How to Cuss in Western

by Michael P. Branch

  At last, it was time for the final event of the rodeo, and I didn’t have to understand anything about it to sense its importance. The large crowd became discernibly more boisterous, nervous, and agitated. The trailer suddenly emptied of medical personnel, who followed Tony in a direct march to the arena, where they stationed themselves along the corral rails with an intensity not noticeable during earlier events. The sense of some finale was in the air.

  Although bull taming spectacles date back to ancient Greece, modern bull riding evolved from Mexican charreada, contests of ranch skills and prowess that, by the sixteenth century, had come to include a bull riding contest called the jaripeo. During the mid-nineteenth century, bull riding became increasingly common in Texas and other borderlands areas where Hispanic and Anglo ranchers worked together in small, rural communities. Competitive bull riding as it exists today emerged during the Great Depression, when the milder-mannered steers (castrated bulls) then used in rodeos were replaced with brahma bulls and their crossbreeds—powerful, aggressive animals that wield deadly horns, can weigh upward of 2,000 pounds, and display testosterone-fueled rage at every turn. It was these fierce brahma bulls that the hopeful young cowboys at the Reno Rodeo were about to mount and attempt to ride.

  Bull riding has been called “the most dangerous eight seconds in sports,” because that is the length of time a rider—who must hold on with only one hand to the braided bull rope, which is strapped around the bull’s chest—is required to remain astride the animal in order to qualify to be scored on the quality of his ride. Riders have been severely injured and even killed by bulls who have kicked, trampled, or gored them. Also at severe risk of injury are the rodeo clowns and bullfighters, whose job it is to remain near the bull and to distract the beast when the rider is thrown and would otherwise be entirely vulnerable. Clowns and bullfighters have also been killed, often while trying to protect a fallen rider from a furious bull, and occasionally while attempting to free a rider who had become “hung up” in the bull rope—or even entangled in the bull’s horns—a potentially fatal predicament for both the cowboy and those whose job it is to protect him.

  As I watched the first of the bulls being prodded into the chute just a few yards away from me, I was taken aback by the sheer bulk of the animal. While the saddle broncs had manifest grace and beauty in their demeanor, here I witnessed an animal of a very different sort. The bull seemed unspeakably primitive, as if it had been forged in some world other than and before our own. In the eye of the horse I detected some relation, a sense that behind that gleaming eye ticked the brain of a fellow mammal. No such kinship was visible in the small, black eyes of the hulking bull.

  The cowboy who was to ride this first bull strode past me confidently and then clambered along the top of the chute until he straddled the rails above the bull. From there he lowered himself gently onto the animal’s broad, black back. There followed a good deal of commotion, as the bull pushed and tried to buck, the chute boss and his crew worked to restrain the animal, and the cowboy struggled to secure his firm, one-handed grip on the rope. The rodeo clown and bullfighters positioned themselves strategically in the arena. At last, after one final, breathless moment of calm, the gate swung open and the bull blasted out of its confinement, tearing into the arena while bucking forward and backward and spinning at the same time. It seemed impossible that an animal so immense could kick, rear, and twist with such agility and force, and twice it bucked into the air and twisted so violently while airborne as to perform a full 180-degree spin before thundering back to earth. Watching the cowboy desperately holding on to that giant bolt of black lightning, I understood for the first time that eight seconds is a very, very long time.

  This spectacular performance was repeated, as cowboy after cowboy tried their best to reach eight seconds astride the backs of the giant, flying, twisting, 1,800- or 2,000-pound animals. Most failed. For their part, the bulls appeared so primeval as to seem antediluvian—as if each cowboy might just as well have been riding an angry triceratops or stegosaurus, or even astride some dark creature born of imagination or nightmare. But what struck me most throughout this event was not the huge bulls, or even the flying cowboys. It was instead the clown. Here was a young man dressed to play the fool in his flowing costume of bright, motley colors, bringing comedy to a scene that threatened at any moment to result in serious injury to those around him or to himself.

