We had purchased a few horses from a breeder in Indiana and we had some success and a lot of fun. They say that success makes you want more success and that was the case with us. My trainer and I did a lot of research on the APHA horses that were winning and it became pretty clear that most of the horses that were winning the large national shows were coming from Texas. They were bigger, stronger and better movers than the horses we were buying. Or so it seemed. I've since come to learn that great horses come from all over the country but I was still learning.
Anyway, we decided to go on a horse shopping trip to Texas. My trainer had some connections with other trainers and he was able to make appointments for us to visit farms in Texas. I was excited and looked at this trip as a guys weekend, similar to a golf weekend. Recently, I had been to Pinehurst with 11 other friends and we had a spectacular long weekend. We played great courses, ate good food, stayed up too late playing cards and drinking beer and we just got to relax. This was my vision for this trip.
Our trip started out a little rough because our plane was late. We left on a Thursday night, after I got done with work. Our flight was supposed to leave at 6:30 pm and it didn't leave until almost 8:00 pm, which meant we wouldn't get to Dallas/Fort Worth airport until 9:30 pm Central time. When we arrived at the airport, we went straight to the car rental counter where our car was waiting. We hopped in and drove straight to our destination, The Four Horsemen Motel.
For those of you from the Pilot Point, Texas area, you'll know this motel. Not being from there I wasn't sure what to expect. My trainer, who made the arrangements, assured me that it was a good place and his friend, a farm manager that he had once worked for, was able to get us a good rate. We pulled into the parking lot around 10:30 pm and stopped at the office. We walked in to the somewhat disheveled office and there were two friendly ladies who were closing up for the night, literally. I asked if they had our reservation and they said yes. One of the ladies offered us each a cookie and since neither of us had eaten dinner, we gladly accepted. I asked them what they would have done if we didn't get there by the time they left and closed the office. One of the ladies said to me, "Sweetie, we would of just left the key under the mat outside with a note on the window." Obviously we weren't in Detroit any more! Back home this would have been a good way to get robbed. Since I hadn't been called "Sweetie" in a long time, I was little disarmed and just nodded politely, took our keys, one for each of our separate rooms and walked to the door. The other lady said the room with the bigger key is a suite and my trainer offered for me to take that room and he took the other. We drove to the back of the hotel where our rooms were, it was pitch black outside so you couldn't see much with the dimly lit door lights being the only light to guide us. We agree to clean up for a minute and then meet at the car in ten minutes to get something to eat.
I have traveled often in my life. I have been in every state East of the Mississippi River and most of the states west. I have stayed in some of the finest hotels and in some of the dumpiest. Once I stayed at a place in New York City where I was greeted at the door to the hotel by a group of hookers asking if I had any drugs for sale. That was kind of eye opening! It wasn't like staying at the Plaza, which was a spectacular experience by the way. Another time we traveled to Richmond, Virginia and the hotel had an alligator in the fountain in the lobby. Well back to the Four Horseman. I walked into the suite, which was very clean but obviously very old. I was used to staring at cottage cheese ceilings, but never have I seen cottage cheese walls before. And they were painted with what can only be described as operating room gloss white paint. When I turned the lights on that room was so bright I think really think you could have seen well enough to do surgery! The carpet was sort of a blue color and the bed spread with kind of a green and orange paisley. I set my bag on the bed and it kind of bounced for a few minutes. This was going to be interesting. I unpacked my belonging and placed them in the drawers of the dresser that looked identical to the one I had in my bedroom growing up. I knew my parents had given that bedroom set away when I went off to college so I never thought I'd see ever see it again. Who knew!
I walked into the bathroom to wash up and the cottage cheese/bright white theme continued. I looked in the mirror and could see every whisker on my face with a clarity that I'd never experienced before. I splashed some water on my face and turned to grab a towel when I realized there was one purple towel and one orange towel. These towels were clean and you could still smell the bleach that they had been washed with. Not only that but they were stiff as a board. Seriously, I took one off the rack and it stayed folded and upright, as if to allow me to stand it up on two feet with the fold in the middle. Again the bathroom was very clean so I thought to myself that its only for the weekend and I can make this work. We aren't going to be in the room for very long anyway. Plus its a suite so I can sit down for a few minutes in the other room and relax before we go and eat.
I go to the other room and there is a small sofa, which was very worn, facing a tv with a dial. Even fifteen years ago, most television sets had abandoned dial tunings and were remotely controlled. But even more interesting was this television had a rabbit ear antenna, which I hadn't seen since we were in college. I turned it on and it took a minute for the tv to "warm up" and the picture to stabilize. I cranked the dial around to see what channels were available, there were only two that came in so that made choosing less complicated. I selected the channel that had a football game on and I went to sit on the sofa. I went straight to the floor. Picture me with my shoes on the floor, my knees bent so that my shins were pointed toward the ceiling and my rear end sitting on the floor with only the thinnest of cushions and the remnants of a spring between me and the floor. It was pointless to call the front desk because the ladies that gave us a cookie and called me "Sweetie" had surely left by now. I struggled to get up and just sat on the bed for a few minutes before going outside to wait for my trainer. He soon came out and he said there probably isn't any place around here that's open other than the Red Rooster, which is on the same property. Let's just go there and have a drink and relax and then we can get up early and have a big breakfast and start our search, he suggested. I agreed since eating at 11:00 pm is never a good thing for me.
