Oregon Tavern Age: Keno Hamburger

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The door opened to the Sea Star Lounge and in walked a man with a dog on a leash. I didn’t recognize the man but I did recognize the dog—Ella, a gray pit bull mix a real sweetheart, and resident of the nearby animal shelter. I had recently began volunteering at the shelter, walking dogs, including Ella, walking to help them and save myself.

It was working.

I sat in the back of the joint, editing a manuscript, drinking a porter. It dawned on me that the man, vaguely OTA, had taken Ella for a walk and walked into the Sea Star! Why hadn’t I thought of that masterstroke?

Glorie the bartender asked the man if Ella was a service dog and practically threw up air quotes when pronouncing “service dog.” She legally had to ask, but didn’t have the legal right to ask for service dog certifications or the nature of the human disability that required a dog for comfort. In my case, the disability would have been listed as “existential dread” and any dog accompanying me qualified as a service dog, with or without his papers.

The man caught the drift and answered on cue. He sat on a stool, hitched Ella to it, ordered a beer, and Ella went to asleep in seconds. At long last she had some peace and quiet to rest after constant and terrible noise at the shelter that shook many dogs to pieces.

To my left, a technician rebooted and rerigged a truculent Oregon Video Lottery machine called Great Zeus. It was adorned with a large image of an OTA-looking man with flowing white hair, full white beard, bushy white eyebrows, and piercing blue eyes, presumably Zeus as imagined by a millennial graphic designer who had never read a lick of The Immortals nor ever learned to draw without the aid of a computer.

Something was wrong with Zeus; his visage felt more Jesus than Greek mythology.

An OTA Jesus! What a concept! The Messiah died at 33 so he never could have developed an official OTA face, but let us suppose he didn’t die on the cross and went to have a long, better life with Mary Magdalene (and her wild friend), a kid, a dog, running a food bank, issuing chapbooks of his parables, and chugging all that jug wine he made from water.

The technician waited and waited…and then the Jesus machine came to life, resurrected to accept low-income people’s money on blind faith and thwart with bells and whistles, the once-great notion of progressive taxation.

My beer was gone and I checked my wallet. Cashless!

The technician then went to work on the Keno game, and in short order, printed out a veritable fistful of tickets. He came over to me and handed me three free tickets, courtesy of the state. One was a possible ten million-dollar jackpot, the other two, one-dollar tickets with the numbers already predetermined. I could play the one-dollar tickets now, but had to return the next day to see if I hit the big score. I was confused.

“I’ve never played Keno before,” I said. “I don’t know how.”

He explained the game and this promotional gimmick. It flew over my head like evolutionary theory to evangelical Christians.

What the hell, I thought, I was cashless and wanted a beer and perhaps I might win enough dough to afford a beer on the taxpayers. The odds were long, however, but I wasn’t supposed to believe that, so I didn’t.

I went up to Glorie to turn in my tickets. I asked her how Keno worked and she narrated something in Chinese and that was that. She processed my tickets and, lo and behold, I won $2!

But not enough for a beer, not even a can of Rainier.

Glorie slapped the bills on the bar and I scooped them up. Perhaps I could purchase a teaspoon of the well whiskey for a micro shot. Glorie could assist with that.

Then I looked at Ella, snoozing on the carpet. She had spent the last four years locked up in the shelter. Pit bulls rarely got adopted and I had come to learn through volunteering that they were an incredibly misunderstood breed by the general public. I even had my eye on one—Frankie—who would make the perfect romping beach dog.

I kept staring at Ella. I still had the two bucks. An idea came. No, better than a mere idea….a great notion! I walked into the adjacent restaurant and up to the counter. I perused the menu.

A young bearded man, the chef I presumed, asked how he could help me.

“I only have two bucks on me, and I want to buy a hamburger patty for a shelter dog in the bar. Someone brought her in on a walk.”

The cheapest hamburger on the menu was seven dollars.

“Can you help me out?”

He didn’t hesitate.

“Sure, no problem. I’ll bring it over when it’s ready.”

I plopped down the cash on the counter and left.

Three minutes later, the chef strolled into the bar carrying a large Styrofoam box. He handed it to me and I opened the box. It contained quite possibly the largest hamburger patty in the history of OTA country. I laughed a huge laugh and thanked the chef. I then started showing the patty around the Sea Star and the regulars roused with happiness and Glorie bought me a beer!

