Several years ago, I performed at a songwriter’s night in East Nashville. It was in a little hole-in-the-wall dive bar that served only beer, and then, only in cans (less dangerous when the fights broke out).
The bartender appeared to be 65 if she was a day, had a missing front tooth, skin like leather(presumably from sun worship) and was attired in low-slung jeans and a leather halter top (all the better to show off the tats, I guess).
I slipped into the ladies’ room after my performance. I made a decision right then and there that I’d rather step outside and use the facilities at the McDonald’s across the street, when the first thing I saw upon entry was a sign that read “please dont puke in the sink” scrawled on plywood with a black sharpie.
My co-writer and I declined an invitation to perform there at a later date.
I kinda liked them, too, and it wasn’t trashy in the scary sense, but there was a certain amount of context that led up to that evening. I used to go to Lake Tahoe and Reno on vacations with my grandmother. A few years ago, I went back. I was also planning on driving to Las Vegas and then Los Angeles, which put me in mind of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the quest to find America. So, finding myself, utterly unplanned, in the middle of a biker rally, had a certain crystalizing effect on my perception of the moment. Hunter may have been looking for America, but I found it.[sup]*[/sup]
The thread is “trashiest thing you have ever seen”; maybe I’ve just led a sheltered life.
Oh, the African-American gentleman was selling other things, too. I know he had flowers, and there was something else I can’t remember. I negelected to ask him how business was.
The second most “finding America” moment I have ever experienced was watching a guy teach his family how to play poker using M&Ms as chips. At the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Unless I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, this is wrong: you leave the left-hand side of the escalator free so people can run down it, and you stand/finger prostitutes on the right.
I worked in a bar, one day a few men came in after a funeral and by the look of them a very boozy wake. The oldest looking man (no teeth and no idea of personal hygiene) asked for a drink, I refused him but the bar owner (a butt sucker of magnitude) decided to serve him anyway. He sat at the bar with his pals and after 2 or 3 drams he threw up on the bar. He apologised and said/slurred he’d clear it up, he grabbed the cuff of his suit jacket and scooped/armed the vomit off the bar and into his lap. Then passed out and fell off his stool.
Here in Texas we see a lot of those overgrown pickup trucks (duh). That decal was explained to me as part of the Dodge / Ford fanboy contest. Ford’s diesel engine is marketed as a “Power Stroke” while Dodge advertises theirs is made by “Cummins”. Bubba and Jim-Bob can’t resist that particular play on words.
It really looks very little like her. And I’m a bit surprised at her state of relative undress. One would think that Dodi’s Father would have asked for some clothes to be put on her. . .
I live in Florida. There’s not enough room for me to describe all the trashy things I’ve seen. Also, when I recall them, I realize that most of them are poverty-based, so they are maybe not as trashy as they might seem at first.
I will relate my first memory of true trashiness, though. I was about 8 and at a close-to-the-beach vacation cottage my grandparents owned. The people who had a cottage behind us were sitting at a picnic table in their back yard, drinking cans of beer. At one point while I was observing them (at that time my family were strict Baptist teetotalers, so I was doing a Margaret Meade-like behavior observation) they handed a can to a toddler in their midst. Turns out he loved beer, so they kept giving it to him, and sure enough, eventually he was stumbling around, falling down, and so on, and all they did was laugh and laugh.
In my home state of West Virginia, about twenty years ago, I saw a car that had two of those signs displayed in the rear window. One of them read, “Baby on Board”. The other read, “If you’re rich, I’m single”.
This is secondhand and won’t win the thread, but a friend of mine was in his apartment one day after a rare heavy winter storm, when an enormously pregnant female neighbor (whom he had never met) knocked on his door to ask if he had a cigarette. He said no, and she went slipping and sliding her way down the treacherous stairs and across the icy parking lot to knock on more strangers’ doors in search of a smoke.
