The Legend of Marlow’s Country Palace

A Dispatches From Appalachia Tale

I came of age among the hills and forest of East Appalachia, raised up on a steady diet of rock n’ roll, drugs, booze, and if not sex — at least the pursuit of it. All in all, a fairly average composite of the working-class youth in the economically destitute region where learning how to fight was as essential as learning how to stretch a paycheck. I was a skinny kid with a smart mouth and a bad habit of ending up in situations where I had no earthly business to begin with. Very rarely, though, have I glimpsed anything in the heavy shadows of these mountains that I would dare to describe as legendary.

Not that Kentucky is without its legends and myths. There’s the Polk Lick Monster, who is reportedly an axe-wielding maniac with the head of a goat; Waverly Hills and all its spookiness; and any number of cryptids and ghost stories that stretch the length and breadth of the Tug Valley. We are people of “haints,” old folk magic, and a million innocuous little traditions, piecemealed from all over, then left to ferment on their own in isolation.

As a general rule, I do not court the legendary and I do not chase the mythical. I have too many treaties standing on too shaky a hallucinogenic ground for that madness — better to focus on small things like the decline of ethics in politics, the need to shoot the rich into the sun, and wondering when Skynet will kill us all.

I do have one tale though, or rather a series of tales, of a place that might well qualify on both accounts. A converted warehouse that for a little over thirty years hosted some of the wildest moments, craziest debauchery, sprawling fights, and served as a near-communal gathering place for those elements who either by financial situation or temperament, would not be tolerated at the more civilized clubs in West Virginia or even Lexington. Founded by a musician and songwriter who grew disillusioned with Nashville, Marlow’s Country Palace was at times both the busiest club in town and the most disreputable. A place where your odds of finding companionship for the night, getting stabbed, and running into your own absentee father who left to get cigarettes when you were 12 and never came back — all were within spitting distance of one another.

Make no mistake, our region has plenty of hole-in-the-wall bars, honkey tonks, redneck dives, biker bars, and if you’re willing to drive for three hours, you might actually find something that vaguely resembles a more urban club. Marlow’s Country Palace was something else though, too big to simply be a bar, three levels worth of floor — each separated by a short but steep bit of stairs — ringed a pit-like dance floor that sat before a raised stage for Marlow’s Southern Comfort Band. Too frequently raided by the cops to lose its appeal or mystique, the place provided no booze, and indeed if one was caught with an open container you would be escorted off the premises by the largest and surliest of bouncers — however, Marlow’s did sell paper cups and what you poured into your paper cup (beneath your table) was entirely your business. People got fucked up here, both literally and figuratively, but it was also some of the craziest fun I’ve ever had.

I came to know the legend well.

Seeing Is Believing

“You can’t wear that, someone will knock your teeth out and fuck your mouth,” Bobby Lee told me with a disappointed shake of his head.

“What the fuck is wrong with how I look? Fuck ’em, I can look however I want!” I shot back as I turned and gave a quick look at myself in the mirror. He was clearly insane, the outfit looked fantastic.

“He’s right, man. Come on, Wally. I guess the pants aren’t so bad but you can’t wear that shirt if we’re going to Marlows. Fucking got frills and shit on it,” Jacob Lee, Bobby’s brother and the defacto leader of our little group, added.

“It’s supposed to have frills, it’sa fucking poet’s shirt.” I tried to defend the position but it was already a lost cause. I let out a sigh, my fingers reluctantly getting to work on the buttons, halting only so I could point out what I thought was the very obvious,

“You know they aren’t going to let us in. None of us have an ID for this. We might as well stay here and drink, all we’re going to do is make a wasted trip.”

Myself, Jacob Lee, and his brother Bobby Lee were all gathered in Bobby Lee’s small bedroom with its Guns N Roses posters, black lights, and impressive large collection of VHS pornography (in the era before the internet, I like to think every group of boys had that one friend with an impressively large porn collection) waiting for their grandmother to finish getting ready. She was going to actually drive us to Marlow’s and let us attempt to get in. We’d squirreled away a fifth of Hot Damn, a fifth of Mad Dog 20/20, and a case of Bud Light, and with not one of us over the age 16 we reckoned this to be more than enough.

I was confident in my prediction, my mother owned her own bar and I knew damned well that no one under 21 was allowed to enter the premises during operational hours.

