History for the day

Rico says he's got history of his own, and this is an interesting part of it: Friday Night in Grants, New Mexico, circa his sabbatical in 1995:

I ambled across the width of the four lane business loop off Route 40 a little after nine, looking for what the skinny, bucktoothed girl at the front desk of the freshly remodeled Days Inn had described as the ‘honkytonk across the street’.
It was called Harry’s, off the lobby of the freshly remodeled Best Western, and you got your coupon at the door that entitled you to some sort of prize drawing held, according to the short fat guy who tore the red pasteboards apart, ‘at ten-thirty, eleven-thirty, and twelve-thirty’.
The place was still pretty empty when I went in, but the duded-up couples were flocking through the doors behind me. The women were the usual Big Hair crowd, with slightly garish makeup and pants too tight across butts too big, but it was the men who stood out.
The West is the last refuge, for white men at least, of the American Dandy. Here, in the Big Hat and Buckle belt, they can still display all the stereotypical dress and behavior they so often deride, in urban areas, in black or Hispanic men—
• the strut, first of all, made more dangerous by boot heels and levels of alcohol not made for walking
• the flashy clothes (bright colors in improbable patterns, and neckerchiefs, for God’s sake) that would inspire fistfights, amid choruses of ‘faggot’, if worn in nearly any other milieu
• the expensive and outsized headgear, from classic white straws to full-bore Garth Brooks big black hats with fancy bands
• the gaudy jewelry, on the hats, at the neck, and around the waist
• the tight pants (tucked into, in the case of the women, and pulled over, in the case of the men)
• the gigolo-toed leather shoes. Sorry, boots, though few of them have ever seen a horse up close

The women are present in nearly equal numbers, and they didn’t seem to refuse to dance with anyone who asked politely. And politeness, along with the simmering undercurrent of incipient violence, as in ‘oh, please, give me an excuse to get it on’ violence, is the order of the evening.
The good-ol’-boy ambiance to the contrary, there seemed to be a live-and-let-live attitude between the Anglos, Indians, and Hispanics in the crowd. Though Alex, the big Navajo that I traded bottles of Miller’s with, did seem to carefully pick who he asked to dance.
The women ranged from ‘just a slip of a thang’ petite to fireplug stocky, with nary a bikini-prone body in the mix. The best of them inspired this: “nothing better than a big ol’ sweaty gal on a Friday night”, so you begin to see the problem… Though there were several of whom it might be said, and was, “Yes, I would”. One even had an impeccable concho belt, with large plain-silver conchos wall-to-wall on her thick waist.
The best that can be said for the evening was that I made it out alive.