I asked Glorie for a knife and she produced one in seconds (she might have been wearing it). I carved up the patty into four big bites and then brought it over to Ella’s handler. She was still asleep on the floor. I marveled at her beautiful face, heavy eyes, a model of sublime equanimity in the face of noisy chaos. I thought about something I’d read recently, written by the Nobel Prize-winning Thomas Mann: “Animals are more primitive and less inhibited in giving expression to their mental state—there is a sense in which one might say they are more human.”

Ella more human than humans. It was all too true.

It was an unspoken thing hanging in the air, but everyone there was considering adoption, wondering how they could make it work with their other OTA dogs. Why couldn’t this dog find a home? Why can’t we take up these dogs into our homes and hearts and heal them and ourselves, and perhaps later, our damaged country? Adopting a shelter dog might be one of those “million intricate moves for justice” that Americans desperately need to start making in every corner of their tiny worlds. They usually don’t cost a thing. They are always great notions. They don’t require any self-promotion either.

I told Ella’s handler about the winning Keno ticket and the patty. He smiled and suggested he feed Ella outside in the smoke shack. A bunch of us got up and followed him and the dog.

The man broke up the patty into smaller bits and thought it might be a good idea to feed Ella slowly and by hand. And that’s what he did, after lighting up a cigarette. He had meat in one hand and a Pall Mall in the other and pulled it off effortlessly.

As Ella ate, we started a little celebration and yucked it up about state-sponsored meat for shelter dogs. A few minutes later we were back inside the lounge and Ella instantly fell asleep on the carpet.

I looked at my remaining ticket. If I hit a winner, ten million bucks. I made a pledge to the bar right there, and raised my hand with the ticket, “If I win this, I am going to build the greatest animal shelter of all time, with a creek, woods, fields, and beach access. We’ll barbecue hamburgers and steaks every day with the dogs! We’ll give them homemade cannabis-infused treats!”

A small round of applause went up. We clinked our glasses. We were the dog people.

The next day I came in and Glorie ran the ticket. A loser. But the shelter is still the dream, my only dream, my greatest notion, these days. And should one day it come to fruition, its financier would remain anonymous—to the humans that is.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Bonnie and Clyde Files 37

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I brought cheese and oatmeal cookies to share with Bonnie and Clyde. It is a good thing to break bread with dogs outdoors.

Drizzle occupied the landscape. Everything was soundless as we moved through the pasture toward the river. I was astonished and ecstatic how swift Bonnie moved on point. Clyde caught her fresh vigor and picked up his gait. Our mojo was strong.

We came to the electric fence and I heard a tiny crackle. I didn’t feel like navigating through it so I took a new path to find the river. I felt like exploring. I wanted to keep walking with Bonnie and Clyde forever, walk right into a new country.

A song entered my mind, a great song about a river, the Cuyahoga River, the Ohio river that caught on fire in 1969 and helped galvanize the modern American environmental movement. The rock band REM wrote the song and it contains the immortal line: “Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up.”

I wanted to gather dogs and friends and elk and family and a woman of Rilke and start that new country up. And I’m not just talking about on paper. I mean on the ground, near a river. There will be no clearcuts in this county and only animals will adorn our units of currency. The biggest denomination will display a beaver.

Bonnie and Clyde noticed the disruption to our normal routine and perked up for the new path. They like exploring! Most humans don’t. They don’t even know how to read a paper may anymore.

Did I need a paper map to find this new country? Would I have to become my own cartographer?

We traversed a section of wet ground littered with wood after a recent high flow. I liked the way debris looked and knowing that the river had jumped its channel and found some wildness, if only temporary. I wanted to jump my channel, too.

I found a tree, a graceful, old and leaning alder for us to have our lunch. I ate my cheese with Bonnie and Clyde and watched the river churn green and brown. Somewhere, downriver, I knew that new country existed for me. I simply had to keep moving toward it, exploring the only way left me, perhaps with a map of my own devising, but perhaps not.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Oregon Tavern Age: Tiny’s Tavern and the Legend of Evelyn Part 2

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The bartender narrated and I listened: Evelyn Bucher owned and operated Tiny’s Tavern from 1956 to 2010, when she passed away. Fifty-four years behind the bar in OTA country, doubtless a record. Beer and wine only then. Cigarettes and stogies. Fried chicken and sack lunches to go. She might have even served an underage Steve Prefontaine, the legendary wild man distance runner who grew up in the area and trained in the dunes! Years ago, she even put in a laundromat inside the joint! She served two generations of loggers and fishermen and back in the day it was probably like Sometimes a Great Notion every morning, noon and night, except for the fact that Evelyn didn’t allow cussing in the tavern and 86’d anyone who did.

