maury

July 22, 2022

Oregon Tavern Age: Summer Musings

I was sitting at the bar of an OTA joint in Oak Grove. A tattooed female bartender with a nose ring worked the room with her usual spice.

Some emaciated older man, but not OTA, was down the bar to my left, drinking a Bud and recounting to another man his career as a male dancer and gigolo in the 80s/90s and his appearance on the Maury Povich Show.

Across the room an OTA man was reading a fat paperback and eating a plate of fried food. Lifeless classic rock drifted through the air. Mindless sports talk played silently on television.

I had just concluded a shift volunteering at a street ministry that serves homeless men and women of Clackamas County.

One client in particular stuck in my mind, a young man, nicely dressed, neatly groomed. He had waited on hold for almost my entire two-hour shift with a homeless shelter in Vancouver. He told me desperately wanted off the streets.

The man finally got through to a staffer and was told he needed an appointment. The next available one was a week away. He’d have to get on a waiting list for a spot in the shelter and blah blah blah.

The man looked whipped, beat. He told me he was trying to be proactive, but it wasn’t working.

That is unacceptable in this crisis. The shelter should have immediately sent a car to pick him up and treat his desire to transition off the streets as the emergency it is.

I took a sip of my IPA and overheard more the former gigolo’s story…he was on the cover of Playgirl twice in the 80s…he was a flunky in the adult entertainment industry…he was in movies…

and

then

I didn’t give a shit.

It wasn’t worth listening to anymore (if it ever was) so I left the room for the smoking porch and some peace and quiet.

I guess I’ve lost my interest in hearing OTA stories, at least metro Portland ones. They are so dull in comparison with coastal tales. In fact, there is no comparison.

Give me an osprey dropping an eel from the sky and knocking out a woman in her yard over a man who said he graced the cover of Playgirl any day of the week.

But I need coastal Oregon Tavern Age country for that.

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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

$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.