The ‘Dillo

by Lane Michael Stanley
Originally Published in Foglifter 10.2

When Daddy started making more money I knew I had to get the hell out of dodge. His hair was suddenly slicked back, like somebody somehow had paved right over a tumbleweed, and he said, Son, how’d you like to go to one of them prep schools with uniforms like your one friend, what’s his name, the Johnson boy, and I walked out and kept walking and the first bus was headed to Austin so Austin’s where I went. 

The water’s green in Austin. Might not look it now, if it reflects the same color as the skyscrapers that went up all around the river, but when I first got into town there was nothing much taller than a telephone pole in sight of Barton Creek. It was like a jewel melted into the crease of the hills, or like a bead of sweat from some ancient deity who shits purple and sweats green. It was like that. 

I got here and I was prepared to make it on my own, smuggling what I could outta dumpsters and drinking the last few sips of backwash outta bottles I found, but life is full of blessings, because in 1973 the whole state of Texas lowered the drinking age from 21 to 18 just two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, blessings and blessings. I bet easier access to booze was helping the Johnson boy too, but the Johnson boy wasn’t my concern anymore. 

A week in I found a bag of pot, and I traded that (minus a joint or two) for a wide-brimmed hat like a real Texas cowboy, and in the hat I found a little silver locket taped up on the inside like it was precious to somebody, and I traded that for a cheap little guitar that went out of tune at a moment’s notice, and I went to play that on the corner of South Congress, but you have to remember it was my South Congress, so I was sitting in front of a feed store, not the SoCo you’ve seen, meaning, I was not in front of anything that could be described as a boutique or a lounge. 

So I was sitting in front of this feed store, and I’m plucking at my cheap-ass little guitar, and that’s when I first see Davey, riding right down the middle of the street on his bicycle, wearing nothing but a bright red thong.

Now what you have to understand is, I’ve never seen a thong in my life at this point. I haven’t heard of the damn things. So when I see Davey floating by, his skin creating little ripples like soft ocean waves on either side of his seat, I stop my fingerpicking and hear only the soft clicks of the spokes in his wheels. He turns to look at me when I stop playing, and dammit if my whole heart doesn’t drop deeper than the center of the earth, because a little corner of his mouth goes up in a smile and he carries on his way, and I’m just happy to be dust in his wake. 

Naturally I started to frequent the feedstore, which was near my special shrub with the little cave carved out of it, where I slept at night and in the sweltering hours of the afternoon. The first place that ever felt like home. It was only a few days before I caught a second sight of Davey, bicycle and thong, but this time he’s added a bright pink floof around his neck that he’ll later tell me is called a feather boa. I’ll lose my goddamn mind laughing when he tells me this, wheezing out, You’re calling that a goddamn snake?, and Davey loves when I can’t catch my breath so he’ll drag a little piece of feather on the softest part of my inner thigh, but instead of tickling me it’ll just collect all my blood down south if you know what I mean, and I’ll have to take him right then and there, careful not to press his snake in the dirt. 

So the third time I saw Davey I was determined to talk to him, but instead of crafting some clever scheme I just screamed at him HEY I WANNA TALK TO YOU!!! and he pulled over on his bike and said hello. I figured he was about twice my age, though in retrospect thinking about those beautiful saggy buttcheeks I’m thinking he mighta been older, but when you’re eighteen and in love you can’t really conceive of anyone being more than twice your age unless they’re basically in a nursing home, and Davey was anything but that. 

Why haven’t I seen you at the ‘Dillo? he asked, and I said, I don’t know what that is, and he said, What, do you live under a rock? and I said, I live under a shrub, and he laughed a big laugh that turned into a hacking cough because he smoked a pack a day and it shook his whole bare-naked body and I thought his piece might break free from his thong but it held him in tight. He said, Well come with me sometime, Willie Nelson played there a couple months back, and I didn’t want to admit I didn’t know something a second time in a row so I said, Wow, when can we go? and he said Now, and I knew I’d follow this man wherever he was going. 

The Armadillo World Headquarters had a high angled roof and a big stage. Hand-drawn concert posters littered the tables and a dog lapped water out of a bucket of peeled potatoes behind the bar. The whole thing smelled like dip and bluebonnets, cigarettes and live oak and a hint of big Texas oil. If I thought it was like hippies got the run of an armory, well, that’s exactly what happened, and they named it after roadkill to boot. Davey strolled in and the barkeep didn’t look at him twice, but it turned out looking at anyone twice wasn’t a regular practice at the ‘Dillo and that’s what made it what it was.

People trickled in for the show that night, young girls sneaking in on fake IDs, old timers with handlebar mustaches down to their chests, and cops smoking Mary Jane after their shifts. Davey sat me in the front but I couldn’t keep my eyes on the pretty cowboy singing, not with him sitting in the back, puffing his endless Marlboros, his legs sprawled out in front of his folding chair. Every time he caught me looking, that same corner of his mouth twitched upward. The crooner finally said thank you, the crowd whooped and hollered, and Davey’s fingers grazed my shoulders. He whispered in my ear, For a cowboy you seem awfully soft. My spine stiffened and his hand disappeared, and I turned around to face him. I said, There isn’t a back room you wanna do that in? and this time both corners of his mouth turned upward, and within moments I was doing a whole lot more to him than I’d gotten the Johnson boy in trouble for, which was just resting my head on his shoulder while we watched Mary Tyler Moore. 

