We’re in Tilghman’s office, where Tinker and O’Connor are muscling him into rehiring Pat. At this particular moment, Dalton is tussling with O’Connor after having broken Pat’s nose and roundhouse-kicked him through a plate-glass window. What did Pat do to occasion this treatment? Whip out a gigantic knife with no provocation and attempt to murder Dalton with it. Having observed all this firsthand, what does Tinker do? You guessed it!

Things wind up going for Tinker much the same as they did for Pat. Dalton kicks him with both feet, forcefully enough to push himself and O’Connor through the shattered window as well. Tinker gets knocked onto the couch, where the other bouncers find him and proceed to immobilize and pummel him. Like one of them holds his arms and the other punches him in the gut. It’s heel tag-team shit, but frankly he deserves it.

Why? Because as we’ve mentioned before, here’s the thing about Tinker: He comes closer to actually killing Dalton than anyone does until the climax of the movie. That knife he whips out and holds aloft like Anduril, Flame of the West? He slashes Dalton in the side with it while Dalton’s in the middle of fending off O’Connor, and if Dalton’s turn toward his new oncoming attacker had been timed just slightly differently his intestines would be hanging out. Dr. Elizabeth Clay would be calling his time of death, not asking what particular philosophical discipline he studied at NYU.

Maybe there’s a lesson in this for us, if we care to look for it. We are all occasionally much better at being ourselves than is our standard. Tinker is, for this brief moment, very good at his job of being a goon—too good, almost, insofar as he came within a hair’s breadth of murdering a man in front of about a hundred witnesses, but good regardless. Most other moments I wouldn’t hire Tinker to whack a piñata, much less the (second) best damn cooler in the business. There’s a Tinker in all of us—a killing machine and a stammering goofus bested by taxidermy. Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar, well, he eats you.

[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.

This is Frank Tilghman, looking at Pat McGurn just before he confirms that he’s firing him, per Dalton’s recommendation. We’ve talked about this scene before, or rather for some reason I wrote a parody of “The Ballad of John and Yoko” by the Beatles about this scene before. We’ve talked about Frank Tilghman’s fist and Frank Tilghman’s grin and Frank Tilghman’s POV and Frank Tilghman’s Buick. But I wanted to take a closer look at Frank Tilghman’s face in this moment. Actor Kevin Tighe spends the bulk of Road House playing Tilghman as though he exists in an entirely different movie; here he looks as if he has an entirely different movie within this one facial expression.

Maybe he’s just registering the gravity of the situation. Dalton has no idea who Pat McGurn is, or who is real boss is more to the point, but Tilghman knows, and Tilghman knows what firing him really means. He’s coming at the king and he’s afraid of missing. Two seconds after Pat’s departure however he’s cracking a dumb joke about how it was a good night at the bar because “nobody died,” which, talk about tempting fate. But all things considered I prefer a different explanation.

The kid had started out as a barback. By the time he applied for the big job Frank didn’t even care he was obviously lying about bartending school. Pat was a wonder to watch back there, thrumming with the energy of youth and seemingly oblivious to its sweat-stained beauty. The first time Frank made a move closing up one night he thought “Why, the kid’s trembling!” but it wasn’t the kid at all.

It was sex at first, sex and that’s all. But it blossomed into something rich and beautiful, despite the their backgrounds. Pat’s mother, Brad Wesley’s only sister, never escaped the streets of Chicago where Wesley himself came up. Tilghman never saw much of the city. State school, baseball scholarship. Bounced from job to job, mostly managerial, never embarrassing himself but never really distinguishing himself either. His folks were old when they had him and by the time they passed there wasn’t much to pass on. He stumbled bass-ackwards into the Double Deuce in the terms of his second divorce, taking it on from his ex’s family. She never really cared for it anyway, but he thought the place had charm, so why not? If nothing else the responsibility would keep him from spiraling the way he did after marriage number one went to shit. And if he could drink to keep the part of himself he could never admit even to himself at bay, well.

Funny thing happened along the way though. Frank fell in love with the place. Then he fell in love with Pat. Music at the Double Deuce, Cardinals games a few times a season. Together. Even stopped drinking, not in time to save the two marriages but maybe in time to do right by the kid and the place of business they shared.