“Nuh-uh, I heard they don’t even card you if you play it cool.” Bobby Lee of course didn’t give up his sources and I saw then that he would not have it any other way but for us to have a go at getting inside.

“Fine, give me a shirt. What the fuck is so great about this place? Just a bunch of old rednecks.” When you’re the lone goth kid in the group being talked into going on an adventure that, at best, ends with you being in a disreputable honky-tonk and at worst could land you in the parts of Deliverance that you were hoping to avoid, you get a bit surly.

Bobby Lee dug an old gray t-shirt from his closet and tossed it to me. The replacement for the perfectly absurd bit of Hot Topic fashion was two sizes too large and swallowed my scarecrow frame. There was no changing the leather pants, I’d bought the ticket and was taking the ride on that one but at least now I didn’t look like one of the sad French vampires that Louis cuts in half towards the end of “Interview With The Vampire.”

“Women! Goddamn, you spend any more time with your nose stuck in a book and we’ll have to start calling you The Professor,” Bobby Lee chuckled out before turning back to his mirror and beginning the laborious process of applying just enough Stetson cologne to choke out a tire fire.

“Yeah, buddy-son! You scared of having a good goddamn time? Ya chickenshit or something?” Jake may have been our leader but he was never as sharp as Bobby Lee, only more confident and much MUCH more handy in a fight. He waited for Bobby Lee to make the openings for his verbal jabs.

I felt the blood rising to my cheeks.

“You can call me Professor when I can call your fatass The Skipper, and I ain’t afraid of nothing. I just don’t want to have to walk my ass back because they don’t let us in or spend all night lurking around the parking lot.”

We would have surely descended into a back-and-forth frenzy of barbs, insults, and descriptive but unflattering accounts of each other’s mothers whereabouts the night before, had it not been for the Lee brothers’ grandmother.

“You boys ready? Come on, I h’aint got all night for you’uns,” Tella Lee impatiently called from the kitchen.

Tella Lee was actually not half as bad as the situation we’d put her into might in retrospect make her seem. She was one of the sweetest old ladies in our neighborhood and though she, like any good Appalachian grandmother, may occasionally when sorely vexed give out a swift slap with dishcloth, she always made sure that whenever any kid visited they ate and ate well. Through the dusty lens of memory, she seemed not quite tall but statuesque, her hair dark and kept in tight ringed curls upon her head, her nose sharp and angular. Her eyes always seemed tired because she worked two jobs and I suspect that if not for the human body’s pesky need for sleep she might well have taken a third.

Some people are just driven like that.

We piled into the back of her small sedan — the passenger seat left empty because the airbag had once deployed and she forbade any of us from riding up front — crammed together like sardines and smelling of cheap cologne. Our bags of alcohol (which yes, she knew about, though it was understood that it was not to be mentioned or shown) were piled high on my lap. I can remember the almost electric tingle of anxiety-laden anticipation as we rode into the black night of rural Appalachia in search of this place that was, until this point, only a construct of schoolyard tales and mostly bullshit accounts from our older peers.

Everyone had a Marlow’s story, you see. In our little neighborhood that lay, quite literally, on the wrong side of the tracks, it was usually the stories of various figures from around our block that stood in for fairytales. There was the time the notorious Mr. Chicken (you don’t want to know where that name came from) who had once shot the lights out with a 9mm, a boy from neighboring Pikeville had reportedly once had his skull cracked open by the bouncers for stepping on Marlow’s boots, and another tale — passed down from one starry-eyed redneck hellspawn to the next in the halls of our high school — swore that behind Marlow’s lay several abandoned school buses, which served as makeshift houses for all manner of debauched and craven behavior.

I was just old enough to believe that there had to be a thread of truth in it. My blood was full of teenage rebellion and my mouth parched with thirst for anything to provide another facet to the otherwise melancholy procession of days and nights among mountains that, while beautiful, look to the teenage eye like the walls of a prison cell. The aura of the Palace was made of the stories of a hundreds of different shitkickers, rabble rousers, cowboys, blue-collar laborers and moonshine-crazed outlaws — and as we drew nearer, as that sweet old lady ferried us through the inky Kentucky night, you could almost feel those little small-town legends and tall tales coalesce into brick, mortar, and a boot-scuffed dance floor.

