Caddy-wompus

“Get back on the interstate, east, go one exit up, exit the 138, go right. Then you wanna go and make a left a Checkers. At Checkers. Then that’ll go around and you’ll see a carnival. Go past the carnival and around. Wait. Left at Checkers, then left into the carnival. Pass the carnival on your left. Then you want to go right and it’s all the way in the back.”

“Let me get this straight,” I say. “I wanna go east on the 20 one exit, left at the exit—“

“Right at the exit.”

“Right, right. Right at the exit, left…”

“Left at Checkers”

“Yeah, left at Checkers. Left at the carnival…”

“It’s all about the carnival. Once you see the carnival you know you’re close.”

“Pass the carnival and go all the way around back…”

“Yeah, it’s a place called Caddy’s. Caddy’s.”

“And you’re sure they’ll be open?”

The young African American man and his girlfriend look at me. “We both drive cabs for a living,” he says. “Hell yeah it’s gonna be open.”

It’s Friday night past midnight and my intrepid assistant Lil C and I are in Conyers, Georgia looking for a place to drink. Everything is closed and Georgia’s notoriously wacky liquor laws have us worried. There exists a very real possibility that we’ll have to go home without a drink, which I most certainly need after enduring the punishment of Elizabethtown.

We are also worried because people in this county have some sort of Bad Directions Gene and we’ve been led astray a few times already. These are pretty specific directions, though, and if they’re still wrong then it’s almost certain that there’s something in the water preventing these people from comprehending north south east and west.

But no, we make it to the surreal ghost carnival and around the back of the minimall, passing through a litter-strewn parking lot and in front of a just-closed Latino restaurant/bar with lots of big bikes out front and hooligans with itchy violent drunks on.

“Uhhhhhh,” says Lil C.

But we continue on around to the very back of the minimall and it’s there where we first see the Mecca. Loud music belts out of the very last establishment there, a beautiful dive called Caddy’s. There is a lineup of motorcycles here as well, but it seems marginally less intimidating and we really need a drink at this point so we park and venture inside.

It’s a dark and seedy place with low visibility and a mostly empty checkerboard dance floor on which big girls are lap dancing hick guys. It’s not a strip club; it’s something more disturbing than that. It’s a meat market for big-n-ugly folks who live in Conyers. I hope I don’t sound arrogant here or anything, but there really is something wrong with these people and the bone structure of their faces. I mean, there really must be something in the water. Or something.

“There are no normal people here,” notes Lil C, and it is true. Everyone is a freakshow and everyone is hooking up with everyone else. It’s an evolutionary cul-de-sac here, a breeding ground for some lost offshoot species. The women are haggard and busting out of their clothes. The men are biker-cowboy simian and prowl the crowd for meat. Everyone is grinding on each other’s crotches like this is socially acceptable behavior. To them it is, I guess.

It’s the kind of scene you’d scene in a movie and say, “There’s no way that could happen. Some Hollywood guy wrote that.”

Lil C is dressed in what I call her “hippie prude” outfit and I’m wearing distressed jeans, mock Timberlands, and a black shirt. We do not fit in. At all. To hammer the point in, the barmaid serves our beers in Styrofoam go-cups. No one else is drinking out of Styrofoam go-cups. Everyone else is drinking out of bottles…or pint glasses. Lil C wonders if this is secret code for “You guys don’t belong here. Leave.”

But we’re not going to leave. We’re going to enjoy our anthropological investigation and our beers and we plant by a speaker and watch the weirdness unravel around us. You’ve heard of dirty dancing? Try filthy dancing. And not with Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Gray. Filthy Dancing with the Lord Humongous and the Sea Hag. People are having sex and getting pregnant with their clothes on. It is vile and pornographic and exhilarating all at the same time. I feel like Marco Polo or something. Or Jane Goodall. I feel like I could do very well with the ladies here if I wanted to.

It’s my turn to buy so I head to the bar and when I return I notice Lil C is out on the dancefloor getting her groove on with a short dude in a Mohawk. Granted, this guy is probably the most normal guy in the place (if it were any other place in the world he’d be gay but here he’s straight as an arrow), but he eventually leaves C on the dancefloor by herself, heading over and joining two hachetfaced girls doing shots.

Lil C is simultaneous repelled by the local alpha males and disappointed that more of them aren’t hitting on her.

I am thinking about working my moves on the only normal person in the joint, the beautiful black DJ who seems as out of place as us. There is a dude sitting right behind her though and when I request Missy Elliot’s “Gossip Folks” he kind of glares at me and so that’s that.

The locals get drunker, the music gets louder, the lap dancing intensifies, and soon a fight breaks out as well.

“Get your damn hands off my wife!” an African American man is shouting at this white dude on the other side of the bar. The white guy isn’t responding, so clearly he is guilty of mauling this woman (with her approval of course). “Get your damn hands off my wife.” A bunch of security materializes out of nowhere and there is chest thumping and looks of concern and shaking of heads and heated anticipation and the white guy knows he is gonna get his ass kicked so he just kind of sits there and looks pensive. “Get your damn hands off my wife!” Which, I think, is a direct quote from Raising Arizona.

Lil C and I vow to come back the following night, but we have to get in by midnight because of the Georgia Sunday Law, which prohibits alcohol sales after 12 midnight on Saturday night. The way bars circumvent this is to sell buckets of beer right up till 11:59. One must purchase the alcohol before midnight but one can consume it past then.

Since we have a 10am start we know it’s gonna be a close call and all day it causes us great stress, so intense is our need to return to Caddy’s for a repeat performance.

Eventually we do make it at about 11:50pm—by some miracle—and we buy our buckets of beer and chill out. But there is a $10 cover because the all-girl Nashville 3band Mustang Sally is here and performing live. The $10 cover seems to have weeded out the riffraff and Caddy’s seems almost respectable tonight. There are red tablecloths on the tables even! Shocking. But we know what Caddy’s really is…

Earlier that day someone told us about the Great Conyers Syphilis Outbreak of 2000. We laughed but we weren’t that surprised. A syphilis epidemic in Conyers…it had to have started and spread at Caddy’s, like that scene in Gremlins where Spike the bad gremlin jumps in the swimming pool and turns into about a million little monsters in two minutes.

Thank you, Caddy's, for the lovely memories.

This is a picture of the forlorn and spiritless Lil C before experiencing Caddy's:



This is a picture of Mustang Sally onstage. The couple in front of us sucked face openly for about forty-five minutes. They kissed like it was a county fair pie eating contest, with liberal tongue action inside and outside the mouth wall.



This is a picture of the intrepid Lil C after having her Caddy's epiphany. "Oh, what a brave new world to have such things in it!" Note the slightly unhinged expression and the recently-escaped-from-the-psych-ward aesthetic of the green bracelet: