Life-Warp Factor Size Six, (Petite). Engage!

One for Birdie and, probably not her boys....

The year was 1987. I was four years out of five on foot in my home town after my second DUI.

It was like being sentenced to 'town arrest' which meant you still had to earn a living and they didn't feed you.

I'd had my own print shop and sold it for the equivalent of cheesecake shares in a beefsteak mine, been all over and now was back at the theatre...

I once again lived in a sleeping room over a Polish restaurant and worked nights running the Depression era movie theatre that I had gone to as a young boy.

I'd shown up then as a kid on many a Saturday with my six RC Cola bottle caps and 85 cents for bus and a Krystal hamburger for lunch on Saturday mornings.

Now I tended bar, ran the movie equipment and herded waitresses with one eye on the door for armed nurses and gambling collectors in this wonderful old theatre.

I had been management staff in the biggest printing house in the area when I lost my license, now I was assistant manager in a draft movie house that sold cold beer and hot pickles, but that is another story.

Assistant manager in this case meant that when I got there the manager, who was also the owner, left.

He had a bit of a gambling habit, one bad enough to have a couple pretty dangerous looking Hispanic types come up from Miami and be looking for him on occasion.

I ended up working every night, running the whole shebang from starting the movie to counting out the four or five waitresses at the end of the night.

I had finally threatened to quit and had wrangled Sundays and Mondays off.

There had been a woman of course, there was always (and sometimes still is), a woman.

She'd disappeared the week her divorce had come thru, but still turned up often enough to cause small problems like shooting at me, but that too is not this story tonight.

I'd had the year from hell.. a couple years ago. I'd resurfaced as a man, started to pull myself out, and well... see above.

A couple years had passed, I'd recovered and was reinventing myself again.

I was just about ready to kick this life and become someone else.

This would be my last story above the Rustic Inn.

Now,... where I lived over the Polish restaurant, I had, off and on, over the last couple years several roommates including two guys named 'Joe'.

'Big Joe' and 'Little Joe'; they started out to be, but since Little Joe had a hobby of falling in love with topless dancers, lavishing his janitor wages on them in spurts, (no pun intended), and being broke between... to the point he'd almost never leave a tip anyplace people worked with their clothes on, he became known as "a stiff".

He used to buy lovely but essentially cheap wristwatches by the half dozen to give these ladies...

I'd once commented, "so THAT'S what you buy a woman who wears nothing to work."

'Big Joe' would jump his case every time we went out for a pizza, or a burger, or to one of the eight bars that were in a four block radius near the 'Rustic', yelling at him about 'stiffing' bartenders and waiters.

"YOU'RE A STIFF" Big Joe would shout and Little Joe would whine right back in his high reedy voice, "NO _YOU_ ARE".

So they became known as the Big and Little "stiffs".

This Sunday was the Little Stiff's birthday.

As I said, he had a hobby of collecting topless dancers, or, they his paychecks anyway.

He'd fall in love with some of the sweathogs in a matter of fifteen minutes and since he had the appeal of a puppy with three legs, they'd play to his weaknesses, money or not.

Little Joe had had the misfortune to be born with a moderate case of that birth defect that makes smallish but not dwarfed people with big somewhat misshapen heads, exaggerated features and skinny bodies and sometimes very very strong muscles.

As if this wasn't bad enough when he was about nine he'd taken a fall in a line going into a restaurant down into a Cleveland stairway and had his right arm broken in a dozen pieces.

The ER Doc was drunk.... so drunk in fact that he passed out while manipulating the nasty mess he'd made of Joe's already mostly ruined arm and fell into the open arm rendering it septic.

The amazing thing was he didn't lose the arm, but it was never much more than a hook or a club after that. a very STRONG hook.

When I met Joe he was about 28, a couple years younger than the rest of us and rather childlike in many ways.

He's do anything for you, if it suited him, but not much suited him if you catch my drift.

There was an element of the user about Joe. He lived depending on his disability to gain him sympathy everywhere but at work.

At work he worked like a madman, proving that he was as good as anybody else.

As I said this was his birthday, and of course the ONLY place Joe wanted to go was the Shark Lounge, at the corner of A1A and Broadway on the beachside.

The Shark was a dive I had worked in a few years before, barbacking and 'helping' as well as pulling soggy drinks at times, or working the door.