The sign for Marlow’s Country Palace rose like a lighthouse out of the thick darkness by the roadside of US-23’s famed “Country Music Highway” — part gimmick, part roadmap to alcoholism and failed marriages if you knew where to look. The sign didn’t get you there though, it just got you to a narrow strip of gravel roadway that fed into the highway some quarter mile back. That empty strip of gravel eventually opened up, seemingly all at once, into a massive parking lot that overflowed with honkytonk life. Islands of parked motorcycles with their surly bikers and scantily clad “old ladies” floated amongst a sea of pickup trucks, muscle cars and more than a few old rust buckets. There was seemingly no set age of the patrons, young and old alike filtered in and out of the giant double doors of this massive warehouse that had been converted into a church for sad songs and questionable decisions.

Even through the windows of the car as we pulled up we could hear Wendy Chanel, Marlow’s female backup singer, working her way through the height of “Gypsys, Tramps, and Thieves” to a chorus of hoots, hollers, cheers, and professions of love that would have rivaled those for any established star. In some stories, Wendy was Marlow’s secret daughter, in other tales she was his lover, but in all of them she was beautiful and wild, a soul that was fashioned for the stage as surely as the stars were meant to hang in the Appalachian sky. Blonde of hair, green of eye, and in the halls of the memory of those who heard her, enshrined forever upon that stage.

“I’ll be back at 2 to get you,” Tella said as casually as if she were dropping us off for a fishing trip.

We ambled out of the car. I still had this giant brown bag of beer in my arms with two bottles of liquor wrapped up inside of it as well, and for a moment we just stood there on the very edge of it all. We were surrounded on all sides by cars and if any of us even waved goodbye to the Lees’ grandmother then, I don’t remember it. It was like we’d finally gotten the keys to the kingdom, a little slice of adulthood that we reasoned we were more than ready for.

A car door opened behind Bobby Lee and gave his backside a bump. A pretty brown-haired young woman climbed out and her lanky oily haired boyfriend did the same on the other side. Both of them wiping traces of powder away from their noses.

“Excuse me, sweetie,” she said, and slipped by Bobby Lee to head for the entrance.

Bobby Lee whipped around to look at me and Jake the moment she had passed him by,

“We’re going to get so much fucking tail tonight, boys. I can feel it!” Bobby all but squealed in delight.

Jake, unlike his more exuberant brother, was busy looking around the parking lot like a wary dog that just stumbled into a new yard. I wasn’t really that worried about any trouble, despite our ages, I knew that Jake could handle most fully grown men himself and would probably have actually enjoyed the challenge. Even though none of us were old enough to have our licenses yet, Jake was already on his way to becoming a star local athlete and I’d once watched him, in a fit of rage, punch a wooden post in half while making direct eye contact with a terrified home owner. He was our own personal Captain America, just with more rage issues and less book learning.

Jake looked back at me and Bobby Lee, squinted, and gave us both a quick up and down with his blue eyes.

“Buddy, son…Only way either of you is gittin’ any is if someone mistakes Wally there for a girl,” Jake slowly drawled and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“Fuck you, every guy had hair like this in the 17th century. It’s not like I’m putting it back with a fucking scrunchie, I got special tie I use for th–” My words dried up in my mouth when I saw how Jake was looking at me.

I sighed.

“Fuck it, you’re probably right,” I agreed and that brought about the laughter that finally gave us the courage to get moving.

We headed for the doors, hell bent on adding our stories to the myth.

Through The Gates We Go

Among the motley band of my youth, plans going awry were so common an occurrence that even as we approached the doors of the Palace I was still not convinced that we would be allowed inside. While Bobby Lee may have been on the lookout for someone willing to indulge his amorous delusions and Jake may have been keeping an eye out for trouble, I was trying to spot anyone that we actually knew. Considering all the stories and brags that I’d heard made, I half-expected a bevy of familiar faces but there was only the haggard, the coked-out, the bleary eyed, and the unfamiliar.

The doorman was a mountain with legs that possessed a six dollar flat top haircut and thick glasses that looked as if they had belonged in the evidence locker of some violent crimes unit out of the 1970s. The house uniform was basically just a white polo shirt with “Marlow’s” in a cheap imitation of an elegant script upon the right breast pocket and a pair of blue denim jeans, but it was the expression of utter boredom that stands out more vividly in my mind than the clothing or even the brute’s size. Looking back on it now I have to wonder how many times he’d heard the sets of the house band? How many times had he endured the DJ working his way through the same collection of tunes? A thousand times? A hundred thousand?

