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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does the good Doctor think of all this?

You tell me.

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

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

DOC: Hi.

DALTON: Hey.

ALL THREE: [giddy nervous laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

MOUNTAIN: Are you gonna fight, dickless?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

People have been placed on FBI watchlists for less than the way Frank Tilghman greets Wade Garrett upon the aging cooler’s entrance into the Double Deuce. “I know you,” he says, wielding the words like a tongue across Wade’s stubble, like Ramsay Bolton bidding farewell to Sansa Stark before she feeds him to his own dogs, like a flea leaping from a rat to the roughspun tunic of a fourteenth-century European peasant. If I were Wade Garrett I’d have turned around, gotten on my motorcycle, and driven right back to the topless joint with the “DON’T EAT THE BIG WHITE MINT” sign above the urinal. Fortunately for Dalton (busy getting pounded into hamburger out back) and Tilghman (Cui bono) and unfortunately for Wade Garrett himself (“IT WAS TAILS”), Wade Garrett is a braver man than I. He decides that helping his mijo out of a jam is worth braving whatever Gary Heidnik chamber of horrors Tilghman has hidden in the Double Deuce’s expensive redesign and heads to the service entrance to whip the shit out of some goons, and the rest is Road History.

What this makes me wonder, as did Tilghman’s thoroughly sinister introduction of himself to Dalton way back at the beginning of the film a couple hundred days ago, is how many coolers Tilghman went through before finding people who could stand to look and listen to him long enough even to entertain an offer. Maybe at some other bar in New York there’s some other NYU-graduate warrior-poet with some other grizzled graybeard of a mentor, who took one look at the corpse rictus Tilghman calls a smile and had him ejected from the premises immediately. Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, who knows, there could be master-and-apprentice pairs of coolers scattered across these United States, all of whom told Tilghman “My eyes are up here, pal” and then sent him on his creepy way.

As with so much about Tilghman, we’ll never know the rest of the story. Perhaps that’s for the best. In elementary school my gifted class went to see an assembly on UFO encounters in which the speaker wondered if the sudden movements and disappearances attributed to alien spacecraft were not unlike what our own trips to the grocery store must read like to our housepets: We know where we went, but they don’t. I’ve seen this basic phenomenon described also with the metaphor of trying to describe a fork stuck through a paper plate from the perspective of one who can only see the tines poking out of one side, not the whole fork jammed into the other, let alone the human being holding it on the other. Tilghman is as Tilghman does, and any speculation as to what else he might be and do beyond the four walls of this movie must remain speculation. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen; whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Wesley is not the only character in Road House in whose eyes Dalton is but a boy. Three others label him as such, and they could not be more different in tone and intent.

First up is Red Webster, one of the Four Car Salesmen of Jasper, Missouri. An avuncular presence in the film—literally: He is Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s uncle—he asks if Dalton is “the boy from the Double Deuce” when our hero shows up at his store before it opens to have various parts of his car replaced. Just a friendly, getting-to-know-you inquiry, from a guy calling another guy “boy” because he’s younger and he’s just arrived in town. Here, “boy” connotes “newcomer,” someone who is experiencing the world around him with fresh eyes, and who finds himself welcomed by those around him. Excepting the clientele of the Double Deuce as currently constituted, of course.

Next is Jimmy, Brad Wesely’s right hand and bastard son [source for this claim?]. “Your ass is mine, boy,” he growls, gesticulating for emphasis in case the owner of the ass of which he is claiming emphasis was unclear. Wesley has just stopped Jimmy from taking on a roughed-up Wade Garrett and a fresh-to-the-fight Dalton 2-to-1 in the Double Deuce, the night Wesley’s men blow up Red Webster’s store and Denise does an aggressive striptease to further assert Wesley’s dominance or something. Here, “boy” means a man less experienced, less tough, less dangerous, less of a man; Jimmy will use the term again when he sneers at Dalton’s fighting prowess during their eventual mano a mano showdown. (His father, spiritually anyway if not biologically, Brad Wesley will pick up the ass-owning baton and run with it, by the way, but not before Jimmy returns to that well implicitly when describing what he used to do to guys like Dalton in prison.)

