Going to the Electric Cowboy is sort of like going to the fair. It’s a
rare opportunity to see someone wear a cowboy hat in public. It’s
inconveniently located — 11 miles on I-30 and nearly a county away from
downtown on a one-way access road going the wrong way. Parking extends,
if not miles, then acres around the nightclub, under and around
dilapidated industrial buildings. After midnight, when the cars start
really rolling over the gravel lots, big plumes of dust choke the
foot-traffic. Inside, it feels like a mass confrontation with humanity.

On any given Friday night, the crowd peaks somewhere near 1,000 just
after 2 a.m. That’s more people than any club around attracts, and with
28,000 square feet, the Cowboy, as its generally called, usually has
room to spare.

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These hundreds are not the cowboy-hatted heirs of BJ’s Star Studded
Honky Tonk, the country-dance club that preceded the Cowboy in the
converted warehouse. There are two-steppers, to be sure, but mostly,
the crowd is a sea of wildly different people, united only by a common
desire not to go home.

The last time I made the trip, that meant giggly Asian girls, frat-boys
in muscle shirts, mustachioed Hispanics, peroxide blondes with obvious
boob jobs, black guys in night camouflage jump suits, ladies in skirts
too short to simply be called mini, squirrelly looking bald guys on
Ecstasy and women old enough to be your mom.

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***

By any comparison beyond Arkansas, Central Arkansas sucks for
nightlife. Once you’ve gone to New York or New Orleans or anywhere else
where bars never close, it’s hard to get too excited about our tepid
scene, small as a natural consequence of our size, but even more
limited because of the screwy blue laws that dominate the state’s
alcohol culture. Call Arkansas the temperate state, where more counties
than not are dry, where booze can’t be purchased on Sundays, where,
even in wet Pulaski County, the labyrinth of regulations that spell out
who can serve what and for how long takes a degree in higher math to
decode.

I bitch, but here might be a good spot to pause and let us count our
blessings. There are, after all, scores of area clubs and pubs and
restaurants that serve booze well into the evening, if not the morning.
It could be worse: We could be in White County.
But damn if the pickin’s don’t get slim after 2 a.m. Which is where the
state Alcohol Control Board comes back into play. To stay open
all-night, or more precisely until 5 a.m., a club must have a Class B
private club license. In 2001, the ABC stopped issuing Class B licenses
and quit allowing the transfer of license between counties. Now, once a
license remains inactive for 18 months, it disappears forever.

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There are currently 22 active licenses in Pulaski County, and one five
months into inactive status, which means that the county will never
have more than 23 private clubs allowed to operate until 5 a.m. A close
look at the group reveals further insularity. Among the Class B’s, five
are strip clubs, three
two cater to gay clientele, four are oriented to black audiences, at
least four cater mostly to whites and a half dozen aren’t open to the
public. Counterpoint, in North Little Rock, doesn’t fit into any of
those categories, but it’s being forced to change its hours in response
to a recently enacted city ordinance that forces all North Little Rock
clubs to close by 2 a.m., regardless of license.

When you whittle all those down, that leaves three equal opportunity
late nightclubs for the rest of us: the Electric Cowboy, Discovery and
Midtown. With so few options, the late night hordes flock, and they
come in all stripes. There’s no setting more diverse in Central
Arkansas. Decadence — it’s what brings folks together.

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***

There’s a popular perception among those who’ve heard of Discovery but
not been there that it’s a gay club. That’s not unfounded. Norman
Jones, a former state worker and female impersonator, opened the club
in 1979 on Asher. Two years later, he took over the far end of a
rectangle of warehouses in Riverdale, where, in the mid-’90s, he also
opened Backstreet, another gay-friendly private club.

The shift at Discovery from gay to “mainstream,” as Jones calls it,
happened gradually at first, the club owner said. Around 2000, he
remodeled and expanded his space by over 50 percent in a move targeted
at a broader audience.

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Around the same time, too, he decided to only open Discovery one night
a week, on Saturday night. He’s pragmatic about the business model. “If
you can do enough business in one night to pay your weekly bills and
still come out with some sort of profit, then why not do that one night
a week and be done with it?”

