STURGIS — It’s a Monday night at One Eyed Jack’s Saloon.
It’s your first night at the 85th Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. It’s also the first bar you visit.
It's love at first sight.
She has dark hair streaked with purple dye. Her lipstick is plum-nude. Her eyes are almond shaped, caramel brown and utterly seductive.
She’s moving her mouth and presumably talking, but you don’t hear any words because her eyes have cast some kind of spell that apparently makes you deaf.
The spell is simple and works like this: She stares at you with intense and convincingly sincere desire, as if she’d never wanted any man more than you.
At last, you snap out of it.
“My name is Sable,” she says. “Can I use your chair to get up?”
“Excuse me?” you ask.
“Your chair. Can I step on your chair to get up on the bar?”
She puts her hand on your shoulder, wedges her boot on the stool between your crotch and hoists herself onto the bar. This moment brings a number of realizations.
First, you realize she is wearing very little: a thong, fishnets and a strappy top, to be exact.
Then you realize there is a man she may, in fact, want more than you, and he's waving a bill at the other end of the bar, where she promptly migrates.
Lastly, you realize you are an absolute idiot.
As if from nowhere, you suddenly notice multiple women on bar tops all around you, including one who’s spinning around a pole like a pinwheel.
You’d think a guy would have enough wits about him to know he’d walked into a pole dancing club. Then again, in a place like Sturgis, it's easy to lose your wits.
It’s also possible that you're high and disoriented from motorcycle fumes, because even after the impression she left, you failed to notice Sable leave.
Everyone’s Blushing
The rest of the One Eyed Jack’s crowd meanwhile, are themselves a whole different kind of entertainment.
In particular, there’s a group of Michigan men who have what you might call “Spring Break Daytona Beach Energy.”
The group’s tone-setter is a guy with a curly brown mullet wearing a red trucker hat that says, “Harley F***ing Davidson.”
He appears to be around 30, but he looks half that age while stuffing bills in dancers’ garter straps, even as his face fills with blush and the stupefied look of a schoolboy at his first rush of maturity.
He’s not the only one turning red.
Throughout the rally, special police officers help keep the peace by conducting routine check-ins on Sturgis establishments. It turns out the pole-dancing area of One Eyed Jack’s poses a specifically high public-safety concern.
At least, that's the impression you take from the officers’ deliberate, recurrent and highly methodical patrol of the pole dancing domain.
Must be a tough beat. Why else would their cheeks turn so red?
As for the Michigan schoolboy, he’s graduating from small bills to big ones. Next thing you know he’s got his head tilted back on the bar with a $20 bill sticking out of his mouth.
Apparently, it’s a whole thing.
Everyone in the place starts blowing whistles, then one of the dancers crouches above him with her feet on either side of his face.
Even you are blushing now.
He sits up from the bar with the lost, wide-eyed look of a man who’s forgotten where he is, like he’d just come-to from a coma. His friends shake him by the shoulders, and he responds with a breathless grin.
Minutes later he’s back down on the bar for another, and then another after that.
Is this a celebration; what’s the occasion, you ask him.
His response is minimal, yet says so much.
“Sturgis!”
‘Show Her She’s Pretty’
Sable at last returns.
You try to delude yourself that she doesn’t think of you as just another client, but then someone taps you on the shoulder and lays the truth out clearly.
“Isn’t she pretty?” says a woman dressed in fishnets, nodding toward Sable.
Later, you’ll learn that this woman studied theater performance in college, currently lives in Chicago, and that her name is Conner.
But right now, what she wants to talk about is her friend, Sable, and how pretty she is. And yes, you agree.
“If you think she’s pretty, show her she’s pretty,” the friend says. “There’s an ATM downstairs.”
Against your better judgement, you decide to show her how pretty she is.
Insufficient Funds
The main level of One Eyed Jack's is a vast, open-air layout with more than a dozen separate island bars. There are no walls between anything, and for this reason it feels kind of like a junior high cafeteria.
That is, if in this junior high cafeteria women wear thongs, bartenders paddle patrons on the derriere and random dudes invite you to pet a 30-pound boa constrictor.
Despite the spectacle, it's all rendered instantly boring and hopeless following the latest news from the ATM: insufficient funds.
You pull out a stool at one of the island bars and put your head in your hands. There’s a man who looks like Joe Pesci sitting beside you, and he asks, “Why the long face?”
Before you can answer he segues into a weird monologue about the real purpose of life and how to live right, like something your incoherent grandfather might offer up on his hospital bed.
His name is Frankie, he grew up in Brooklyn and now builds cranes in Las Vegas.
“Don’t let anybody tell you what to do,” Frankie says. “Do what you want to do, what you know you need to do. You make life what you want life to be.
“Right now, make Sturgis what you want it to be. You can make it everything if you just focus on it. Make it what you want it,” he said, swinging a leg rapidly back and forth in his seat.
His legs don’t reach the ground, which means he may be even shorter than Joe Pesci.
You tell him that you can’t make Sturgis what you want it to be due to a phenomenon known as insufficient funds.
Here Frankie offers up a piece of advice that's genuinely what you need to hear. Of all the guys at Sturgis, it's the Pesci look-alike with the Brooklyn accent who breaks the Sable spell.
“No, no, no. Not that. Trust me, I’m from Vegas, remember?” he says. “You know what Vegas is, right? Trust me, that’s not what you want. You just think it is.”
Contact Zakary Sonntage at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com
Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.