The third and final boy-sayer is Wade Garrett. Staggering into the Double Deuce the night after Dalton kills Jimmy, Wade has been badly wounded in a fight with three unspecified Wesleyan goons. Dalton realizes that if Wade is still alive, it could be that the hammer is slated to fall on Elizabeth. He rushes out to find her, but not before assuring Wade that he will grant his mentor’s wish at last: They will leave this town and never look back, allowing Wesley to win rather than keep up a fight that by rights isn’t theirs. Wade looks up at the younger man and smiles. “Attaboy, mijo,” he says. Mijo, of course, means “son”; this is the “boy” of approval, of pride, of love. This is the “boy” of a dying parent’s love for his only child.

“This is Jack. I’m sure he meant well.”

I think it’s only natural to look at this image of Dalton and Denise, Denise sidling up to Dalton to cheerfully and in fact thoughtfully proposition him for sex and Dalton preparing to rebuff her pretty much no matter what she says, and focus on the hair. Those two glorious manes, brown and blonde, male and female, yin and yang, equal and opposite, an Aqua Net Argonath. Do they not suit each other, complement each other, mirror each other? By the end of this film you’ve seen both of these people mostly naked and once you cross that threshold—well, brother, we’re all adults here, and given what’s gone on in the back room of the Double Deuce already I don’t see the percentage in beating around the bush—you want to see these two people fuck. I sure do!

But I want more.

Oh, things work out fine in the Dalton/Doc timeline, for sure. Not for Denise, who gets beaten by Brad Wesley and then does an aggressive striptease on his behalf and then gets ridiculed by Dalton and dragged away and never seen again. And of course not for Brad Wesley and his men, who all get murdered, so hey, maybe things work out fine for Denise after all. But for Dalton and Elizabeth, you know, they find true love, Dalton turns a personal corner and quits cutting and running and gets over his guilt and trauma from the last time he murdered a guy, they have a bunch of no-nonsense sex in there somewhere, the Double Deuce and Jasper are freed from the tyranny of Brad Wesley, and regardless of where you come down on Frank Tilghman the movie implies this is a good thing so let’s go with that.

But sometimes I imagine another world. In this world Dalton does go back to Denise’s place and fucks, it doesn’t kill him, he does even like it. First of all kudos to Denise for maintaining her own apartment or whatever, maybe she and the girls are roommates, it’s a fun situation like Sarah Connor and whatsername at the beginning of The Terminator, just independent women of the ’80s living their dreams, there’s a lot of snickering and giggling when Dalton and Denise offer perfunctory greetings to them while they watch The Golden Girls and then fall into her room together. Second maybe it accelerates the timeline vis a vis Jimmy, Wesley’s top goon and illegitimate son (source for this claim?), who tells Dalton to say Goodnight, Denise. Maybe Dalton actually does say “Goodnight, Denise” in response and it really humiliates and angers Jimmy the way Dalton’s mildest comebacks seem to snap the likes of Morgan and Steve like dry twigs, and so Jimmy participates in the fight that follows with Ketchum and the anonymous goons who look like they’re dressed for Sunday services at a midwestern evangelical church. Maybe this fight is a real backbreaker for Dalton and Jack and Hank and Younger now because it’s five on four and at least two of the participants are pretty dece at fighting or would be if Dalton hadn’t yanked one’s boot off and twisted his ankle and hauled him into the parking lot like a sack of potatoes, but regardless we later see Jimmy beat Jack and Hank and Younger and damn near Wade and Dalton too before Wesley calls it off, so it could get rough. And let’s say Denise finds that boot with the knife in it that Dalton threw, technically we never see where it lands, and she sneaks up behind Jimmy as he’s about to deliver the coup de grace on Dalton and just fucking brains him with it, you see the lights go out right in front of you, it’s kind of horrifying but this abusive psychopath had it coming. And the rest of the goons fuck right off and yes I’m sure Wesley would go absolutely ape shit considering his bastard (?) just got done by his girlfriend, but guess what Brad? She’s not your girlfriend anymore, nope, she’s busy having Dr. Elizabeth Clay who showed up just in time to watch Dalton fall into the arms of another woman treat his wounds. And it’s a touchy thing for a while, what with the police in Wesley’s pocket and now there’s kind of a love triangle developing, and Brad’s acting rashly now, he’s not timing the explosives right for Emmett and Red because it’s like Tinker or O’Connor placing them rather than Jimmy and for all I know maybe Strodenmire gets run over along with his car dealership this time because Ketchum can’t sleep because all he can see is Jimmy’s vacant eyes with his boot embedded in his brain and he’s doesn’t give a fuck who gets hurt anymore because it’s hard to feel anything. But who should ride into town to help Dalton put down this pack of mad dogs but Wade Garrett, just like he always has, and even if Red and Emmett and Pete are all dead this time around there’s still Wade to pull the trigger and save his mijo from becoming what he’s always dreaded, he’ll be his sin-eater and that’s fine, and the Double Deuce will be fine, and Jasper will be fine, and yes Wade comes on to Denise pretty heavy but wouldn’t you know it, this time around Dr. Elizabeth Clay is not spoken for, and the red fucking hot sexual chemistry between the two of them combusts and they’re fucking before you know it, everyone’s fucking up against walls, left and right, like rabbits, because death’s thick in the air, it’s in their brains like a disease, and this is how you treat it, this is palliative care because you need love to feel alive, don’t you, you need to have love and make love to show death it hasn’t fucking gotten you yet, and Dalton and Denise who escaped her abusers and Wade and Elizabeth who escaped that abuser before are still alive and they say as they fuck and love each other goddammit we still have time on this earth and we’re going to live, live, live, live, live, live, live, live, live.

