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Electronic Cowboys
By John Shirley
When I told him I was going to the Grand National Rodeo (which recently took place in San Francisco’s Cow Palace), my normally mild mannered friend fixed me with a steely glare and said, “Do you know what they do to those horses to make them buck like that?” I said it was but a momentary discomfort, something like an extra-tight jockstrap, and the horses and brahma bulls normally live the Life of Riley. “Sure – you try having your testicles in a wringer for a minute or so.”
But after a lifetime of not fitting in on either side of the corral fence, I was able to shrug off my political incorrectitude with Olympian ease and, the next evening, decked out in white Resistol cowboy hat, jeans and levi jacket and exquisitely well-worn Mexican cowboy boots, I was settling into an excellent box seat at the Cow Palace; settling in there alone, but for the strangers around me, most of them in Stetsons and Resistols—my wife refused to come along on the same PETA-influenced grounds.
Me, I’m a rodeo fetishist; an armchair cowboy. With defiant satisfaction I consumed a PETA-incorrect tri-tip sandwich, and took in Cattleman’s Night of this weeklong rodeo. The rodeo had its ripples of cognitive dissonance: It was, after all, 1999, an era when Montana cattle ranchers use little runabouts similar to small dunebuggies (“Japanese Mustangs”) to herd cattle; when they consult satellite data, communicate with outriders by palm pilots and cellphones—and here at the Cow Palace both genuine cowboys as well as “fellas who’re mostly ‘boots and hats’” are often seen with petite little cellphones pressed to their ears, the latest beepers on their hips in lieu of pistols.
After a baritone who ordinarily plays hockey for the San Jose Sharks led us in the Star Spangled Banner, and a couple and child dressed as pioneers, embodying family values, drove a buggy around the arena, we plunged without taking a breath into Team Penning. In Team Penning a series of horseback teams “cut out” yearlings, marked with team numbers, from a small herd, separating them doggies from the rest by horsemanship alone, driving them into a pen at the other end. Best time, performed according to rigid rules of riding and cattle handling, wins a modest cash prize. I was enchanted; the cattle were bewildered. All the evening’s cattle were bewildered; all the horses patient and confident. Then Miss Grand National—a proud young blond (as they usually are), with a long history in FFA and stock work (as they always have), herself star spangled, trotted a rodeo banner around the dirt-covered floor of the arena as the “all around hands”, the cowboys working for the rodeo, set up for the bareback bronc riding. Cowboys leaning back, kicking the air in counterpoint to the horse’s kicking, one hand on the strap the other in the air, were soon riding such broncs as “Ruby Moon” and “Honky Tonk Angel” (perhaps a little joke about ‘riding’ in that name).
Along the way we got to know Bob Tallman, the announcer, “the voice of rodeo”, who announces for “upwards of 200 rodeos a year” and finds time to be a cattle rancher himself. His announcer voice, projecting from gigantic state of the art speakers at ear-splitting volume, varies from a rich “Frankie Laine” drawl to a lot of odd little Ed-Grimley-like “I must say” asides; he seems deeply knowledgeable about rodeo, but is doubtless helped by the little computer screen in front of him which he constantly consults, to add to his western-style database about cowboy contestants; there was also the inevitable rodeo clown, dwarf whose name I couldn’t catch, a weary-seeming little old pro who seemed genuinely surprised and pleased to discover that some of the arena’s hands had pasted Playboy fold-outs inside his dented protective barrel (painted to resemble a Coors can).
A digital sign, sponsored by Copenhagen-Skoal smokeless tobacco, scrolled out the cowboy’s scores as the broncs did their honest best to throw and shatter them—much of Bob Tallman’s info on the cowboys related to their recent surgeries, how much hospital time they’d had recovering from shattered jaws, crushed knees, stoved in ribs; this was even more true of the bull-riders, later. It was the cowboys, I mentally told my censorious friend, and not the stock who were at risk here.
Now and then the dwarf rodeo clown runs on tiny little legs to the center of the arena, engages—with the aid of a headset microphone—in a bit of schtick with the announcer, regaling us with props and a weirdly microscopic pony, like something from prehistoric times, which jumps tiny horsejump barriers; towards the end the clown brings out a miniature pug dog in a foam rubber fish suit, and chases it around with a fishing pole: he’s dog fishing, he says. Sometimes rodeo imitates authentic Surrealism.
Some of the riders had come all the way from places like Oklahoma for as little as 6.7 seconds on their convulsing steeds before being ingloriously thrown. Riding broncs and bulls, wrestling steers and roping, is an exacting and risky science requiring microsecond calculation and with risks that make poor battered Steve Young seem on easy street by comparison. Riders are judged not just by their ability to stay on, but by such refinements as high kicking action, proper riding position, correct spurring action, “the spot where the steer wrestler’s feet hit the ground after taking hold of the steer, and a great deal more including how savage the animal is—if it’s not a dangerous ride it counts against you. There are young “collegiate circuit” riders here, and some, who walk with a permanent limp and grim, set smiles covering chronic pain, who seem nearer 55. I’m captivated as I watch the broncs, and later the bull riders—each ride is brief and so high-action and intense that if I look away for a half-second I lose some essential. Each ride pits a man against an animal far more powerful than himself in a situation designed to magnify confrontation; I’m forty feet from some of the bulls whip-lashing across the arena and I can see their eyes: these sons of bitches, still sporting wicked horns, are truly enraged. As each competitive drama plays out, a computerized PA system plays exactly edited snippets of popular songs—not just country western, but bits of Reggae, Buster Poindexter singing “Hot Hot Hot” and even “Macho Man.”
The 21st century’s cowboy may be electronically embroidered, but rodeo continues to be about man versus nature; man wrestling nature to the ground. Still, there’s something more: as is made clear by the uncanny rapport of horsemen and women with their mounts in the stock horse finals—in which we see exquisitely noble horses, responding to verbal orders, racing headlong at the opposite wall as if doomed to collision, stopping on a dime, skidding with correct form, doing 360 turns in place. Clearly, rodeo is also about man in harmony with nature.
The Cow Palace is an indoor stadium: the smell of horse-sweat and cow-dung seems to congeal ever more heavily in the air as the night goes on. But I don’t really mind.
Towards the end, four reckless cowboy daredevils win extra money by sitting at a foldout card table—a furious bull is released and hooks two of them head over heels into the air. The last one still sitting at the table wins $200.
In the parking lot, my grimy, tenderfootin’ little Geo Prism is almost crushed by any number of enormous four-seater Dodge Ram pickups driven by drunk cowboys…I took off my cowboy hat and envied their radically politically-incorrect pickups…And drove home, whistling “Ghost Riders in the Sky…”
Copyright © 2000 John Shirley All Rights Reserved
John Shirley is the award-winning author of Black Butterflies, Wetbones, "Really Really Really Really Weird Stories", and Eclipse, among many others. Eclipse, the first book of his cyberpunk trilogy, has just been reissued, revised and updated, by Babbage Press, http://www.babbagepress.com
Check out the authorized John Shirley Website at:
http://www.darkecho.com/johnshirley