Two OTA women were drinking bottled beer and playing video poker.

It was raining outside.

A woman sitting near the bar was telling tall tales about herself. Or maybe they were rock solid true. She’d just got off the wagon.

I was writing an academic paper about the existential brilliance of The Rockford Files.

On screen, Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw were acting in Convoy. Christ almighty, was there ever a better looking couple in the history of Hollywood couples?

The scene where they make it in the sleeping cab of his big rig was playing. Black Sabbath was rocking through the speakers.

Two weird-looking non OTA dudes sat near me and did inexplicable things. They were drinking straight whiskey with tomato juice backs.

Somehow the ventilation changed and I caught a drift of the female conversation. It went like this:

How would you feel about a poker game if every one is vaccinated?

I’m in.

I’ll set up.

What kind of game?

Texas Hold em’.

Good, I like losing. People love me to come to their poker games because I always lose.

Ahhhhhh, normalcy, easily the worst word in the American vernacular, and invented as a campaign slogan to elect one of the worst American Presidents in history, Warren Harding, was returning.

That is both a good and bad thing. Normalcy wasn’t working out so well for most Americans before the Pandemic, but a return of a house poker party for OTA women was a good thing for sure.

I sat with a friend in Oregon Tavern Age country in Oregon City—a choice dive—and one possessed of a truly great ownership story. So the female bartender told me, her mother had worked in the joint for 30 years, squirreled away some money, and finally bought it not too long ago, lock, stock and barrel, fulfilling a dream. The bartender told me this after her mother eased around her to go whip up the Sunday steak and eggs special.

That’s the entrepreneurial spirit, the only spirit, that will keep OTA country alive and save us all from brew pubs and snot nosed kids running around, making a racket, while their parents don’t parent.

The place was spacious and people were following the Pandemic rules, well, mostly. There was the grizzled, long haired, OTA man wearing a neon yellow safety vest and surfer shorts who kept coming up to everyone without wearing a mask, wanting to show off his new tattoo of an eel or snake. Everyone seemed to know him, Lloyd or Floyd. I didn’t quite catch it.

No one really wanted to see his tattoo, and I certainly did not when Lloyd/Floyd came up to our table and just stood there. I quickly masked up, and turned toward him. He was three feet away. I looked right at him. He was drunk. I said nothing. My friend said nothing. He said nothing. He left.

I watched him leave and go accost another patron. Behind me, an ancient golf video game starring John Daly, an OTA golfer if there ever was one, seized my attention. I doubt it had been played or serviced in a decade. I love old unused things still in operation. I was thinking exactly that when something else old in the joint caught my eye.

Across the room from our table, was a rotary phone mounted on a wall. I couldn’t believe it! It instantly brought to mind the old phones in all the OTA joints when I first started investigating them in Portland in my early 20s. These were the ones that had a direct line to Portland’s only taxi company. I don’t think you even had to dial. You just picked it up and an operator at the taxi garage hooked you up for a ride. I never used it, but saw people who did.

Nostalgia swept over me at the sight of the telephone. Oh for those days when you went to the phone booths or alcoves in dive joints and slapped in a quarter and called someone or to check your messages in an attempt to meet up later. It seemed like a million years ago.

The odd thing about this particular wall phone was its placement in practically the middle of the joint. You used this phone and everyone heard you. What sport that must have been for the patrons! You wanted to listen in and get the goods.

Contrast that with communication today: you are assaulted with phone conversations you don’t want hear! Nostalgia can really mess a guy up.

I pointed out the phone to my friend. I said there was no way it worked. There wasn’t any possible way a working rotary phone existed in an OTA joint or any other joint in the state or Western states for that matter.

My friend got up from the table to check it out. She picked it up, put the receiver to her ear, and then turned quickly back to me. She was smiling. The son-of-a-bitch had a dial tone! I would have thought you had a better chance of finding a heart in a Republican US Senator.

My friend bounded over to the table. I suggested we call the joint’s number. I wanted to hear that sweet sound of a real telephone ringing. She looked it up on her phone and called it. We heard a phone ring, but it wasn’t the one on the wall. It was coming from behind the bar, a modern sounding land line.

The next step was to go over to the wall phone and make a call. I was about ready to do so, when I stopped. The only phone number I knew by heart besides my own cell was my Mom. I couldn’t call my Mom from OTA country! How would I explain that?

Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” played through the speakers. I want her face, (okay, cleavage, too) on a unit of US currency. Make it a $44 bill.

I sat at my usual corner table in the back of the joint, next to the King Kong pinball machine, drinking a craft malt liquor.

To my right, half a hairy ass mooned me from a chair. It was an OTA man’s ass and this mooning was a first for me in OTA country. How a body sitting in a chair could half moon like that was a marvel of American anatomy.

Moon Man was drinking a shot of Crown Royal with a Tecate back. His OTA buddy at his table was drinking the same. The two men were alternately watching golf and auto racing. A packet of Pall Malls rested on the table.

They sat glued to the screens and held exactly one conversation. Actually it was one question to the Moon Man:

“Did you cut those shorts off yourself?”

“No.”

Well said. I’d rather have a friend who was terse in storytelling rather than a windbag.

I drifted away from them and back to the letter I was writing in longhand. I was trying to write as legible as possible, but was failing. So what? The recipient would be happy to see a real handwritten letter arrive in the mail. It’s like a mystical communication from an undiscovered country that a golden eagle delivered.

The two OTA men stood up from their table. The mooning ceased. They limped together like a couple shot-up deputies toward the video slots. I considered putting them in the letter, but there were more pressing matters to discuss, in this case, questions to a writer about what is worth writing about.