For the past week I’ve chronicled sixty seconds in the lives of Mr. Wade Garret and Dr. James Dalton. (For the purposes of this conversation I’m assuming his degree in philosophy from NYU was a Ph.D.) During this pivotal minute, Dalton calls his old friend and mentor Wade to ask if he’s heard anything about a guy by the name of Brad Wesley. At this point, friends, you and I have talked about Dalton’s initial encounters with the richest man in Jasper: watching him buzz Emmett’s horse corral with his helicopter, swerving out of the way as he sings doo-wop while driving into oncoming traffic, shaking hands and having a brief conversation at Red Webster’s auto parts store, beating the shit out of several of his minions after they try to stab him to death in an attempt to make the Double Deuce re-hire a bartender. I’d say he’s handled all this rather well. What, you might be wondering, occasioned his call for counsel?

These happy assholes.

Dalton catches two of Brad Wesley’s premier goons, Jimmy and Karpis, just as they pull out of Red’s parking lot. Karpis, whom we see exiting the store, has just busted the place up, spilling various motor oils and antifreezes and whatnot all over the place as punishment for Red’s recalcitrance in paying his full “contribution” to the Jasper Improvement Society, the legal name of Wesley’s protection racket.

“Work ain’t work when you’re havin’ fun,” Jimmy says from behind the wheel of the getaway car as Karpis hops in after doing the deed.

“Life is good,” Karpis confirms.

And like that—poof—he’s gone.

One last, lingering, smoldering staredown at Dalton later, Karpis is driven away from the store and right out of the movie, forever. It’s the last we see of him, much to my chagrin, handsome devil that he is.

But oh, his legacy! What Karpis does this day puts Dalton and Wade on a collision course with Jimmy and Wesley, their opposite numbers. The explosion that results, which includes multiple literal explosions, will leave three of those four men dead, and change the face of Jasper forever. And Karpis’s mesmerizing face that sets it all in motion. In that Cheshire Cat grin, I see the future: Life is good, but all men must die.

We joke here at Pain Don’t Hurt. We do. And we laugh, don’t we? We laugh, and we kid. We kid the movie. But I have not decided to spend three hundred sixty-five days of my life—a significant fraction of my life no matter how long I live, a fraction my kids can mention at my funeral for some chuckles—to write about a film I find funny on account of it’s impossible to recognize myself in it. On the contrary. As I’ve said in the past, Road House endears itself to me. Dalton endears itself to me. Patrick Swayze endears himself to me. I like these people, and I like the way they enact…I dunno, the things that people care about. They like to drink and dance and sing and fuck. They have to navigate moving to a new town, meeting new people, taking a new job. They keep in touch with friends. They try to fight against assholes who are ruining it for everyone. Does it matter that they get paid six-figure salaries to toss professional wrestlers out of a bar with a dirt parking lot? Only insofar as that makes it funny. There has to be something underneath to be made funny if the thing’s worth writing about it all.