  I gazed in admiration as the clown thrilled the crowd with his antics. He appeared as agile as a gymnast, as fast as a sprinter, as quick as a prize fighter. At times he taunted the bulls, turning his back on them and strolling away, daring them, through pantomime, to render him a parti-colored shish kebab. Standing behind his protective barrel, he would roll it audaciously toward a bull to provoke a response. At other moments, he climbed inside the protective device, from which emerged a single arm, waving a cowboy hat to invite the bull to hammer the barrel. Or, he would pop his head out just long enough to plant his thumbs on his ears and waggle his fingers derisively toward the bull before again disappearing from view. The laughter he elicited from the crowd seemed partly a response to his farce and partly a release of the nervous tension produced by our uncertainty about his ultimate safety.

  If the clown’s art consisted of a provocative combination of daring and absurdity, the peak of his performance was his willingness to literally run circles around the bull—its wheeling horns just a foot or so behind the arch of his back—as injured cowboys were hustled out of the arena before they could be attacked by the angry bull that had just ejected them. As a spectator, I found these moments difficult to process; they were clearly the most dangerous, and yet also the funniest. There was a Chaplinesque quality to the clown, as if, though in constant danger, this jester possessed the cartoon character’s magical powers of resilience and even immortality. The closer the bull came to goring the clown, the more I laughed; but the more I laughed, the more I found myself laughing through a disconcerting feeling that amusement was the wrong response to the actions of a man who was operating within inches of his life. Perhaps the clown understood that it is his natural work to keep the forces of comedy and tragedy in close relation to one another. Humorists always do their best work close to the bull.

  After the rodeo, I followed Tony back to the medical trailer, where I returned to writing in my field journal while he and his crew resumed fixing broken cowboys. A few moments later the door burst open and the clown, still in full costume and makeup, jumped into the trailer. He beelined for the freezer and reached deeply into it, presumably to bag some ice to treat a fresh injury.

  “That bull tag you?” asked one of the Justin sports medicine athletic trainers, with some concern.

  “No, sir!” said the clown in a burst of enthusiasm, as he pulled out and cracked open a tallboy can of beer he had hidden beneath the cubes. Everyone chuckled.

  As he turned to leave, beer in hand, the clown noticed me scribbling in my journal.

  “You a preacher?” he asked earnestly.

  “Nope, but I can sermonize in a pinch,” I replied, smiling.

  “Not tonight, Parson; these folks have suffered enough!” he declared loudly, as everyone laughed together again.

  “Paint Your Wagon,” I returned, recognizing that old film as the source of his perfectly timed joke.

  “Well, preacher,” he said, grinning through his painted-on smile and reaching out his hardened hand to shake mine, “I might just join your congregation.” And with that, he bolted for the trailer door.

  “Take care of yourself,” I said, as he left.

  “My mother prays for me,” he replied as he swung himself out the door, “so I’ll be allright.”

  I HAVE ALWAYS been entertained by vanity license plates—at least when they are genuinely clever or funny—and have long thought that a little back bumper wit on my part might help my fellow Silver Hillbillies endure the one stoplight that interrupts our t
wenty-five-mile cruise from here to town. But there are perfectly good reasons why I have never made a move on customized plates. First, I am so frugal as to have trouble rationalizing an unnecessary expense. Second, I like to change my mind about things and so have been hesitant to commit to one message, however witty or insightful. Most important, to get customized plates I would have to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, a place that is the seventh circle of administrative hell, even in a Kafkaesque world already overflowing with mind-numbing bureaucratic horseshit. I just have not thought of a vanity plate funny enough to make it worth the misery of wasting hours at the DMV.

  That did not keep me from thinking about the possibility of custom tags, and, occasionally I would toy with ideas. I reckoned I would go with something that would assert my identity as a high desert hillbilly, likeDSRT RAT orBSN RNGE orGR8 BSN orDSRT MTN. Even something Boulderesque likeNEWWEST could be cool. Or I might go with a wiser, place-based proclamation likeIM SAGE. Or maybe I could tap the nickname we sometimes use for rattlers out here:BZZZWRM. It also occurred to me that I could cleverly use the fact that our state tags boldly sayNEVADA atop them to create a two-word slogan by addingNOTWSTLD, since “Nevada: Not a Wasteland” is the slogan used by those of us who would just as soon not have the nation’s high-level nuclear waste buried in our home state. Another two-word message could be produced by choosingWD OPN, since one of our many equivocal state mottoes is “Nevada: Wide Open,” a slogan that seems vaguely to refer not only to landscapes but also to booze and pot laws, accelerators, and thighs.

