Custard's Last Stand

It's Thursday evening so the kid is with his dad and we go out to eat. We've picked Charlie Brown's because I've been there only once before and the food was great. I vaguely recall fish and chips being on the menu, so that's probably what I'm going to have. Inevitably, as we head along Wetmore, I have the Coasters' song stuck in my head.

 

He walks in the classroom cool and slow.
Who calls the English teacher Daddio?
Charlie Brown,
Charlie Brown
He's a clown,
That Charlie Brown!
He's gonna get caught,
Just you wait and see.
Why's everybody always picking on me?

It was never a favourite song, and I was always troubled by my inability to square it with the Peanuts continuity of Charles M. Schulz, and once again the fucking thing is stuck in my head.

'I've got Charlie Brown by the Coasters stuck in my head,' I tell my wife.

'Now I have it too,' she says. 'Thanks for that.'

Charlie Brown's is a bar which serves food and is something of a change from the usual. It's dark inside, there's a presently vacant stage at one end of the room, and the bar is surrounded by hairy bikers with tattoos. We take a booth and wait for service, although the place seems more full than last time so it may be a few minutes. Some woman is doing something on the stage, setting up a chair behind some kind of mixing desk and testing a large screen which hangs from the ceiling behind her.

'Do I remember there being a quiz night?' I ask, trying to recall details of our previous visit.

Bess indicates a small poster taped to the wall at my side, trivia night - Thursday.

'Aha!' I say. 'I thought so.'

A waitress takes our drink orders. 'We have Modelo,' she tells me, 'but it ain't been in the cooler so you might want something else.'

'It's okay. I'm from England. We like our beer warm.'

She chuckles, having been spared the task of pointing out that I ain't from around these parts, and goes off to the bar.

The woman steps down from the stage and does the rounds of the tables. 'Are you taking part in the trivia?' she asks us as she hands out forms on which contestants will write their answers. It's a quarter to seven and the quiz is starting in fifteen minutes.

'No,' we say. The woman moves on to the next table. Everybody is playing apart from us.

The drinks arrive, then a menu, but no-one to take our order. they seem busier than I remember from last time.

The basketball-sized papier mâché head of Charlie Brown - the Schulz rather than Coasters version - looms up from behind a flat screen TV on the other side of the room. The screen displays an advertisement for what are essentially vibrators for men - large battery operated personal massagers which a group of muscular body builders grimly hold against their biceps. You can tell they're serious about getting toned up, or whatever effect the vibrator is supposed to have, because they look stern, and not one of them has considered holding the thing against his knob or sticking it up his bum - not for one moment. No sir. No funny stuff here, my friend. The thing is called a theragun, conflating the words therapy and gun, and is actually shaped like a gun with a grip and a handle, so like I say, definitely no funny stuff here.

Sure, I think, unconvinced.

I order chicken fried chicken. Chicken fried chicken is chicken which has been deep fried by the same process as chicken fried steak, which itself is steak which has been battered and deep fried by the same process as fried chicken. I've never worked out why it isn't simply called fried chicken, but that's what I order. Somehow I just wasn't in the mood for the fish and chips.

Bess orders chicken in a sort of mushroom sauce, or possibly just a sauce with mushrooms. Our food takes a little while to arrive because they're obviously rushed off their feet, but is worth the wait.

As we eat, the woman who came to our table returns to the stage and welcomes us to trivia night. Her first question asks for the name of that thing with a single dot above a comma, a semi-colon. The question appears on the screen behind her, presumably just in case anyone missed it, and remains up for the next three or four minutes as she plays some song by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. I guess she's giving us time to think it over.

Bess beckons me closer and quietly informs me that she has just heard someone at another table inform his teammates that the single dot above a comma is called a polka dot. I suddenly understand why we're getting these long gaps between each question.

'What is a better known name for the Battle of the Little Big Horn?' our mistress of ceremonies eventually asks.

'Custer's Last Stand?' I guess, still eating my chicken fried chicken.

'We should have entered this,' Bess says. 'We would have cleaned up.'

I glance across to the next table, to eight or nine Mexican women who have, for some reason, adopted the OGs as the name of their trivia quiz team. OG stands for original gangster, and has become a somewhat devalued term, I feel. Where once it stood for that slightly older guy from your 'hood who may have put the car jackings behind him but is still down for whatever when the occasion demands, now you can be an OG simply through asking the serving staff to supersize your Blizzard™ at the Dairy Queen™ drive through, earning high fives and big ups from your homies in honour of your poor dietary choices. The OGs don't seem to know the answer, despite having three or four minutes of Pearl Jam or Journey or ZZ Top or something to think it over

'What did the L in the name of L. Ron Hubbard stand for?' is the next question.

'Lafayette,' I mutter between mouthfuls of chicken.

'Scared of you,' says Bess.

'I've read a few of his books,' I say, 'from before he became a cult leader. It's a shame, really. He was an above average talent as a writer, but he kind of blew it, I guess.'

Somehow I'm surprised that Hubbard is sufficiently well known to have featured in a trivia quiz, but then maybe that's just because I didn't grow up here.

We have the duration of another generic rock-boogie bar tune to sit through before our hostess tells us it's time for the answers. The quiz lasted fifteen minutes and featured just three questions. The answer to the first question was not, in fact, a polka dot, but a semi-colon. Our hostess then tells us that the Battle of the Little Big Horn is also known as Custard's Last Stand, and it's specifically identified as such in projected print on the screen.

'Holy shit,' I say to Bess. 'Look!'

She turns but can't get her phone out in time to take a picture. We later rationalise it as probably the fault of spell check, but it's still funny.

Finally, no-one knew that his first name was Lafayette apart from me, and I didn't enter the competition.

Maybe next time.