I set my notebook down on a lacquered table top fashioned from an enormous slab of wood. Ten people could sit around it, but I was the only one sitting there on a June afternoon in the Salty Dawg, in Port Orford, a town where Jack London once stayed in a hotel, got drunk, laid, and wrote part of a novel, The Valley of the Moon.

Jack London got laid in Port Orford! I do love writing that sentence!

I was bushed after a hot day on a construction job where I sanded, painted, and wrote another chapter of a kink modern Western in my mind.

A tidbit of talk behind me drilled into my ear. An old man who lived up a nearby creek said descendants of Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters lived on 140 acres near him. He named a few names and they corresponded with Kesey lore.

The man was trying to explain the Pranksters, the Acid Test, Ken Kesey and Further.

“Never heard of him,” said the old man’s drinking buddy.

The table top’s wood intrigued me and I asked a regular if he knew its type. Spruce? Doug fir? Cedar? He did not. But he did explain the thick, black steel pole spiked through the middle of the table and bolted to the ceiling beam. He told me it held up the roof and occasionally served as a handy-dandy stripper pole when shit got crazy in the joint. A woman would hop on the table, work the pole, and well…

I didn’t know if I wanted to see that craziness, but certainly not late at night. If it occurred in the afternoon, then yes, I might watch and throw down some bills. It might depend on the music the stripper chose. Tom Petty yes. Def Leppard no.

A raised conversation at the bar interrupted my stripper pole ruminations. I turned toward it. The female bartender, wearing a white top over a black undergarment of some kind arrested my attention. She was explaining to some regulars the federal sanctuary law that invited people from Central America to make their way to America for political asylum. Well, people took up that invitation and now were being held in detention centers (concentration camps) run by private contractors for a considerable profit, and the American government was separating small children from their parents and dosing them with pills.

At one point, the bartender gave up, said she was done, and walked into the kitchen to check on a chicken wings order.

I admired her for the attempt at explanation. That took energy and pluck.

If we quit talking to one another as Americans, and that time is getting close, we are done as a nation.

She was a hero for trying and I told her exactly that as I left the bar.

“Can I fix your hair?” said a woman behind me.

Seconds earlier she had sat five stools away at Pitch’s East, drinking beer and a Crown and coke. She was dark haired, dark skinned, sun burned in the face, verging on OTA or perhaps already there, and giggling up a storm.

It was a sunny afternoon in May and I was drinking a beer after a grueling day on my new construction job and scrawling lyrics for a country song that would be be the first country song in music history that rhymed Smirnoff with gettin’ off and farts with Karl Marx.

My hair was long, brown, gray, dusty, sweaty, messy. I had a month-long beard going. I smelled of paint and plywood.

Before I could answer, the woman ran her hands through my hair and started massaging my scalp and shaping a style. She was at my right side now, and I turned toward her. She had a huge smile, dark eyes, and a couple nicks and scars. Her breasts grazed my shoulder.

She belonged in the kink modern Western I had recently started writing. I suspected she was already living it.

“Sure,” I said. “You think it needs fixing?”

She kept massaging and styling. Her touch felt incredible. I was getting turned on!

“This will make you look less crazy,” she slurred. “You’re handsome.”

I watched her work my hair in the mirror of the back bar. That turned me on as well.

“There,” she said, as she extricated her hands from my hair, but not before twirling several strands of gray hair into a thicker one, a braid, and letting it hang loose to the right of my nose.

She came around to my left side and we struck up a conversation. She had a first name without a vowel, worked the graveyard shift as a caregiver in a local nursing home (“I finally found my purpose.”), lived in a condemned house not far away, with a hundred-pound pig as a a pet and roommate, wrote poetry and affirmations on the walls of the house, and planned on buying a RV and taking the pig on the road and working as an itinerant caregiver. The pig didn’t care much for men and sometimes attacked them. “She’s going to keep me single the rest of my life,” she said while laughing.

I thanked her for the styling and commended her commitment to a job that paid $11 an hour for an ethically bankrupt nation. I thought about buying her a drink, but sensed she’d had enough.

It was time for me to go home and whip up supper from some cans.

As I stood up from the bar, she said, “You want to see my pig?”

I was tempted.

If I had, the Western would have written itself.

It was time to leave after another fruitful hour at the Sea Star on Free Pool Sunday: I bartered one of my books for a porter; Gary regaled me with yet another fantastic story from his boat racing days; I wrote 300 words on my kink Western while a decidedly non-kink Western starring Glenn Ford played on television.

I was almost out the door when Rick stopped his pool game and hurried over. He’s an unforgettable fixture on Sundays with his maniacal laughs (on good or bad shots) that carry to California.

Rick asked if I read nonfiction. I said I did. He asked if I would examine a letter he had written to various local organizations and authorities demanding a retraction of his banishment from the senior center. In the preceding months, I’d overhead him discuss the banishment, its alleged unfairness, pettiness and illegality, and possible courses of action for his reinstatement of playing pool at the center.

The precise reason for his banishment had not come up, or at least I never heard anything about it. I did want to know, of course. What does it take to get banished from playing pool at a senior center?

I said I would help. I began right there, standing near the bar, with Glenn Ford blasting away, and perused the two-page letter, while Rick returned to his game.

He needed a crisper opening, a brief narrative of the dispute, some citations of the center’s bylaws he claimed were violated, and perhaps a softer tone, more of an invitation for the center to do the right thing, rather than berating.

Does berating people ever inspire them to do the right thing?

I stuffed the letter into my coat packet and told Rick I would edit it, make some comments and suggestions, and return it next week at Free Pool Sunday. He was of course free to reject all or some of them and it wouldn’t bother me in the least.

Rick thanked me profusely, drained a long shot, cackled, and I walked out into an overcast afternoon, determined to help Rick communicate better and perhaps win the day. No man should be denied the pleasure of playing pool at a senior center without proper due process.

We never discussed a price, but I knew a free beer was coming. Barter. Barter is always best in OTA country.