I had a show recently at the Roadhouse Café in nowhereville Maine. I love how they added Café as if it made the place more elegant. As a general rule, if your establishment has cattle skulls on the wall, the Roadhouse is more than sufficient if it turns out that someone in the area has already used the Shithole. You could really apply the premise to anything, such as Roscoe’s Bistro, Tyrone on the Green, and The Dead Possum Tearoom (which, by the way, has the most delightful Earl Grey this side of the Bronx River).

Did I mention the cattle skulls on the wall? The last time I done seen that I was watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Behind some Plexiglas in an alcove above the kitchen was a display of severed heads reminiscent of Madame Tussauds Redneck Wax Museum. The best part of the morbid display was the John Deer and Hess hats sitting atop the heads and the 2 plastic ducks randomly placed in the display. All I know is if my room service was delivered by someone wearing a mask made of human skin then I would most certainly be complaining to the manager.

The next thing that caught my eye was a very confused jukebox. This particular jukebox had a video screen to inform you of all the musical possibilities at your crusty little fingertips. They showed a picture of Brooks and Dunn, then LL Cool J, then Jewel, then the local karaoke star/bar whore, then Clay Aiken. Someone really needs to sit down with the jukebox and have a little talk with it. They need to point out the guy sitting alone at the bar wearing an I’m With Stupid hat who is watching NASCAR and let the jukebox know that if it plays LL Cool J, the aforementioned feller will break open your screen with a broken Bud Light bottle and then pee moonshine all over your precious little jukebox innards.

I soon took the stage to the worst butchering of my name humanly possible. Afterwards the host actually asked me for clarification of my name. He said, ” is it Jerry Gersten or is it Jerry Gerstein?” I had no idea how to answer that question. For those readers lured to my blog by some freaky google search on Jeff Gillooly’s penis or JewSoap, my name is actually Jesse Gersten.

The stage was sitting next to a giant rack of pots & pans with Christmas lights blinking in the background. Hanging from the barn-style ceiling were cardboard stars and on the ceiling were advertisements from local businesses such as Adam’s Bakery and Ye Olde Bait Shoppe.

Other items of interest around the room included random pink flamingos, a knee high clock sitting in a corner of the room, some frog-moth thingy hanging from a string, a giant porcelain mermaid with shells covering her privates, a MooseTrail sign, and lots and lots of hub caps and license plates.

There was also a large collection of the most bizarre books you could imagine. This will have to wait for a future post, as I cannot do justice to a carrot in an Elvis outfit within the confines of this post.

Oh, and the bear. How can I forget the bear? There was half of a large angry brown bear protruding from the wall just west of the redneck wax museum. This bear was in full growling mode with all of its razor sharp teeth just waiting to bite into some tasty tourist torso. Like most bears, this bear was carrying a ukulele and had a tiny little sheriff hat perched atop his grizzly head. And as if this were not enough, this bear had 3 Hawaiian lay wrapped around his stocky neck. It was as if with just the ukulele and the sheriff hat the bear wasn’t quite festive enough. What put it over the top was the “Hawaiian shit” that Bobbie Jo had purchased just days earlier at the dollar store.