Oregon Tavern Age: Hammond
(From my forthcoming publication Oregon Tavern Age: Sketches from Coastal Drinking Life)
A man sat on a stool at the bar of the South Jetty Bar. He nursed a house whiskey on the rocks and talked to the female bartender in a low familiar voice. They exuded a diminutive Sid and Nancy vibe had Sid and Nancy listened to rap, lived in Hammond, a hamlet whose biggest employers were a log yard, fish processor and assisted living homes and had the distinction of being the camp firewood-for-sale capital of the United States.
It was a gray Saturday, almost noon. A college softball game played on one of the televisions. I walked up to the bar and waited my turn. I couldn’t see the man’s face to determine his OTA status. I could overhear him, though.
“We had a fifth of Fireball,” he said. “It went down the table and was gone in 20 minutes.”
It had happened the night before.
He turned my way and nibbled on a red pickled grotesquerie. I caught his visage: pre-OTA. But he was well on his merry way.
The bartender came over and I ordered an IPA from Lincoln City, or Lincoln Shitty or Tweakin’ City as the jaded locals call it. Lincoln City isn’t all that bad a town. Tom McCall used to have a second home there and drank scotch and sodas while watching the ocean. Moreover, some of the finest, most creative, most hard core Oregonians I’ve ever met hailed from Lincoln City.
An OTA man came up to the other man and sat down next to him. He said, “I thought you were dead.”
“I should be.”
They laughed. Then they launched into their respective should-be-dead-from-drinking stories. One day, one of the stories wouldn’t be a story. It would stick. Naturally there would be Fireball and road kill elk served at the wake.
An elderly woman came in and ordered a large coffee in a Spanish coffee mug. She sat at a table and watched a show called River Monsters, about a mythological river snake in the Nicaraguan jungle that was killing fishermen in their boats. A white adventurer was sent by a cable network to to slay the beast and sample the cane rum and grilled monkey. One can only hope the snake killed him, too, swallowed him whole.
I went to my table, a lacquered slab of wood that used to rest in the galley of a commercial fishing boat. I shuddered at the thought of hearing the drunk fishermen stories told across this noble table before the advent of fishermen binge watching Netflix on their phones.
The softball action picked up. There was a suicide squeeze and a collision at home plate. Safe! I sipped my beer and took a few notes on a Keno card.
I looked around and noticed the closed wishing well in the far corner where the gambling machines stood and tinkled their delights. I knew the well was closed because on a previous visit I asked and learned its sad story; too many men had pissed in it so the water got drained and the crippled children would just have to suffer.
My beer disappeared. I went up to the bar and ordered another one. I noticed a fifth of Chocolate Whipped (vodka) on the shelf. I got a hangover just noticing it.
I asked the bartender about the bottle. She told me no one had ordered a shot in the two years she’d worked the South Jetty.
There is a God and he doesn’t truck with a bar serving Chocolate Whipped, even to sinners and House Republicans.
The radio played bad dance pop music. A lefty ripped a liner over the right field fence. The river snake killed another fishermen. Nancy said goodbye to Sid in the doorway of the office. She kissed him while holding a fifth of J & B. They’d just run out and someone wanted a double.
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