their shirts on . The first two lines go:
Hey, lady, please donât show them tits
Youâve done run all the bikers off and youâre scarinâ all the kids
This song pretty much brought down the house.
It occurred to me that, though Iâd never heard of a genre called Trailer Park Rock, this was pretty much what this music was; that Rusty and Mike were performing songs that Jimmy Buffett might have written had he grown up, say, dirt-poor in a storm-damaged double-wide with cars up on blocks in the front yard. Once you cut past the humor, the music seemed to have an appealingly raw honesty that went down well on the Redneck Riviera. In their own way, Rusty and Mike sold a lot of beer.
Iâd later learn that of the two, Rusty McHugh, a big-boned, long-haired guy who looks like he couldâve been the bouncer at Woodstock if Woodstock had not been a love-in, was the songwriter. His sidekick, Mike Fincher, played straight man on guitar and backup vocalsâwell, straight man, if looking uncannily like one of the stoned-out players in the band ZZ Top could be called straight. When their set ended, I went up to introduce myself and buy one of the CDs they were peddling. Rusty, staying completely in character, said I could steal it if I wanted to, as long as I spelled his name right in the book. (I paid, and promised to spell his name right anyway.)
I went outside into the dazzling late afternoon sun looking for Body, hoping to observe some serious beer wrangling. It was broiler-hot now and the crowd was a rippling sea of T-shirts, tank tops, and swimsuits and it was hard to spot a hand that didnât have a beer in it. The aroma of boiled crawfish filled the airâa serious beer association for me. I got in line and after about fifteen minutes snagged a Heineken, then started pushing my way through the mob. I figured a black guy in a sea of white faces would be pretty easy to spot, but it took about half an hour.
I finally caught up with Body pushing a dolly laden with about a dozen cases of Bud into one of the outdoor coolers over by the faux tattoo stand. I stepped into the cooler with him. His face and polo shirt were drenched in sweat and he was consulting with a helper about a crisis: this particular beer cooler, having been opened so many times already, was registering 60 degrees. Thatâs a nice temperature for an air-conditioned room but thatâs not cold enough for mainstream lagers like Bud. (The Bud people, in fact, recommend you drink their beer at 40 degrees F.)
As Body puzzled over how to resolve this, he said heâd already pushed about 600 cases into coolers and expected to reload them with at least 600 or more tonight. Heâd been at it since nine this morning; he figured heâd be done at 2:00 A.M. He then unloaded the hand truck in silence, wrestled it outside, and trundled off to reload.
I decided not to follow; I realized a lot of hard work went into beer wrangling but not much drama. Later, I asked Body, after three consecutive eighteen-hour days of this, if he ever dreamed of pushing beer cases around; he said he didnât, mercifully. The one thing he did worry about, though, was catching cold as he moved from the hot sun in and out of the chilly coolers.
I decided to conduct my own little experiment. I went up to one of the outdoor beer stands and punched up the timer on my watch, interested in knowing how quickly the beer was moving. The answer as that over the ten-minute period that I clocked, five bartenders were serving about 3 beers a minute, or about 180 beers (7.5 cases) an hour. A number of the seventeen beer stations were two-person jobs, so clearly not all were doing this brisk of a business. But this was a sobering amount of beerâconservatively, I calculated, at least 100 cases an hour. It was now 5:00 P.M. ; if that rate were anywhere close to accurate, Bodyâs 600 cases would be gone by eleven.
Joe Gilchrist was doing his part.
1796-1874 Agnes Strickland, 1794-1875 Elizabeth Strickland, Rosalie Kaufman