Today, as perhaps a sign of its evolution into the mainstream, the
club’s posted a sign near its entrance, aimed for at least one
relatively new demographic: “NO ‘THUG WEAR’ ACCEPTABLE. NO BACKWARD
HATS. NO HEAD WRAPS. NO OVERSIZED T-SHIRTS. NO OVERSIZED PANTS.”

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Inside, there’s still an obvious sense of gay culture. A large, lit
portrait of Norman as Norma, elaborately made up and with a ‘do that
would make Dolly Parton envious, greets club-goers in the entryway.
Then, there’s the real thing next door. In an expansive theater with a
strange plaster-of-Paris-style Egyptian motif, drag shows run every
Saturday at midnight and 2:30 a.m.

The last time I visited, the stage’s set looked like it’d been looted
from a high school play. A faux-fire pit, with a sheet blowing and
“coals” illuminated, sat center stage, with potted trees and two
cardboard totem poles, with penises for noses, in the foreground. Beach
balls hung by fishing line from the ceiling.

The audience seemed to suggest that drag shows are far from the
exclusive province of the gay community. I did see a man in a cowboy
hat and chaps, with a wife-beater rolled up to expose either his
stomach or giant belt buckle, but also a number of middle-aged couples,
a very pregnant African-American woman and a distant cousin, who was at
an after-party for his high school class reunion.

I got to my seat just in time for the start of the 2 a.m. show, which was introduced by an unseen MC.

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“All right, we’re going to bring our first entertainer to the stage.
She is sending this number out to Bethany, who is celebrating her
divorce.”

“Give it up for Bethany! And her divorce!”

“At this time, we are going to bring her to the stage. She is Miss Little Rock US of A. Give, it up for Teon Iman.”

I’m not sure what the criteria for being Miss Little Rock US of A is,
but Teon, wearing sunglasses, tight but concealing pants, a
cleavage-exposing bra and a fur-lined long coat, looked pretty womanly
as she stalked the stage lip-synching to Mary J. Blige’s “Deep Inside.”

Elsewhere, Discovery’s 21,000 square feet look and feel like a modern
club, or at least enough like what a modern club looks like on TV to
pass muster. Off the entryway, in the large room Jones calls the lobby,
there’s a velvet-roped VIP area (empty when I last visited) and a
square bar, with liquor stacked on multi-tiered platforms, like a
pyramid. Beyond the bar, young black, white and Latino twentysomethings
bounce and grind to hip-hop.

A third room sits farther off the lobby. Darker and more compact, with
a high ceiling and strobe lights, it’s one of the few places in town
that regularly plays house music. Whereas most hip-hop is built on a
tempo of around 80 to 100 beats per minute (BPM), house music typically
pumps out 135 BPM. People dancing to house music often forfeit the beat
to just sort of expressively flap their arms around. Not unlike the
hippies.

The last time I was there, only a few occupied the dance floor. Above,
though, in a cage reached by ladder, two attractive young women danced,
kicking their legs through the bars every so often. Below, a group of
guys unabashedly gathered to peer up their skirts, while a lone man in
an opposite cage grasped hold of the bars in his cage and thrusted
slowly.

***

Someone with a keen sense of social interaction arranged the Electric
Cowboy. The basic floor plan revolves around a basketball court-sized
dance floor that’s enclosed by a narrow bar: a spot for the
exhibitionists, a perch for watchers. Better yet, beyond the bar is a
wide, open space that forms a kind of track around the dance floor, for
those unwilling to dance, but too fidgety to stay in one place. Tests
of drunken courage sit in opposing corners: the famed electric bull in
one, and an electronic punching bag in the other.

With maybe one exception, I’ve only seen women ride the bull. They
usually start with a fair amount of trepidation, holding on stiffly,
and then after about 30 seconds, they feel the rhythm and loosen their
torso and lift one hand in the air and holler out some cowboy-cliche.
Then, the operator usually pushes it up a gear and they fall off
awkwardly. A group of dudes always appears before bull rides.

