USS MULLINNIX DD-944

  Woody's   

9545 11th Bay
Ocean View, Virginia
(1973)

If you're still a hippie, turn your sound on...

You walk through an innocence looking front entrance of a mundane white clapboard duplex and your world changes as your senses are assaulted. Your ears pound with Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ coming from a screaming 240 watt Sansui quadraphonic amplifier equipped with a reverberation applifier and 6 hard-wood-encased speakers stacked to the ceiling in two pyramids. Simultaneously, your eyes are battered by a strobe light supported by a 4-ft long black light, making the ‘black-light’ posters on the wall spring to life – shocking the ever-lov'in-shit out of you... Concurrently, your nostrils pick up a slightly-sweet thick aromatic fog that drifts through the room in layers, eddies follow each person as they move in a stroboscopic illusion of slow motion. WTFO...

Blinking in sync with the strobe & Floyd, you realize the place is packed with party-animals. How in the hell can you get this many people in one room?

Adjusting your senses the best you can, you put a few names with some of the stroboscopic faces – Shorty, Slick, Bo, Rita, Pete, Gayle. Others, seemingly strangers but only because you can’t immediately recall their names. Given time, they will come…

Birdman offers you a chair he saved from the destruction in the kitchen, telling you the stereo sounds best if you sit ‘right here’. MJ-Foghat passes you a ‘refreshment’. Inhaling, you pass it on to Coyote. Diane offers you an almost-cold can of Shaffer (East Coast Coors) beer. The stereo DOES sound good – damn good. You look to your right and see ‘Griff’ drilling holes, with his eyes, through a black-light poster of a Viking-massacre. He is as far away as the Vikings…will he ever make it back???





Wayne yells your name over the pounding base beat, pointing to the ceiling, he shouts, “Hey, look at that,” pointing to the ceiling. You glance up, only to see a giant black spider the size of a fucking basketball hurtling towards your forehead. You scream %$#*&^@$%#) and erupt out of the chair like a bloody rocket. The living room explodes into laughter loud enough to drown out the 4 boys of Floyd. Dumfounded and still gasping for smoky-oxygen, you look at the spider – a fucking plastic spider hanging on a thread about five feet from the floor. Though you can’t see the tread through the smoke, you realize it must be tied to the massive man-made spider web that adorns the ceiling from corner to corner. Charlie, TR, Jewels, and Snake have tears in the eyes they’re laughing so hard…




The front door opens and, with an ever-so-slight breeze, in walks Cathy, Gus, Stash, and Ole. Funny, everyone seems to know everyone. The 4 are followed by a bra-less knockout in a loose fitting almost see-through top laughing with a hillbilly twang in her voice. Now, what was her name...

You eventually gather your wits and glance over at the back of the guy fucking with the stereo. He’s on his knees, hunched over the turntable. He abruptly starts threading a real-to-real tape into the Akai tape deck. The stereo equipment, with all their knobs, gages, and lights looks like a bloody cockpit in a fighter jet. His hair is a dark brown mop and he’s wearing Navy-issue black rimmed glasses. His blue jeans are bleached white from the knees down. He’s shirtless with broad lean shoulders and a dark golden tan. Slightly on the shy side, he’s got 'womanizer' in him that stretches a country mile. He knows it, but doesn’t show it…




He turns, and with a twinkle in his eye, laughs with an infectious grin and proclaims,

“Wait'll you hear this shit…”
Then and ONLY then,
do you realize you're at --- Woody’s
          

Woody - 2009                                     Woody - 1976

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