Then things went south, and don’t they always. Frank should have known where the Double Deuce was headed the night he swept up his first eyeballs after closing. He should have known he was so besotted with Pat that he was looking the other way at the younger man’s involvement in the bad element. Money got tight. That bouncer Morgan he brought on, well, he only made things worse. Morgan got close to Pat and Frank wasn’t worried, if you knew Morgan for longer than five seconds you’d know it wasn’t that way for him, but the big man brought out the worst in the kid, and not just the mustache, though yes, the mustache. Funny how all his life Frank worried he’d get a reputation (“You will get a reputation” his mother had said when they found him with Jim Conniff that summer day long ago, and no more was said about the subject because no more needed to be said), when the reputation he should have been worrying about was the bar’s. Different bad reputations for sure, but bad either way. Worse this way, that was the bitch of it. He couldn’t help what he was and there were days, and nights, he thought what he was was beautiful. Not even he could make that mistake about the Double Deuce.

Money got tighter. Security was a joke. The budget for replacement furniture alone was skyrocketing. For a while he thought of simply asking for a cut of the coke sales in the restrooms but didn’t want to bring down the kind of heat that action tends to draw. And Pat…well, Pat was Pat. Kisses sweet with Jack and Parliaments but something he used to see behind those eyes just wasn’t there anymore, if it ever was. Now there was something cold there, something hard, something sly and shifty and shitty. Had it always been there? Had Frank always been too big a fool to see it?

Before long he was coasting on fumes. All the accounts were dry, and the taps were soon to follow. Then one night—and Morgan was standing there in the door the whole time, goddammit how could he have been so stupid—Pat approached him. Not like that, that was over, neither of them had said so because neither had needed to. (Mama would have understood that, he’d thought to himself with a chuckle that tasted like battery acid.) Maybe that would have come to a head eventually, maybe he’d have quit or Frank would have asked him to. Maybe.

But Pat, see, he had this uncle, fella name of Brad Wesley. Yes, the Fotomat. Yes, the ribbon-cutting at Pete Stroudenmire’s Wagon Days. C’mon Frank, you been in Jasper long enough to know Brad Wesley. Throws some good parties, yeah, inn’t that so Morgan? Anyways Uncle Brad, he’s a businessman, all kinds. An investor, you might say. Helping out people all over town, like that Red Webster cross the parking lot. He’s got some cash, for one thing. Liquor too, biggest distributor in the county. Three counties, that’s right Morgan, thanks man. Three counties, Frank! And he’s author-rized me to invite you to his place for breakfast Sunday. Oh you don’t need to know why yet, Frank. Let’s just say it’ll be worth hearing.

C’mon, Frank. For old time’s sake.

Then years and tears and eyeballs later, the second ex’s mother died and wouldn’t you know it, she was fonder of Frank than she’d ever let on. With that kind of money he could have just blown town, set up shop in the Keys, or hell, just retired there. But no, goddammit, no. Let Brad Wesley win? Let him finish doing to the Double Deuce what he’d done to Jasper? To Pat—this Pat-thing behind the bar, wearing Pat’s smell and laughing his laugh and as hollow as the foundation wood that time Frank’s old man showed him the termites? Seemed to Frank the termites had gotten their share, and more than. Seemed to Frank the time had come to, for once in his life, fight. 

And he knew the name to help him do it. Everyone did. And was the man the named belonged to beautiful? Yes he was.

But Frank Tilghman had learned his lessons from the barback. This was not about love, or if it was it wasn’t that kind of love. This was a land-love, a legacy-love, a kind of love Frank Tilghman never felt more strongly than when he looked into the twinkling void Brad Wesley’s eyes and felt it slipping away. It was a love worth the fight.

But oh it was hard, firing Pat. Easy for the cooler maybe, but not for Frank Tilghman, no. No, it was hard and sad and a battery-acid bitch of a thing, and did he have any idea he still felt half this much, half this strong, about the man Pat used to be, the Cardinals game man, the Jack and Parliaments man, the man he’d trembled for? He did not. He felt that feeling inside of him, fighting to get out, pounding against this ears, his heart, his forehead, his hands, the back of his own eyeballs. Who’ll sweep them up, he thought, and fought back what seemed close to madness.

And the feeling caught the words in his throat and held them there. Couldn’t have seemed long to the others, maybe they didn’t even notice at all, but in that Miller Genuine Eternity of a moment Frank Tilghman did not know if they’d ever come out at all. Get out, then, Get out he heard himself say, and it was over.

