ABSTRACT
Hoppy’s band had just finished an energetic rendition of “Re-lease Me,” done in the Ray Price style and capping a set ofMarty Robbins, Merle Haggard, George Jones, and Waylon Jennings songs.1 The musicians were heading for the bar and the bathroom, and the dancers back to their tables and conversations. Miss Ann, the owner of this redneck bar (“Ann’s Other Place”) by the side of the state highway north of Lockhart, Texas, walked to the floor in front of the stage. Holding the microphone in one hand, she gazed authoritatively across the smoky dance hall, quieting the raucous crowd of local families as she introduced the afternoon’s main event. She stressed the seriousness of the situation that had inspired this “benefit” party for Jerry Meese, a respected regular patron facing a new and expensive diagnosis of advanced lung cancer:2
As the crowd applauded in fond acknowledgment, Hoppy, a revered local singer whose band had been providing good country music all day long, took the microphone from Ann and introduced Tony Collins, who had agreed to serve as the first auctioneer of the afternoon. Tall, gaunt, bearded, and merry, Tony (who worked at a local chicken processing plant) took quick command of the crowd:
For the next hour, Tony proceeded to cajole, beg, demand, and manipulate nearly every person in the audience who could spare a few dollars-and the few who could spare more-to part with surprisingly large sums of money in exchange for goods that, in any objective sense, were worth little or nothing. The few items-especially the gunsthat did have real value sold for extraordinarily high prices, to men whose careers had taken them into the higher strata of working-class earning power. Such men were not among the more regular patrons of the bar, but were bound by networks of obligation, kinship, patronage, and solidarity to appear at such events as this auction. To this end, the organizers had obliged by holding the benefit on a warm September day when a group of such men had planned a trail ride, the local term for a boozy re-creation of a nineteenth century cattle drive, complete with horse-drawn wagons and elaborate cowboy costumes. This event always drew a sizable contingent from the “Wild Bunch,” a loose association of local men with a passion for such rituals and the drunken, carnivalesque sociability they entailed. The dance hall was full of men in curled-brim hats and high leather boots, lubricated, relaxed, and ready to subsidize the back-breaking health care costs Jerry and Shirley suddenly faced.
