I can’t stay home on Friday nights. Saturdays, I don’t mind so much; I’ll hang out at home, watch a movie, read. But on Fridays, the week must be unwound. I can’t sit in a chair any longer, staring at pages. I’ll go out and walk around.
Across Picture Park, with its two-story-high mural, the lights of Dudley’s Sports Bar flicker and glow. But Dudley’s is too young, too up-scale for me, too filled with television sets and the empty noise of sports enthusiasm. I turn to the right and push open the lobby door of the Whitman Hotel and its attendant bar, the Round Up Room. Nobody I know calls it the Round Up Room, but that’s the name on the marquee outside. Inside, among friends, it’s just the Whitman.
The lobby is dim and shabby. Two battered wooden telephone booths crouch against the wall next to the staircase. Hung above the booths and following the line of a narrow molding that runs around the top of the lobby walls, are large, sepia-tone photographs that offer intimidatingly-majestic views of high mountain lakes and unassailable peaks. Hand-lettered captions beneath the photos read, “Packing into the Bighorn Craigs,” “Wagon Box Pass,” and “Looking Down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River,” and although these places are geographically distant from one another, the series can be read as a pictorial record of someone’s pack trip--taken in the nineteen forties, to judge from the clothing.
The heavy front door of the Brentwood fans my backside with a puff of apartment house smell, that musty combination of old men and soiled baby diapers. I stand for a second on the curb, toes flexing in my sneakers over the cement edge, then start off down the block. I cut through Poky High, between the main building, deserted this time of night, and the gym, where the basketball shoe-squeaks of a pickup game filters through the steel doors.
The fountain on the square is lit, but no water's running. In the center, sculpted silver fish leap into empty air. I imagine them crashing back into the dusty basin, their spawning frustrated. They swim rigidly, as metal fish would, among the flipping and fluttering trash that litters the square.
I turn at the corner by the bank, and now I hear music coming from the First National Bar, two blocks down. A sandwich board propped out in front tells me Skinny Boy is playing tonight and Saturday. For a two-dollar cover, I could go in and drink a Rolling Rock and nod at Myers Afraid of Bear--who never speaks but nods back from his corner barstool—and tap my foot along with the beat. Then Emily will come whirling up to me, laughing, and drag me by both hands into a circle of dancing women. We’ll all smile and sway, some of us still clutching our beer bottles, a few of us staggering a bit with the joy and the heat.
But I don’t go in right now. As I pass the Nash’s open doorway, warm, noisy air blasts against me like exhaust behind a city bus. I cross Center, glancing surreptitiously at each dark, inverted U of the underpass’ tunnels. I skim the backs of the post office and the cab company, open the parched wooden door stenciled “Whitman,” and walk down a long, poorly-lit hallway into the back of Lynda’s Philippine Restaurant. I pause at the counter and consider an order of garlic fried rice and crab Rangoon, but the tiny waitress--Lynda’s daughter, I think--shakes her head, pointing to the clock and the “Close at Ten” sign. That’s okay. I wasn’t hungry, just feeling aimless. The waitress gives me a red and white candy, and I stand on the sidewalk in front of Lynda’s, peeling it out of its cellophane wrapper. The cinnamon overpowers the garlic smell of the restaurant behind me.
I turn at the corner by the bank, and now I hear music coming from the First National Bar, two blocks down. A sandwich board propped out in front tells me Skinny Boy is playing tonight and Saturday. For a two-dollar cover, I could go in and drink a Rolling Rock and nod at Myers Afraid of Bear--who never speaks but nods back from his corner barstool—and tap my foot along with the beat. Then Emily will come whirling up to me, laughing, and drag me by both hands into a circle of dancing women. We’ll all smile and sway, some of us still clutching our beer bottles, a few of us staggering a bit with the joy and the heat.
There’s a light on still in the Walrus and the Carpenter Bookstore across the street. The proprietor is staying late tonight, reading maybe, or sitting in the half-gloom, strumming his guitar. Soon, he’ll snap off the light and crash on the lumpy sofa upstairs in the used book section, dozing and rolling over on a splayed-open Ferlinghetti biography.
