Three days before Christmas, on a
Saturday afternoon, two couples drank in a Nehalem Tavern called The
Rain Blow Inn. The joint was famous for its Saturday prime rib
special and crusty owner Mary, who greeted every person with the same
greeting: “You gettin’ off or just gettin’ off?”
It was sleeting outside the Rain Blow,
leaking inside, watering the dead plants, and about dozen men and
women all appearing anywhere from 40 to 70 years old, or Oregon
Tavern Age (OTA), drank cheap beer and carved up the prime rib like
the citizens of Whoville carved up the roast beast.
One of the couples hailed from
Portland. He was a mad poet and she was his moody moll. They drank
fine tequila out of snifters. The other couple lived in Nehalem. She
was a Hunter S. Thompson kind of social worker, he was an amateur Ken
Kesey scholar. They drank black beers.
A college bowl game played silently on
television. On the jukebox, deep cuts by Rush chosen by the poet
rocked the room. The poet was reciting his latest poem, about a
fishermen who drowned in tennis shoes.
A pounding rattled the front door.
Everyone ignored it. The pounding continued and grew louder.
The poet stopped reciting and walked to
the door. He pushed it open and got blasted with a shotgun spread of
sleet that nearly knocked him over. He managed to hold the door ajar
and a large man wearing a tattered red parka and tan slacks wheeled
himself into the Rain Blow in a creaking, duct-taped wheelchair. His
bare feet rested on the metal footplate. They were purple and
swollen. His boots were tied around his neck. He wore no hat. His
beard was white and scraggly. He carried possessions in two greasy
backpacks secured to the sides of the wheelchair.
He was the spitting disheveled image of
Ken Kesey’s Santa Claus from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
the dazed and confused hobo who showed up at the asylum on Christmas
Eve and Nurse Ratched locked up and wanted to lobotomize.
On his way to the bar, he ran into the
fake Christmas tree and left it teetering like a punch drunk fighter.
No one at the Rain Blow seemed to know the man. He parked under the
overhead Reznor heater blowing out gusts of warmth.
The poet went up to the man.
“Where
are your socks?” he said.
The
man shook his head and looked at the liquor bottles. “Can you help
me?” he said.
“Yes,”
said the poet.
Everyone
watched.
The
poet darted out of the bar and across the street to the store that
for a century had supplied the clothing and boots for loggers,
fishermen, construction workers and hunters. But it was going out of
business—the very next day in fact—because the locals now shopped
at Wal Mart, Costco and Amazon.
A few minutes
later, the poet returned with two pairs of gray
wool socks and a yellow Tillamook Cheese stocking cap. He bent down
and slipped the socks on the man’s feet. They snagged on his long,
yellowed toenails, but the poet somehow got them on. The man smiled,
donned the stocking cap, and the poet bought him a J&B Scotch and
soda and the prime rib special.
The man ate his prime rib and drank two
more scotches in silence. He thanked the poet, put his finger to the
side of his nose, twinkled his eyes, and wheeled out of the bar into
the cold Nehalem afternoon.
It was then that everyone noticed he
had a cedar wreath attached to the back of the wheelchair. In the
middle of the wreath was a tiny cross fashioned from milkshake
straws.
A debate raged the rest of sodden
afternoon whether the man was Jesus resurrected in the nick of time
or Ken Kesey’s Santa Claus escaped from the nuthouse and on the lam
at Christmas. The Kesey scholar argued for both. The social worker
said Jesus would look exactly like that today if he did return. At
least for American life. The moll wished they’d learned his name. The
poet wanted hobo to return to the vernacular.
The poet started writing a poem about
the man on a napkin. The bartender bought the house a round of
Fireball in edible candy cane-flavored shot glasses and served up
free mashed potatoes and gravy on the side. On the jukebox, Rush’s
Christmas album started playing. Rush never released a Christmas
album. It did now. Track one: “Little Drummer Boy.” The poet lost
his mind, but in a good way.
