Their tall hats and spiked-heel cowboy boots didn’t fool me. : Doin’ a Cowboy Boogie

When I was a kid I never wanted to grow up to be a cowboy. I was raised in East Oakland and it was thugs, not cowboys, who enjoyed the greatest popularity among the guys south of 14th Street, which was the line that divided those who loved the Lone Ranger and those who did not.

But a couple of weeks ago, when I began hearing about the upcoming country-and-western music festival at Hansen Dam, I decided it was about time I updated myself on the local cowboy scene, which I did at a place in Canoga Park called the Longhorn Saloon. Mosey along as best you can.

To begin with, buckaroos, I did not attend the free hoedown over the weekend in the hills above Pacoima, for the same reason I have never attended rock concerts, race riots and love-ins. I don’t like crowds.

Anywhere from 40,000 to 200,000 were expected at the country-music doo-dah, and I would rather swim face-down naked through a sea of piranhas than find myself surrounded by 200,000 people who, at any moment, might be stirred to madness by primeval longings I am too high on the evolutionary scale to perceive.

A rock concert, for example, can turn into a full-scale riot at the simple thrust of a singer’s pelvis, and love-ins used to get rowdy as soon as the Berkeley girls began stripping.

It wasn’t their bodies that got the crowds excited, since Berkeley girls are famous for their misshapen torsos, but the slogans tattooed on their breasts.

One woman, it was said, had the entire Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in miniature across her gazongas, and while it was voluminous, so was the available space upon which it was inscribed.

But, as Tom Lehrer used to say, I digress.

I knew as soon as I walked into the Longhorn Saloon that I would like it, because at least 80% of the men were short. I, being a short person, feel more comfortable among those with a similar deficiency.

The fact that they wore tall hats and spiked-heel cowboy boots didn’t fool me for a moment, because all a perceptive person need do is look into the eyes of a short man to know that when the hat and the boots come off, the little dear will still need a footstool to reach the top shelf in his kitchen.

I myself always refused to use a stool, and a lot of the food on the top shelf rotted. But then my wife took to putting my vodka on the shelf, and out came the stool.

Unfortunately, however, the incentive motive evolved into a Pavlovian response, so that now every time I see a stool of any kind I want a drink.

She never takes me to furniture stores anymore.

Back to the Longhorn. The place was jammed with all those little people standing around with their tiny thumbs hooked into their snakeskin belts, trying hard to appear as though they had been out punching cows all day instead of punching computers.

The women, it seemed, were of a little hardier breed who, had they lived in the frontier age, would not have been the type to sit around while their log cabins were burned to the ground and their daughters raped by Apaches.

They looked as though they could hold their own.

For instance, an annual event at the Longhorn is a husband-calling contest, in which the cowgirls are encouraged to yell, “Dan, you get your butt in the house this minute, or I’ll drag you in by the saddle horn!” and “Marvin, you mongrel, if I have to call again, you’ll be swimming in your spit cup!”

Spit cup?

That’s another thing. I was warned before going to the Longhorn that some of the men, in order to enhance their buckskin image, chewed tobacco and occasionally would ask a waitress for a cup into which they might expectorate.

It was not a cultural trait I anticipated with any enthusiasm, so I am pleased to report that not once did anyone within range spit into a cup, or anywhere else.

To the contrary, everyone seemed to have a fine, spitless time doing a kind of cowboy two-step to music supplied by a band called American Made, which beat out hits like “All My Exes Live in Texas.”

Not No. 1 on your hit parade, perhaps, but the short guys seemed to enjoy it.

When they weren’t dancing, by the way, the little fellas stood around the bar and drank Corona beer from a bottle.

They all held their beer exactly the same way, with a thumb and index finger locked high on the neck of the bottle, in a manner popularized by Alan Ladd, another short person, in the movie “Shane.”

But that’s not important. What’s important is that I went to the Longhorn prepared to mock the simple pleasures of a bunch of little gauchos and their plucky women, and spent an evening, God help me, almost enjoying myself.

I wasn’t exactly out there stompin’ to “Cowboy Boogie,” but I was seen to tap my tiny foot under the table when the band revved up.

My wife thinks it was the vodka that turned me on, and she does have a point. All those bar stools in the place can be hell on a short guy with a Pavlovian hang-up.