The lobby is dim and shabby. Two battered wooden telephone booths crouch against the wall next to the staircase. Hung above the booths and following the line of a narrow molding that runs around the top of the lobby walls, are large, sepia-tone photographs that offer intimidatingly-majestic views of high mountain lakes and unassailable peaks. Hand-lettered captions beneath the photos read, “Packing into the Bighorn Craigs,” “Wagon Box Pass,” and “Looking Down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River,” and although these places are geographically distant from one another, the series can be read as a pictorial record of someone’s pack trip--taken in the nineteen forties, to judge from the clothing.
The photos without captions are more interesting; they tell the smaller, more intimate story of the men, women, and animals who made the trip. In one, a pack mule struggles up a nearly-vertical incline toward a weather-stripped pine tree. Both the tree and the mule’s bulging, canvas-covered pack tilt precariously into emptiness above the ravine on the mule’s immediate left. In another photo, five men huddle around a nighttime cook fire; the only spots of light are an aluminum kettle in the lower right foreground and the shiny patches of reflected fire on the men’s cheeks and foreheads. In a third photo, a cowboy sits silhouetted in a dark barn; behind him a bright, wide valley spreads toward distant hills. The cowboy’s hat is pushed to the back of his head, and his hand is poised as if cupping a cigarette, but no smoke rises from the cocked and curled hand; his fire is dying in reverie.
My favorite photo is of a group of women waiting by a horse corral. Some of them lean against the log fence; the others perch along the top rail like a row of sprightly birds on a power line. Anticipation is coiled in their alert arms and jean-clad legs. They’re waiting for the horses to be brought out: who will ride the big strawberry roan?
All of the photos are of a particular dinginess--not just sepia--that attests to their long encampment overhead. At cheerfully-violent odds with the silent testimony of these pictures is the music thumping on the other side of a set of padded leather doors. Pressing the doors open, I step into the music and mount a stool at the near end of a long bar. The bartender pulls me a draft. He piles the change for my twenty next to my hand without looking up, and so I miss the chance to ask him, “Aren’t you Mike, who used to tend at The Wheel, before it changed hands so long ago?” He gives the bar a perfunctory swipe with the edge of his apron and moves off to the other end, near the cash register. I rotate a little on my barstool, sipping and licking foam from the corners of my mouth.
On a wide, raised stage at the far end of the room, the Velocitones crank their way through “Pie Slice Blues.” The percussionist, Susan, pounds and rakes her collection of drums and cymbals. One narrow, leather-booted foot keeps a deep rhythm going, and her silver bracelets slide on her forearms every time she reaches for the crash cymbals. The bass is in the hands of an exuberant love child. Sherrod’s eyes are tightly closed against the flickering stage lights. In his own tune-full world, he steps high and joyfully to the song the lead guitar sings him. Occasionally, the excitement of the sound overwhelms him, and he takes a little leaping run across the stage at Ken, the guitarist, who is concentrating, his brow furrowed with his efforts and the energy of the moment. Long hair has escaped its bonds at the back of Ken’s neck; it swings and shines in the spotlight. His left hand skitters up and down the neck of his guitar like an agitated spider, spinning the melody low and high and low again.
For a reason I can’t immediately fathom, the sincerity of this band elicits a slight melancholy. Maybe because they’re so young, and they’re in such an old place. Maybe because Sherrod is wearing a new tie-dyed shirt that he must have bought at Pegasus. The shirt’s fabric is still a bit stiff and the colors still machine-made vivid. It hasn’t begun to relax yet and fade, the way a hand-dyed shirt would, and its electric blues and yellows, along with Susan’s gleaming silver bracelets and even Ken’s vibrant hair, are too bright, too hopeful, for this tired bar.
Maybe I’m just the one who’s tired. I’ll walk some more. I finish my beer, leave maybe-it’s-Mike a tip, and, waving to the band, go out the way I came in.