Almost. He heard Pat’s laugh as he left like a distant thunder and it made him nervous. He cracked a joke, barely realizing what he was saying but realizing even as he said it that this was his last shared thing with that man, like he was giving him a reason to laugh that would travel back in time for him to hear, just to stop that laugh from being the cruel thing it was. The cooler spoke again then. It’ll get worse before it gets better, he said. In that moment Frank Tilghman thought he’d never heard a truer thing in his life.

One thing I never noticed before starting this project, one thing I never noticed before tonight in fact, one thing I never noticed despite watching Road House dozens of times over the course of nearly fifteen years, is that when Brad Wesley’s goofiest goons, Tinker and O’Connor, come to the Double Deuce with Wesley’s nephew Pat McGurn to force Frank Tilghman to overrule Dalton’s decision to fire Pat under threat of physical harm and the cessation of liquor shipments to the bar due to Wesley’s control over distribution in the Jasper, Missouri metropolitan area, and Dalton expresses skepticism about the idea, and Pat almost instantly loses his fucking mind and attempts to slice Dalton open with a knife the size of a Little League baseball bat, and Dalton breaks his nose and tosses him through a plate glass window, and O’Connor assaults him and they both go tumbling through the place where the window used to be, and they fall first to a raised dais and then make their way to the main floor below after O’Connor bumrushes him over the railing, and Dalton pounds the crap out of him and eventually beats him unconscious, and doesn’t even bother to deliver a coup de grace, just kind of holds O’Connor up by his jacket for a moment and then drops him to the ground in disgust, and meanwhile Tinker, who during Dalton and O’Connor’s initial fight in Tilghman’s office punched Tilghman in the gut and then sliced Dalton open with his own knife and then punched Dalton in the face before Dalton kicked him in the chest for leverage to thrust himself and O’Connor through the window, meanwhile Tinker he suckerpunches Younger when he rushes through the door to see what’s going on, but then Hank comes in to help and he and Younger incapacitate Tinker and punch him in the gut while holding him still which is the kind of thing villains do but all’s fair in bouncing, and as Jack and Hank and Younger drag the punchdrunk bodies of their enemies through the bar and presumably to the exit, and Dalton is all covered in sweat and blood and getting ready to head out the back door and go seek medical attention, Tilghman, you remember him, Tilghman staggers over to the broken window and makes eye contact with Dalton and raises his right fist in a gesture of triumph and solidarity that’s one of the most ridiculously obsequious things Tilghman does in the whole movie, which in the parlance of our times puts it in the running for most ridiculously obsequious thing worldwide, I mean Tilghman contributed nothing to the fight, he just got winded by Tinker until he was rescued by the other bouncers, but there he is, small business owner, vicariously victorious in his non-worker role, and Dalton gazes into the fist of Frank Tilghman, as he raises that five-sided fistagon, as the bodies get dragged away.

Road House is a film in which Patrick Swayze beats the shit out of John Doe from X.

It’s simple, really. Sister-son Pat McGurn returns to his former place of employment with his uncle’s most useless enforcers O’Connor and Tinker in tow in order to force proprietor Frank Tilghman to reverse the decision of the bar’s new cooler Dalton and reinstate him to his position of bartender. Dalton takes very mild issue with the plan. Pat whine-gloats like a petulant child who thinks their parents are gonna punish their little brother and not them, then produces a knife the size of a machete and proceeds to simultaneously slash at and gay-panic taunt Dalton. Dalton punches his nose in. While he holds his hands to his broken face and howls in pain, Dalton spin-kicks him through a plate-glass window. He remains incapacitated for the duration of the fight that ensues, after which he is bodily carried out of the bar.

Concerned that Pat McGurn didn’t receive enough punishment? I’ve got you. First it’s important to note that by the end of the film Dalton will murder Pat McGurn, using the body of a dying goon to block Pat’s shotgun blast, then withdrawing the knife he’d inserted into the now dead goon’s gut and throwing it into Pat’s chest, causing him to misfire one last time and then plummet from a second-story landing to the ground below. Second you’ll notice from those screenshots that Pat’s nose was already bleeding before Dalton’s punch connected; you can call this slapdash continuity if you want, but I prefer to believe that either his body anticipated the damage that was about to be done to it and started hemorrhaging spontaneously, or that Dalton caused him to bleed without touching him by sheer force of chi. Or both! I’m not picky.