There we came sauntering up to the door, Jake and Bobby Lee leading the way while I carried our precious cargo in my arms. The interior walls of the entrance were lined with old photographs of the Palace in its younger years and all the many guests that Marlow had brought to this little corner of nowhere over the decades. Conway Twitty, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Loretta Lynn had all at one point graced the Palace with their presence, not as performers — no, Marlow shared his stage with no one but Wendy Chanel — but as patrons and guest of the man himself.

Giganto, The Mountain That Thinks He’s A Man, sighed as he looked us over and I thought for certain we were to be turned away but instead he rumbled out,

“Eight dollars a piece,” Giganto punctuated his collecting of the cover charge with a lazy scratch of the front of his chest.

We shelled out and each received a stamp on the back of our hands to indicate that we had paid. We were just about to push beyond that final barrier and into the club itself when ol’ Giganto there stopped me and silently beckoned me closer. I shot a glance at Jake and Bobby Lee, who had both pushed ahead somewhat but were still waiting on me and now pretending (without much success) to not be paying attention to myself and the fate of the booze that I still carried in my arms.

“Cups only above the tables. I catch you with anything above the table, I’m taking it away and you’re out of here. You understand me?” Giganto explained with about as much enthusiasm as a man who’d won a free proctology exam from Andre the Giant.

“Yes, sir! I gotcha! Just paper cups above the table.” I threw in an enthusiastic nod just to make sure that it was clear I got the point. No one actually snuck booze in, the deception was itself only the illusion of deception, the bouncers knew and that meant Marlow knew.

Plausible Alcoholic Deniability.

I hurried to catch up with Jake and Bobby Lee and as my heart started to flutter and pound with the raw excitement of the fact that we had gotten away with it, that we’d been let in even though we barely had peach fuzz on our chins and had no earthly idea what we were doing or even how we were supposed to behave, the sheer presence of the place hit me full on. The sensation was unlike any that belonged to any bar, night club, or even raucous festival that I have ever found myself a part of since, like wading into a strange ocean filled with alien lifeforms from depths so vast that smoke-haze draped lights replaced their need for the sun.

The three-layered interior was filled to the brim with both the fine and the frightening, the rough hands and the smooth talkers, the cowboys and the city slickers who wished to have a good laugh and a taste of authenticity. The walls themselves dripping with sadness, desperation, revelry and the gallow’s humor of the poor — no one here was getting out alive, no one who came to Marlow’s Country Palace was going to flee the region and escape the mountains, they were trapped, just like us — but if they partied hard enough, if they sang loud enough, if they debauched themselves vigorously enough, just maybe they could forget.

Moths who were all drawn to the same neon flame.

“This is fucking great!” Bobby Lee said with such naked excitement that one would have thought he’d just won the lottery.

“Where are we supposed to sit?” I shouted over the din of the house music. The band had chosen to take a break and now the DJ was pumping in what can only be described as country-dance or Family Reunion Bump n’ Grind — you know, Big and Rich and their ilk.

“Come on, buddy-son. I’ll find us a table.” Jake had no more been here than Bobby Lee or myself but that was no obstacle for him. He was like a hunting dog that had for the first time been turned loose on a trail and he was soon off ahead of us, leaving us to follow or be lost in the crowd.

Navigating the crowd was another experience in itself, we hadn’t even found our seats yet when a brawl between men broke out on the other side of the club and three surly lumps of muscle in the same white shirts that Giganto had worn rushed by us like a stampeding herd of buffalo. The table we found for ourselves was on the upper tier in the far back, we never sat with our backs to the front door because it was understood that in a place like Marlow’s Country Palace that to do so was an invitation for someone to simply walk up and knock the shit out of you from behind. When possible in a honkytonk, always put your back to a wall. This isn’t a disparagement towards the establishment itself, only a law of survival, like making yourself look big when threatened by a mountain lion.

