Western Swing: Jazzercise for Drunks

For ten years, let’s say roughly from the day I turned 27 until I turned 37, I danced in the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar six nights a week, five hours a night. Roughly. It varied a bit but not as much as you would expect.

Dancing was life, there for a while, but problems arose because the bands played forty-five minutes then took a break for fifteen and I didn’t have anything to do for the fifteen other than drink. Every night, for years and years, I mixed four or five hours of extremely aerobic exercise with at least five drinks. Jim Beam with a splash mostly. I daresay I was one of the healthier drunks in Wyoming.

What kicked off the dancing and drinking chapter of my biography was this: The nice girl I married left me. We’d more or less raised each other from childhood and she was ready to grow up. Here is self-evident truth 2.) “The only thing worse than breaking up with your first love is not breaking up with your first love.”

I hate to think of all I would have missed if she hadn’t had the courage to go.

But, a couple months after she left I realized I was suffering from Failure to Flourish. This is a real syndrome, by the way, only it rarely afflicts people over two. It means if you don’t touch a human for months at a time, you’ll get really weird. It’s even worse for writers. My friends were imaginary to start with. I knew I was in trouble when I found myself trying to cop a fingertip-to-fingertip feel off the cashier at the Wort coffee shop.

Then, one fateful night I wandered into the Cowboy Bar and there they were — women, waiting to be touched. All you had to do was learn how to dance Western Swing. Thank God this was in the days before the ten-step or I would have had to make friends with sheep. Western Swing involves holding hands and rocking back and forth. You spin, your partner spins, every now and then the couple stands side-by-side in a near cuddle.

I couldn’t believe it! Touch… Lots of touch and all I had to do to earn it was drink like a college freshman. Katy (the wife I mentioned; nice woman) and I were one of those couples who spend 24 hours a day together, day after day, year after year, until you realize you haven’t spoken to anyone including the wife in six days, so I wasn’t too adept at talking up the girls between dances, which is why I drank during the break.

I lived one block from the bar. Driving dunk wasn’t an issue. I do recall drawing a map to my apartment on a bar napkin one night before I passed out and waking up at home. Lord knows who took me there.

Mostly I was a dance object and my partners were Platonics who were beautiful but wouldn’t have taken me home with them if I’d been the last cow poke on the range. Real cowboys watching didn’t know this so I developed an undeserved reputation as a chowhound. After a couple of years, I started developing R.I.s (Romantic Interests). The Platonics and I spent most of our time together and communicated through dance or even conversation. The R.I.s filled the other gaps. The R.I.s hated the Platonics and I was too vague to understand why.

“I’m monogamous,” I would say, in my defense.

“You’re sick,” the Romantic Interests would shout as they headed out the door.

I thought this was normal.

Anyone who has read my first novel, “Sex and Sunsets,” has read all this guff before. While the plot of that book is a figment of the imagination, the spirit is true. It’s a lot more factual than what passes as memoir on Oprah. Except, of course, in the book I get the girl in the end. Novels tend to turn into daydreams for the last fifteen pages.

An aside: The American cowboy is the only profession I know of with its own art forms. You’ve got your cowboy dance, cowboy poetry, cowboy music, and cowboy art. Lawyers don’t have genres of poetry named after them. Carpenters don’t have carpenter dances. All they have are the ants.