But here’s the bottom line, friends: Road House is a film in which Patrick Swayze beats the shit out of John Doe from X.

Standing in the bar down in Jasper
Sweeping up the eyeballs for thrills
My bartender’s Pat
Hey, at least I have that
Until when Dalton said he’s skimming the till

Christ, you know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
A man named Brad Wesley
He’s gonna crucify me

Finally found myself with some money
Thought I’d fix the place up just right
Dalton helped me to learn
That my man Pat McGurn
Costs me about a hundred-fifty a night

Christ, you know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
A man named Brad Wesley
He’s gonna crucify me

Pat McGurn’s the son of Brad’s only sister
Canning him’ll take me some nerve
I may own the bar
That only takes me so far
Cuz Mr. Wesley owns the liquor I serve

Christ, you know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
A man named Brad Wesley
He’s gonna crucify me

Wesley takes my money almost every day
“Jasper Improvement Society”
It’s his town he said
Oh boy when he’s dead
The killers will be four men who are old (Tink)

“Take the train, consider it severance”
Pat looks at me raising his brow
Incredulous Pat:
“I didn’t hear you say that”
I stammer “Well, I’m sayin’ it now”

Christ, you know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
A man named Brad Wesley
He’s gonna crucify me

Pat McGurn’s my headcanon lover
Firing him makes me start to pout
His voice is a purr
When he asks “are you sure”
Takes all I have to whisper “get out”

Christ, you know it ain’t easy
You know how hard it can be
A man named Brad Wesley
He’s gonna crucify me
A man named Brad Wesley
He’s gonna crucify me

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.

“I name Éomer my sister-son to be my heir.”—Théoden, The Lord of the Rings

“He’s my only sister’s son, and if he doesn’t have me, who’s he got?”—Brad Wesley, Road House

Not even I, a person with the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my arm who is writing an essay about Road House every day for a year, can come up with much of a connection between the King of Rohan and the Chief Job Creator of Jasper, Missouri beyond the antiquated syntax with which they refer to their nephews, Éomer son of Éomund and Pat McGurn respectively. Wesley isn’t about to name his mustachioed kinsman his successor anytime soon, certainly. “Pat’s got a weak constitution, you boys know that,” he tells his assembled henchmen after two of their number, Tinker and O’Connor, failed to forcibly reinstate Pat in his old gig at the Double Deuce during one of the Knife Nerd incidents. “That’s why he’s working as a bartender.” Poor Pat, not even fit for full-time goonmanship.

Pat isn’t even present to hear this condescension, having slunk shamefacedly into Uncle Brad’s mansion at the first opportunity, allowing his comrades-in-goon to take the heat. Why should he bother sticking around? He knows his place, and it’s not at his uncle’s side. It’s Jimmy, Wesley’s strong right hand and, in my considered opinion, secret bastard son who’s the heir apparent. “I should have let you go, Jimmy,” Wesley says regarding the failed mission, an avuncular (fatherly?) hand on the back of the younger man’s neck. Better for Pat to spare himself the sight.

So no, Wesley’s rhetorical style here doesn’t remind me of Théoden King. Rather, I’m put in mind of another great man.

Jack Lipnick is the head of Capitol Pictures, the studio that hires a certain New York playwright to give a Wallace Beery wrestling picture That Barton Fink Feeling. Like Brad Wesley, he came up the hard way (“I mean, I’m from New York myself. Well, Minsk, if you wanna go all the way back—which we won’t, if you don’t mind, and I ain’t asking”) and rose to prominence and power by exerting control over the local economy, largely by screwing other business owners out of their share (regarding his assistant Lou Breeze: “Used to have shares in the company. Ownership interest. Got bought out in the Twenties. Muscled out, according to some. Hell, according to me”).

The tone Lipnick adopts when speaking about producer Ben Geisler, whom he fires instead of Barton when the latter screws up, sounds familiar. “That man had a heart as big as the all outdoors, and you fucked him!” he says, voice soaring as if with the eagles as he describes the generosity of spirit found in a guy he shitcanned, then cracking like a whip as he drops the f-bomb on the person truly at fault, at least in his eyes.

