Cassie the Bartender

My good friend Don dropped by the house and presented his killer Trek road bicycle as a gift. He could no longer ride and thought I might put it to good use. I will.

Then we retired to a nearby dive bar, Jake’s Place, where a friend of his, Dave, would join us for a beer. Don writes an incredible blog called The Beerchaser (thebeerchaser.com/) where he has profiled over 400 joints across the region and is one of the great unheralded writers in Oregon.

Don, like I do, recognize these joints for the rich storyteller factories they are. You never get fantastic stories emanating from brew pubs or wine shops.

I had chosen Jake’s Place because I wanted Don to profile it for Beerchaser. But not for any interesting historical reason or a celebrity sighting back in the day, such as when Andy Gibb and Victoria Principal may or may not have stopped into a dive bar in Astoria in the 80s.

Jake’s was my choice because of Cassie, the weekday bartender (open at 9:00 in the morning!) who I had observed for over a year dealing with the various homeless people of the neighborhood who routinely wandered into the joint and utilized it as a defacto service center once they spent a buck in the slot machines or bought a beer with change. Cassie always dealt with these customers with a no-nonsense style laced with kindness and compassion. She also was the only bartender I’d ever seen who dusted the blinds of a window, in Jake’s case, the only window.

Don and I had talked at length about the crisis of Oregon’s homeless and he’d been an enthusiastic supporter of The Old Crow Book Club.

I met Dave outside the joint. We went inside and took up residence at my usual table in the back of the room. There were a few customers but the place was mostly dead and not a single homeless person was there, a rare occurrence indeed.

I went up to the bar and ordered. I asked Cassie when she had time to visit us and meet my friends, one of whom was a writer who wrote about joints like Jake’s Place. She said she’d be right over.

A minute later she was sitting at our table. What followed was a 20-minute conversation between us with Don, Dave and me asking he questions about the joint, her life, and her strategies with serving the homeless who come into the bar.

In short order, we learned:

Jake’s had once been a biker bar. Cassie was from the neighborhood and used fake ID when she was 17 to patronize Jake’s as her first bar. Her mother (!) was the evening bartender. Cassie had once been homeless herself, years ago, after having a baby and giving it up to the father. She treated the homeless people who came in with unconditional love and she’d had only one problem with the homeless in the four years she’d worked at Jake’s Place. A man kept asking her to turn up the music, then turn it down, then turn it up, then turn it down…and he was finally asked to leave. He left considerable winnings behind on a slot machine. Cassie punched out the ticket but held onto it in case the man returned. He did. She told him about the winning ticket. He told her to keep it.