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November 16, 2023

Oregon Tavern Age: First Aid

Rain pummeled the landscape. I took refuge in my local OTA dive to drink a dark beer, write fiction and ride out the storm.

It was Sunday around noon, and NFL games played on television.

An amiable female bartender served drinks and chatted up everyone. She always exudes a fantastic vibe and occasionally recounts with quirky humor how drunk she got the night before.

Multiple OTAs worked the slots. Two OTA women ate weird fried food at a table.

A homeless man sat in a corner and charged his phone. This joint allows this sort of thing and that’s why I patronize it on a regular basis.

Boring soft rock drifted through the joint. I don’t need to ever hear a Cranberries song again.

A bearded and mustachioed freak, verging on OTA, held loud court at the bar, blathering total nonsense about peppers. He polluted the low key ambiance much like Republican members of Congress pollute the idea of sane governing.

Their latest proposal: cut spending on Amtrak. Yeah, really give it to those train people! For as long as I live I will never understand the Republican hatred of light rail and passenger trains.

An elderly man wielding a cane entered and sat at the bar. The bartender called out to him. She obviously knew him as a regular. Larry, I think his name was. Larry, a great OTA name. Kaden will never be one.

The bartender immediately cried out to Larry about an injury to his hand. He was gashed and bleeding! She quickly fetched a first aid kit and whipped around the bar to treat the injury.

I should mention that she served him a draft beer first! Yeah, of course she did!

She donned latex gloves and went to work. They discussed the nature of the wound but I didn’t catch the details. Probably a can opener on a can of chili.

Five minutes later she had him bandaged and he was drinking his beer and walking toward a slot machine.

It was a first in OTA country for me, first aid.

I was moved. I would have been substantially more moved had she had the old timer bite down on a Keno pencil and rinsed the wound with Jack Daniels. And take a belt from the bottle before the procedure. To kill the pain.

I wanted to see that bad.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

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Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

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In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.