I looked at Evelyn’s portrait again. They never have portraits like these in brew pubs and that’s pretty much the reason I stopped going to brew pubs. Who wants to talk about beer when you can talk about gizzards?

The bartender told me that Evelyn was beloved in the community, belonged to multiple service organizations, sponsored bowling, baseball, softball and pool teams, once donated 69 handmade quilts to veterans, and was a proud and active member of her church. When she died, practically all of North Bend turned out and they held a viewing of her in a mortuary, a celebration of her life in a church, and celebration of her other life in Tiny’s. Preacher drinks beer with logger. It don’t get no more OTA than that.

I asked about the carpet on the walls and why Evelyn hadn’t ripped it out once smoking was banned. The regulars wouldn’t hear of it, the bartender said, and besides, Evelyn’s husband or son owned a carpet cleaning business and they regularly came in and shampooed the walls. I asked and asked and the bartender kept riffing Evelyn stories.

The more the bartender shared about Evelyn, including showing me the commemorative bar stool with her name embroidered in the vinyl and the ladder she used to clean the top of the grill, the more I marveled. Can a woman like Evelyn with a name like Evelyn still exist on the Oregon Coast? I mean, was she the last Evelyn in reality and metaphor?

A half hour vanished. The bartender excused herself and headed toward the back. I got up to find the restroom and headed toward the back. A few seconds later, to my left, I noticed a rectangular enclosed space fronted by large windows. I went inside. It was the laundromat, a tiny laundromat, and I was utterly shocked because I thought it had closed down decades ago.

No one was inside the laundromat. I looked around: there were industrial washers and dryers and a half dozen old pool league trophies decorating the space, big trophies made of marble and metal that could kill a man in a bar fight. One trophy even had a mini pool table with real green felt! I desperately wanted one of these trophies for my home. I also wanted to do my laundry and drink beer inside Tiny’s laundromat and imagine what had gone on while the beer flowed and clothes were washed and dried.

A few minutes later I was back sitting at the bar, finishing the rest of my session. The bartender was programming the jukebox. The Ninja woman was winning and making Ninja-like noises and gestures. The gizzards were waiting for a gullet. I took a final look at Evelyn. Her glowing image was the combined OTA portrait of Mona Lisa, the Virgin Mary and the Hamm’s bear.

As I got up to leave, an OTA man and woman entered the tavern each carrying a hamper of dirty clothes. They were smiling.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Oregon Tavern Age: Tiny’s Tavern and the Legend of Evelyn Part 1

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A woman leaned against the facade of Tiny’s Tavern in North Bend.

She wore her blonde hair in a ponytail. She also wore black cat-eye gasses, pink pajama bottoms, a gray hoodie and UGG boots. A cigarette dangled from her lips. A nose ring sparkled in the sunlight. There were hushed OTA whispers in the lines of her face.

“Are you my bartender?” I said.

“I’m your bartender,” she said.

She snuffed out the cigarette with her fingers, shoved it into a pajama pocket, and we went into the tavern together. It was 11:45 on a weekday morning and I’d never had a bartender wearing pajama bottoms serve me a drink before.

Steve Miller’s “Jungle Love” played on the digital jukebox. I was the only customer. I sat down at the bar and ordered a local session beer. I listened to Steve sing: Everything’s better when wet.

The session materialized in record time. Must have been the pajamas.

I looked around Tiny’s. It was tiny and had carpeted walls, something I’d never seen before.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Point Blank” came on. I hadn’t heard it in 25 years and never before in a bar.

