BANDIT vs. SWEETWATER: Episode 2 of 6
Read the first episode by clicking here
The Accidental Encounter
By Idella Sweetwater, PhD
Chief Cheerleading Officer, CCO
The bar was small, only eight round, scored and scratched hickory tables with mismatched, rickety wooden chairs that creaked and complained when you sat on them. There were only two other patrons. One was a local cowpuncher, who sat at the bar, back to us, absentmindedly opening and eating one peanut at a time and watching the PBR on an overhead screen. The other, well, he was something unique.
Bandit sat down at a table where the other guy was already seated. I figured that was the other guy’s bike out there when Bandit pulled up. What the hell, I thought to myself, are all these Easyriders guys stereotypical Ken Doll-firefighters with just the right scars and swagger? The guy Bandit was talking to I would later come to know as “Special Agent Zebra”. I mean, does it get more corny? He literally went by “Agent Zebra” in his byline. He apparently had no known real name. First guy I’ll fire, I thought. I won’t fire him outright of course, too disruptive. He’ll simply get caught up in a “streamlining” effort. Sorry, model/lumberjack, blue-eyed literary tough guy, but you gotta go bye-bye. Momma’s making some cuts.
I don’t know why he bugged me exactly, Mr. Zebra. He just struck me as a little too confident, a little too fearless, a little too fit, head shaved a little too perfectly, beard a little too just-right, one of those 55-plus guys who needs to either age or get off the pot. Anyway, he sucked.
Bandit ordered what I would come to know was his signature drink; Jack “Black” Daniels double, on ice. I made a mental note; he likes Gentleman Black, with ice. And for some reason he likes this operator wannabe with a CZ AccuShadow 2 pistol hanging off his right hip. My retired Ranger daddy back in Georgia taught me guns and taught me to shoot like an operator. Okay, I thought, I’ll give the intense-looking too calm Zebra guy one point for running a super-high end, accurized 1911 and a Trijicon RMR with a Surefire X300 weaponlight. But just the one.
Finally, and I do mean finally, Special Agent Zebra—God help me—got up and walked out, his dusty western boots marking his exit on the worn wooden floorboards with deep thumps. My turn. Watch and learn, my bitches.
I got up and walked to the bar and leaned forward to get the bartender’s attention. Wait, whuut you said, girl’s got a perfect “beep” hiding under those Daisy Dukes? Oh me, oh my. That’s right, Bandit, that’s Ph-D backside you’re seeing now, big boy. Somebody call the fire department because this Georgia peach just went four-alarm and it’s gettin’ hot in hea’. I’m sorry? Did you say something about my glorious derriere in your aged mind, Bandit? I leaned slightly further across the bar; yoo-hoo, Mr. Tender of the Bar.
I was a fly fisher, the fly just stinging the surface here, there, a size 6 dry-fly dancing the jig of death. I noticed the cowboy at the end of the bar was immediately radar-locked on, half-opened peanut hanging between his fingers. The bartender scuttled up obediently.
Glancing casually into the bar mirror I noticed that I’d been noticed. Fish on! Welcome to the big leagues Mr. Bandito Baller Big Boy. I’ve got a stringer full of bank presidents and billionaires tied to that tree over there on the muddy bank, just like you will be shortly.
I took my Gentleman Jack double, with ice, that I ordered and walked back to my table, avoiding Bandit’s cool gaze, and tossed my custom Lucchese rattlesnake cowboy boots up onto the cranky wooden table. Hmm, how peaceful, just a pretty girl and her long, tan legs and her delicious cock-tail.
Bandit leaned back in his chair, the cantankerous, dry wood let out a loud creaking complaint. He put his own black boots up on his table and took a sip off his drink.
Oh really, I thought to myself, you want to play the corporate mirror imaging game? With me? Old man, you have no idea what sort of power-of-ten magnetic magnitude I can crank up with this sweet custom ride I call me. I sipped my drink, waiting for the inevitable collapse. I stretched out my tan legs and glanced at the cowboy as if he’d somehow caught my eye. Bandit would crumble. They all do.
Bandit checked his text messages. He got up. Ha, here kitty-kitty. Come to mommy.
Any last words before you walk over here and get owned? Those whining women, they’re all bunch of—
Bandit walked to the bar and sat down, his back to me. He ordered another G-Jack. This gray-beard old-timer is playing me, I thought, furious. He’s done. He should be either coming to me to ask something stupid like, “Is anyone sitting here?” To which I would reply something like, “You tell me.” Or he should walk out that door and I should hear nothing but tailpipes. You’re not fooling me, big boy, Mr. Marlon Brando of Motorcycles. You can’t leave because you’re caught in my southern belle tractor beam. Go ahead, I can play all day. I’ve made movie stars private jets a day late, I’ve delayed rock concerts at Madison Square Garden by six hours, Mr. Publisher Outlaw Hotshot.
Bandit took his new drink and walked out. Sonofa…
I angrily waited the requisite ten minutes, then walked outside “to stretch, get some fresh air”. I wasn’t new to this sport. I’d purposely left my hat and dark glasses on the table outside, just in case I got a playboy like Bandit obviously was. Just in case I’d need to have an excuse to “follow” my mark out, or simply have an excuse to break contact at the precise moment of power and go outside to get something I'd “left outside”. But it pissed me off that this gray grandpappy chopper poppa, was playing me now.