After a few minutes of settling in and one excursion back into the sea of Stetsonand sweat for those paper cups (which cost three dollars apiece and looked as if they might last for two beers before the cup became mushy and began to leak) we were finally free to just sit and marvel at where we were. From our table all the stories seemed true, there were beautiful women and outlaws and rednecks and all manner of wildness and not a single fuck to be given among it all.

Then the house lights went down almost completely and shrieks, hoots, and caterwauling yelps rose up in the dark. You could see all the cherries from the various cigarettes glowing like little orange stars, still a few years out from being dimmed forever by the screen’s of cellular phones or indoor smoking ordinances.

“Ladies and gentleman..” the DJ’s voice came over the PA, low and smooth…

“Marlow Tackett.”

A lone spotlight broke the darkness and there in its heart, upon the stage, stood the man himself.

I’d never actually laid eyes on the man from whom the Palace had taken its name. Marlow Tackett, as I’ve said before, was a man for whom there were as many stories and rumors as there were curves in a snake’s back. He, like so many of us, had been born into the brutal poverty of the region. One of sixteen siblings, who had — if all accounts were true — been so moved by a little girl’s letter in 1975 that he had eschewed living in Nashville to return to the region and organize the first “Marlow’s Christmas for the Needy.” While I cannot say that I was always a fan of his music, that night when I saw him for the first time beneath the spotlight, I could tell that he carried himself with a sense of accomplishment owed only to those who had proven they could crack the Billboard Top 100 on more than one occasion. He was a throwback to the time before video had killed the radio star, caught somewhere between stocky and paunchy with long curling sideburns that fed into a bushy beard. The rock star may have to embody sexuality, rebellion, and the intangible qualities of “cool” but the outlaw country troubadour, in its most classical form, is bound only by authenticity. With his guitar slung across his chest like a targe held before one of our Scotch-Irish ancestors on the battlefield, he positively dripped that authenticity.

Should the Pope ever visit Eastern Kentucky he will not be greeted as warmly or with as much enthusiasm as Marlow Tackett was greeted upon that stage.

What followed was a collection of what one can only suppose were Marlow’s greatest hits. He rarely did covers, leaving that to Wendy and the house band — when it was him who the spotlight lay upon, the music was always his.

Now Marlow, as it turned out, would take the stage sometimes two or three times a night and usually work through three or four of his songs at a time. During this period, no one danced. Yes, everyone certainly seemed to be in good spirits but mostly what they did whenever Marlow hit the stage was drink themselves into oblivion at their tables. This wasn’t to say the music was bad, it’s just Marlow’s 1970s country music stylings were sometimes at odds with the urge to dance. Once or twice in later visits I witnessed what I can only describe as “controlled misfortune” in the form of Giganto dragging a man out by their ears when a heckler would pipe up — mostly everyone understood that it was Marlow’s club and he could play whatever he damned well pleased.

Manners mattered even if they weren’t of the conventional sort, and an education in such were readily available for dispensation.

The Wheels Fall Off

Of course we began drinking almost immediately, and despite our age, our little trio was already well on its way to a bright future in functional alcoholism and substance abuse issues. The case of beer alone was enough to wreck the three of us but the two fifths we’d brought along were an overkill in the worst way. We had none of the moderation we might have displayed if we were soaking suds in Bobby Lee’s basement or on a hillside somewhere, instead we leaned full on into the foolishness of getting hammered. Marlow was just rounding “Ride That Bull, Bertha (Ride!)” when the wheels began to fall off of our little planned excursion into honky-tonk hilarity.

Our first and most unforgivable sin was that none of us had any idea of what sort of alcohol went with any other sort of alcohol. We’d yet to learn that crucial lesson in life and thus had no idea that mixing a belly full of carbonated horse piss (or Bud Light if you prefer) with Hot Damn (itself a cinnamon schnapps liquor) and then throwing in swigs of Mad Dog — which is apparently loosely defined as a fortified wine (bottled bad decision was sadly already taken by the tequila industry) and tasted like the cough medicine we received as children — was in fact, a terrible idea.

Secondly, the drunker that Jacob “Jake” Lee got, the more convinced he became that other patrons were trying to pick fights with him. By the time we’d finished the cans of beer and began working on the bottles I was fairly glued to my chair but Jake was a bundle of anxious energy. Not fearful, no — I very much doubt that Jake feared anything at all, but he was hyperaware of every glance and every fit of laughter.