As with many of these places, now I didn't know a SOUL there including who even owned the place.

I did know it was now a biker 'property' bar though as most of the girls were 'owned' by a local chapter of a national bike club, and it was Sunday afternoon.

"Hey Stiff!", (everybody he liked was a 'stiff'), big Joe called down the hall to me, "we are takin' the Little Stiff to the Shark for his birthday, you're comin' aren't ya???"

"Jeez Joe, I dunno there is a program on the box I wanted to watch tonight"... was my reply.

"Hey, it's Sunday, we work tomorrow! we won't be out late!" he assured me.

"Well I guess so, long as I can get back by nine o'clock" I said.

"Sure Buddy, no problem" he replied.

How many times have I heard that, knowing full well I was screwed...

So we went.

A friend who still had a car and a license took us over and stayed an hour or so, then had to leave. No big deal, we had walked home many a night from farther than this.

Seven O'clock came and went (yes in a topless bar that IS a pun!), eight O'clock came, sputtered a moment and then was gone, and at some point somebody, I don't know who bought a lap dance for me with a woman I'd been admiring, lovely little thing, and a cut above the rest of the hard eyed sweeties in there.

Now it's eight thirty, and I have to decide what to do. This takes awhile because I'd been imbibing along with the boys and had eaten nothing all day but a bowl of fish chowder downstairs next door and THAT may not have been a good idea.

During Spring Break, Bike Week, and NASCAR foolishness of various kinds, the Shark had put on mud, Jello, and Cole slaw wrestling with the girls already nearly naked getting explicitly so.

They'd be rolling around in the pit off to the side of the big place in the muck of whatever substance was 'on' that week.

Since it was off season and ballgame time they had pulled the big BIG projection TV out a storage area in the back and slung it from the ceiling.

This was easily the biggest TV I had ever seen, then or since and it was at LEAST the size of a king sized bed.

I'd been chatting with the bartender, had told him I'd worked there a couple years back, struck up a easy going friendly banter and now I said,

"Well Ed you better call me a cab, and DON'T you dare call me a cab!"

"why Mac? Where you goin'? Your buddies are just warming up....", was what I got back.

I looked over at the Stiffs, Little Joe with a girl on each knee, Big Joe egging him on, and thought, "oh what the hell"...

"Ed, Does that big damned TV work" I asked him, and is it hooked up to cable?"

"Sure Mac, is there a game on?" he asked back.

"uh.... Nooooooooo, it's complicated" I replied,  "but I tell ya what,... I'll buy a couple rounds for myself, my buddies, those two girls, and you if I can watch the teevee".

He thought about it a minute, it was a pretty slow Sunday night, we WERE the crowd for the most part, and walked over to the managers office in the back of the package store up front and spoke with him.

In a minute or two he came back with the remote and handed it to me saying,

"keep the volume down, we got a business to run here."

So I got a chair, pulled it up over in the far side of the room, got all of us a couple beers, put my feet up on the edge of the rough coquina and concrete mud pit and at five minutes to nine on September 28, 1987 turned on the huge teevee.

I fiddled with the controls for a few minutes to get it set where it wouldn't interfere with the canned crap that they were playing for the girls dancing, and waited a bit skeptically for the next installment of a rather hackneyed dream that I had been following since I was young enough to be sent for a shower before bed and missed the intro to almost every weeks show.

I saw the two hour premier of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the Shark Lounge in Daytona Beach Florida.

I started out sitting over there all alone, hunched forward so I could hear, nursing an expensive beer and wondering just how in the hell I had gotten into THIS...

The show ended with the front door locked, all the girls, the bartenders, and all the patrons except for two very drunken guys who insisted on dancers dancing. The dancers gyrated with eyes glued to the king sized bed teevee across the room, and would scamper back as soon as their trick was done.

The show itself was a dog.

"ENCOUNTER AT FARPOINT", which later was broken into a two week potboiler and run into the ground like all the rest of it, but THAT night, we'd never SEEN anything like this, and something.... something odd and strange and wonderful passed between all of us, clothed and unclothed, biker and 'citizen', young and old, except the two guys over at the end of the runway.

And I doubt any of us has ever forgotten it.

IT was a topless joint when we came in, by the time I shut the teevee down and we left, it was an outpost of the future.

And that as they say, is history.