  While I was dreaming up customized Nevada tags I came up with other ideas that might work for someone else in Silver Hills, if not for me. One of my neighbors, who is a professional poker player, might eitherDBL DWN orFOLDEM. The old lady at the only gas station in our valley likes to pull slots, so she could hope toHIT 37s, while her friend, who plays roulette, could chooseRDR BLK. The guy up the road from us raises longhorns and so might like to proclaim that he hasBIG BLLS. Or maybe not. But he could still useSTEERNG. My friend who paints desert landscapes should useRBBT BRSH, and Chickenfeathers, our neighborhood dowser, could declareHRS H2o. All the equestrians out here can argue overBITBYBIT, and the lady mining engineer might confess to being aGLD DGR. Mister Grumpledumps, our road’s resident conspiracy theorist, should haveCNA UFO. And our unreliable mail delivery woman, who has frosted blonde hair, poor taste in clothes, and a fancy tramp stamp lower back tattoo that reads “LADY,” might do well to order upNTA HKR.

  I even resorted to going online to seek additional ideas for my would-be tag. There, I found a site called something likeZILLIONTAGS.COM, which not only featured many hundreds of actual vanity plates, but also had them organized by state, which I thought might help me determine where the good ideas were coming from. I began with my home state, which I soon discovered had mounted the most pathetic custom-tag display imaginable. Nevada had a total of four entries:IHVNOJB, 99PROBS,IH8 WMPS, and the incredibly dumbNOT DUM.

  Next, I turned to Utah, which provided no encouragement whatsoever. Utahans are apparently too well-mannered to excel at self-expression in the highly constrained rhetorical genre of the vanity plate. Like Nevada, Utah boasted only four entries, three of which I could not understand; the fourth wasGOLFING, which struck me as genuinely depressing. Next I tried Idaho, which had a whopping five tags, not a single one of which made a lick of sense. Could these be survivalist code messages instructing rural neighbors to hoard guns and whiskey in anticipation of the apocalypse? In desperation I turned to Oregon, whose tags were weirdly sincere, likeBEYRSLF andGOD NO1 andBE GR8R, though one lady, who reminded me of an old girlfriend, confessed to havingPMS 247. Thankfully, I found that the Sand Cutters down in Arizona were more creative and had come through not only with many more tags but also with a variety of respectable entries, includingAEIONU,SCO BEDO,VNTY PL8,MMMBEER, andRCY BOBY, not to mention the charmingly confessionalIFARTED.

  Although the plates of a few Arizonians were slightly risqué, likeGETNAKD andIL SPNKU, they could not hold a candle to the work of my neighbors to the west. California had hundreds of custom-tag entries—many more than Nevada and all its other neighboring states combined. The messages on at least half the plates were pornographic, and even those that were not explicitly sexual seemed obsessed with power and money—a sentiment elegantly distilled by2L8 I1 on a new jag. But the California tags were also expressive, irreverent, and comical in ways that might prove instructive here in the desert West, where the plates were not only unimaginative, but frequently incomprehensible. Among the hundreds of solid entries from the Californicators wereFROMMYX (on a Mercedes),MO FAUX (on a Caddy),JST 1MPG (on a Hummer),FRENDLY (on a creepy, windowless panel van),BLONDE (with the tag mounted upside down),GEEKDAD (on a Prius),H8LAFWY (on an old pickup),UGHHHH (on a Tercel), and my personal favorite:CMON WTF (on a yellow VW bug).

  Despite all this inspiration, I still had not come up with anything clever enough to drive me to the dreaded DMV. But all that changed on my last birthday, when Eryn said she had made up my mind for me, adding that the deed was done and the plates were already ordered. She declined to tell me what my custom tags would proclaim, but she seemed confident I would appreciate the message. I had no alternative to being vocally appreciative and silently curious.

