Brawlin' and Ballin' and Dancin' at the Buckhorn Bar

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Certainly one of if not my very favorite of the many bars I've known to whatever degree of intimacy in my meanderings o'er the expanse of this grand land. The spirits of however many embodied and disembodied (and perhaps partly embodied) souls manifest as patrons and entertainers, gray haired grandmothers and grandfathers, college kids and townies, professors and oil field workers, technicians and hair dressers, thespians and lesbians, cowboys and hippie mamas, hipsters and mountain men and mountain women, too, bartenders and glossy glass-eyed trophies mounted on the walls, and perhaps a few veritable ghosts haunt this iconic gathering place in old downtown Laramie, Wyoming.

One might not immediately notice the Zia-style sun symbol is centered on the ceiling above the pool table to the left as you walk through the antique wood door with a thick pane of glass that has “Buckhorn Bar” etched thereupon in old west style lettering, and a five point mule deer etched in between the words, posed as if warily peeking inside. You are not unlikely to hear any number of tongues spoken at tables and booths and 'round the U shaped bar surrounded by padded and red upholstered woodwork stools pressed up against the brass footrest, as English and Spanish, Japanese, Norwegian, Bantu, Russian, Arabic, Hindu and French and likely even Arapaho or Shoshone or Cheyenne or other more truly regional languages have been heard here. You might chance meet a Hollywood star chancing through town, strike up a conversation with a physics PhD or a real live range riding cowboy or a high school dropout or even a Nobel Prize winner, offering epiphanies in their words or just a nice friendly chat.

When I first started to frequent the Buck, sometime in the mid to late nineties, there were brawls would break out at least a few nights a week in some corner or other of the red light chandelier lit room, bars firmly fixed on the inside of the windows to prevent a perhaps two hundred plus pound body from inadvertently flying through. Sometimes three or four or more fights chance might transpire on the occasion of a full moon or some other unsettled vibration in the air or earth or from the stars above, in those days. I myself have never much faced such at the Buck, nor even the too serious prospect of a fist fight even much threatened, despite bearing a sometimes outrageous appearance, dreadlocks and skirts and a sometimes (to some sensibilities) rather provocative personality and self presentation. The bouts so de riguer in those days were mostly amongst those who mutually agreed to throw down, if but by gestures and postures and words offered to indicate a willingness or want to play out such a violent exchange, to act out that role in the postmodern old west play/screenplay was thus played there in those days. Guns had been no significant part of the scene since a 30 '06 bullet went through the mirror on one end of the bar sometime in the seventies, by the way, as fists and basic brawling (and not even knives) suited the storyline at the Buckhorn just fine.

Those like myself who were intensionally peaceful people were mostly left out of such fun altogether, though on one occasion one of the most notorious bruisers in town did endeavor to try whether he might elicit the fighter in me, out on the sidewalk in front of the bar one sunny day. After a little bout between said scrapper and a girl I was sorta seeing and sometimes sleeping with, provoked when he tugged on her cast-bound foot to which she responded with a barrage of fists which mostly didn't connect and I standing by but still not sure whether or not I really needed to defend her honor, as she was one of those bad-ass mountain mamas who're the daughters of Wyoming's womens' suffrage movement and of a hard and fierce land, and of the sort that sometimes might take offense at a gentleman stepping in the way.  A few minutes later said burly bruiser stepped up to me on the sidewalk and started “talking shit” whilst bumping his chest against mine, lips spewing epithets and insults inches from my ear. With the principles of Ahimsa and satyagraha firmly in mind and a recently found passion for meditative practices, I stood my ground but did not let the proffered provocations push me to throw a first strike. I must note as I stood toe-to-toe with this intimidating figure I instinctively considered my options open were he to throw the first blow, but the tensions played themselves out and we both walked away. Later after we got to know each other a bit, he at least once almost begged of me, “Cummon'!! Just wrestle me!”

On another occasion as I was about to take a shot on the pool table, my back to the bar, I felt something strike the back of my cue stick. I turned to see a balding older fellow falling to the floor, gazed down to note that indeed he was breathing and observed rather nonchalantly as he shortly returned to consciousness and started to get up. I turned and took my shot. A half-hour later or so, I saw the fellow who'd been flattened on the floor sitting at the bar and sipping a beer with his erstwhile assailant.

When I first frequented the Buckhorn, I was a fairly well practiced pool player. Like the greater frequency of fights then compared to now, a change I'm not at all unhappy about by the way (despite how well a well choreographed fight scene can be played—even sometimes divinely), the pool shooting seemed more charged than now, more a game was played passionately by more than a few.  Beers and mostly small change was the fare for bets, but the Buck was a noted local venue for such gaming and gambling nonetheless, and another medium of entertainment and the dance other than fighting, fucking or dancing on those occasions of a band on stage or the right song played on the jukebox.

When I frequented the Buckhorn in those days, I got to know a redhead that was indubitably one of the best shooters in the place, and she and I behaved rather scandalously for a span of wild afternoons and nights that often led us back to my black Honda Civic parked behind Coal Creek Coffee and the Home Bakery, and on at least one evening got rather Rabelaisian as she and I occupied the ladies room for a rather inconsiderate span of time at the Buckhorn. More than one other intriguing player in that sorta love-play did dance that dance with me that would sometimes start at and oft meander through the Buckhorn Bar, at least a bartender and so many glass-eyed heads observing the show from behind the bar and above.

Over the years of getting to know and becoming known at the Buckhorn Bar, live music and dance and even the jukebox songs often somehow conveyed, at least to my perception, the song and dance of the grander show, the macrocosm displayed in our dance and in the songs sung and played as a well-timed soundtrack to our little production of the big-time stories.  Certainly this is a synchronicity that is more readily discerned when a crowd starts to move in time with intension to the rhythms and rhymes and other bodies in motion, a bit of booze flowing through the body and a place to be not so distracted by petty drama. In our movements and inadvertent mudras I envisioned myself and the others on the floor as expression of Siva Nataraja, Lord of the Dance (i.e., of the Universe), the music as performances of the celestial songs and sounds and vibrations that order the quantum dance of everything from galaxies, stars and planets to atoms, protons and electrons and beyond. It was in the person of another fiery redhead, tall and regal and rather not unlike a female version of my own form, with whom on the occasion of a however auspicious night I found moments of synchronous almost mirror perfect movement on the floor to each other's moves and meditations on the music, The Green Street Majority on the stage and a fifty to a hundred hippies likewise in display of those archetypal and abiding expressions of the forever stories, turned into the free form movements of dance. A grand dance and romance played as above and so below and so on, presented and proffered for all our pleasure at places like the Buckhorn Bar, Laramie, Wyoming, where sometimes the eternal magic that in truth animates the grand show of loving and living and drinking and dieing, both above and below, can sometimes be seen clearly enough under the red light chandeliers and Zia midnight sun and glass eyed elk and deer always watching the performance from above.