Oregon Tavern Age: Keno Hamburger

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.

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