The Legend of Drain Gravy Part 2

NSP Correspondents, Oregon Coast_History , , , , ,

Drain, Oregon. Named after Charles Drain. What the hell did he do to warrant a town named for him? It is a good and bad name for a town. It offers its residents a cruel metaphor (going down the drain) or an empowering one (drain the swamp).

Really, what is Drain all about?

Drain is about gravy, legendary biscuits and gravy, the best biscuits and gravy in Oregon or the entire Pacific Northwest for that matter, perhaps the entire country, but not the world because the rest of the world doesn’t matter when it comes to biscuits and gravy. They don’t serve biscuits and gravy in France or Mongolia.

On my previous visit to Drain, I had walked into the second best biscuits and gravy story in the annals of Oregon history. A gas station in Drain serves biscuits and gravy and only biscuits and gravy until 11:00 a.m. or until they run out (they usually do). They serve it out of a monster crock pot on the checkout counter and the recipe comes from the station’s owner, a secret Southern recipe that he refuses to divulge.

The legend is true: I have seen it with my own eyes. People drove, walked, bicycled and skateboarded from miles and miles around to eat Drain biscuits and gravy. Some took it to go. Some ate it right there. Some sucked it up with a straw while riding a bicycle.

No, I had not tasted the legend on my initial visit. I was a vegetarian for over 20 years and feared the power of Drain gravy. But in my former life I was a connoisseur of the dish and once had a breakfast date with the actress Heather Graham where I took her to my favorite dive bar in Portland for biscuits and gravy after a one night stand with her. (See my book Rose City Heist for the full true account.)

I pulled into Food Mart filling station. A 70-year old woman was sitting on a stool near one of the pumps. I told her I wanted 20 bucks worth of regular and asked if the crock pot was still full. It was nearing 9:30 a.m. She told me they had plenty left.

Whatever leftover remained she would no doubt take home and feed to her family and pets for every meal of the day. Imagine that household.

It was time for the legend. I might never return to Drain as I try to avoid going down the drain and drain the swamp of this and that.

I got out of the car and approached the Food Mart. A tall woman in her 30s with flowing blonde dreadlocks and a pierced nose sat at on overturned bucket near the entrance. She was wearing the Food Mart uniform, which made her, impossibly, an employee.

She got up and greeted me. I told her I was there for an order of biscuits and gravy. She had an accent I couldn’t quite place…and then did. South African.

A dreadlocked woman from South Africa with a pierced nose was about to serve me biscuits and gravy in Drain, Oregon. I was getting it to go. The idea was to eat it for breakfast near Reedsport, while looking at elk after the drive through the Coast Range and along the Umpqua River.

We went inside. I was the only customer. I asked her for a half order and how much it cost.

Two dollars she said and ladled up the order into a huge Styrofoam box. She handed it to me and I opened it. There was enough biscuits and gravy to feed four people and two dogs. This was a half order? It was a $17 full order in a fancy breakfast joint in Portland where people wait two hours in line and the gravy is more gruel than gravy. I tipped her two bucks. She winked.

I smelled the legend and immediately wanted a bloody mary. If we lived in a civilized country I could have gotten one to go as well.

Time to head west I thanked the South African and the gas pumper and edged out onto Highway 36. The biscuits and gravy rode shotgun and its aroma quickly enveloped the car. I was getting a bit dizzy and turned on some air and the radio, and locked in a FM station.

Thirty seconds later, I was stopped in the highway behind a dozen cars. An ODOT crew was clearing a landslide and clearing it slowly.

I looked at the Styrofoam box. Why not? I wasn’t going anywhere for ten minutes, maybe longer. I opened the box and found a plastic fork ready to Gravy and Roll. “Beat It,” by Michael Jackson came on the radio.

There was congealed crawling movement inside the box. I forked the legend into my mouth. My God! The lard. The chunks. The texture. The spice. I ate half the order by the time “Beat It” concluded. The flagger turned her sign around and we started moving. A few seconds later, smoke from slash piles aflame in the nearby hills drifted across the roadway and visibility all but disappeared. It was smoke the color of gravy. Things begin to feel heavy, leaden. “US Blues” by the Grateful Dead came on the radio. My eyelids collapsed every now and then.

I woke up looking at a herd of elk in a field. They were sitting down in a circle. The Styrofoam box was licked clean. There were also my notes written on the box. I gathered I wrote them although I ha no recollection of doing so. They were notes for a murder mystery where biscuits and gravy played a sinister role.

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Remembrance of an Oregon Thanksgiving Football Past

NSP Meditations, Sports , , , , , , , ,

In Marcel Proust’s, Swann’s Way, the narrator “raised to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake.” Instantly, the character finds “exquisite pleasure,” forgets about life’s problems, yet wonders why the taste had made him so suddenly joyous. He asks: “whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?”

Today, this associative process is called a Proustian moment, and many of us experience these warm moments, because Proust felt, as an adult we sometimes come across a happy object from childhood.

My Proustian moment always comes whenever I toss a football.

