by Walter Agnew Moore II
Summer 2002, Between San Antonio and Helotes

My dad and I are driving in the dark. We were at Lester's, a little bar also known as the Helotes Country Club, where there is a pump shot-gun propped against the wall behind the bar and the roof leaks in 3 or 4 places. There is an old German guy on a stool who will teach you Slovenian proverbs whether you ask him to or not. When it rains, chickens cross the road, come inside, and roost on the back of a chair by the skittle board.

I had said something about how nice and calm everybody was in there. Devon laughed as she gave us two more Buds and said "Not hardly."

"No?"

"Hell no. I was in here once, and some young guy started a fight with one of the old guys. He punched him a few times, then a bunch of other old guys grabbed these tools hanging off the ceiling and got to pounding the young guy with 'em."

I look up at the hammers, vise-grips, and hatchets hanging above me. Claw hammers, ball-peen hammers, meat-tenderizers. Saws.

After the beer, my dad decides he wants to go see what is happening at Hill n Dale's. We drive 4 or 5 miles towards San Antonio, but when we get there they are closed.

We turn back towards Helotes and are cutting through some back lanes, headed towards the Bandera Road, with a hundred miles of dark silent Hill Country in front of us.

My dad chuckles to himself.

"What?" I ask.

"Aw, I was just thinking of something funny from a long time ago."

"What was that?"

"It was something we called a 'happening', back then."

"A 'happening'?"

"Yeah. That's just a name we had for it back then."

"When is 'then'?"

He flicks a cigarette ash. "It was in the 50's, in Florida. I was down there hanging around. Went to some little club on the beach. Some little club, hardly any place to park. It was packed. So I pulled up and went in. They had a band playing."

"They were a rock'n'roll band. They were OK, nothing to write home about. Playing whatever the hits were that year. It was fairly crowded, local people. I went on in and sat down at the bar and ordered me a beer. The musicians put down their instruments, to take a break, they came over to get a beer too."

I picture it in my head, I've seen these places down on the Gulf. A dark shack of a bar with slapping screen doors, fans, or maybe a rattling window unit dripping condensation on the white sand outside. Dune grass and blue wind as bright as today.

My dad takes a puff and thinks back himself. "They all went to get a beer. Except for this one fellow, the guitarist. He stays sitting at the stage, tuning his guitar. Then he starts playing a tune, picking out an old country tune. The Double Eagle: dah dah dah, dah dah dah, dah dum dah, dum dum dah. I know you've heard it."

"Yeah," I say. I've heard it, a fast, driving bluegrass sound to it.

"So as soon as he lets those first notes go, some people start cheering, some people start clapping. You know how they clap when they want the band to come back on. So he keeps playing the old 'Double Eagle'.

"Now, he's up there by himself, and people are getting into it. And one by one, the other musicians just start to drift back on stage. They pick up their instruments, and listen, and then join right in. All the time, people are standing up, clapping in time.

"Now when that drummer sits down after all the others, and starts kicking that 'BOOM BOOM BOOM' on the bass pedal, Walt, those people are going crazy. They pack that floor dancing, and spill outside onto this stage that was built up on piles driven in the sand. There wasn't even space to do a real dance, we're all out there just basically jumping straight up and down. Sometimes everybody would jump at the same time, and you could feel that old pier rocking up and down, whoomp whoomp whoomp, I was really scared for a minute that it was going to collapse, like a suspension bridge with troops marching in step.

"They played that one song for 45 minutes. People kept cheering them on and dancing the whole time. You could hardly even breathe."

We are coming back into Helotes now.

"So," I ask, "where was this in Florida? Was it some famous band?"

"Oh no. It was down around Panama City. Just some local boys playing for the local crowd, having the time of their lives."

"And I bet they went on back to their day jobs on the shrimp boats the next day," I say, "I bet today, some old shrimp captain keeps that beat-up guitar on his boat, I can see him bragging about the old days in some bar..."

"Yeah," my dad says, imitating a salty sailor: "'I used to have a band!'"

Then he sums it up: "There they were, a rock'n'roll band, and the best they ever did was when they played that old 'Double Eagle' country tune. Nobody planned it, nobody could have seen it coming.

"It's just what we called a 'happening', back then."