General Dusty Pickles was born in 1831 in a ditch outside Purcellville, Virginia to parents whose names he never learned because they were gone before he was out of the womb.

He was raised initially by a pack of raccoons, a depressed donkey, and a turkey with a manifest destiny agenda who had been systematically expanding its territory across three counties since 1829. In the spring of 1835 the turkey led Dusty and the rest of its coalition west into the sovereign territory of the Wankentug Nation, who wiped out the turkey immediately and with no hesitation, kept the donkey for reasons they never explained, released the raccoons, and raised Dusty as one of their own for the next eight years. The Wankentug Nation never gave him a name. He did not ask why.

At age 12 he wandered into a pickle jar facility in Purcellville, picked up several jars, and simply never left. His employer created a position around him paying $0.02 a day, which was considered fair given that nobody had asked him to come in and nobody had successfully asked him to leave in eighteen years.

When he enlisted in 1861 and the recruiter asked his name he stood there for several seconds, looked down at the dusty pickle jars he had carried with him out of habit, and said the first two words that came to mind. The recruiter wrote them down without looking up. Neither of them discussed it further. Pickles was assigned as Regimental Pubic Lice Inspector, responsible for conducting daily physical inspections of every soldier from the waist down following an outbreak in September 1861 that Dickel described in his journal as the second worst thing that happened that month. Pickles performed these inspections every morning for fourteen months with a magnifying glass he had purchased himself and brought from home. No soldier ever complained in writing.

During a rest period outside Snickersville, Virginia, Pickles lost a game of hoop and stick to a sixteen year old private named Clarence who was blind, deaf, and had two peg legs and had never won anything in his life. The terms of the loss required Pickles to put on General Dickel's coat and lead the regiment into engagement as a prank. He put the coat on. It fit. He led 200 Confederate soldiers into what became the Battle of Snickersville, which lasted two hours and forty minutes, produced four sprained ankles, zero strategic gains for either side, and a level of public humiliation for the Confederacy so profound that military historians have since identified it as a direct contributing factor to them losing the war. Pickles was gone before anyone figured out what happened. He took Dickel's coat and left Virginia without telling anyone. He kept the name General Dusty Pickles for the rest of his life because it sounded kinda cool.

He went to Ballsack Flats, Arizona. He learned to ride bulls, went 8 seconds on 34 consecutive rides between 1871 and 1879, and spent the remaining decades pursuing what he described in later correspondence as the two greatest opportunities available to a man in the American west: bull riding as a spectator sport and the company of women of a loose and agreeable nature, both of which he identified as a viable and scalable business model if relocated to the Appalachian mountains where the winters were long, the population was isolated, and nobody had thought to combine the two yet.

He arrived back in Lovettsville in 1927 at 96 years old with $340, a bull named Betty, and a business plan written on the back of an Arizona steakhouse menu. He had not looked into either Prohibition or the fact that the town of Lovettsville still blamed him personally for the Confederate loss before making the trip. Both of these things were communicated to him within the first hour of his arrival, the second one physically, by three separate men.

With Betty tied to a fence post and nowhere else to go, Pickles opened The Last Resort Malt Shop in a converted barn at the current address in 1928. It sold one item: the Snickle, a Snickers bar stuffed inside a hollowed out dill pickle, named after Snickersville as an apology that did not work on anyone. The malt shop lost money every month. The speakeasy Pickles was running in the basement made $4,200 in its first year, a figure that did not account for the bull riding events he ran in the back where Betty was the main attraction and the moonshine was the secondary one.

Two children arrived at the malt shop in 1929 claiming to be his, both from women he had known in Ballsack Flats and neither of whom had accompanied them on the trip. The boy had been kicked square in the face by a pack mule as a toddler and made a sound on impact that his mother had written on his birth documentation as his name. His name was Huck. His eyes were permanently crossed. The girl was older and had been named Clitilda by her mother after the mythical land of Clitoris that Dusty had spent two decades and three journals trying to find. He never found it. Her mother said the name felt appropriate. The children were raised in the bar. This is the only period in the establishment's history with a dress code.

