South Jetty Bar

Oregon Tavern Age: Roz is Gone

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I hit the beach at Fort Stevens Stat Park with a kooky mutt and relished in the fact we were the only ones there, if you don’t count the bald eagle. It was a good morning for finding treasures: two fishing floats and a sand dollar.

After our romp, I landed at one of my favorite OTA joints, the South Jetty in Hammond, camp firewood capital of America. Over the years I’d documented dozens of great OTA stories there.

One of the regular bartenders, Meredith, caught me up on various Covid-related matters connected to the South Jetty’s loyal clientele, and I was surprised to learn that no one had died of the virus.

As Meredith talked, I sipped my stout and reckoned I’d written about a hundred thousand words in this joint, but those days were over and the OTA inspiration is fading as a subject of creative interest to me. Perhaps a return to the Oregon Coast my rejuvenate it, but as I have written many times, OTA country is dying out there, at least the OTA country I love and documented for over two decades.

At one point, Meredith walked away to serve another customer and then came back and delivered the shocking news that the other regular bartender I’d interacted with for years, Roz, had recently died from the effects of acute alcoholism. She had visited a doctor and received the diagnosis of three-four weeks to live. No chance of liver and kidney transplant. She died on schedule. Roz was 31. She left behind one small child.

The news hit me hard and was a slap across the face of my occasional glossing over the fact that some people in OTA country are drinking themselves to death, quickly, slowly or at medium pace, right out in the open, and sometimes in entertaining fashion.

In all my hundreds, if not thousands of conversations, eavesdropped on or as a participant in OTA country, this fact had never once been brought up.

I’d briefly mentioned it in print a couple of times, but never discussed it with the OTAs. Maybe you don’t in OTA country. Maybe it’s implicit or better left unsaid.

Roz was a fun and quirky red-haired bartender and put me on to some great OTA area stories. I will miss her and her outstanding gentle rapport with customers, some of them quite cranky, and one downright insane.

The South Jetty is staging a wake/commemoration for Roz soon. I won’t be able to attend, but Meredith said there will be a Go Fund Me page or some kid of giving tree to help with various expenses and the kid.

I’ve seen this sort of fundraiser for decades in OTA country and the locals really come out and spend. Of course it won’t be enough, but it is something they can do.

Oregon Tavern Age: The Couple

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“Take it out of savings honey,” the OTA man told his OTA wife, “I’ll put the work check in later.”

The woman got up from the stool and left the state-sponsored video slot machine. She went over to the ATM and withdrew funds.

Both of them were drinking water.

I sat at a table and observed them. We were somewhere in OTA country, the exact location unimportant.

It was 11:30 in the morning and I was nursing a beer. I was writing a sonnet on a keno card, a sonnet whose key word was lasagna. If only I had paid attention to the lasagna she made for me. That’s what the sonnet was about.

The bar was practically empty. Eight grown men wore OSU colors and watched the Beaver football team flail on television. Tequila was misspelled on the drink special whiteboard.

They sat three machines away from each other. She talked to the machines, he did not. She said, “Come on baby, I got 227 nickels in you.” It was vaguely sexual.

She thanked the machine when she won. She clapped and caressed. When she lost, she cursed. She played near the wall where three Hamm’s bear mirrors, Polar, Brown and Grizzly, hung next to the poster warning against gambling addiction.

At least she was talking. I’ve seen people sit at these machine in silence for hours, transfixed.

I got the feeling she talked more to the machine than she did to her man. I think they were married. I saw wedding rings. He was a head shaker, not a talker. Maybe that’s why they were still married.

He played a game called Wild Ride. It was a game about horses, not women. I saw him hit a hundred buck winner, the dinging went on forever. He didn’t say a word, not even to his old lady.

She got up and went to the ATM. She returned and switched machines.

“Why don’t you come over here and give me some good luck,” she said.

She patted the stool next to her.

“OK,” he said.

He punched out of his machine. He left a hot machine. This is unheard of in OTA country, or Vegas for that matter.

Must be love. I’d take it.

He went over and sat next to her. She was talking to the machine, flattering it. She reached out her right hand to him. He clasped it with his left. They held hands and played slots, one handed.

