Crazy Uncle Mike

Some may never live, but the crazy never die. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Huskers, The Rolling Stones and a Midget Cowboy

It was the spring of 1989 and my office-mate leaned back in his chair and said, “Hey, want to see the Stones at Busch Stadium in September?”  I said yes quickly, I’d never seen the Rolling Stones in concert and they were getting old so you never know when their last tour might happen.  It’s now 2024, and they’re still touring, amazing.  So I ponied up my cash and he said that his friend in St. Louis was handling the tickets.  She was in grad school there and we’d be staying with her the weekend of the show.

September arrived and we jumped into my friend’s Olds Delta 88 and hit the road.  For those of you who don’t know, the Olds Delta 88 was a massive sedan, V8 much like the former cop car in the Blues Brothers movie.  We’d also be meeting one of his high school friends in St. Louis to round out the foursome for the show.

We got into town late the night before the show and crashed at his friend’s apartment, his buddy also arrived late that night and the huskers reminisced about growing up in Nebraska and for those of you who don’t know Nebraska is called the cornhusker state.  We had a few beers and crashed out on the couches.

The next day we went to brunch and hung out at the apartment a bit.  We headed toward the stadium to pre-game a bit before the concert and get dinner.  Busch Stadium is huge and we had ok seats.  The show was really fantastic, the band sounded great and I was with a couple of absolute die-hard Stones fans who were seeing their favorite band for the first time so it was a joyous occasion.

As the show wrapped up we took our time wandering out of the stadium, none of us interested in navigating the behemoth that is the Olds Delta 88 through the inevitable post-concert crush.  As such, we’d packed a cooler with a few cans of beer to enjoy as things thinned out.  The huskers were excited about our post show plans.  We were heading for the Madison Bar and Grill in East St. Louis to see Rondo’s Blues Deluxe.  Now if you’re not familiar with St. Louis, East St. Louis is racially 95% black.  When we walked into the Madison Bar and Grill it felt like the scene in Animal House when the frat brothers walk into the bar to see Otis Day and Knights.  We were the only white people and I swear the whole place stopped and looked at us.  And we weren’t just white, I’m the second whitest man in America (there was a contest), and I was with three ghost white folks from Nebraska, hell our driver, she was damn near an albino with fine super light blonde hair.  And let me add to that description, she was about 5’7” and very thin, maybe about 110 pounds.  She was bright, a graduate student in psychology and super nice.

We were seated at a table, conspicuously right in the center of the bar.  The huskers were fired up and excited about the band, a band that had supposedly won an award as the best blues band in St. Louis several times.  Given the blues scene in St. Louis that’s a heavy duty endorsement.  So we ordered up a couple of pitchers of beers and some appetizers.  And to the horror of this half-Italian kid from NY one of the appetizers was raviolis, FRIED raviolis.  I was freakin horrified, what is this atrocity?  In fact, they weren’t half bad and after an extensive lecture from me about how fucked up mid-western food culture was, we settled in and the band came on and Rondo’s Blues Deluxe was a damn fine band.  Now, we’d had some drinks at lunch, at dinner, we’d pre-gamed before the show, had a couple of beers at the show and one after.  We were now drinking again, it was starting to add up and a thought hit me, who the hell was gonna drive?  So I leaned over to my friend and asked that very question, his response was, she is.  I was incredulous, the 110 pound woman who was going round for round with us?  He laughed, “She’s a freak of nature, she can’t get drunk, she’ll be fine.”  I’d had enough to drink at that point that this sounded perfectly logical to me and the night went on.

The band continued to play, the beer continued to flow, my friend’s buddy began to seriously fade.  At one point while the band went on a break, he got up to go to the bathroom and was obviously very drunk as evidence by his staggering walk to the restroom.  A little bit later he returns to the table and he’s laughing hysterically like some kind of drunk hyena.  The kind of laughing where you are trying to talk but you can’t get enough air and just start laughing again.  Finally, he settles down and says, “I have a riddle.  What do you say to a 300 pound black man taking a shit?  Ooops, excuse me.”  Then he bursts into hysterical laughter again.  It took a few minutes but we finally got him to tell us semi-coherently what the hell happened.  Apparently he stumbled into the bathroom and the urinals were all taken so he went to pee in a stall.  He stumbled and fell through the stall door and right into the lap of the one and only Rondo, of Rondo’s Blues Deluxe while he was sitting there taking a shit.  We thought maybe he had hallucinated it until the band returned and Rondo shot a look of daggers at Paul as he took the stage.  This was when I first started to wonder if Paul would get me killed that night.  But the weirdness was just getting rolling.

