IN THE BEGINNING: This month's installment began here in my new digs tucked away in Lost Hollow.
                               

From Innerspace to Luckenbach...
Story & Photos by IRA KENNEDY

I thought about writing a tour about what I thought might happen.
After all, what good is my Poetic License if, every now and again,
I don't put it to good use?

s I was pondering the notion, Ollie Gravis showed up saying that if   I'd take him along he'd let me pretend to be me.  Offers like that don't come along everyday, especially from Ollie. So we lit out early on a Saturday for a quick stop to the Granite-O-Bar in Llano for some Lone Star sandwiches.
       Nigel the Land Rover was never running better.  All the windows, lights and brakes worked; the tank was topped off with high grade gas; and that slow leak in the left tire shut itself off altogether.
       We had hardly made any headway at all before Ollie yelled for me to stop.  Which I did. 

       Reaching into the ice chest I pulled out a cold one, drank a fair amount right off then put it to rest on the coffee table while waiting for instructions from Ollie.
      "Am I getting wages for this?"
       "Like I said before," explaining the situation yet again, "You ain't getting nothing now and you're ain't getting nothing later, so what ya' got to lose?"
       "Well at them rates," Ollie said, "I want to skip the driving part and find some down-home road house with maybe a few young fillys at the bar suffering from a powerful thirst and a decided preference for gentlemen of a certain maturity."
       "You mean floozies?"
       "Put the spurs to it!  We can haggle details later."
       With that I turned back to the laptop and commenced: 

       Just up ahead on the right was The Bar None Bar and Bar-B-Q.  The place was dark as the insides of a cow after stepping in out of the daylight.  But Ollie could find a bar stool blindfolded with his hands tied behind him, and ear muffs on, so I just followed his shadow.
       Once my eyes were able to give shape to things I looked around. The bar seemed to be put together from older, long-gone, wore-out cowboy cantinas.  Off in one corner was a juke box framed in an arch of rainbow colored tubes with bubbles flowing up through them.  Suddenly it started all by its lonesome with Patsy Cline singing "Crazy".
       Behind the bar hung a large, dusty print of Custer's Last Stand from the Anneuser Bush Brewing Association.  On a shelf  were gallon jars of  beef jerky, pickles, pickled eggs, pigs feet and hot sausage.  A couple of old cracker tins completed the menu.  Leaning up against what was probably a mirror with business cards crammed in around the edges of a sign:
        "Please don't make us write don't signs."
       While I was taking everything in, an extra-fancy cowgirl with blond hair just like Marilyn Monroe leaned over from behind the bar bracing herself with a rag in one hand and a cigarette in the other which sported a wedding ring about the size of a Mason jar.  
       "What's your flavor?" she asked Ollie as if talking about something entirely different and sweetly intimate in nature.
       "I just drink cold beer, sweetheart," Ollie smiled. "Get one for that feller sittin' next to me too.  He's buyin'."   Then he turned to me, "You're doing good kid, but where's them fillys?  This one must be married to an oil well."
       The words hardly left his lips when, just as I laid eyes on the door it swung open and the light blinded me like a Texas sized flash bulb. I was seeing spots but most of them turned out to be one of the prettiest red and white polka dot dresses I ever laid eyes on.  What with the matching lipstick and polished fingernails everything fit together perfectly.  The whole affair belonged to a filly some five foot-four in heels.  She was girl-size vertically speaking.  But her horizontal proportions were growed up for certain.  I reckon God had to make everything about her small so he could put so many pretty parts on one place.
       "City girl," Ollie muttered.
      

          PAGE 1: HEADIN' OUT  /  PAGE 2: HONKY TONKIN'
PAGE 3: LUCKENBACH  /  PAGE 4: HEADIN' HOME

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