A few minutes later, the woman hit a winner—37 dollars. They kept holding hands.

I thought I might try that one day with someone I love, but for now, I was writing a sonnet about lasagna.

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Oregon Tavern Age: Friar Part 2

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The server came over and my cousin ordered another round. I went into full reporter mode and asked her about the party and the Friar. I pumped her for information and she took a little step back at my pumping. I dug out a Keno card and started scribbling notes with a gold pencil.

It was a going away party for the local priest of the Hammond Catholic church (pictured here). He hadn’t been posted all that long and now faced his flock for perhaps the last time—in a dive bar—and received their earnest well wishes.

I asked the server the good Friar’s name. She didn’t know and I said I had to know.

“I’ll work on it.”

She was working both rooms.

“Does the congregation meet here often?” I said.

“I would say yes, for meetings and gatherings,” she said.

“What are they like?”

“Sometimes they can get a little rowdy.”

My cousin listened and somehow tried to take it all in. He appeared a little dizzy.

“What’s their favorite drink?” I said, expecting to hear Black Velvet or Seagram’s.

“Wine.”

“Red, right?”

“No, white.”

The white threw me but also made me clap my hands in glee. I could see oceans of Chablis from boxes and jugs. Carlo Rossi and gravy! Monks and gravy!

The server left and my cousin launched into what we’d just heard. I felt I was verging on mania. I wanted to get up and interview the priest, get his take on coastal Oregon Catholicism and Catholic OTAs. We would talk long into the double Benedictine afternoon about the spirituality of rain, too. Maybe I would convert and confess right there!

The server returned with our beers.

“Ben, Father Ben is his name.”

I looked into the dining room and the Friar turned my way. I got a straight look at his face. It was the most feminine face I’ve ever seen on a man in an OTA joint. There was more going on in that face than any face I’d ever seen in an OTA joint and it wasn’t even an OTA face.

There was mighty, mighty, wondrous, cataclysmic change in the Friar’s face and I think it bodes well for the future of the faith.

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Oregon Tavern Age: Friar Part 1

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My cousin and I hadn’t seen each other in ten years. He lived in Los Angeles and worked in advertising. He worked hard, moved fast, and made a lot of money. He drank fine liquors and ate in fancy restaurants, surrounded by beautiful and glamorous people with perfect smiles of real teeth. He hadn’t been on the Oregon Coast in 30 years but here he was, soul searching like me, and thus our reunion was on.

I suggested we meet at the beach, perhaps build a driftwood fort, and then head to Oregon Tavern Age country, the South Jetty in Hammond for lunch. Everything would slow down in there for my cousin; it was a physical law he was powerless to resist. He would see unforgettable toothless OTA smiles. He might even order a frosty Hamm’s and shovel into his Oregon roots.

We talked for almost three hours on the beach and saw two other people on a sunny day in August. He couldn’t believe the absence of people. I gave him the short history of Astoria’s pathology, fake fish in the Columbia River, and hubris of building the South Jetty. We laughed, cried and went deep into reminiscence, not for nostalgia’s whitewashed sake, but to relearn important matters pertaining to ourselves. We both knew that if we can’t learn anything new at our age, it’s over.

The parking lot of the South Jetty was jammed and that mystified me. I have never seen an OTA parking lot full in my life. Something inebriated was afoot. Could be a wedding. Could be a wake. Could be a firearm exhibit. Could be a caucus to politic against your own economic interest and hate the people who staff nursing homes you will die in. Could be a charity toy drive that doesn’t have to involve drinking, but somehow it does.

My cousin and I repaired to the lounge side and found it practically empty. The dining room side was packed with octogenarian men and women. It was obviously some kind of party and the din being thrown up augured good elderly mischief.

We ordered lunch and beers and dove back into our conversation. I sat facing the dining room party and secured an excellent vantage point for Maximum Storytelling Potential (MSP). There was tremendous bustle in the dining room, servers and busboys moving with serious purpose. A big meal was about to commence. Let there be rubber chicken. Let the mashed potatoes and gravy flow like milk and honey.

What the hell were these Hammond old timers drinking? They seemed like a Canadian whiskey crowd. I had to know.