I was gonna be your Romeo you were gonna be my Juliet
These days you don’t wait on Romeo’s you wait on that welfare check
and on all the pretty things that you can’t ever have and on all the promises
That always end up point blank, shot between the eyes

The bartender chose this semi-obscure song, perhaps the bleakest in Bruce’s catalog? I started liking her. I started thinking of a short story about her in the “Point Blank” tradition and wondered what Bruce would have made lyrically from a pink pajama-wearing bartender before noon who had walked to work in a dead mill town because no one would give her a ride.

I looked to my right, to the marquee menu over the deep fryer and grill. It had movable type and was surely the last movable type menu in America.

A menu item caught my eye: gizzards, $3.

I asked the bartender if anyone ever ordered the gizzards.

“One woman. Yes. I’ve got a regular who calls in for three takeout orders,” she said.

Takeout Gizzards—great rock band name.

“How old is she?” I was expecting someone elderly, OTA to the stone greasy core.

“In her 20s.”

“What’s she drink?”

“Coronas. She slams a couple before leaving.”

“Hang Fire” by the Rolling Stones came on.

In the sweet old country where I come from
Nobody ever works
Yeah nothing gets done
We hang fire, we hang fire

Three women entered the joint—all OTA.

“Lunch time!” one of them said. “Shot of whiskey.”

The bartender went to the Jack Daniels Fire.

There is word for the convergence of fire like that. I’ll let a wordsmith figure it out.

“Jesus I’m winded!” she continued. “Three blocks is a long way to walk!” She laughed.

She wore black lycra shorts and a black lycra top. No coat. In November. She weighed well over 250 pounds and was about the happiest person I’d seen in years. A lot happier than me.

The bartender handed her the shot of Jack Fire.

“I’m here to defeat the Ninja!” she yelled, referring to video slot machine that featured a Ninja holding a sword. She made Ninja-like sword movements with the shot and then pounded it.

A new bartender appeared and the pajama lady left. I never got her name as she sashayed out the door.

I sipped the session and watched the new bartender punch in juke box selections. A Billy Joel song from the 70s came on that I didn’t recognize.

A framed photograph of an old woman above the back bar intrigued me. You never see this sort of decoration in brew pubs—but they are legion in OTA country. They are landmarks in OTA country.

“Who’s that woman?” I said to the bartender.

“That’s Evelyn.”

The music stopped. The digital goblins were mucking up the works.

And then the bartender launched into Evelyn’s OTA story and I hadn’t even solicited it.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Ruminations on Rilke

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I met someone who loves Rilke. I love Rilke. Can Rilke bring people together and move hearts to new, better places in the digital age? Yes, I think he can.

Below are some stanzas from Rilke that I simply had to write down. They are each their own little writing workshop on love that is honed so sharp it draws blood. I welcome anyone out there reading this to respond to some of these lines. It is good for the heart. A new way of seeing might occur. We all need new ways to see, even from windowless rooms stocked with VHS instructional tapes to improve Americans.

Don’t you sense me, ready to break

into being at your touch?

Your wholeness cascades into many shapes

You run like a herd of luminous deer

and I am dark, I am forest…

Luminous deer! Who doesn’t want to be described as that? It is beauty beyond measure. It’s a great rock band name, too, and a great visual for a large tattoo across a back of someone who lives life like a luminous deer. These people are very few in our country.

You are not surprised at the force of the storm–

you have seen it growing…

Now you must go out into your heart

as onto a vast plain. Now

the immense loneliness begins…

I know that nothings has ever been real

without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

That line…my looking ripens things…feels true to me in my current situation. I am looking where no other American writer has ever looked. My looking is ripening the irreality of a deadly administrative organism in American life. My looking is bearing poems that call out for a deeper look. At long last, I am learning to see.

Smoke Eyes Tell the Truth

NSP Meditations

Many, many years ago I dated a remarkable woman named Janet. She passed away from cancer well over two decades ago but I always remember something she told me one night, around a campfire, our only one if I recall correctly.

The wind shifted and our eyes were singed with smoke. Right there, she said, “Smoke eyes tell the truth.” I asked where that extraordinary phrase originated and she told me she had grown up with it.

After our eyes somewhat recovered, she went first with a truth and then I followed. We went late into the night.

I hadn’t thought of that campfire or that phrase for almost three decades, until this New Year’s Eve, and I sat around a campfire with someone, and we got smoke eyes. I recounted Janet’s story to my companion and we launched into some truth telling, which is always good for the soul, particularly to begin a new year and always around a campfire.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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