My Memories of Grady Gaines: Marred by a "Hurricane Ashley"
Every year around Cinco de Mayo the Onion blasts out a video from a few years back of “Hurricane Ashley,” the horrifyingly on-the-money stereotype of a highly intoxicated young upper middle class white woman: by turns, rowdy, tearful, enraged, and mocking, but utterly obnoxious throughout.
My most memorable Hurricane Ashley ordeal came in about 1997. I’d just landed back in town from almost a decade away in Austin, Nashville, and overseas, and in those days I was deep into blues mode, and very much loving what my hometown had to offer then in that area. So I was a semi-regular at the River Cafe on Montrose, where Grady Gaines and the Texas Upsetters had a steady midweek gig and I think another on weekends.
On one of my visits, I ran into my old friend Christian Busker, a one-time West U Little League rival turned fraternity brother turned actual friend. The year after we both were asked to leave the University of Texas we kind of roomed together in ratty apartment in Gulfton with a rotating cast of other lost souls in an abode we called the “Junky Den.” Which overdid things a little much, as we seldom indulged in anything stronger than entirely too copious quantities of Schlitz Malt Liquor, daily catching up to already aging rappers like Eric B & Rakim and LL Cool J and EPMD. And then one of us got ahold of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and that was about all we listened to for the rest of that long, hot, fucked-up bewildered summer. Being a dropout sucks. You don’t even know how bewildered you really are.
Anyway, we bonded tight that summer and were both on the upswing when we ran into each other at the Grady show. By then, Christian, or “Bart,” as he was and is sometimes known, had a thriving home-based business peddling fresh bagels to downtown office workers and was dreaming big. As for me, by that time I’d learned that one good way to become a writer was, like, A) to actually write stuff; and B) hand it in to people who might print it and even give you some money, too.
So yeah, it was a happy backslapping kinda occasion. But a storm was brewing across the bar-room, and soon, before we had a chance to hunker down, we were in its crosshairs. This was the Houston River Cafe Hurricane Ashley of 1997.
Our distant early warning systems had failed. Like the Great Storm of 1900, suddenly, she was just there, and there was nothing we could do about it.
“Hey! Either of you two wanna dance?” she asked. Instantly we could tell that she was beyond wasted. Blotto. Shit-faced.
“Not right now,” I said. “Just trying to catch up with a friend.”
“What about you?” she asked Christian. He said some words to the some effect.
And so she changed tack.
“Oh, I get it!” she said. “You guys are gay! That’s okay! Gay gays are cool as shit!”
One of us said that was not the case, and that really got her goat.
“Well,” she said. “If you are not queers, you are looo-zerrrs!” She even did that little L sign on her forehead.
And with that she was gone. Christian and I just laughed and shook it off, occasionally turning around from the bar to watch as the storm ravaged other tables. And you know what they say — there is someone for everybody, because eventually she persuaded some fool to take her for a spin.
She was not out there very long before we heard a tremendous crash coming from the bandstand and the music ceased.
Somehow, "Ashley" had managed to make it on the stage, and in her whirling white girl dervish passion, then did a header straight into the drum set, taking it completely out of commission, and bringing the show to a temporary close.
Even Grady was stunned, and this was a guy who'd been playing live music for a half-century or more by that point.
But you can never underestimate the power of a Hurricane Ashley.