Though he prefers physical assault to firings, Brad Wesley reacts in similar fashion over his sister-son’s plight, arbitrarily beating his goon O’Connor unconscious for, alternately, being untruthful, unable to admit he was wrong, weak, unable to tolerate pain, cowardly and above all prone to bleeding. O’Connor’s failure regarding Pat may have occasioned the beating, but it isn’t even mentioned during the beating itself as one of Wesley’s half-dozen reasons for inflicting it.

For men like Wesley and Lipnick, people are worth caring about only to the extent that doing so, or pretending to do so, enables them to torment others on their nominal behalf. These men, like their words, are overinflated and empty. The overwrought sentiment intended to conceal the lie reveals it instead.

A person watching Road House from a remove of decades could be forgiven for wondering if packs of pointy-faced dorks with switchblades, roaming the land and stabbing bouncers, were the subject of some sort of ginned-up panic along the lines of Satanic nursery schools and wilding superpredators. No fewer than four blade-wielding wieners try to slice up Dalton before the film is even halfway over. Though as a category they are a distant second to brawlers in terms of goon prominence, they bear examination for what their presence tells us about Dalton’s world.

These two nitwits are the first people in the film to get bounced, from the Bandstand, before Tilghman hires Dalton away from the place to come work at the Double Deuce. The fellow on the right sparks a bounceable incident when he attempts to pay for the attentions of a young woman who finds the offer insulting and pins the hundred-dollar bill he offers her to the table with a knife; he knocks over her chair by planting a kick right between her legs and we’re off to the races. Dalton thinks he and his men have cooled things off, but this weaselly goof yanks the knife right back out of the table and takes a slice out of the cooler’s arm the moment his back is turned. He and his friend Farrah Fawcett are taken outside by Dalton and company, thinking they’re about to throw down with the man himself. (“I’ve always wanted to try you,” says the knife nerd to Dalton prior to exiting the premises. “I think I can take you.” This is another essay entirely.) But their date with immortality is cancelled when Dalton just turns around and goes back inside. They hurl invective at him in an effort to rile his temper or shame him into combat, but not even such vicious insults as “dirtball” and “moose-lips,” which are things these two people yell at the top of their lungs at a man they’re trying to intimidate, can change Dalton’s mind. Later, Dalton will caution the staff of the Double Deuce against taking such insults personally, since they’re just “two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.” That knowledge is clearly hard-earned.

This beady-eyed Parrothead is the first person Dalton bounces from the Double Deuce, earning him the undying awe of the people there assembled. All he wants to do is watch his girlfriend dance on a table. Such a fan of her gyrations is he that he attempts to murder, with a knife, the bouncer who asks them to cut it out. “Motherfucker” is his preferred binominal, but what he lacks in creativity he makes up for in extremely loud shirts. Dalton breaks a table with his face, and thus the cooler’s head prevails.

Here’s our old friend Pat McGurn, Brad Wesley’s only sister’s son and the Double Deuce’s now-ex bartender. He’s returned with his fellow goons Tinker and O’Connor in tow to muscle Tilghman into rehiring him, lest Wesley shut down liquor distribution to the bar. When Dalton takes mild, even bemused issue with the idea, Pat whips out a monstrosity that looks like something Legolas would pull out of an Uruk-Hai before lobbing it into another one’s forehead. As he attempts to stab Dalton in the fucking face in front of multiple witnesses in a crowded bar that can be observed clearly through the glass window of the office in which the murder attempt is taking place, he calls Dalton “chicken-dick.” In the end it works out no better for him than it did for Store Brand Crockett and White Tubbs or Hawaiian Punch, but I’m pleased to note that he at least came up with the film’s most ridiculous insult.

For the purposes of this essay I almost didn’t count Ketchum, the unnamed and fundamentally anonymous Brad Wesleyan who drives the monster truck and for whom bladed weapons are a specialty, as we will later learn to tragic effect. Though he is an obnoxious prig, he actually seems like someone you’d think twice about getting in a fight with. That ought to—ought to—elevate him out of Knife Nerd territory. On the other hand, his first knife attack involves attempting to high-kick Dalton in the head with a blade embedded in the toe of his cowboy boot, one of the lamest attempted murders in the movie, and it’s not like the competition isn’t stiff. Dalton catches his leg in midair, twists it savagely, and drags the guy out of the bar on his ass, which he proceeds to kick. Ketchum may look tough. He may even be tough. He doesn’t call Dalton “shit-ass” or “poodle-sack” or anything. But watch him dragged out to the curb like so much stonewashed garbage and then deny the Knife Nerd within at your peril.