I walked out into the setting sun. The colors or red and orange and violet spangled across the distant mountains. Bandit was sitting at my table, casually fondling my sunglasses and my baseball cap.
“You must have forgotten these when you followed me into the bar,” Bandit said in a relaxed manner. I looked him in the eyes. I stammered. I never stammer. I froze. I never freeze. The words of that whiny bitch rang in my ears, “Never look him in the eyes.”
“What? Yes, well, I was on a call when I had to step inside to get better signal,” I said, making up the lamest excuse I’d ever manufactured. Ugh, that sounded so bad, I thought, scolding myself. Take charge, woman!
“Well then you’d better head back in there,” Bandit said, setting down my baseball cap.
“Why?"
“Because you left your cell phone in there on the table,” he replied with an easy smile.
“I did?” I asked involuntarily, immediately regretting taking the bait. In a quick, cool-free self-frisk I felt my cell phone sticking out of the back pocket of my high-cut cutoffs. “No, it’s…” Shit, he got you. Idella, you dumbass, he was messing with you and you—argggh.
“So what’d you want to talk about?” Bandit asked me, signaling for me to sit down, at my own table. Asshole!
“What makes you think I wanted to talk to you?” I asked with forced coolness, taking back my sunglasses and cap. I was making a mess of this. This guy was good. So good I hated him. But those other bitches were weak. I will own this jerk before I’m done here.
“The fact that you were here waiting on me, then followed me inside, waited on me to finish talking to Zebra, and then followed me out here to pretend to pick up your things you staged up in case you needed an excuse to come back out here,” he said dryly, as if we were over-rehearsing dialogue from a worn-out school play.
I glared at him. For the second time I locked up. For the second time I heard the women telling me, “Never look him in the eye.” It was like I was looking down at my words frozen in a horse tank in January. My plan was crumbling. Bandit was in control and if I tried to wrest control back, I’d only look worse and give up more critical negotiating ground. Ordinarily by now I would have already turned down at least two salary packages and be working on the third while toying with probing questions like, “If we were to relocate you, would we be moving a family, or just you and a husband, or just you?”
“Actually,” I said, “I was just leaving.” Loudly inside my own head I heard myself shout, What did you just say, Idella?! You’re going to leave? What about the offer? You spent two months staging this accidental encounter up, you dumb ho! How can you get him to ask you to CCO Easyriders, you complete dumbass, now that you just committed to leaving? Oh my god you're an idiot! Now you have to leave or you’ll look like a total psycho!
“Oh yeah?” Bandit asked. He sipped his whiskey. I waited for my break, a chance to reconfigure, regain the upper hand, any opportunity would do. “Okay. See ya’, round, kid.” I heard my mental balloon pop.
Kid? Kid? You arrogant sonofa-bastard-mother—I am a doctor! Kid my ass. Sure, a doctorate technically, but what I don’t do is take guff off old men who think they’re clever and run failing rags that never… ugh! I stormed off.
I got on my motorcycle and fired it up. My only opportunity now to preserve any face was to light a fire and blow out of there like I’d be glad to never see him again. Which would likely be the case now that I’d gotten star-struck-in-the-head and blown my whole operation to smithereens, like a 25-something; which I was. Otherwise any iota of bargaining power I might still have would be burned.
I dropped the clutch and brought the bike around hard and under big throttle, sending up gravel for effect. Unfortunately I also—Fuck you, Luck, you are no lady!—peppered Bandit’s gas tank, the horrifying TINK! TINK! TINK! ringing across the New Mexico valley like pistol rounds smacking off steel plates.
In my rearview mirror I saw Bandit grimace and throw up one hand as if to say, “You crazy slag, that’s a $4,000 paint job you just redecorated.”
As I roared off, tears welled up in my eyes, blurring my vision as they slid backward in the 80MPH winds and then walked the wrong direction back across my sunglasses lenses. I’d blown it. Bandit was a thousand times better than any CEO I’d ever taken down. He was a different league, like he needed nothing in this world. I was the big game gamer, the Annie Oakey of male C-suit power players and I’d just been gored to death by a rare African rhino who ambushed me from behind out of heavy brush so fast I didn’t even know I was dead until the buzzards were plucking out my eyeballs. It was a massacre.
You’re so hot, I chided myself in the roaring winds. You’re sweet little tush and perfect boobs and big-brain swagger is sooooo irresistible. Well, he resisted. With ease! You just ate a mule deer at 100 miles an hour in the rain, sweetheart! You just got your Georgia peach of a backside handed right back to you with a very polite, “No thank you, miss. I have no need for this most common offering.”
I was so mad at myself I wanted to not cry. I also wanted to ride all the way back to Georgia and run into my daddy’s arms and cry my face off and tell him I don’t want to be a baller anymore, I can’t do this, I hate business, I hate competition, I hate everything, I want you to please go kill Bandit, daddy, he was really mean to me.
Then I saw it. My heart fluttered involuntarily. I stopped breathing. Two miles or so back, on the horizon, a single blazing headlight crested, coming on strong.
To be continued…
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