Three days before Christmas, on a\nSaturday afternoon, two couples drank in a Nehalem Tavern called The\nRain Blow Inn. The joint was famous for its Saturday prime rib\nspecial and crusty owner Mary, who greeted every person with the same\ngreeting: \u201cYou gettin’ off or just gettin’ off?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was sleeting outside the Rain Blow,\nleaking inside, watering the dead plants, and about dozen men and\nwomen all appearing anywhere from 40 to 70 years old, or Oregon\nTavern Age (OTA), drank cheap beer and carved up the prime rib like\nthe citizens of Whoville carved up the roast beast. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the couples hailed from\nPortland. He was a mad poet and she was his moody moll. They drank\nfine tequila out of snifters. The other couple lived in Nehalem. She\nwas a Hunter S. Thompson kind of social worker, he was an amateur Ken\nKesey scholar. They drank black beers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A college bowl game played silently on\ntelevision. On the jukebox, deep cuts by Rush chosen by the poet\nrocked the room. The poet was reciting his latest poem, about a\nfishermen who drowned in tennis shoes. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A pounding rattled the front door.\nEveryone ignored it. The pounding continued and grew louder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The poet stopped reciting and walked to\nthe door. He pushed it open and got blasted with a shotgun spread of\nsleet that nearly knocked him over. He managed to hold the door ajar\nand a large man wearing a tattered red parka and tan slacks wheeled\nhimself into the Rain Blow in a creaking, duct-taped wheelchair. His\nbare feet rested on the metal footplate. They were purple and\nswollen. His boots were tied around his neck. He wore no hat. His\nbeard was white and scraggly. He carried possessions in two greasy\nbackpacks secured to the sides of the wheelchair. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was the spitting disheveled image of\nKen Kesey’s Santa Claus from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nes<\/em>t,\nthe dazed and confused hobo who showed up at the asylum on Christmas\nEve and Nurse Ratched locked up and wanted to lobotomize. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n On his way to the bar, he ran into the\nfake Christmas tree and left it teetering like a punch drunk fighter.\n No one at the Rain Blow seemed to know the man. He parked under the\noverhead Reznor heater blowing out gusts of warmth. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The poet went up to the man.\n\u201cWhere\nare your socks?\u201d he said. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nThe\nman shook his head and looked at the liquor bottles. \u201cCan you help\nme?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n\u201cYes,\u201d\nsaid the poet. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nEveryone\nwatched. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\npoet darted out of the bar and across the street to the store that\nfor a century had supplied the clothing and boots for loggers,\nfishermen, construction workers and hunters. But it was going out of\nbusiness\u2014the very next day in fact\u2014because the locals now shopped\nat Wal Mart, Costco and Amazon. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few minutes\nlater, the poet returned with two pairs of gray\nwool socks and a yellow Tillamook Cheese stocking cap. He bent down\nand slipped the socks on the man’s feet. They snagged on his long,\nyellowed toenails, but the poet somehow got them on. The man smiled,\ndonned the stocking cap, and the poet bought him a J&B Scotch and\nsoda and the prime rib special.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The man ate his prime rib and drank two\nmore scotches in silence. He thanked the poet, put his finger to the\nside of his nose, twinkled his eyes, and wheeled out of the bar into\nthe cold Nehalem afternoon. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was then that everyone noticed he\nhad a cedar wreath attached to the back of the wheelchair. In the\nmiddle of the wreath was a tiny cross fashioned from milkshake\nstraws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A debate raged the rest of sodden\nafternoon whether the man was Jesus resurrected in the nick of time\nor Ken Kesey’s Santa Claus escaped from the nuthouse and on the lam\nat Christmas. The Kesey scholar argued for both. The social worker\nsaid Jesus would look exactly like that today if he did return. At\nleast for American life. The moll wished they’d learned his name. The\npoet wanted hobo<\/em> to return to the vernacular. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The poet started writing a poem about\nthe man on a napkin. The bartender bought the house a round of\nFireball in edible candy cane-flavored shot glasses and served up\nfree mashed potatoes and gravy on the side. On the jukebox, Rush’s\nChristmas album started playing. Rush never released a Christmas\nalbum. It did now. Track one: \u201cLittle Drummer Boy.\u201d The poet lost\nhis mind, but in a good way. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three days before Christmas, on a Saturday afternoon, two couples drank in a Nehalem Tavern called The Rain Blow Inn. The joint was famous for its Saturday prime rib special and crusty owner Mary, who greeted every person with the same greeting: \u201cYou gettin’ off or just gettin’ off?\u201d It was sleeting outside the Rain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5725,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-meditations","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5724"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5727,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724\/revisions\/5727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}