  The state bureaucrats aged Eryn’s paperwork as if it were a fine Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, but eventually we received word that my custom plates were available for pickup. I wondered if the new tags had been produced by inmates, as the “Live Free or Die” plates in New Hampshire reportedly are. It did occur to me that even the inmate of a federal penitentiary might hope to land in New Hampshire just to avoid having to make “Famous Potatoes” tags in Idaho, which might itself still be preferable to repeatedly stamping out a bad pun in Utah, where the goofy tags read “Greatest Snow on Earth!” Even if you like puns, it seems to me there’s something ill-advised about choosing a tourism slogan that alludes to P. T. Barnum (“Greatest Show on Earth!”), the king of hucksters, a man who excelled at separating tourists from their money by never forgetting his core maxim that “Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.”

  Fetching my new slogan meant a trip to the DMV, a prospect that inspired unalloyed terror. This instinct was confirmed as I arrived at the facility, where the ironically inadequate parking had triggered a Darwinian battle for spaces, in which I was twice nearly sideswiped. Entering the building, I was directed to join a long line in order to get a number that would allow me to wait in another line that was much longer. After about forty minutes, I reached the front of this first line and was issued a number by a surly woman who was wearing a hair net, as if she worked not at the DMV but instead as a tater tot dolloper in a junior high school lunchroom. I then took a seat on one of the DMV chairs, torture devices that are bolted to the cinderblock walls and made of coarse wire mesh that invariably leaves a grid pattern on your butt, as if you’ve been whacked with an ass-sized flyswatter—though, in truth, the mesh may have been practical, given that several of my fellow citizens looked as if they might, at any moment, begin to urinate on themselves.

  I say “my fellow citizens,” because a visit to the DMV offers a spectacularly disturbing opportunity to witness what a cross-section of the local community actually looks like. On one side of me sat an older man who sounded as if he were negotiating an important business deal. Only later did I notice that he had no Bluetooth headset but was simply talking to himself. All the while his phone kept going off, and the ringtone was the unmistakable tune of Wild Cherry’s midseventies hit, “Play That Funky Music White Boy.” He never answered it.

  The young man sitting on the other side of me had a weird tonsure haircut that looked as if someone had slapped a soup bowl on his noggin and shaved everything below the rim. He passed the time by loudly repeating every number as it was called by the DMV’s automated voice system. “Three hundred sixty-nine,” droned the robot speaker,
flatly. “Oh, yeah! That’s right! Three hundred and sixty-nine!” yelled hair-tuft guy. “Three hundred seventy,” said the soulless, mechanical voice. “Yeah, baby! There’s three hundred and seventy! That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!” shouted the man. I looked down at my number and winced: 462. I had a long way to go.

  Nearby, a lady was giving herself a full pedicure, complete with those little foam spacers that splayed her toes while the toxic fumes, perhaps mercifully, gave those of us around her a mild contact high. Another woman walked by wearing a puffy red parka and a plaid-green Elmer Fudd hunting cap with ear flaps dangling; below the waist, she wore only purple gym shorts and bright-orange flip flops. Babies were crying, and catatonic people were snoring, and a man who was apparently deaf was plucking a ukulele that was badly out of tune. Near a young couple, who were passing the time by making out, sat an angry-looking lady in a full clown suit who was herself sitting next to a young woman wearing a tight, bright yellow T-shirt advertising the famous Mustang Ranch brothel. No one seemed to notice the clown.

  Blithe platitudes about democracy, equality, and respect for others are sorely tested at the DMV, where sustained exposure to my fellow citizens constantly threatened to drive me back to the exquisite remoteness of my desert home, from which I hoped never to return to town. I doubt that even Pete Seeger, may he rest in peace, could have endured more than an hour of this theater. DMV is the place where populist sentiment comes to die.

  After the better part of two hours, the automated voice finally called my number. So numb was I that I did not notice, until I was startled to attention by hair-tuft guy, who shouted, “No lie, people! I’m preaching the gospel of four hundred and sixty-two!” Realizing, suddenly, that my number had been called, I jumped to my feet and waved it over my head as if I were a winning game-show contestant, before remembering that I had won nothing more than permission to take this excruciating experience to the next miserable step.