This is my seventh consecutive day writing about a phone call between Dalton and Wade Garrett that lasts for one minute, to the second depending on what you count as the start or finish. It’s a funny conversation because Sam Elliott pronounces things in an unusual way, because there’s a continuity error I can spin into a CLUE, because at times it seems to undermine the system of bar-fame upon which the rest of the movie depends, because Wade calls Dalton mijo and thus invites an entire range of gutter-minded speculation.

But as Wade’s mile-wide grin when he hears who’s on the phone shows us, these men are friends, and their friendship is, I think, why I’ve gotten stuck on this single minute of film for an entire week. The friendship is what makes it a rich text, not just something you can say a lot of silly shit about. It’s the reason I like it, because it makes me like the men involved.

Wade, for instance. Wade characterizes his current place of work as such a haven for drooling cretins that “This place has a sign over the urinal that says ‘Don’t Eat the Big White Mint.'” Yet earlier—less than a minute earlier, since the whole conversation is over and done in sixty seconds—he tells Dalton that he’s in hog heaven, that “If I was doin’ any better I couldn’t live with myself.” His smile hear shows that he means it: He is thrilled to be working in a place this skeevy and dumb, where the troops charge the stage with water guns and the topless dancers flash him looks of gratitude and attraction along with everything else they flash. He doesn’t need to explain away the apparent contradiction to Dalton, his pal and confidant. He knows the kid’ll understand.

Dalton, then. Dalton seems more at home during his conversation with Wade than at any other point in the film so far other than his chat with Cody, and for the same reason: He’s not trying to impress or intimidate Wade, because Wade is his friend. Moreover, he’s not exhausted, or wounded, or trying to kick someone’s ass. His affect is genial, maybe ever so slightly deferential, the way you sound when you’re talking to a friend you haven’t seen in a while, and you’re just grateful to bask in their presence, so grateful you feel you owe them just the tiniest amount of subordination to whatever would make them happy in the moment. When Wade asks if he’s in any kind of trouble, Dalton tells him it’s nothing he’s not used to; as he does so he kind of tosses his hand up and then down in a hurry, a nervous “aw it’s nothin'” gesture that’s extraordinarily adorable. So is the uncontrollable tinge of chuckle that bubbles up as he says “But it’s amazing what you can used to, isn’t it?” He’s tickled by this, and tickled by his ability to express that feeling, and—again—confident that his friend won’t need this explained, that he’ll just get it. Indeed this occasions the “don’t eat the big white mint” gag, at which Dalton laughs gladly. Just a few seconds earlier he was nervously bringing up the Brad Wesley situation; he’s now able to very sincerely laugh at a very dumb joke simply because Wade’s the one who told it to him.

That Sam Elliott is good in this scene is obvious. He’s playing a sexy funny rough-and-tumble super-bouncer, he sounds like Sam Elliott, he nails it. That Patrick Swayze is good in this scene is crucial. It’s one I’d point people to in order to explain why he and Dalton are so appealing in this picture. There’s an ease to what he does here, a feeling like somewhere out in the multiverse there exists a Patrick Swayze who looks and acts and behaves in this exact way, and they simply traded places for a bit so they could make this movie. “What does this action hero sound like when he calls up one of his buddies” is not a question that gets asked very often, much less answered, much less answered with such charm, and since it’s Patrick Swayze we’re looking at, such beauty.

You leave this phonecall thinking Wade Garrett’s someone you wanna hear some stories from. You leave thinking Dalton’s a guy it’d be fun to grab a beer and shoot the shit with, maybe get a little philosophical in (“It’s amazing what you can get used to”) in the process. You leave thinking these guys are friends. They’re my friends too.

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.