Rope ‘N Ride – The cowboy bar in Dry Creek, Oklahoma where Ella-Loo Parsens met Darryl Roy James in Devoted in Death. She was waitressing there when he walked in on his 21st birthday, and it was love at first sight for them. The bar had fake saloon doors, and most of the clientele were “the barn-smelling, ass-grabbing sort.” Parsens described her work as “serving up beer and rotgut whiskey to cowboys and the hard-eyed women who dogged them.” She supplemented her income with blow jobs and quick bangs in the bathroom stall or the cab of a pickup. Within 24 hours of meeting, she and the duffel bag holding all her worldly possessions were loaded in the truck with him.
Dry Creek was “a place many who lived there considered the armpit of Oklahoma as it sat on a curve of a desolate spit of land where the Panhandle cornered into Texas.”[1]
Parsens worked there from March to July, 2057.[2] A bartender there said bjs were her specialty, and she always talked about going east, that she was saving up, marking time until she could head to New York City, shake the prairie dust off her boots and live the big-city life. When she left, she had two nights’ pay coming, but she made that up by stealing a case of brew from the storeroom, and the till was a few hundred short that night. The bar featured Country Karaoke the afternoon Santiago and Carmichael visited, from 2-4, and there was a band coming later.[3]
References:
- ↑ Devoted in Death, Chapter 1
- ↑ Devoted in Death, Chapter 16
- ↑ Devoted in Death, Chapter 18