Oregon Tavern Age: White Wine Wednesday

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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