Thirty-eight years ago on Thanksgiving, my family played the last of its Thanksgiving football games. No film, video or photographs exist of the event. It’s documented only in my journal I kept for my Beginning Journalism class at Oregon City High School.

It was a generational affair pitting the male cousins (Matt, Darin, and Kirt) versus the uncles (Karl, Dan and Dale) as Grandfather watched. It began in the early 1970s as a diversion from the boring half-time show of the Dallas Cowboys game traditionally broadcast on Thanksgiving afternoon.

The routine was: watch Detroit lose in the morning, gorge on a feast prepared by the women, watch Dallas play most of the first half, then at the two-minute warning, change clothes, toss the football around (the weather never mattered), play our 45-minute game on a muddy field, come back in, not change clothes, feast again, and settle into a game that invariably saw Cowboys’ quarterback Roger Staubach pull it out at the end.

As the years passed, the game evolved from a friendly Kennedy family photo op to an intense rivalry. Grandfather kept score as he prowled the sidelines, never cheering, thinking about pie for dessert, shooting bad photographs, and proud to see his brood on the field.

I played quarterback for the cousins and we lost every game, usually as a result of gimmick special teams plays or trick touchdown passes. We came close a few times, and after an especially aching defeat in 1978 when we lost on a Hail Mary with the score tied, we pledged right there on the field to go all out and win the next year.

That meant ratcheting up the seriousness of the game so that’s exactly what we did. We repeatedly talked strategy on the phone in September. In October, I recall at some family gathering Darin gave Dale, the younger uncle, a tube of Ben-Gay, saying “You’re going to need this when the next game over.” Dale didn’t think it was funny.

About a week before Thanksgiving, the cousins met and an incident occurred that made me realize just how serious we’d become in pursuit of victory. In a discussion on how to thwart Dale’s big-play capability, Darin set up a wooden folding chair, coiled into a perfect three-point stance, and announced, “This is what I’m going to do to Dale.” He then exploded into the chair, sent it flying into a wall ten feet away where it shattered into a half dozen pieces. We were in a church at the time.

It would almost be literature if I could write the game was close, hinged on a final play. I cannot. We blitzed the uncles from the opening kickoff and won 49-14 on a dry field at Ainsworth Park in Northeast Portland. We scored on every possession. We seemed faster, more into it. We never let up on the uncles as they had on us in the earlier games of the rivalry. When the rout concluded, we all shook hands, and I remember feeling great in a way that I had never felt before.

We headed back inside, I think the women might of asked “who won?” and the two teams gathered up a second big meal, and caught the rest of the Cowboys’ game.

In six months Grandfather would be dead from a heart attack, Darin off to college, my dad no longer part of this family’s holidays because of divorce, and I would get my driver’s license. We never played football as a family again.

I’m not wracked by nostalgia for the victory, my family as it existed then and a wish for an American era when Woody Hayes was important and where Lucy would have always let Charlie Brown kick the football. I give thanks every Thanksgiving for the reason that I know I’m very lucky to recognize the exact moment when I experienced the best of my youth. I know what it signifies. Rereading the journal entry recently for the first time in three decades, I think I even knew back in 1979.

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Thanksgiving List

NSP Meditations , , ,

I am thankful for my family, my two sets of parents and my sister and brother in law, who have helped me weather a raging storm that obliterated me and renders me talking about my former self in the third person.

I am thankful for dogs, old dogs, puppies, discarded dogs, dogs in liquor stores, dogs on the beach and dogs in my dreams, and the people who care about dogs and work for them.

I am thankful for my ex-wife Cindy, who has never given up on me.

I am thankful for Earl and Carolyn in Gold Beach.

I am thankful for the Oregon Coast bookstores who still order my books.

I am thankful for Bonnie and Clyde.

I am thankful for Jacque at the Angels for Sara Sanctuary for allowing me to volunteer.

I am thankful for the holiday craft fair giggers.

I am thankful for birds and ferns and seals and elk.

I am thankful for Oregon’s legacy of publicly-owned beaches.

I am thankful for Caroline and Tom O. They both kept me in the Oregon creative game.

I am thankful for my three special human friends and two canine ones in Astoria that have kept me afloat.

I am thankful for authors of books. I am thankful for those who threw out old books where I found them in the strangest of places. Nothing like changing your life for free or 50 cents.

I am thankful for the ten kind inmates of the Chill Tank who served time with me in the Clatsop County Jail in January of 2017. In the future, I hope to do good work in your name. That was some writing workshop we had together. I’ll publish it some day, somehow. Nobody hears you. I heard you.

I am thankful for the people who keep signing up for the writer’s workshops. These workshops had a large part in saving my creative life.

I am thankful for anyone who withholds judgment. I am thankful for your patience. It is a dying art in our culture.

I am thankful for anyone from my past who wants to reconnect but seems at lost how to do so. Just write. Just broach. I would love a broaching. I promise not to refer myself in the third person if you do.

(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.)

Random Rainy Thoughts

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , , , ,

Rain seeps into my docile. It tickles and trickles in through invisible seams. I need to caulk and recaulk. I write this while sipping a black beer. I wish I had some good old country music playing. I am living a good country song right about now. I am wearing a Western shirt as I write this. Can you have a black beer in a country song?