“See that motherfucker over there, Wally? He keeps looking at me like he wants to start something,” Jake growled out from behind clenched teeth.

I followed his gaze to a group of guys a few tables down, all drinking and cavorting. They all appeared several years older than ourselves, young men rather than boys pretending to be young men, and as far as I could tell they didn’t even know we existed.

“I don’t know, Jake,” I tried to soothe the paranoia the best I could but Jake was having none of it.

“You gonna let ’em fuck with you like that? Lawd have mercy, I thought Wally was the pussy,” Bobby Lee said around the edges of a belch that was loud enough to rise above the music.

Jake’s brow crumpled up like he was working on a particularly difficult math problem. One that had words and numbers before looking back at his brother.

“I ain’t no pussy, buddy-son,” Jake reaffirmed and narrowed his eyes into slits.

Suddenly I had the urge to use the bathroom very badly.

“Boys, watch my seat. I’m goin’ to the pisser,” I said as I got up and tried to put some distance between myself, the brothers, and the storm brewing among them.

Staggering through a crowd with the air thick with the smell of smoke, cheap beer, sweat, and half forgotten dreams of what it was like to be free of one’s worries filling up my nose, I soon realized the second of our mistakes. None of the booze mixed well together. I doubt it would have mixed well together in the guts of seasoned hard drinkers much less dumbassed youths, and I realized as I made it down to the bottom floor that not only was I hopelessly drunk, I was perilously close to tossing my cookies all over the dance floor.

I was a scrawny gothic punk kid masquerading as a redneck in a giant honkytonk and honestly, pushing my way through that crowd half out of my mind felt like I was being tumbled through some glorious part of Hell where the party never stopped even when you wanted it to. I had no concept of the layout of the place and only got glimpses of the architecture when I would push through the people into some semblance of a clearing until I found the back wall and then it was just a matter of following it until I found my destination. This method may have also provided the extra benefit of allowing me to support myself with one arm against said wall but that was rendered a trivial matter when I saw what lay beyond the dented metal door of the men’s room.

There was one fucking metal toilet. One. Just one. A trough like urinal that was filled with cigarettes, puke, and a pair of aviator sunglasses. A drunken corpulent man was passed out on the toilet with his pants around his ankles and I had no estimation of how long he’d been there or why no one had yet told the bouncers. Another man was pissing in the sink with his head thrown back while still another used a plastic card and his elbow to crush a pill upon the top of the hand dryer.

I decided then and there that I could hold it.

I returned to the far back table to find that Jake had not only befriended the man he’d been eyeballing but was now drinking merrily at their table and Bobby Lee was nowhere to be seen. I craned my neck up and tried to glance around the room to spot him out and at first I had no luck. There were simply too many people and it wasn’t until Marlow returned to the stage and thus sent all the people who had moved onto the dance floor back to their seats, that I did see him.

Bobby Lee was kiting about the room, drifting like a jellyfish caught on a sea current from table of ladies to table of ladies. He wasn’t walking, not exactly, it was almost half dance and half shuffle. Every step brought a little jostling pump of his arms and a quick hunching thrust of his pelvis.

The sight of this was so absurd that I immediately went mad with laughter and almost fell over the chairs to get to Jake and point it out. When I pointed him out to Jake (and by extension the table) it only grew funnier because now we were seeing the rejections come rolling in. We must have watched him get turned down twenty times with everything from shrieks of laughter to very polite deferments and none of it slowed him down. He just went right along, hunching and jostling like he was in some bad ’80s music video by Clarence Carter. When he finally returned he was drenched in sweat, his heavily gelled hair beginning to leak and melt upon his forehead and he panted for breath.

“I had to beat them off of me, boys. Beat. Them. Off. Me,” he proclaimed and both Jake, myself, and Jake’s new table full of friends broke down into hysterical laughter.

“Who? Who, motherfucker!?!? Show me who!” I couldn’t help myself, I was drunk and it was too much.

Bobby Lee turned and made like he was trying to find someone to point out but then gave up and shrugged,

“I think she went back to the table with her boyfriend.”

“Buddy-GODDAMN-son!” Jake threw his arms up and looked up at the bar room lights as if he expected the good lord to answer the question of how this could actually be his brother.