The federal government approached Pickles, then 110 years old and still behind the bar every night, about converting the building into a wartime production facility. He agreed immediately because the government was offering $800 a month and Betty had backed into the kitchen stove three weeks earlier during a Thursday night that Pickles described in a letter to the county as getting out of hand. Between 1942 and 1944 The Last Resort produced what federal procurement documents describe as a psychological support apparatus developed in response to a classified memorandum regarding troop morale and loneliness in the field. The apparatus was inflatable. It was life-sized. Each unit shipped in a canvas bag marked COMFORT DIVISION and included a small card that read she believes in you. The Last Resort produced 11,000 units. In the spring of 1944 a congressman from Ohio asked the war department what they were producing. The war department said mattresses. The congressman said that did not look like a mattress. The war department said it was a new kind. The program was discontinued the following month. 10,999 units were unaccounted for after the war. One was returned. It had been named Carol and was covered in an unknown substance.

General Dusty Pickles died in 1945 at age 114 on the toilet in the upstairs office reading a Sears catalog open to the women's undergarment section. Huck and Clitilda found him, assessed the situation, and changed their last name to Fontaine after their mother before calling anyone. He is buried under the outhouse behind the barn because it was the only pre-dug hole on the property and it was July and Huck was not going to dig a new one. His initials are carved into the outhouse door. Visitors who notice them and ask what GDP stands for are told Good Dumpin Place, which is accurate on two levels and which Huck considered a fitting tribute.

Huck and Clitilda opened a sock hop because they believed that was a place where people paid to hop over socks arranged on the floor. They hired a man named Terrence to arrange the socks. Terrence was talented and people came specifically to see what he would do that week. In 1951 someone explained what a sock hop actually was and Huck and Clitilda called that person a liar and kept going until the money ran out in 1958. Terrence moved to Tallahassee to pursue a professional career in Finnish Tap Dancing, a discipline whose practitioners referred to themselves as Fappers, which Terrence put on his business card without hesitation.

Held annually beginning in 1962. The name referred to poking a campfire and stroking a guitar string and nobody questioned this out loud. The inaugural lineup featured CCR — the Cumquat Crawdad Revival — and The Doors. The Cumquat Crawdad Revival cancelled the morning of day one because their van broke down outside Charlottesville and not one of the four members knew how to change a tire and none of them were the kind of men who asked for help. The Doors never confirmed in the first place. Huck had received a call from a man who said he was calling about The Doors, assumed it was a door installation company following up on the barn's broken side entrance, gave him measurements, and asked for a quote on hinges. The man stopped calling. The side entrance is still broken. What arrived instead was a man named Douglas who owned a harmonica and knew four songs, three of which were the same song played at different speeds, and an uninvited traveling preacher named Brother Wendell who occupied the main stage for six hours attempting to save people who were too drunk to stand and therefore could not leave. Huck and Clitilda filed a formal complaint against Woodstock in 1969 for stealing their concept. Woodstock did not respond.

Huck and Clitilda converted the bar into a disco club called The Last Resort Lido Deck in 1973. There was no deck. There was no water. The entire operation was funded by a proprietary white powder Huck described in a 1975 county permit application as a premium adult recreational stimulant of Colombian origin, which the county approved without reading and which kept the lights on, the ball spinning, and the staff working at a pace that concerned several of their doctors. It also directly informed the decision to install a 300 pound disco ball on a ceiling rated for 23 pounds, which in retrospect was the kind of structural judgment call that should not be made while inhaling Colombian bam bam but was. In February 1974 it came down on a Saturday night and landed directly on ten members of a fifteen piece group from Gary, Indiana called the Jackson 15 who were performing that evening. The five surviving members regrouped, relocated to Motown, and the rest is history.

