crown

September 8, 2021

Oregon Tavern Age: Vodka, Cream and Crown

I was killing time in an OTA joint because a car dealership proved exceptionally incompetent in servicing my car.

It was a hot day and I sat outside at a picnic table next to graveled alley. Rush was playing on the speakers at a near deafening level.

Rush sucked. My beer sucked. I no longer recall what brand it was. The city sucked. All the world’s a stage and the world sucked, too. It was a Tuesday afternoon and Tuesday sucked as well.

A dented and sagging black sedan pulled up next to me. Two OTA men up front. Two OTA women in back. The passenger door swung open. He couldn’t get out of the car because he was so fat and feeble. The two women got out and came around to assist the man. They were drunk. He was drunk. The driver was probably drunk. He was dropping them off at the joint to get drunk. He would join them later and get drunk with them.

What a relief! Finally, something didn’t suck! After the professional incompetence at the car dealership, here I was in the presence of professional competence when it came to OTA depravity. It felt damn good.

I just hoped to heaven or hell they wouldn’t start talking about Trump or Biden or the hoax of Covid and ruin my sudden good mood.

The three people gimped toward me. They were refugees in an American war of some kind. They made it to a picnic table. They collapsed into the seats. An OTA bartender came out. They all knew each other. The man ordered a beer, one woman ordered a beer, and the other woman ordered a vodka, cream and Crown (Royal). It easily ranked as one of the weirder drink orders I’d ever overheard in OTA country.

The bartender left to fill the orders. The three began talking.

It was coming, some Trump-inspired bullshit…I just knew it…it always does in OTA country these days.

I listened…and…they…started talking about how fucked up they were the night before and here they were drinking the next day and getting fucked up all over again. They yukked it up over that.

It was sweet, sweet depraved music to my ears.

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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.