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had told me that Mullet Toss beer chores largely landed in the lap of guy named Body, who, for lack of a better title, was the Bama’s beer wrangler, and I should look him up when I got to the bar.
    I introduced myself to a woman behind the Bama’s package liquor counter named Susan Poston. She knew what I was up to and directed me to an inner storeroom behind the package store. I found Body (pronounced just like the human body) in a cluttered, tight room surveying the Bama’s vast reserves of beer and booze. Nobody calls Body anything but Body and I wouldn’t find out for a couple of days that his first name was Edmund. Or that he’d worked his way up into this post after spending a few years as the Bama’s janitor, cleaning up the landslide of empty beer cans and bottles after the place closed every night.
    I quickly learned four things about Body: on this overwhelmingly white strip of the Gulf Coast, he was one of the few African-Americans around; he was always busy; he ran the bar’s beer distribution network with the cool of a college quarterback used to dodging rushing linebackers; and he wasn’t a man that anyone would ever accuse of being loquacious. By doggedly following him around all morning and peppering him with questions, I did find out that preparations for the Mullet Toss had begun with a series of meetings starting back in November and that the planning for the event is one part war gaming, but mostly, Body said, “like putting on a county fair without having to worry about the livestock.” The Bama normally has about 150 employees but it hires 50 to 100 extras during the Toss, depending on the weather forecast. Body’s main job is to order enough beer in the right proportions (Bud Light, Bud, Miller Lite, Coors Light, Miller, Coors, and a few imports, pretty much in that order) to serve 20,000 people. Then he has to commandeer a clutch of workers and, with hand trucks, move in a perpetual circuit stocking the bar’s numerous giant beer coolers. This plan is also dependent upon an unusual logistical arrangement: the Bud, Coors, and Miller people agree to park diesel-operated refrigerated beer trucks on a lot next door to the Bama and keep them there for the entire Toss.
    â€œWe just don’t have enough coolers on premise to handle the load,” said Body, who is thirty-something and built like Tiger Woods.
    When I asked other people at the bar what they thought of Body’s job, Susan Poston told me, “Body’s job is impossible. On the ordering side, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Imagine being in a position of having somebody say during the middle of Mullet Toss, ‘Hey, you just ran out of my beer!’”
    I had no idea that a beer wrangler’s life was so pressured. I decided I would come back and watch Body in operation during the height of the Toss—late Saturday afternoon and into Saturday night when Gilchrist had told me the crowds could peak at 5,000 or more.

    Saturday was another clear, warm day and I arrived a bit early because Rusty and Mike were playing on the same bandstand where I’d caught Jezebel’s Chill’n on my previous visit. I’d left town then without being able to hear them and I was curious about a duo that wrote songs about the return policy at Wal-Mart. They’d already started by the time I got there and were in the middle of one of the songs that Steve and Wanda had hinted at regarding a manatee. It was actually a song about a hapless barfly who, his judgment blinded by liquor, went home with a woman he was sure was a beautiful mermaid and “woke up with a manatee.” The room was packed and everybody laughed every time they sang the chorus.
    They then launched into a raunchy though equally hilarious number that sounded like it came straight out of the Bama’s bra-tossing period. It is an appeal for certain kinds of women to keep