All the laughter made me forget that I was sick for a moment, the queasiness passed among all the mirth and good cheer so naturally I got back to the steady work of abusing my young and healthy liver. Jake excused himself from the other table and returned to our own and for awhile we just soaked it in, bullshitted, and people-watched. Maybe Bobby Lee had the right idea, just the wrong execution but I was too totaled to test that theory. Still, it had been an OK adventure so far.

That’s when the whole thing came tumbling down.

Marlow’s was full of all kinds of strange, crazed, hilarious, or dangerous characters. Now I do not know if it was Bobby Lee’s “Hunchabout” that brought this on, or if it was the table of gentleman that Jake had been sitting with that had also enjoyed a good laugh, but someone convinced a lady who was — probably in her mid ’60s wearing a black slip dress with makeup that I can only describe to you now as “Crackhead Joker” and burnt frizzy hair to come up behind him while he sat there with us and toss her leg around his right shoulder from behind and hook her heel under his left arm. Her fingers falling almost immediately to his hair where they played across his scalp.

This all happened so quickly, so smoothly, that CLEARLY this lady had been some form of assassin or CIA operative in a past life. Jake and myself sat there, mouths agape as Bobby Lee craned his head back and looked up.

“I heard you were lookin’ for me, sugar,” she said with a three-pack-of-Lucky-Strikes-a-day sweetness.

In that instant Bobby Lee’s eyes dropped back down to Jake and myself, he turned as white as mountain snow, and INSTANTLY puked all over the goddamn table.

Chaos erupted.

The woman screamed, the table beside us broke into a roar of laughter, Jake threw himself back as if he was dodging gunfire and went crashing to the floor and I jumped up sending drinks tumbling down to join the mess, my own stomach now threatening to heave and rip out my throat.

“Fuck! FUCK! Aww Jesus Christ what the fuck!?!?!” I found myself yelling as if it would make a difference.

The bouncers were already coming our way, making their way from the other side of the club through the people. We were, as the popular expression goes, “had lads” and I knew it then. Jake and I exchanged glances and melted into the crowd itself as the bouncers began to ascend the stairs. It was all hands abandon ship and every man for himself.

I no longer could pretend that I wasn’t going to puke myself, I felt it rising up in me and I fought the booze-devil with everything I had. As the bouncers were hauling Bobby Lee up out of his seat and trying not to get anything on their shoes, I was all but dashing to the bathroom and as I reached the door it flew open before me and there stood Marlow himself and Giganto, with the big bastard himself holding a mop and a bucket. I can only assume that someone had finally told Marlow about the conditions inside.

Naturally I vomited all over Marlow’s cowboy boots.

All over them.

All. Over. Them.

To make matters worse, Mad Dog 20/20 is red when it erupts from your body. Very red. The exact shade of red I would describe as “Am I bleeding internally?” red. There was no stopping it when it came, no halting the process or even getting my hands up. I was only comforted by the fact that I knew soon that I would surely be dead.

Marlow stood there with his hands on his hips and his lips pursed up, Giganto — still holding the mop and bucket had his mouth hanging open like I’d just rundown the Pope and crammed my thumb up his ass.

All I could think to say was, “I’m so sorry, m’mom and grandma own a bar and I know this is a dick thing to do, please don’t knock out my teeth. I won’t come back!” If you’ve never drunken-groveled to what may well be the living inspiration for the movie Porky’s then all I can say is 1 out of 5 stars, would not recommend.

“Fuck! Get him out of here, take him to the back, I want to talk to him after I clean this shit off my boots.” Marlow gruffed out like an old saloon owner kicking out the last of the night’s drunks.

Yup. I was going to get the shit beat out of me. This was it. We all know what it means when a wealthy or influential person wants to have a word with you in private after you puke on their shoes. Giganto put a hand that could have engulfed my head on my shoulder and gave it an anything but reassuring squeeze.

“Come on, you heard him, you little prick.” Giganto wasn’t happy and to be fair if I had to mop that up I wouldn’t have been happy either.

Marlow’s “office” was a little room with a couch, a television, and a desk that might have once been the stock room for the bar where they now only sold paper cups. The walls of it were decorated with his old albums and even more photos of old country legends and local celebrities along Marlow himself. Most of these were of a more intimate nature than the ones you saw when you came through the front door — Marlow and George Jones drinking beer or Marlow and former Governor Paul Patton out on a boat, just to name a few. There was a phone on the desk and I briefly thought of grabbing it and calling my mom and begging her to save my ass.

