Conference (3 of 3): Discotheque.

After the 1st day of the conference, me and the 2 students I split a hotel room with went to the downtown strip of the small off-the-highway town where we found a cheap hotel room...

Everywhere around was cornfields and a flat horizon, and occasionally a car dealership or a fastfood place or something, and then there was this cluster of trees where you could see a church steeple like a mile or 2 off the highway, and if you drove to that, you found a little strip of downtown that followed some railroad tracks a couple blocks, and then a block in in the westward direction.

We 1st went to the one bar around 9:30pm - right when you walked in there was a big plastic tub of Bud light, and a staircase to your right that went up to this big platform built into the front wall of the room, and overlooked the entire bar... There was a tin ceiling and an old wooden bar and a NASCAR banner up, and the place was wall-to-wall (white) people of all ages, though a little bit on the younger side. There was this old guy in red at the bar with a cane, and when he left later, this 20-something heavily-made up (white) girl took him by the arm and led him out... There were also some older early 40s (white) women there in college sweatshirts and jeans, including one who had said (unfacetiously) "Nice scarf!" to my colleague when she passed us on the street earlier (he was wearing a sweater and a scarf tied round his neck, but no jacket).

The band was a cover band, and opened up with some heavy rock song.

Shortly after that, we left to the other bar in town, a pool hall/club.

So, my friends played a bit of pool, and I watched (black) music videos play in the (white) club part. I was talking with the bartender a bit, and he said that the Christian university that was hosting the conference would call up their bar to see if any of their students were there drinking.

"This is their hideaway," he was like, "But we don't tell them shit. We'll stop 'em if they're not 21, but otherwise, they're adults, we're nobody's babysitters."

The club was sparsely attended by (white) people and several (Mexicans), except for maybe a period of like maybe an hour sometime after midnight.

At one point, several (white) girls kicked off their shoes and danced all along the bar, then stopped, and then like a half hour later started up again, at which point a young (Mexican) guy reached up and drummed one of them's buttcheeks with his palms.

A few minutes later, some (white) chick was all like, "FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU" with both her fingers up to him, and he stormed out the door with two of his (women) friends.

When I asked the bartender (actually, the barback, and the local football coach to boot) what that was all about, he was like, "I don't know."

An hour later, I look down from a music video, and it looks like this taller (drunk) (white) guy is armwrestling the short (Mexican) bartender, only I look closer, and he's choking him and pulling him across the bar, except the (Mexican) guy is suspended in mid-air with both his tennis shoes off the ground. Like 20 seconds later, the barback and a bartender run up, and then the barback goes around and they disappeared from my line of sight for like 10min., and I see the (Mexican) bartender walking around all day with the top 3 buttons of his shirt open since they'd been pulled off, and after that a cop walks in and in the direction of the barback and the drunk...

Later, the barback told me that the guy was drunk and for whatever reason picked a fight.

"He was a mess," he was like, and said that he was knocking down beer bottles and shattering them, and picked the owner up and threw him against the wall.

At some point my friends from school left, and I had promised them that the walk home wasn't too much, so like 2am I was sauntering down the street when a police car pulled up and asked me if I was all right... I told them I was visiting and my friends had gone back to the hotel near the highway, so they gave me a ride. They said they weren't surprised about the fights at the bar.

"You have to remember," the one cop was like, "It's a bunch of hillbillies down here."