There are so many things I should be writing about but in recent weeks I haven’t been writing about them. The plan was to sequester myself in a remote place in my mind and write something that could potentially earn me a living. Writing to fend off starvation was the working editorial urgency.

Instead I am writing on: biscuits and gravy, dogs, old dogs, rain, Christmas craft fairs, clearcuts, culverts, Oregon tavern age life, ferns, watersheds, Port Orford, books no one reads, Sometimes a Great Notion, poetry, love, rivers, rain, RV parks, firewood. I can’t seem to commit to what should be written and perhaps therein lies the key to what is important to write.

I am also reading books and pamphlets that no one reads anymore. I find them everywhere, abandoned, bargain bins, street libraries, dive bars, trash cans.

Strangers come out in the rain: a man hauling firewood; a woman running down the beach in absurd fashion; an old timer mining for gold; a bartender reading self-books written where the sun perpetually shines, written by authors who all sport tans; a woman selling wood burnings for Christmas tree decorations made from wood scavenged from construction sites; a man playing pool with a hustler’s past mindset, but not the skill; two men who knock off from roofing to drink in the afternoon.

I walked a dog in rain the other day, a crazy mutt the color of apple brandy. He was more Mexican jumping bean than dog and he delighted me with his antics and the little break of skin on my hand from his treat-eating savagery.

It is hard to believe that Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann both wrote long short stories about dogs that barked with so much existentialism (human, not canine) that they often proved difficult to read.

But at least the dogs didn’t die at the end! (I think.) I can’t say the stories had happy endings, either. They just ended.

(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.)

Probation Poem 11-13-17

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , ,

I drive into the parking lot

of the probation office.

I am not going to write a poem

about the experience today

or ever again.

 

Wind billows the American flag,

naturally at half mast,

perpetually at half mast.

Just keep it there

and turn it upside down.

 

I survey the vehicles in the lot:

meth rigs and a pickup camper

with a homemade red, white and blue paint job,

jury rigged with duct tape and baling wire.

Living upside down,

at half mast.

 

Time to go in.

I bring along Leaves of Grass.

I put my right hand on it

and swear I won’t write a poem.

 

A man bums smokes

A woman plays Angry Birds

A man hides in a hoodie

A woman fidgets

I hear a man say he has a 1:00 appointment.

He has no idea what time it is.

He has the wrong day, too.

 

The man now offers to buy a cigarette.

The woman takes him up.

He fishes out change.

They go outside.

I check her face: surface of the moon.

I check his face: faceless.

 

Sterility. The humming. The inertia.

I feel myself becoming the gray carpet.

I crack open Walt

to glean some life.

 

Rain begins to collide

against the windows.

The talk moves toward rain.

Two men describe it as “pissing.”

The talk moves toward pissing,

into cups, beakers, tubes,

and training their minds

and bodies for the UA.

 

We go inside the room.

I hear:

“I’m living under a bakery.”

“I’m journaling instead of drinking.”

“I need one good day.”

“I’m almost out of pills.”

 

When you hear a man say,

“I’m living under a bakery,”

how can you not write a poem?

Or whatever this is.

I swear it’s the last one,

until the next one.

(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 31

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , , , , ,

It was just me and Clyde headed for the river on a windless morning. Bonnie howled from the back yard and damn near broke my heart. She got an extra handful of treats, but just left them piled on the grass.

I can’t bear leaving her behind and must conjure a way to bring her along that doesn’t cause pain. A wagon? Cannabis? Both? Think goddammit!

Record rainfall had sent the river over the banks and into the field.

I saw fresh beaverwood everywhere and evidence of our throwaway civilization. You are what you throw away. How easy a river at flood stage reveals that, reveals our essential flimsiness as a culture.

Flimsy is a great word to describe us. It’s one of those rare words that sounds like what it is.

I know something about flimsy. I had been trafficking in it for years. Flimsy is an adjective. What does flim the noun mean? Flim flam man. What about that?

There is nothing flimsy in a river and old dogs. I grasp them as hard as I can. They are my new friends, my decidedly non-flimsy friends to replace the flimsy friendships that ruled my previous life, cultivated by the friendship flim flam man, the old Matt Love.

Goddammit! I had missed the river running wild because I had been stuck in Portland doing decidedly non-river things intended to straighten the winding channels in my life. It’s a funny feeling being dredged in an office and paying a lot money for the dredging.

I found a beer bottle in the mud, a high end craft malt liquor. I saw a red canoe entangled in the tall reeds. Where was the body? Clyde seemed out of sorts. No Bonnie, of course. He flopped down on the bank and stared downriver. I picked up the bottle and threw it into the current. I’d never thrown a bottle in a river before. Somewhere down the watershed a transient would find and redeem it and keep his Oregon life going with a fast food hamburger and energy drink.

Nothing was happening in my heart or mind. Clyde came over and looked at me. He had no interest in a treat. My mind rocketed to an immortal line from John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, when he’s staring at his poodle, “I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple?”

(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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