Oregon Tavern Age: Apples and Muscle Cars
I sat at my favorite table in the South Jetty with a beer and a notebook. I had no idea what day it was but it was light outside, barely.
A group of OTA men gathered near me, drinking beer and Canadian whiskey, and discussed their various (drunken) travails of removing water pumps for classic cars. Apparently a vintage Mustang was a real bitch with 10 different bolts.
The video slot zombies were killing the machines and actually winning. I heard the feint sounds of high fives.
A mustachioed man dressed in denim and work boots, wearing an Andy Capp cap, a real dapper OTA ensemble, brushed past me on the way to the bar. He ordered a Seven and Seven, a double. He told the bartender he was celebrating.
“I just got new dentures and I’m going to eat apples for the first time in 15 years,” he announced.
He continued. “I went to the store and bought all different kinds. I’ll still have to slice them up, but I can’t wait!” He smiled and the new dentures gleamed and astonished me. They were practically saber-tooth tiger like!
The forbidden fruit was forbidden no more! I wondered what booze the apple man would chase the apple wedges down with. I thought about mentioning the apple-flavored Jello-shot special advertised behind him to get the apple party really started, but I didn’t. Something about saber-tooth dentures and Jello-shots and OTA didn’t cohere.
The men moved their conversation to the building of pole barns. One man said his rake had broken earlier that morning so he came to the Jetty and drink instead. Two other men planned meeting at 5:30 a.m. the next morning to drive into the snowy Coast Range and harvest some secret hardwoods used by the makers of fine musical instruments.
A zombie came over to cash in a $500 ticket. She didn’t order a drink.
The apple man went over near the table where the other men gathered. The conversation moved to the differences between super chargers versus turbo chargers in muscle cars. It was the most beautiful American foreign language I’d ever heard and somehow I understood enough to follow along.
It occurred to me that I didn’t have a muscle car story and never would. I did have a great Pinto and pickup story but those weren’t the same. They didn’t make any roaring engine noises, just other roaring sounds ( a dent on a hood, too).
Every man had a drunken muscle car story that nearly resulted in dismemberment. The apple man hit 110 miles an hour in a Dodge Charger on the road from Banks to Buxton. “We rode the mist,” he said, which was easily one of the best muscle car sentences I’d ever heard drag racing through OTA country. I knew right then I’d rip it off one day for a novel and turn it loose on a dark and smeary night, a novel that might contain the last muscle car scene in American literature.
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