As I hesitate in front of the Whitman, a woman comes out of a shop in the next block. Roma is locking up late. When she sees me, she waves and points, crooking her finger to indicate she’s headed around the corner to the First National Bar. She makes a pool-shooting gesture, sighting along an invisible stick. I nod and start walking toward her. “Ready to lose some money?” she asks when I meet her on the corner.
We don’t have to wait long for a table in the First Nash, because tonight most everyone is either dancing or standing along the bar. Roma and I collect a couple of beers, select two not-too-warped sticks, and feed quarters into the pool table’s coin slot. She breaks and sends the four into the corner pocket. She’s a better player than I am, but neither of us is very good: her banked shots go astray, and I often manage to hop the cue ball up and over my target.
But we don’t care. We play wordlessly and do our talking in the quiet spaces between Skinny Boy’s sets. I introduce Roma to people who wander by or who stop briefly to watch our game. Roma’s still new in town--she moved here from Oklahoma a few months ago--and after every new acquaintance shakes her hand and ambles away, she says to me, “You know everyone.” Of course that’s an exaggeration, but she says it because some nights, when the bar’s quieter, we sit in the corner booth and watch people come in, and I identify them for her and tell her little stories about them and about Pocatello.
I tell her about Michael and the Halloween night we dressed up as the Blues Brothers and walked all the downtown bars, having a drink in each and cheering for our favorites in the best costume contests. No doubt, we had too much to drink, because my memory of the evening ends with my pushing Michael down Harrison Street in a wire shopping cart—where did we get it?—until I push it against a curb, and he spills, tangled, into the street, laughing and clutching his fedora.
I tell her about the lady who always orders a garlic salad at Buddy’s and then moans and grumbles her way through the oil-drenched lettuce leaves, wincing when she hits one of those big chunks of bleu cheese. And I tell Roma that I always thought it was the salad that made the lady scrunch up her face so violently, until the day I saw her driving her car down the road, grimacing and groaning at the stop lights, no Buddy’s salad anywhere in sight.
I tell her that up until a few years ago, if she’d driven into town from the south--coming up through the Portneuf Gap--if she’d looked quickly off to the right, along about milepost 68, she’d have seen--just glimpsed--a set of undulating blue worms. Roma says this is the kind of thing that weary travelers hallucinate, that I’m making this up, and I swear again that they used to be there, worms or waves or whatever you want to call them. They were deep-sky blue and each at least six feet long, mounted on steel girders in a gully between the foothills next to the highway. I know they’re real, because I watched them change over the years from bright blue to faded blue marked heavily with graffiti to halfheartedly whitewashed. Finally, I could bear their degeneration no longer, so Jackie and I took paint and long-handled poles with brushes duct-taped on the ends, and we painted the worms blue again. Close up, the steel structures were a lot wider and taller than they looked from the highway, and Jackie shinnied up the girders to reach the highest spots. A red fox came to watch us, picking his way daintily among the clumps of sagebrush.
Roma asks what happened to the worms, and I say I don’t know; they’re gone now, like many things in Pocatello. And Roma says I should write this down so other people will know and remember. What she means but doesn’t say is so people will know and remember after I’m dead and can’t sit in the First Nash and tell my little stories.
Roma and I finish our pool game, and she says she better get home, she’s got to open the store early tomorrow. Saturday, big day downtown. We give each other a friendly see-you-soon hug on the sidewalk. She heads for her car, and I wait until I see it pull out of the parking lot, make an illegal U-turn, and disappear into the Center Street underpass, as if being swallowed by some giant ground-dwelling beast. Roma tootles her car horn as she passes through the subway. I fill my lungs with frosty midnight air and turn toward home. I don’t feel tired now; I’m relaxed and alert. I feel like doing a little more writing before bed.
*Photo of the First National Bar at night courtesy of Connie Rodriguez-Flatten, 2011
[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]
*Photo of the First National Bar at night courtesy of Connie Rodriguez-Flatten, 2011
[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]
