Funny experiences after 40 years of living on the road
Hey everybody, Bill Millwood here. I'm just sitting here in my rocker today thinking about my life on the roads of Texas after retiring from 40 years of outside selling. Going from town to town, always moving, countless motel rooms, bars and roads that not even an armadillo had crossed in years.
I have met and worked with countless folks, many were forgettable or regrettable, but the one's that weren't made for countless memories, mostly humorous.
My chapters are going to showcase one person primarily so as not to wander all over the place and be confusing. Time frame for these chapters is late 70's thru the 80's. It will revolve mostly around three men I worked with; George, Larry and Carl, or my personal reference to them, The Three Stooges. All womanizers while married with children, they led a strange but privileged life during those years. Chapter One intro is George.
I worked with a fellow named George in the north Texas area for about 15 years. He was already in place when I came aboard so I guess you could call him one of my mentors. Now George was the typical salesman of the day; loud, gruff and in your face. He also had a no confidence streak that caused him to fall into a number of predicaments, usually bad for him and you.
George was a portly man, nowhere near a stud, stallion or any of those descriptions. He had a comb over hairdo and smoked and drank a lot. He was married with children, his wife an attractive housewife, rather oblivious to his shenanigans when out of town. He had bulging eyes, like the old comic Marty Feldman from Monty Python days, but he did have the lines for the ladies. Well, let's call them ladies for now. Remember the no confidence? George would find ugly first and then move up; his success ratio for scoring was directly parallel to who he went after. One of his particular statements when entering a club or bar was "Let me cut one from the herd", referring to a woman in a group. I'll give you a few examples of his scores.
I met up with him once in Waco. Now this town back then was a bible thumping community and it was near impossible to find a bar, let alone one that had trolling women in it. We stayed at one motel but visited another that had an attached bar, the Ramada Inn. George was not a man who ate first before drinking, that was reserved for the 2am meal at Denny's. So he usually started with black russians and then switched to white. Well at this bar, an older woman, dressed a little wild for her age, enters and takes a seat near us. The lighting in this place is poor, so other than seeing this lady was old, it was too difficult to determine more. The conversation, started by George was getting more risqué as the evening went on, and this older woman was just as wild in her comments. Challenges were tossed out and she blatantly said she would get a room and take us both on; this was enough for me, I excused myself and went back to my motel and got a burger to go. I would see George in the morning, hopefully in one piece.
Both George and I were early risers, so it was no surprise when I saw George enter the café at 6am and walk up to my table. He looked a little disheveled; it appeared he got little sleep last night. I asked straight out how last night went.
"Partner, she was a crazy old loon"
"George, that's how you like them right?"
"Well, she did get a room. It was the honeymoon suite; it had glass walls and a glass ceiling to"
Picturing George's flabby ass reflecting in the ceiling was making the egg I just swallowed wanting to come back up.
"Well, what could be wrong with that?" I inquired.
"Partner, she got naked and spread eagled on the bed and told me to eat her. She was bare and I said to her, darlin you shave, she said no, I'm just old. I could not get it up after that. Then when she said she just turned 80, I locked myself in the bathroom for 30 minutes, telling her I was sick, which I was"
With that my pancakes were coming back up thru my nostrils and the laughter wouldn't stop.
Another time with George was in the town of Longview where they had a honky tonk called Rio Palm Isle. This was during the hay day of Urban Cowboy so it was a gold mine of activity. On a weekend night this place would bring buses over from Louisiana of partiers, mostly middle aged women (or older). This was a regular hangout for George so it was understood that we would be trolling there.
Now this was also the time that Detroit was trying to be efficient, so vehicles were being converted to diesel from gas. George bought one of these, an Oldsmobile that he loved and only he drove. Again this was not a true diesel, simply a revised gas engine that ran louder than shit and needed a running start to get on a freeway.
So after our business calls we head over to the Rio in this Oldsmobile. It's starting to snow a little, just enough to keep a thin sheen on everything.
This club is big; a huge dance floor in the middle of the room with wooden picnic seating around for the folks to better mingle and also to accommodate larger parties. In this place the women were the aggressors, if you within range of the dance floor it was nothing for a gal to come out of nowhere, grab you and haul you on the floor. That was my first experience. George was a regular here, but he did not mention this to me; so I just got my Lone Star beer, took my first swallow and was swooshed up by the predecessor of Marge Simpson, a tall spiral hairdo (referred as the rodeo hairdo), a woman 25 years my senior. She reeked of perfume that must have come from a swamp and as she spun me around so my face would make contact with that hair. It was so sprayed; I believe a brick wall would have been softer making contact. The dance then went to a slow hug number in which she latched on to my ass cheeks instead of my shoulder. I looked across the room to a grinning George at a table with another half dozen rodeo gals.
