Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing and farting out loud proved that Randy Mutton's time in the Gamma Alpha Gamma house
had yielded the self-made man profiled in the Sunday Chronicle—that would be the Houston
Chronicle. Beside the story were photos of Mr. Mutton, his lovely wife Betty and their infant
son Max.
All this came on the phone many years after last speaking with Betty, her voice faltering
on this tale of success. Randy had it made, she said, raking in scads o' dough. All he had to do
was not mess it up. That was easy for her to say. How many years can a guy hustle hotdogs and
beans and not wonder about the great, wide world? Anyway, he started mumbling a mantra
when Subway came along and put a dent in the street-side market.
Fuck! Why didn't I fran-
chise? Fuck! Damn! I could have franchised. Fuck!
Randy had made his million dollars in a few years but suffered a barrage of self-inflicted
regret—it could have been millions and maybe millions more. He probably hung himself
when Quiznos came along, but that was a decade later.
Meanwhile, his amazing strategy for staying ahead of the curve was to build a bar ded-
icated to sports fans, what is now called a sports bar. This was the leading edge, and Randy
Mutton got it right, almost. His place was carpeted and nice, in respect to sports fans, who are
not a bunch of loudmouth louts but have feelings and sensitivities too, who appreciate recog-
nition as fans.
But they didn't want carpet or nice. They wanted to yell
You fuckin' has-been bum!
hey
wanted to drop fries on the floor and mash them in without feeling guilty. They wanted a barn
with big TVs. Randy's living room sports bar failed. He'd gone in with cash, because he had it.
he place never caught on. He spent weeks in denial, laying off the entire staff and drinking
in the bar alone with twelve TVs tuned to different sporting events. He could re-hire the staff
when the crowd showed up, which it surely would, once it remembered the great good times.
The cleaning crew arrived one evening, and Randy struck up a friendship with a maid, a
short, squat woman of forty-five who agreed that they both needed a break. They became an
item, so Randy moved out two weeks after the birth of his and Betty's second child. He told
her he was in love.
Betty was thirty-seven and still a knockout.
We were old enough by then to know that life can get very strange, but few of us could
sort the strangeness or make much sense of it. Betty had post-partum difficulties with her
new baby, because things had gone so wrong. She couldn't hold the baby without crying. She
became distraught, feeling like a two-time loser at marriage—her, Betty Boop, the pussycat
queen, the sexual object who made every passing male in her entire adult life ogle and drool.
Her obstetrician had seen it before and referred her to a shrink, who asked how these
events made her feel. “I told him I'd fucked a bunch of guys. So what? Most women do. Maybe
it was different for me, because so many guys came on to me. I don't think I fucked nearly as
