Spring Cleaning & The Mental Weekend Wander

There is no disinfectant like light and fresh air. My car, formerly known by Mary as the superfund site of a tragic gasoline spill is just now neighboring on the familiar musty old car smell, or I am just used to it. The house is doggy, especially with the extra dog Stoltz who is currently sleeping literally on my feet, but I just vacuumed, the windows are open and I am burning a few candles. What funster epics have I left out of my blog? We went and sang karaoke on Thursday night before Christine got here. Beth called me after her work party; a CPA celebration of the end of tax season. She and I met Mary up at McClain’s. There are two bars here in St. Louis that remind me oddly of shrunken versions of counterparts in the ville. One is Off Broadway, which is a dead ringer for The Golden Spike, and the other is McClain’s. I have a theory about the psychic population pressure of a major city forcing these recurring locations into smaller spaces, but I would need several other similar bars in varying size cities and good population statistics to make truly scientific calculations.

McClain’s is like the long lost Dukum of old. Well, The Dukum Inn post turn of the century inn, post prohibition, post Biker Bar, pre lightning strike funded mass expansion into student centered disco-rama (which is growing on me, I am no Luddite). It has the same red ductwork smoke eater over the bar, but it is made of smaller pipe hung from a lower ceiling. It has the exact same red brick interior with mounted dead animal heads, but less of them, and is half the floor space of the old Dukum pre bathroom smash. It also has food, so perhaps Dukum when paired with the now caved in and hauled away Taco Shop; the foundation of which Craig, the owner, has thrown an awning over and calls The Dukum Out.

McClain’s has the same Budweiser rotating Clydesdale’s circling into infinity above the center of the old, mirror backed bar, which is covered in the same kind of weird memorabilia placed there by patrons long dead or departed. The same Mega Touch machine is mounted to the end of the bar. It has Trivia Whiz, but lacks Wally sitting there playing it, fingering his jewel encrusted money clip given to commemorate his years in the factory. The necks at McClain’s are long and mostly red, but infinitely friendly once it’s clear that you’re going to drink and sing like every last one of them. A pint glass gin & tonic is two dollars and fifty cents, you would have to go far back in time indeed to get Dukum prices like that, or you could walk up to Ryan’s and get one for a buck and a half. Harry, “I just don’t understand why the kids drink over at the Dukum when we are so much cheaper.” Karl, “I don’t know Harry (atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere & the smoke and grease smell from the poorly vented “kitchen”).”

McClain’s is located catty corner from the McDonald’s that my older brother Andrew worked at in High School. Back in 1983 he leapt over the counter and helped a patron make it through a severe epileptic seizure. Well done there. You can’t step in the same river twice, but you certainly can sit under the same old tree for a bit and marvel at how the river’s changed.

There’s another bar there in that same area that we used to frequent when the boys were all still in law school at SLU. It’s called Shoot A’Rack and has several full sized pool tables, which took me awhile to get used to after the miniature tables of the ville. “That’s a lot of green.” Long before it was Shoot A’Rack, back when Andy worked at McDonald’s, it was a liquor store called Deer Run Liquor, which I always found odd, as everything back in small town Wisconsin was Deer Run this and Deer Run that.

My sister V’s wedding reception was held at Deer Run Country Club located on The Deer Run Golf Course. I spent most of that affair in the basement playing Galaga. There was a choice of Beef or Shrimp and my other sister Sandy’s boyfriend Brian asked me to request Spirit in the Sky from DJ. Brian was a graphic designer and athlete who won a small part in the film Major League, which was filmed in Milwaukee’s Brewer’s stadium. You can see his face briefly when they’re all getting chewed out in the locker room, otherwise he’s just in the outfield and you can’t tell it’s him. Brian had a habit of loosing his wallet and he drove an orange Ford Fiesta until he wrecked it and my dad used it to Frankenstein Sandy/Andy’s white one and his/mine red one. Not exactly Marcel Proust, my remembrance of things past suffers from a postmodern sense of disjuncture and obfuscated meaning.

I’m still quite good at Galaga, which survives globally in laundry mats. There’s a sit down version in the laundry mat next door to Shoot A-Rack. I would often play it when R and I used to go there to do our laundry. There’s a standup version at the mat over on Millbrook, that’s a hood laundry mat where people often drink beer while doing their laundry. I was oddly upscale with my Corona during my last visit more than a year ago.

Idle speculation that should be removed from this blog: (as if it isn’t all idle)

Why would they call the Liquor store Deer Run? The golf course allusion is obviously linked to the deer that live and run on the actual course. This liquor store was after all in the Deer Run shopping plaza, but now we’ve just shifted the blame. It’s in a bit of a valley next to a viaduct that must have replaced a small river. There are railroad tracks right there that speak to the former more industrial economy of the area. Deer use both rail lines and viaducts to navigate into the heart of Mid Western cities like St. Louis and Chicago. Maybe it was just a popular name for things built in the late seventies and early eighties, like all the thirty one year old Jennifers, and five year old Sages, who roam the earth. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a folk etymology. It sounds plausible, but it is most likely bullshit.

When I first grew a beard in High School, Deer Run would sometimes sell to me. I would buy weird things, like Matilda Bay wine coolers and bottles of expensive red wine, to throw them off the scent. When Angela was in college at Webster, she would go there on the beer run for her dorm. These places form an odd triangle of locations that apparently hold a certain gravitational influence on my life. I stopped going to “the rack” gradually, but an event that marked my real separation from that bar was the recent death of Rowland the bartender.

BJ was in town on a Friday night and we went up for our usual poolathon. Rowlad would have made me several drinks that night. I think early the next week he had a stroke behind the bar, while working, and was rushed to a hospital. He was fine for more then a week when a second major stroke killed him. There is some room for a negligence suit as he should have been stable. The lawyer boys were consulted on our last visit to the bar, but I haven’t heard anything nor would I. Dan & I went to the visitation, where we were both welcomed and appreciated. I went to the funeral by myself and probably shouldn’t have. I guess I didn’t know him well enough and some of the more regular regulars seemed uncomfortable that I was there. Though his daughter appreciated me coming, she’s replaced him at the bar and has trouble remembering my name since I’m rarely there. It’s ok because I have trouble with her name beyond the moniker “Rowland’s Daughter”. She knows I drink gin & tonics though, and is always sweet to us when we’re there. They had only recently reconciled as father and daughter. “At least,” she says, “we had a little time together and he got to know his grandson. At least we had that.”

So I don’t drink there much anymore, just when BJ is in town. The Rack reminds me of Ryan’s, never many women there anymore. Cheep booze, clouds of smoke & a body count. Though I suppose that’s an apt description of nearly every similar dive bar in the world. We used to hang out there with a group of women we called the Volley Ball girls – they were Webster’s Volley Ball team in the fall of 2001, we did a cultural exchange where we taught them how to swing dance and they explained who Nelly was, but those are stories for another day. Remembering Rowland has taken the wind out of me for a bit so I think I’ll take the dogs for a late afternoon wander and sort Mary, Arnie and Alana out for dinner.