In the other corner, goateed dudes in muscle shirts gather around an
oversized speed bag attached to a sensor that gauges the force of a
blow. It’s like modern take on the sledgehammer and the bell at
carnivals. Some strength-testers take running starts. Others employ a
shot-put-style spinning punch.

But amidst the wealth of people watching, nothing compares to the sight
of the crowd when the DJ plays “The Cha-Cha Slide.” Like its forbearer,
“The Electric Slide,” the song was made for an urban line dance, though
the latter has none of the former’s soul. In fact, the beauty of “The
Cha-Cha Slide” lies in its pure functionality.

“Song” might be a stretch. It’s simply a steady 4/4 beat that even the
most arrhythmic can follow and dance instructions, delivered by the
song’s creator, DJ Casper, in the eager intonations of an exercise
instructor leading a step class.

Everyone does “The Cha-Cha Slide.” On an August Friday this summer, I
watched a trim middle-aged man, who, with a chinstrap beard,
high-waisted pants and a black bow tie, looked like a recently fallen
Amish, sprint to the dance floor when the opening bars of the songs
blared across the club. At first, after finding his place in line, he
stood almost rigid, save a gentle leg wag in time with the beat. As the
bass deepened and DJ Casper gave a call for clapping, the man obliged.
When the commands got more complicated — “slide to the left/slide to
the right…/one hop this time/right foot, lets stomp”  — he followed
along expertly, but perfunctorily, like he was doing a job that he’d
done for years, but grown weary of.

The song catches its breath three quarters of the way through with more
clapping and a series of questions, posed as dares, “How low can you
go? Can you down low? All the way to the floor?” Like limbo, there’s a
tremendous potential for people to make asses out of themselves during
this section. Liquid confidence inspires the too-drunks to forget their
limber limits, and they go tottering over. And then there are the
short-skirted. On this particular Friday, a woman in a mini, heard
earlier loudly decrying thong underwear in the women’s bathroom,
dropped low enough that everyone in sight respected her choice.

***

Most all-night joints hide off main drags, but Midtown Billiards sits
on the south edge of downtown on Main Street. By comparison, it’s only
a fraction of the size of either Discovery or the Electric Cowboy, just
a narrow pool hall with a stage and a small bar, but because of its
proxim-ity to downtown, it often gets customers that neither of the
bigger clubs do. If you’re wavering between bed and a night extender,
Midtown’s an easier sell.

Open from 3 p.m. to 5 a.m. every day of the year save Christmas, it’s
the picture of dive bar: a concrete floor, Polaroids and beer signs
cov-ering just about every inch of wall space, a chandelier made of PBR
cans and three pool tables, stained so heavily that if you squint, they
look like maps.

The smell of the bar, a dank combination of decades of unventilated
cigarette smoke and hamburger grease, is unmistakable. Last year, in a
list of the “Best Bars in America,” Esquire said that the bar’s name is
“an epithet among wives whose husbands stumble home at 4 a.m.
‘smell-ing like Midtown.’ ”

Like Discovery and the Electric Cowboy, the Main Street dive is the end
of a funnel of nights spent out all over town. It’s not unusual to see
half a wedding party angling for a spot at the bar with grizzled dudes
in motorcycle jackets, girls with fake tans coming from the River
Market and spiky haired punks from three doors down at Juanita’s. Few
arrive sober. Someone almost always leaves by force.

Most spend their time milling around the bar, waiting for a hamburger
(cooked on a griddle and heavily spiced, there’s no finer food to be
had at 2 a.m. in Little Rock), waiting for a drink and waiting for the
bathroom. The latter often inspires men to find an alley outside,
some-times women, too. At peak hours, the line stretches 20 deep, and
the one-john bathrooms that wait at the end hardly count as a prize.
Despite gender designations, few abide, and just about every inch, even
the women’s toilet seat, is covered in graffiti.

Last time I stopped by, a young guy wearing a homemade shirt, repping a
local punk band called the STD’s, asked if he could read my palm. I
declined, but he persisted and, without looking at my palm, told me I’m
ready to have kids, dissatisfied in my job and unhappy in marriage. O
for three, I told him. But there weren’t any hard feelings. He showed
me the tattoo of his initials on the inside of his lip, and we said our
goodbyes.

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