In we walk to the Red Rooster! The Red Rooster is sort of a bar/honky tonk/meeting place all rolled up into one. We sit at the bar and there are two, three foot tall plastic drink holders like you see with those blue drinks that people get in Vegas. Instead of a blue concoction these were filled with goldfish crackers about half way up. I noticed people would just grab the containers and pour our a handful and just eat them. There was no silverware or napkins to be seen so I assumed this was all there was going to be to snack on. The two ladies who were behind the bar were very busy. The place was packed because it was Karaoke night. More on that later!
After a minute one of the bar tenders approached. She was probably as old as I was but she clearly had spent a lot of time in the sun because her face had that weathered look to it that you get from too much sun exposure. She also had a cigarette dangling from her mouth with an ash that was at least one inch long. Without taking the cigarette out of her mouth and without loosing the ash she said, "What do you want to drink Sweetie?" Twice in one night, hmmm! I asked what do you have? She obviously knew at that moment that I was not a local and she told me in a somewhat, "What in the world is this guy doing here" sort of way that they had whiskey and beer. Great I said. What kind of beer? Coors and Lonestar, she responded. I'll have a Coors. My trainer had a Lonestar. Now he was more appropriately dressed because he had his hat and boots on so he fit in a little better than I did. I tried to just sit there and drink my beer and just relax.
I said to my trainer that this place is really loud. He said it's all concrete. I hadn't noticed when we walked in but he was right. The walls were concrete, the ceiling was concrete and the floors were concrete. There wasn't a stitch of carpet anywhere in sight. At the back of the building was the Karaoke stage and one person after the other took the microphone and attempted to impress the crowd. I noticed the crowd was a mixture of just about every kind of person you could image. As I look back on it I'm reminded of the Toby Keith song, "I Love This Bar," because this place had everyone of those characters. There was a policeman who had gotten off work, there was an Indian wearing more turquoise jewelry than I had ever seen, there were cowboys and farm hands, there were girls looking for a date, some not looking for a date and some selling a date, if you know what I mean. As I was halfway through my second bottle of Coors I noticed the biggest man in the place stand up and approach the microphone. This man was at least 6' 5" tall and he had to weigh well over 300 pounds. He was broad shouldered and had massive arms. You could see his shoulders and arms clearly because he was not wearing a shirt. Instead he was wearing green bib overalls and a John Deere ball cap. The next few minutes were, to this day, some of the most surreal I have ever experienced.
I anticipated that this guy would attempt to sing a Waylon Jennings song or maybe a Merle Haggard tune. On second thought, maybe he's going to sing something by George Jones. The noise level in the place dropped a bit as people noticed he was moving to the stage. He'd obviously been here before and people were paying attention so I thought this should be interesting. The sound had been reverberating throughout the building all night and my ears could not really take another bad song sung by someone that couldn't hold a tune. Karaoke can be bad but when the sound ricochets around a concrete building that echoes like he Grand Canyon no amount of beer is going to sooth that sound. So I was hopeful that this wouldn't be bad. The music track started up and it sounded familiar but not at all what I was expecting.
John Travolta was popular in Texas because he had done Urban Cowboy and the movie had been a big hit a few years before. I've been told that many of his movies became sort of cult classics in Texas after this movie came out. Apparently, the guy in the green overalls was a fan of John Travolta's work in Saturday Night Fever and saw himself as Travolta's character Tony. The soundtrack playing was that of the Bee Gees singing Staying Alive only without Barry Gibbs. All I could think was this guy is never going to be able to sing those high notes to this soundtrack, this is going to be awful. Let's just say I was shocked. The guy could carry the tune and singing in what was obviously a falsetto voice, he managed to hit most of the notes and stayed reasonably close to the correct key. As he sang, most of the girls with dates, paid for or not, and their guys were up on the dance floor. I asked the off duty cop, who was now standing next to me at the bar, if this guy is a regular. The cop said he's here every night and he has a regular following. He also said he'll sing all kinds of songs and everybody seems to enjoy it. The cop asked where I was from and what I was doing in the area. I told him we were on a horse shopping trip and he said there were a lot of nice ranches nearby and we should find what we were looking for. I asked the bar tender, who was now smoking a new cigarette, to bring the cop a beer and me the check. I settled the tab and we left to go back to the room and get some sleep.
On this trip we went to fix or six ranches and we probably rode twenty or twenty five horses. We couldn't agree on anything so we didn't buy anything that weekend. I don't even remember what horses we rode or what ranches we went to, but to this day, I still remember the Four Horsemen Motel and the Red Rooster Honky Tonk like it was yesterday. And so went my first real horse buying trip to Texas.
