otabeaver2

April 8, 2022

Oregon Tavern Age: MIA

I stepped inside the Gladstone Card Room. A cluster of OTAs loudly held court around a round table in the middle of the room. One stood. One was barely standing. The other sat in a wheelchair. They were all hitting it hard with cheap beers and shots of something brown.

It was three in the afternoon on a weekday. I sat on a stool at the bar. A friend was meeting me to catch up on life. A sign over the liquor offerings announced Gina as my bartender.

Gina wasn’t anywhere around.

Music played. Sports played. An OTA played a slot machine.

I waited for five minutes. No Gina. I stood up to see if she was in the kitchen. She wasn’t. I roamed around and inspected the photographs of the joint’s Hall of Fame Dead OTAs and the various fliers promoting the celebrations of life.

Still no Gina.

An OTA man came up behind me and fed a jukebox. Another OTA man, three stools away, sipped a coke. No one said a word to me about Gina’s prolonged absence. They didn’t care.

The Card Room was obviously a fan of Oregon State University because there was a lot of beaver football memorabilia and promotions hanging from the walls. I kind of liked it. I always prefer OSU Beavers-themed dives to UO Ducks-themed dives. Why? I like beavers more than ducks and I loathe Phil Knight and his support of crackpot Oregon politicians.

I got up again to check out the smoke shack, thinking Gina might be out there puffing or vaping away.

No Gina. Just two OTAs and a young couple in OTA training.

Fifteen minutes elapsed. Gina didn’t appear and neither did my friend. I now can’t recall what I thought about as I waited. Most likely nothing interesting.

I left the Card Room. In all my years of hanging out in OTA country, this MIA bartender was a first. I wondered what Gina was all about. Her utter indifference might have been charming. I’ve known a couple of female OTA bartenders like that. Their not-giving-a-shit is delightful.

I sat down on a bench outside the joint. I waited another 15 minutes for my friend. He never showed. I wasn’t upset at all. I didn’t feel like talking anyway.

Support Meditations Blog

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

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

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.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

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.