The door opened before I could think of what I’d tell her.

“You owe me a pair of boots, kid. This shit isn’t coming out.” Marlow told me bluntly as he closed the door behind him with a cup of coffee in his hand.

“I’m so sorry. I don’t have any money, man. I’m just fucked up. I don’t get this fucked up.” If I sounded like I was whining it was because I was, I was drunk and scared and knew at any moment that door would open and it would be the notorious Marlow’s bouncers throwing me a quick beating.

Marlow sat the coffee down with a sigh and took a seat behind his desk.

“Drink that. You said your parents own a bar, what bar?”

“The Frontier Bar and Lounge, sir,” I sniffled out as I took the coffee in both hands and took a sip.

“Wait. That’s Nellie and Sheila’s bar, isn’t it? Are you Nellie’s grandson?” Marlow asked, leaning over the desk a bit to get a better look at me.

“Yes, sir,” I answered, too scared and drunk to lie.

“Nellie Johnson?” Marlow asked again.

I nodded my head.

He reached over to the little cup he kept his pens in, took one out and used it to tap one of the framed photos behind him.

“This Nellie Johnson?”

I looked up at the photo and there was Marlow, a much younger version of my grandmother, and Johnny Cash all sitting at a table together in what might have been a much earlier version of Marlow’s Country Palace. My drunk brain struggled to process what it was seeing, the gears were turning but the machine just wasn’t working. This did not compute. My grandmother was a little old lady who, yes, owned a bar and yes I did know that she had “lived on the road” so to speak in her younger days following music festivals but I’d never heard any such stories about country music legends. My mom didn’t break that one out when I brought a new girlfriend home and granny certainly didn’t cart it out at holidays.

“Oh my God, that’s my mamaw!” Drunk or not, stunned is stunned.

Marlow shook his head in exasperation,

“If I let something happen to you here, she’d have my balls. I am not having that little lady get mad at me. So what I’m going to do is let you finish your coffee and then you’re going to get your friends and we’re both going to pretend that I never saw you here tonight. Nothing you did tonight happened. That way when you come back you can make a good first impression, all right?” Marlow offered gently.

“Thank you, I mean that. Just, thank you so much,” I was grateful and didn’t care if every word dripped with open gratitude.

“Do not get that way in my club again. Now finish your coffee.” The gentleness, if it was real, faded quickly.

I did and unsurprisingly after I had finished I found Jake in the parking lot holding Bobby Lee up. They’d managed to call Bobby Lee’s grandmother and our ride soon arrived and ferried us back across the tracks to our neighborhood. This wasn’t the last time we’d go, this wasn’t the most violent time we had there, it wasn’t even the wildest, but it was the first and because it was the first it had been imbued with a sort of magic that would allow it to endure in our memories for far longer than it might have otherwise been capable of.

The Palace would last for another decade before the club’s reputation for trouble got the better of it. It survived raids, gun fights, knife fights, blood-soaked brawls and the flaunting of every legal ordinance I can imagine, but in the end it was lawsuits brought on the behalf of those unfortunate enough to cross Marlow and his merry band that finally shuttered the doors. Our little town was never the same again, there were always bars, but they never had that same history or power seemingly baked into their very foundations. The world around us grew a little dimmer because of it, even if it did make us a little more “civilized.”

Marlow himself would go on to become known as one of the most charitable men in the region. His work with the underprivileged and impoverished far outweighed any wrongdoings or rumors of criminality. Sometimes he was Al Capone, sometimes he was Waylon Jennings, but in the end the path he chose was that of a Mountain Santa Claus. The legacy of that charity work and those good deeds will outlive both the stories of his notorious club and even his music. In the mountains even our saints are sinners and that’s just the way we like it.

As for my grandmother, who I did ask about the photo and whether she knew Mr. Cash, the only response that I got was that she had met him “once or twice” but that “everyone was partying in those days”. She never elaborated further and since Marlow, Johnny Cash, and my grandmother are all dead it seems unlikely that there’ll ever be a true in-depth answer.

In the end not having an answer is fine for me, that’s why they are part of the legend of Marlow’s Country Palace.