The ‘Dillo’s my ticket out of here, he said as he held me after, and I wondered how he could want to escape from the same place I wanted to escape to. Why do you want to leave? I asked the musk of his armpit, and he said, There’s bigger towns than this, boy, and he pressed a hard nipple against my cheek and I sensed it wasn’t time for any more questions. 

I became a regular fixture at the ‘Dillo too after that, as regular as anybody could be there, and I got the sense that people knew about me and Davey but nobody came to the ‘Dillo to have opinions about shit. Folks called me Davey’s boy and they’d say hello to me as I plucked on my little guitar out front as they walked in, and one day the barkeep invited me to play inside before one of the shows and I said no and Davey threw a whole fit. 

It’s the fucking ‘Dillo, for Christ’s sake, he said, and I said, I’m here for free peanuts, I don’t need nobody gawking at me, and he took that personal so I said I was sorry. If you play here then I can be your roadie and we can get taken far away, he said, and I said, You could be a roadie for anybody, and he said, Yeah, but they’d make me wear slacks or some shit and I said, Yeah, that’s prolly true. 

So I played the dumb show, and Davey dressed me in jeans with a big silver belt buckle and an open flannel shirt with no sleeves. I opened for an idiot with an accordian if you can believe it, and there was a good crowd that day and they went nuts for me, they were just absolutely rioting for some damn reason, and Davey was my roadie in his thong and his feathered snake. A man in a suit came up to me after and he said, Boy, how’d you like to go on tour, and I said, You can talk to my manager, and pointed at Davey and the suit-man’s face paled and he said, Can’t we figure it out, you and me? and I said, No, I don’t believe we can.

Suit-man’s horseshit smile melted but he walked over to Davey, and Davey pulled a tiny spiral notebook right out of the front of his thong to check his notes, and the man left with a handshake and then Davey came over to me and he said, You’ve got an appointment tomorrow at noon, but don’t worry, I checked your calendar, and I lost my shit laughing in the middle of the ‘Dillo and I didn’t even care, I just kissed him right on the mouth. 

Davey and me, we toured for years. I didn’t like the road but I liked seeing him happy when we saw a new skyline, and he wanted to go farther but he stayed inside of Texas just for me. The venues told him he had to cover up to be a roadie, and so he learned harmonica and became part of the act and then his thong was just us being eccentric artist types. We fashioned ourselves as Davey and the Boy, though people usually thought I was Davey and he was the boy, I guess because of his outfit. Sometimes we’d show up and there’d be a suit-man instead of a hippie running the hall and he wouldn’t let Davey on and we’d say, Oh no problem at all sir, we actually don’t give a fuck about your bullshit venue, and we’d smile as we walked right out, and we’d go play on the street. We got called faggot a lot in Corpus Christi and had to run from boys with knives in Abilene, but damn did we make some good rounds. 

We played a sidewalk in Houston a few years in, and I looked into the crowd and there was a suit holding up the face of the Johnson boy, his eyes boring into me, and I thought I must have imagined it so I looked away and kept playing like nothing was wrong, but then the suit walked over and dropped three hundred-dollar bills in my guitar case, and I stopped playing then to make sure they didn’t blow away, and that night at the hostile I rested my head on Davey’s hipbone and he grazed his thumb back and forth behind my ear.

Outside of Dallas Davey fell in with some guys from New York, and they were touring for real, the whole country from the sounds of it. I was homesick for that jade green river and my little spot outside the feedstore, but Davey got all amped up talking to these boys, and they offered him a spot on their tour. Sometimes sacrifice is the sweetest part of love, but sometimes giving leaves you dried and spent and mournful, and I asked why, why was it so important to him to get out and where exactly was he going? 

I want to see snow, he said, I want to look out a window and see nothing but softness and cold for miles. I want to be wrapped up in blankets with a mug of hot cocoa as puffy flakes fall from the sky. Maybe the people will be different, the heat won’t make them chase me with knives, maybe the people will be kind. I could see the snow falling in his eyes, but I never left the state of Texas and it never left me, and I just wanted to be home. So I said, You’re gonna need warmer undies if you go up there, and he laughed and then he cried, and I held him and we said our goodbyes, and he boarded the tour bus with the boys from New York, and it was the first time I saw him fully dressed. The corners of his mouth turned up just the same.

It was 1981 by the time I got back to Austin, and the Armadillo World Headquarters had been razed and a high-rise took its place, and the shrub I used to live under was part of a busy hiking trail now. I got a job working the front desk at the new shiny building, and I met a boy around my same age who wore knit sweaters and had soft, warm lips, and we told everyone we were roommates, and he bought me a little toy armadillo for my desk. I kept it there for years, and eventually they put up a plaque telling young kids that the ‘Dillo was here, and sometimes I’ll go to the plaque and play a song or two and the kids never ask if I was really there. My boy became a man and then an old man, and we started to see more people like us, so he said what if we didn’t pretend to be roommates anymore, and we put rings on our fingers and I guess change isn’t always bad, it’s just change.

I never knew what happened to the Johnson boy or if he still watched Mary Tyler Moore, and I never knew what happened to Davey in the snow neither, but I’ll tell you one thing. Not a day’s gone by in the forty years since I saw him that my asscheeks have been graced by anything but a bright red thong under my work slacks, and that’s the god’s honest truth.