A figure came into view. My cousin was saying something but I stopped listening. The figure was large, very large, and dressed in a brown robe with a white rope tied around his waist. There was enough fabric and rope to outfit a sail, for a boat sailing on a perilous missionary mission.

I picked up my beer and sipped a sip. My cousin was still talking.

The brown robe and rotund body reminded me of Friar Tuck from Robin Hood lore (the Errol Flynn classic, not the Kevin Costner atrocity.) Was I looking at a friar? A monk? A priest? What the hell is the difference anyway? I thought about ordering a double Benedictine on the rocks and perhaps the answer would divinely arise. They had a bottle behind the bar. A couple of doubles and I’d soon be finding images of the Virgin everywhere in the South Jetty, maybe even in the lines of an OTA face talking about how he missed reeling in a sturgeon.

The Friar called for quiet, uttered a few pleasantries, and then began blessing the meal. Goddammit! I couldn’t hear the blessing because of the accursed noise generated by a drag race on television.

I motioned for my cousin to turn around and take a look at the sight of a Friar blessing deep fried food in a dive bar on the Oregon Coast. I reached out to his shoulder in preparation to steady him

He turned around. He watched the blessing. Then he turned back to me. We looked at each other in awe, gesticulating, throwing crude hand signs that harked back to anthropology’s golden age. Wispy halos circled above our heads as we silently nodded. We both got it: we were in the humble presence of god, the OTA god who walks and drinks Hamm’s among us all, and loves lapping gravy at noon.

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Oregon Tavern Age: White Wine Wednesday

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I ventured up to the bar for a beer, looked left, and did a double take: an OTA man drinking a glass of white wine in an OTA joint! This was a first in my two decades of reconnoitering.

There have been many OTA women who favored red wine, but never an OTA man who favored white. I didn’t know what to make of it so I didn’t make anything. I also didn’t make anything of why I didn’t have a single reason for being in the South Jetty Bar on a late Wednesday morning but there I was hoping one would emerge.

It was the house white from a black box. The man sat next to another OTA man drinking Budweiser from a tall can. In the wings, a female bartender fiddled on her phone. Stanley Cup final highlights played quietly on the flat screen. At a nearby table, an OTA women drank coffee and ate clam chowder and dunked a peanut butter bar in both while reading a firearms magazine. She hacked an ex-smokers hack between dunks and turning the pages.

Two OLA, Oregon Lottery Age Men, entered. They ordered waters and went to the slots. They pumped in bills and went to work collecting taxes for the state while collecting disability.

I took my beer back to a table and waited for something to happen. My mind drifted to an ex girlfriend, a goddess, super high maintenance, and possessed of an incredible vocabulary. She only drank white wine, the high end stuff, and knew the Oregon wineries. She would infrequently accompany me to OTA joints and roll her gorgeous brown eyes when the bartenders recited their meager white wine offerings—one. When the offering was an airline mini bottle, my ex evinced a particularly wicked scorn.

In the end, she didn’t care. She would order five or six mini bottles at once and prepare for takeoff. She knocked the wine back fast, on a slum, lined up the dead soldiers, and laughed hard. I think she was actually having fun for the first time in her adult life and it wasn’t only the rotgut wine.

Unfortunately, it ended badly for us and she undoubtedly went back to the expensive wines in the suburbs and eternal discussions of real estate with good looking Oregon men who care deeply about the fortunes of professional sports franchises, but never make their girlfriends laugh nor drop the bombshell vocabulary word that turns their smart girlfriends on.

The Bud man broke up my dreamy reminiscence by telling a joke. It went something like this: two potatoes stand on a street corner. How can you tell one is a prostitute? It greets a potential customer by saying “Ida-Ho!”

That busted up the bartender. She came over and yucked it up with the two men. She asked the wine man if he wanted another glass. He picked up his empty glass, twirled it aloft, and set it down. The clock struck noon.

“Sure, why not?”

The Bud man joined him.

Somewhere, my ex was toiling in an office overlooking a filled wetland, miserable, diminishing, perhaps even dreaming of another life in OTA country, far, far from the suburbs and chain watering holes.

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Oregon Tavern Age: Hammond

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(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.

(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.)