Now John Wayne was acquitted of domestic violence on Tuesday, February 7, and we got to know each other three days later. It was an instantaneous and natural bond, between me and him, because like me John Wayne is a simple man—a guy who likes beer and women and working with his hands, has God in his heart and a few inviolable principles he's carried since his youth, and just wants to do better today than he did yesterday (though—again, like me—not always to much success: Just look at his repetitive press clips over the past dozen years).
We consecrated our friendship with a round of drinks at the Kopper Keg in northwest Las Vegas on Friday, February 10, while the sun was sinking into the Spring Mountains behind us and leaving in its wake another one of them spectacular twilights. And after we had put five more under our belts, John Wayne and I had been friends for years. It was the beginning of what was to be an historic night for both of us. Me because over the course of three impious bars, nine inspired hours, and countless interruptions from women still curious to meet John Wayne Bobbitt, the man who got his member cut off 12 years ago, I was reconnected to the spirit of this city; and him because it was the first weekend of a new start in life.
Yes, sir: John Wayne was just like me when I met him: shipwrecked, stranded by women, and with only a few twenties to his name and no place to call his own. Only vestiges of the man whose popular yet evanescent porno career garnered some $30 million were his eyes, vigilant and arctic blue like those of a pure white wolf dog, and the "BOBBITT" printed across the back of his football jersey, which he of course strutted around the endless groups of sociable young women smiling and drinking throughout the Roadrunner Saloon. That's where we had decided to continue our excursion.
Like a lot guys I know, Vegas has been tough on John Wayne. Ever since he followed an Olympic Garden stripper out here in 1994, drama and misfortune have shadowed his every move. Three divorces, five domestic violence charges, and seven arrests. Spent two years in jail too. And the reason for that, his friends told me Friday night, while John Wayne damn near broke his leg attempting the electric slide on the congested dance floor at Dylan's Saloon, the unrepentant cowboy bar on Boulder Highway we walked into just before midnight, is plain and simple: The man's got bad judgment. No sense of discretion whatsoever. Above all with women. Any girl can approach him—and trust me, it only takes one night out with him to see there are a lot of girls who still want to be with John Wayne Bobbitt—and sure enough, he'll entertain her. Give it some time, and he might just start loving her. Then he won't know how to leave her. That's the way John is.
And he hasn't changed. No sir, not a bit. The same ol' John Wayne has persisted through the 12 years he's been in Vegas. Persisted through failed comedy acts and wayward preaching, through bartending at the Bunny Ranch and taxiing johns up to that perky brothel in limos and taxis, through his workdays excavating pools and breaking down conventions and, as he does now, moving furniture; and it's persisted through all of his aborted relationships, to both the swarm of leeches who've taken advantage of John Wayne because he is quite gullible and ain't very good at saying "No," and the girls whom he says never actually liked him but only his infamous name, off of which they sought to rally their own personal aggrandizement with methodical and devious resolve.
No sir, he says, not since Lorena, his first wife, has someone liked him for who he really is: just John Wayne, born and bred in upstate New York, buffalo country, amidst five brothers and, to the beginning of his misfortune, no sisters. The John Wayne who left his parents' conservative household to go to college, and then the Marines, where he encountered his own kind: guys who liked booze, and the ladies, and fighting with their hands. That's the John Wayne to whom Lorena Gallo nodded "Yes," when he asked her to dance the first time he saw the adorable little Ecuadorian bird, and the same John Wayne to whom she said "Yes" when asked if she'd take him to be her lawfully wedded husband on June 18, 1989.
Now, after she severed his manhood four years later, (and after the doctor succeeded to reattach it), catapulting him by mere chance into worldwide recognition, the girls who followed Lorena's place in John's bed were so easy to come by, he told me Friday night while drinking mugs of crude beer made for the sole purpose of enduring this world and its inscrutable women, that he forgot the intricacies of a woman. He said, with an interminable sigh:
"I just don't understand them."
It's true. Yes, sir. First came Kristina Elliot, the stripper from Olympic Gardens, from whom he was only an aisle away from marrying. And good thing he didn't, for their relationship was a train wreck captured by the national media, and in the end he had two counts of domestic abuse stamped on his record and she had a nice layout in the December 1994 issue of Playboy.
Then came Dottie Brewer. They married at the Silver Bells Wedding Chapel in the wee morning hours of February 3, 2001, but their union didn't even survive the honeymoon. Apparently, however, it was long enough for Dottie to write a tell-all book entitled; This Week I Married John Wayne Bobbitt: Extraordinary Stories about an Ordinary Life.
After that curt annulment, John was living on Buffalo and Vegas drives, and that's where he met Joanna Ferrell, a solar blond with the gravitational force of a movie star. She would keep John Wayne's name in the papers, accusing him of domestic violence on three occasions. The first wasn't but two months after their March 2002 wedding, and to that charge he pleaded no contest. The second came in August of 2004, but he was acquitted after multiple witnesses testified to his innocence four months later. And then in the fall of last year, another, for which he was acquitted again. At the hearing, which took place on February 7 and put John Wayne's name back in national headlines, Las Vegas Municipal Court Judge Toy Gregory said, "Just because there are injuries, doesn't mean there were batteries," echoing the essence of John Wayne's defense for years.
Now, John Wayne filed for a divorce from Joanna in September of last year, right around the time the European production company World of Wonder came to Las Vegas to shoot a documentary on John Wayne Bobbitt. They followed him for two weeks, capturing his mundane and monotonous daily tasks, capturing an immemorial party of his at the Bunny Ranch, and capturing, of course, his exposed package. That is: The documentary, which has already been broadcast in the U.K. and will arrive in America by the end of February, did exactly what it was supposed to do: It filmed John Wayne being who he is.
Affable, soft-spoken, imprudent much of the time, an indiscriminate partygoer who has also been faithful to Sunday church services his entire life, and a man, 38 years old, in an eternal struggle to fend off loneliness: It's the John Wayne I departed early Saturday morning with a man's handshake, and it's the only John Wayne he's capable of being, no matter how much he wants to play the part of the celebrity, and no matter how long he tries to delay his 15 minutes of fame.