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April 13, 2021

Oregon Tavern Age: Steve Prefontaine Smiling

A blonde OTA woman wearing slinky yellow running shorts breezed into an OTA joint.

I did a double take and stopped writing drivel about having hope in the world. I sat in an ancient booth in the corner of a tiny dive. Above, staring down at me from a massive TV screen, was the goblinesque face of a 213-year old Pat Robertson. Thankfully the sound was off or I might have converted to Satan right there. How in name of the Universe was Pat Robertson still alive and Tom Petty dead? Riddle me that God and then I might believe in Bishop Usher’s proclamation that the world began in 4004 BC.

The OTA-in-shorts woman ordered a champagne in a mini bottle. She wiped herself down with a bar towel. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

It was two in the afternoon on a weekday. I overhead the woman tell the OTA bartender that she had jogged to the joint for her day’s exercise. After taking possession of the champagne bottle and glugging down a belt, she went to join her OTA friends in a nearby booth.

It struck me that this was possibly the first and only time in the history of OTA life that an OTA woman had jogged to the joint in shorts and then ordered champagne. Somewhere in the atoms of this planet, Steve Prefontaine was smiling and sucking down a draft of Hamm’s. No doubt if he’d lived past 24 he would have ended up as OTA royalty around Coos Bay. No fucking way he would have ended up as an executive at an apparel giant that made over 2 billion in pretax profits last year and didn’t pay a single penny in federal income taxes. You know the one. They always feed off Pre’s broken body for legitimacy and Oregon cred. That corporation is about as Oregon as Shell Oil.

The OTA woman emptied the champagne and ordered another bottle. I dove deep into eavesdropping mode and overheard stories of cutting up brush, weak gravy at a nearby greasy spoon, a fat dog, and the vagaries of the new Apple smartphone software update.

Yes, many denizens of OTA life have Apple smartphones.

I don’t like it one bit, but hey, OTA country has to evolve or it will go extinct, just like Pat Robertson and his ilk will one day, with their proclamations that gender neutral bathrooms and a decent minimum wage are the work of the devil and the liberals.

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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.

$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.