Huck and Clitilda rebranded as The Last Resort Roadhouse in 1982. By 1984 there was a fight every Friday without exception and two Saturdays a month that ended with someone going through a window. Huck hired a cooler named James Dalton out of Memphis who arrived on a Tuesday in a car that was too nice for the parking lot and told the staff to be nice until it was time to not be nice. Dalton brought in his mentor Sam Elliot, a 58 year old man with a mustache that had its own reputation, who stood at the end of the bar every night drinking bourbon and was called upon exactly once during the roadhouse era, at which point he broke three of a man's ribs with one hand and ordered another bourbon without changing his expression. The house band during this period was fronted by a blind guitarist who looked exactly like George Thorogood, played exactly like George Thorogood, and claimed under direct questioning to have never heard of George Thorogood. The bar's primary antagonist was a local businessman named Carl Elroy Pickett III who owned the Lovettsville feed supply, the Lovettsville towing company, the Lovettsville electrician who has still not fixed the parking lot light, and a monster truck named Sweet Clitilda which he drove through the Last Resort's back fence in October 1987 in a dispute over a property line that Huck had surveyed himself using a stick and his best judgment. Dalton fell for the local physician Dr. Linda Rae Sutton, ripped the throat out of a man named Bobby Bass in the parking lot in March 1988 after Bass put his hands on Dr. Sutton outside the bar, and was asked by the responding deputy to describe what happened, to which Dalton said he used his fingers. The dispute with Pickett culminated in a confrontation at Pickett's estate in 1988 during which Dalton, Sam Elliot, the George Thorogood lookalike, and fourteen bar regulars showed up uninvited. Pickett pulled a shotgun. Dalton took it from him. Four of Pickett's associates jumped Dalton simultaneously and Dalton put all four of them on the ground in eleven seconds, which the George Thorogood lookalike accompanied with a slide guitar riff that everyone present has described as perfectly timed. Pickett did not survive the evening. The property line has not been disputed since. Sam Elliot was killed during the confrontation by one of Pickett's men and is buried on the property in a location that is known and marked and that we are not sharing out of respect. Dalton left in 1989. In retrospect the moonshine operation running behind the barn throughout this entire period may have been a more significant contributing factor to the violence than anyone acknowledged at the time or has been willing to acknowledge since.

Darlene Fontaine is Dusty Pickles' granddaughter and has owned The Last Resort since 1994. She arrived by way of one previous marriage to Garth Brooks — yes, that Garth Brooks — who took a vacation to Jamaica in 1991, spent two days there, and came home convinced he was destined for reggae. He pursued this direction under the aliases Garth Marley, Rasta McEntire, and Brooks Mon, performed once in Kingston, had mangoes thrown at him by the crowd, and did not finish the set. Darlene was in the front row. She filed for divorce on the flight home, was back in Lovettsville by the end of the month, and walked into the bar and told Huck she was taking it, which Huck agreed to immediately because Clitilda had been telling him to retire for three years and this felt like a sign. She rebranded it The Last Resort Bar & Grille on day one and added Grille with an E because she felt it communicated culinary seriousness. Dale Sr. had been working the door since 1993 and stayed on under Darlene, which eventually led to a courthouse wedding in 2003 that lasted eleven minutes. Dale Sr. cried. Darlene did not.

8:46AM — Gary Burchett drove his riding lawnmower through the front window of The Last Resort while reaching down to retrieve a pack of Marlboro Reds that had slid under the seat.

9:03AM — Gary Burchett drove a second riding lawnmower through the other front window of The Last Resort in an attempt to recover the first one, and in doing so lost a second pack of Marlboro Reds.

The 2009 Virginia earthquake measured 3.6 on the Richter scale and lasted four seconds. At The Last Resort it knocked a signed framed photograph of Dale Earnhardt off the south wall, cracking the frame and causing Dale Sr. to become non-verbal for the remainder of the evening. Darlene declared an immediate state of emergency, closed the bar for six days, filed for FEMA disaster relief, was denied, appealed, was denied again, contacted her congressman, was not called back, filed a third application describing the loss as a cultural catastrophe with regional implications, was denied a third time, and filed a fourth application in 2011 that remains under review.

Betty the bull died in 1996 at approximately 69 years old and is buried behind the barn next to Dusty Pickles, which was not planned but which feels right. Her hide was used to upholster the mechanical bull Darlene installed in 1997, which is also named Betty. Some find this touching. Others find it unsettling. Both groups are right. Betty has thrown 2,341 people. Four of them deserved it more than the others.