The Coffee Tavern

For those of you who remember the Dugout, well, picture it going to shit. Chapter 8 is here!


THE REST OF IT GOES HERE
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CHAPTER 8--THE COFFEE TAVERN



The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright,
to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his
country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know
it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the
jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our
possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are
intellectual prostitutes.
--prominent NY journalist John Swinton, New York, 1890.

Sandwiched between the MAX light rail tracks on Yamhill and Morrison, and
fronting Eighteenth Avenue, across which swelled into the western sky the green concrete
parabola of PGE Park, home of the minor league Portland Beavers, squatted a dirt-bricked

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appendix on the posterior of the five-story Stadium Station Apartments. It’s only
identifying sign was a wooden pullout on the sidewalk, spotlighted by slants of morning
sun, upon which painted brown letters drizzled into each other: the Coffee Tavern.
Gilbert snuffed out his cigarette and spat yellow gunk on the pavement. What
happened to the Dugout? He waited for the voice to wake and whisper its secret input,
but when it didn’t Gilbert surveyed the new advertisements on the windows and sighed.
Hotdogz 2 Bucks! Beer Here, 5 Kinds! Need Coffee? Gilbert’s armpits trickled ice. What
the fuck. Mayor and I spend a day away from this shit-hole and Bruce sells it. I need
free refills. How am I gonna. Gilbert looked again at the ads, closely, and exhaled,
relieved. He got the beer license. No one but Bruce would spell hotdogs with a z.
Gilbert entered and his nostrils quivered with usual lust from the wafting vapors.
But his eyes and ears noted the unusual. Not a single customer occupied the front tables.
Electronic voices clamored from surround-sound speakers at a volume inappropriate for
business. Next to the elevated chalk-scribbled menu board the clock said nine am. Gilbert
crept to the un-manned counter, snatched three candy bars from the display and crammed
them into his pockets. A black-and-white photo reprint of Honus Wagner, seated on a
baseball bat with wan expression, and labeled at bottom, 1904, stared at him from the back
wall beside the entrance to the unlighted corridor which led to a stock room and office.
“Bruce?” Gilbert said to Honus’ grey, accusing eyes. The radio answered amid
harsh crackling: Health Insurance! You can’t afford not to have it! That’s why Oregon--
Gilbert grabbed a paper cup from the stack beside the register, plucked a bag of
Doritos off the rack and dropped it into his bag, then shouted, “Bruce!”

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“That you Champ!” snapped the reply.
Gilbert cupped his hands around his mouth. “No, it’s me, Spaz!”
Bruce emerged from the back gloom, pot-bellied and red-faced, his blue jeans
splotched with brown paint, his white Pittsburgh Steelers’ t-shirt ringed with grey at the
armpits. His dark eyes, slightly magnified, squinted behind wide rectangular plastic-
rimmed glasses. He clenched an open beer in his right hand. He met Gilbert’s smile with
a stern frown, lifted the bottle and guzzled.
“Bruce, what are you--”
“I ain’t in no mood today for no kook shit,” Bruce said in a full body shudder.
Sweat flowed from his short-cropped mustache and sideburn hairs. “We’re at war.”
“Yeah, the War on Terror, I know--it never ends.”
“You ain’t heard yet?” Bruce glanced first at the ceiling, then to either side, huffing
out breaths and swiping at his scowl with a wet hairy forearm. “It’s the goddamn
dolphins.”
“What?” Gilbert slid a few feet to the left and while filling his cup from a
decanter labeled Good Ol’ Boy’s Brew in crayon, peeked over to the isolated wing of
the shop, referred to as kook’s corner by a small Mayor-approved cadre of conversa-
tionalists. It was furnished with an olive green couch of torn upholstery and a single table
surrounded by three badly aged arm chairs patterned with faded red and black checkers.
The Mayor, who was reclining on the couch, met Gilbert’s gaze with a face-lengthening
frown. He swiveled his head side to side in the abrupt jerking motion of a crude auto-

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maton from a bad 50s sci-fi flick while pressing a finger to his pursed lips. Gilbert looked
back at Bruce who grumbled, “C’mon, c’mon,” to the radio while turning up the volume.
Clear channel news. A special report.
“Listen to this shit!” Bruce drained his beer and yanked another from the display.
Ominous segue music dominated by thumping bass drums. Gilbert sipped his coffee,
eyeing Bruce’s steel-toed boots, careful not to lift his face, and thereby betray its excited
glow. The drums faded as a woman’s voice, panting and stammering, rose.
This-this is Katie Cuh-Carnac reporting from Sea World outside of Cleveland,
Ohio. For those just tu-tu-tu-tuning in I apologize. It’s terrible. Homeland Security has
shut down this, and uh-uh-uh all oceanariums in the United States due to an unprovoked,
widespread attack by. She halted. Hard breathing wheezed over the radio’s crackling;
a man screamed. You wo-wo-wo-won’t believe this--it’s the dolphins! We don’t know how
but up-up-up-apparently they’re beaming electromagnetic death rays into our bruh-
bruh-bruh-brains, and I better go now be-be-be--ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Dead air, during
which the only sound was Bruce’s chugging esophagus, was followed by three drawn-out,
shrill notes. This is the emergency broadcast. Bruce clicked the radio off and dropped his
bottle in the trash bin. Gilbert chewed his lip and continued to look down.
“Champ’ll be here soon. I’m lockin’ the doors. You two can stay.”
“Well, uh,” Gilbert pretended to clear his throat.
“I’m checking on my family,” Bruce snapped. “And loading my guns.”
Gilbert took his coffee over to the table and sat down facing the Mayor, who was
rolling a cigarette on a CD case on his lap. The Mayor stuck the finished smoke in his

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mouth, lifted the CD so that Gilbert could read it--Eschatological Jumpsuit, and smiled.
“This calls for celebratory beer.”
Gilbert tossed his hat onto the ledge, covering the No Smoking sign, and lit first
the Mayor’s then his own cigarette. He looked out the window at morning’s slanting
enchantment of orange light on concrete. Cars passed through it. Pedestrians walked
through it. Gilbert’s heart leaped from groin, from guts, from chest, from brain. Auras of
orange clung to everything. “Life is magic again,” he said. “Shut this toilet down.”