We were all pretty damn drunk at this point and I hear this voice next me, “hey, how you guys doing tonight?”  Of course, the voice sounded like the head of the Lollipop Guild for the Wizard of Oz.  Which of course I thought was just my inebriated brain misfiring, until I turned toward the voice.  And there, standing next to me, was a midget drinking a beer, fully dressed in cowboy gear.  Yes, a white midget cowboy in a blues bar in East St. Louis.  At this point it had been over five years since I’d dropped acid, but in the moment I was absolutely convinced I was having some kind of weird ass delayed flashback.  At least until our drunk friend pointed his finger at him, laughed and slurred, “Look, a fucking midget cowboy!”  That sealed it, he was real.  So, I did what you do when you meet your first midget cowboy and started asking him questions, his name, where was he from, what did he do?  It was that last question that kicked the surreal into overdrive, he claimed, in his full-on Lollipop Guild tone that he was a blues singer.  Not only a blues singer but one of the best in St. Louis, he claimed to be able to mimic any blues singer who ever lived, he even claimed to be able to sing just like Rondo, the 300 pound black man whose voice was shaking the rafters in the bar.  It was too much for my drunk brain to process and we just kind of stopped paying attention to the little guy until he moved on.

As the night continued on bathroom stumbling friend completely dropped out.  I looked over at one point and there he was face planted on the table.  I called to my friend to see if he was ok.  My friend grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head up.  He twisted his head to face him and asked if he was ok.  His mouth moved and apparently it was sufficient evidence and my friend said, “He’s fine,” and let his hair go and it dropped face first and head-butted the table.  It was at this point we decided it was probably time to go.  We shook our friend to consciousness and got him to his feet.  Getting outside into the fall air seemed to wake him up fully and he started being a full-on drunken idiot.  He was doing that thing where you kick or slap the side of something and pretend to hit your head on it at the same time.  He did it on a sign, a mailbox and then on the side of a white, windowless panel van, each time bursting out in crazed laughter.  I was closest to the driver’s door on the van when this happened and almost immediately a short Hispanic dude was leaping out of the driver seat and pointing a revolver in my face and pulling back the hammer.

I started saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa it wasn’t me.” And I put a finger on the side of the barrel and the dude let me direct him to point it right at our druken friend, who like the other two was standing there frozen in the street staring at the gun with Looney Tunes sized surprise eyes.  I went on to explain what he had been doing and that yes, he had slapped the van but there was no damage.  The dude looked like he was softening a bit and I said, “If I knock him the fuck out will that make up for what happened?”  He half-nodded and I spun around and punched our drunk friend right in the jaw dropping him to the street.  I then looked back to see the dude getting back into the van with a small grin on his face.

So we picked our idiot friend off the ground and piled into the Olds Delta 88 and headed back to the apartment.  And to my absolute amazement our tiny blonde friend was an amazing driver.  We got back to the parking lot at her complex and tried to pull the idiot out of the backseat of the car.  Every time we got him and pulled him up, he’d misjudge the opening and slam his head into the top of the door frame and then fall back onto the seat.  After the third time, we called baseball rules and just locked his ass into the car to sleep it off.  We cracked the windows, but this is St. Louis, in September.  By about 9AM it was about 75 degrees and 90% humidity and the temperature climbed quickly.  But in the morning sun in the parking lot, it was likely well over 90 in that car by 9AM.  We were passed out in the living room when were awoken by a scratching sound on the front door.  My friend yelled out that the cat wanted to go out, she yelled back that she didn’t have a cat.  Scratch, scratch, scratch.  My head is screaming and I can’t fathom moving, neither can my friend.   Scratch, scratch, scraaaaaatccchhhh.  My friend can’t handle it and gets up and goes to the door and rips it open.  There is the idiot, he’d literally crawled from the car and was laying on the stairs, soaked in sweat and scratching at the door.  My friend helps him up and into the bathroom, laughing the entire time and comes back into the living room and relays the sight.  We hear him in the bathroom, “Why do I have lumps on my head, what happened to my jaw?”  I’m lying there, amused, eyes closed, head thumping and I hear the crack of a pop top, my eyes pop open and my friends starts laughing hysterically.  He said my eyes looked as big as dinner plates as I stared at what was thankfully a Dr. Pepper, not a beer, and at that moment I realized, you should never drink with huskers.