Wormy Dog Blues

Harper was standing on the street corner talking to two other men when I pulled up.
I guess they were being released from county the same time as Harper. He shook their hands and jumped in my car. For a few seconds we just looked at each other not saying a word. He was a ghost from Wormy Dogs past.
A lot of things go through your head when your friend has gone missing for 12 hours.
Visions of him dead in a field of ragweed crossed my mind, but I’d hoped he’d left the bar with a woman and stayed the night with her. Trading a venereal disease for death would have been a smiling alternative, as long as I could see my friend again.
He was always the emotional one, but now as he’s buckling up in the passenger seat of my car I put my hand on his shoulder and squeeze.
“It’s good to see you man,” I say. “I didn’t know where you were.”
His story was one I’d never heard. It was one reserved for drug addicts, thieves, and rapists – criminals. Now it was a verse from familiar lips.
The night before The Eli Young Band was playing at Wormy Dog Saloon and we had decided to go. A normal Friday night as far as a group of twenty-something’s were concerned. Dancing, drinking, and finally dropping at Harold’s house nearby was the plan. But in the midst of the show, with his dancing partner mid-twirl, Harper decided to leave the party for some air. (This has become an ongoing joke that we will someday warn our kids about. It’ll start like this; “Kids … never, never, ever, ever … go outside for fresh air. I’m just warning you now.”)
So sitting on the curb minding his own and smoking a cigarette, a cop approached Harper with questions. How much have you been drinking, how is your night, etc. In ‘cop speak’ that means I don’t care what you are saying, I’m going to smell you and watch your eyes, and in the meantime try to find out how big of a threat you are to humanity.
Somehow Harper took these questions to mean stand up, and that’s when he felt a baton across his forehead (I know this because the next day there was a knot and a red line there).
The cop had taken his standing up as an offensive threat and cracked Harper over the head. Worried, Harper wobbled straight to the brick wall and put his hands up. Now in shock, Harper told the cop he wasn’t fighting back and surrendered in every way his altered mind could think of.
Then the cop pushed him against the wall, cuffed him, and threw him into a paddy wagon crammed with others taken from us too soon.
Our party continued inside with no thought to the happenings outside these reverberating walls, thick with the sounds of Eli Young.
Harper’s walls on the other hand were cramped and cold. Then he began asking the reasons for the altercation and why he was attacked for standing. The only answer he could get was if you continue to ask questions you are going to the county jail instead of the drunk tank.
The differences in these two are the difference in a few hours and a day. Both are cold and miserable, but county lasts longer. The only good thing about county is when you are released, there is bar around the corner that will give you a free shot and beer if you had the proper markings on your hand from being processed and booked. Much like cattle as they are branded, so are the markings of the penal system.

While Harper was being placed in a large holding cell before being booked, I was pushing my car out of the drive thru line at Sonic after it ran out of gas.
Luckily a gas station was across the street, and luckily the workers had a gas can to loan me, so I filled up the can, transferred the gas to my car and I was off again.
That was not the case for Harper.
The next morning I had made many calls to Harper but none were answered or returned. Other calls to friends revealed he had not stayed with anyone we knew of and no one had seen him. That one, notorious phone call an actor makes in the movies never happened.
After riding down the road to 4th St. and Classen and taken into a bland, ten story, brick building, Harper was sitting on the floor while being handcuffed to a long metal bar above his head. So were all the others from the holding cell.
From there, all the men were lined up and strip-searched, one by one. Harper didn’t elaborate on these precious moments, and instead skipped to his personal cell, which was being kept warm for him by two ‘redneck guys’ as Harper referred to them. They had been keeping the cell warm for a year – one for failing to pay child support, the other for outstanding warrants.
The second, and younger of the two, was caught was after a high-speed chase in which the driver was killed after running off the road. Redneck two survived and was jailed after the warrants were discovered.
After the campfire chat and learning of each other’s plight, not one, but both men took horrible smelling craps, as Harper described it.
“They had been eating prison food for a year. What do you think it smelled like,” Harper told me.
The toilet was also in the middle of the cell, in full view. Conversations didn’t stop when one went to the bathroom. Harper cussed the younger of the two for the top bunk and told them, “If either one of you touch me, I’ll knock your faces off.”
Harper slept with both eyes open that night. Not because he had no pillow and a scratchy wool blanket to keep him warm, but because the threat of being willy’d was a possibility.
The next day around 4 p.m. I got a call from Harper while I was worried and watching a matinee at the dollar movie to keep my mind off what could be happening or what had happened to my friend. I left halfway through the movie to pick Harper up.
I bought Harper a burger and took him back to my place where he ate and I played George Strait on the guitar. Harper cried as I sang this song:

I still feel 25,
most of the time.
I still raise a little Cain with the boys.
Honky tonk and pretty woman.
Lord I'm still right there with them.
Singing above the crowd and the noise.
Sometimes I feel like Jesse James,
Still trying to make a name.
Knowing nothings gonna change what I am.
I was a young troubadour,
when I rode in on a song.
and I'll be an old troubadour,
when I'm gone.
Well, The truth about a mirror,
It's that a damn old mirror.
Don't really tell the whole truth,
It don't show what's deep inside.
Oh read between the lines,
it's really no reflection of my youth.
I was a young troubadour,
when I rode in on a song.
and I'll be an old troubadour,
when I'm gone.
I'll be an old troubadour,
when I'm gone.