All of these men use the blade as surrogate bravery. They may talk a good game—alright, they may talk a game. But when push comes to shove, they attempt to stab. They can whip out whatever they want in their attempt to try and take Dalton. But Dalton’s blade is his body, honed to a nicety, and it will wind up inflicting a far more serious gash than any knife before the story is through. A true cooler is worth a hundred such cowards.

You can’t make a JC Penney without breaking some eggs. That’s where these fellows come in. Organized crime boss, mall developer, and job creator Brad Wesley employs a small army of goons, thugs, henchmen, minions, and muscle to do his dirty work around the town of Jasper, Missouri. Blowing up an auto parts store, blowing up an old man’s shack, and running over a car dealership with a monster truck are just the most glamorous aspects of the gig: These guys’ main function is to punch people in the face, and get punched in the face in turn. The following is a brief survey of the Wesleyans with speaking parts. You’ll be seeing more of these gentlemen for sure, but this should bring you up to speed.

Morgan

Ornery brute. Originally a bouncer at the Double Deuce. Fired by Dalton because he doesn’t have “the right temperament for the trade.” Doesn’t take it well. Played by pro wrestling legend Terry Funk. Strengths: Looks and acts like a guy who could kick someone’s ass. (Not for nothing did he prompt the “It’s still real to me, dammit!” incident.) Weaknesses: Syllable emphasis.

Pat McGurn

Vicious weasel. Nephew of Brad Wesley. Originally a bartender at the Double Deuce. Fired by Dalton for skimming from the till, sparking the Wesley/Dalton feud. Played by punk legend John Doe. Strengths: Convincingly sleazy mustache. Weaknesses: Uncle’s Boy.

Jimmy

The main man. Wesley’s favorite. Rarely far from his boss’s side. Martial-arts master who fights both Dalton and Wade Garrett to near-standstills. Gets the film’s most famous non-Swayze line: “I used to fuck guys like you in prison!” Played by Marshall Teague. Strengths: Smoldering eyes, witty banter, maniacal laugh, actual fighting skill. Weaknesses: Sore throat.

O’Connor

Middle management. Basso profundo beanpole who leads the expedition to restore Pat to full employment at the Double Deuce, among other crucial tasks requiring minimal competence. Played by Juilliard graduate Michael Rider. Strengths: Business casual wardrobe. Weaknesses: He’s a bleeder.

Tinker

Lummox. Portly core component of the Wesley team. Frequent partner of O’Connor. Partial to trucker hats and suspenders. Played by John Young. Strengths: Comes closer to actually killing Dalton than almost anyone else, inflicting the knife wound that leads to Dalton meeting Dr. Elizabeth Clay; perhaps for this reason he is the only member of the Wesley Organization to find forgiveness and redemption. Weaknesses: Polar bears.

Mountain

The tallest. Towering doofus who serves primarily to dance amusingly during Wesley’s pool party and engage in brief but memorable dick-based repartee with Sam Elliott. Played by Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule fry cook Tiny Ron. Strengths: Hell of a dancer, very tall. Weaknesses: “Give me the biggest guy in the world: You smash his knee, he’ll drop like a stone.”

Ketchum

Serious business. Wesley’s most all-American thug. Trusted with the most hardcore tasks. Almost entirely forgettable despite performing several of the film’s greatest acts of villainy unless you’ve seen the movie enough to write about it every day for a year. Played by stuntman Anthony De Longis. Strengths: boot-mounted knife, regular knife, monster truck. Weaknesses: …wait, who are we talking about again?

Karpis

Man of mystery. Piercingly handsome guy in a smart-looking suit worn with rakish dishevelment. Present in background when Wesley’s chopper lands during the character’s introudction. Present in background when Wesley throws a pool party. Wordlessly witnesses Wesley’s punishment of O’Connor for failing to secure Pat’s job. Tosses Red Webster’s store to keep him in line and says “Life is good” as his one line. Vanishes completely from the film after these four scenes. Lives forever in my heart. Played by Joe Unger, aka Sgt. Garcia from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Strengths: Looks like he plays rhythm guitar for Dr. Feelgood or the Strokes circa the $2 Bill show, dangerously sexy. Weaknesses: Barely in the movie, named “Karpis.”