Oregon Tavern Age: Silver Dollar at Noon

The Silver Dollar Tavern in Coos Bay. Noon. A Saturday in September.

Two OTA women played pool and slugged bloody marys. Every slot machine was in use. The female OTA bartender and her male OTA handyman struggled to to shut a door that led to the kegs. I waited at the bar for well over a minute before the bartender noticed me and poured me a draft of some foreign lager.

I sat at the bar and stared to my left at various sentences posted here and there: “Cash only,” “We do not accept sweaty boob money,” “Don’t be a dick.”

No typos. Perfect punctuation. A rarity in homemade signs in OTA country. Someone somewhere had a decent English teacher.

Two menu items caught my eye: pizza pocket $5…corndog $3.50.

Is corndog one word or two?

Elmer the husky and I were in the area camping for the weekend and to recon. One day I may move here once my time in Portland ends. Something about the sheer grittiness and moldering, decrepit quality of the locale intrigues me. They also have the second best cluster of excellent OTA dives. Nothing will ever beat Gold Beach.

I’ve spent considerable time in Coos Bay the past year researching the Steve Prefontaine book (out soon!) and the place speaks to me as a writer. Now all I need to do is find a partner who wants to take on a fixer house and fix it up. But who wants to move to Coos Bay besides me?

Silence reined inside the Silver Dollar. No music. No TV. No conversation. Just the tinkling noises of the slot machines sucking the cash from the impoverished. Someone could croak at a back table in this joint and no one would notice for days.

On the drive from the Coos County Museum (Outstanding. Pro Native American storylines with some good debunking of the Pioneer myths that infect so many rural history museums), I saw that Reagan, the new bio pic, was playing at the North Bend cinema complex.

Who in the world would pay to see that movie? I wonder if anyone in America seeing this historical fantasy in a theater got a blow job or got felt up. God I hope so! Probably in the Red States by people in their 60s and 70s.

Finally, the stooge manhandled the door to the keg into closing. He excused himself to go out for a smoke in the parking lot. Three of the slot machine players stood up and left the tavern.

I sipped my beer and stared right. More homemade posters. I looked for typos. I was once an English teacher, you know.