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Kingfisher Spring
2003, Volume Two, Number Two page
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Will The Real Blue Moon Tavern Please Stand
Up? I
came to college as most Sagittarians do, a year earlier than most the
others. I
was seventeen, a college freshman, and a fraternity pledge, I am sad to
relate. The Moon was
not my first tavern (The Duchess was, after an afternoon of flag
football), but I went to The Moon soon enough afterwards, one time with a sixteen year old girl, my
date for the evening. We were both admitted without a look of askance, though I looked
about fifteen and she even younger than what she was. We both carried what was called
“False Ids,”--proof of legal age lent us by friends who were older.
She and I slurped our dime beers and soon left. To neck, I presume. The
Moon was a fraternity hangout then, and usually shortly after a weekday
ten at night, when study
hours ended, a group of us would head (either on foot or in somebody’s
car) for The Moon and its commodious back booth, hoping it was not already
occupied by another frat gang. We were not much different from them and
an outsider would find no difference. We sang college fight songs, frat songs,
popular songs, and learned to chug-a-lug. The year was 1948, and my pledge
class was completed with numerous veterans of the occupation army from
WWII (pronounced, w-w-eye-eye). I was soon to turn 18, but they were 21 and
22 already,
used to drinking beer daily, and a lot of it, as I was not, and they kindly lent me their ID
cards (though I didn’t look like any of them), as they did the rest of
us younger young drunks. I
soon learned to drink beer without throwing up, but nightly had a bad
case of the whirlies that had to be walked off before I dared to attempt
bed. Time
passed, I grew older, we all did, and I went through a series of major,
finally ending up in my senior year in English and in spite of bad
advising enough credits to graduate. By then the Moon had changed with
the times. It was the McCarthy era and subversives were being
scrutinized and publicly investigated.
Careers were ruined, teaching jobs lost, Commies found, and
everybody grew deservedly paranoid. This lasted through the non-war in
Korea and the aftermath of the Eisenhower years. The
Moon didn’t exactly prosper, but it endured, and its clientele changed
by quick degrees. As we radicalized and developed intellectually (it was
called pseudo-intellectualism, no
matter how much we read or coherently though, or the number of degrees
we picked up along the way), the Moon played a steady role in many of
our lives. That is, we went there almost nightly, but we went to other
taverns almost as frequently. In the documentary John Huston
characterized this well. He named the Century and Red Robin taverns, as
well. He could have added The Rainbow and The College Club (not to be
confused with the downtown bunch of post-college drunks with the same
name). Both of these were nearly next door. They
too went through a cultural metamorphosis. One became a go-go dancer
club, the other eaten by the freeway that is known as I-5. My
Moon experience are both typical and unique, as are everybody’s, but I
have only mine to recount. They are people, as was the Moon, with a host
of weird characters. The
Moonites of the documentary remember differently than I do. I never saw
Ted Roethke there, but I’m sure he was, after his one-o’clock class
let out; he had one at noon for appreciation of poetry and one at one
for the writing thereof. He met classes four days a week, Friday then as
now being a lark. For eight hours of classroom work a week he was paid
generously enough so he drove a Buick Roadmaster. Naturally we all
wanted to be poets and teachers and drive Buicks, which were preferred to Caddies by white status seekers. I
don’t remember Roethke at the Moon, but I sure recall David Wagoner.
Jack Leahy, who was a writer, too, and carried with him in his
Harvard-imitation bookbag a hundred-watt light bulb, which he
substituted for the economy, mood-enhancing 25-watt that the Moon and
other taverns used to light their booths. Jack was a believer in the
Balzac approach to writing; one wrote best when being observed by people
who were not writing in public places and who were repeatedly asking,
“Who’s that over there, with the bright light and the pencil?” And
the name would be reverently spoke, whether or not you had ever
published anything. For a writer was one who proclaimed himself one.
Still is. Harry
Burns, an assistant professor of English who was working on a book
doomed never to be finished to be published and who was in himself
doomed never to be promoted or have his salary increased, sat at the bar
and drank wine, as I recall. I was in his graduate course in lit crit,
and he once asked Jack if I was “knowledgeable,” and Jack said,
indeed, I was, and I was assured, there in the Moon, of an A even before
I opened my mouth in class and mumbled some inanity. Thus
the Moon. There was Gordy Anderson, the cartoonist and sculptor, who did
corny cartoons on the walls of the Moon (now many times done over, and I
mean over) and at the Northlake Tavern, now coming into its prime. Gordy
didn’t know then that he really didn’t like girls, but girls liked
Gordy, and there was one quandary the Moon nightly settled. In spite of
what the documentary stated, women did go to the moon, usually with some
guy, but if not guy then with another girls or two. Or some of the more
desperate of them, late in the evening, as closing time approached,
alone. And,
yes, babies were often conceived, not as the documentary stated “in”
the Moon, but immediately after leaving the place. I speak first-hand in
this regard, or so I was informed by a sweet young friend, who told me
about it only long afterwards, and when I said, “Why didn’t you tell
me? I deserved to know. At the least I could have helped you out with
some (abortion) money.” And she said, “Why should you have had to do
that? It wasn’t your fault. I knew what I was doing.” O the loss,
the losses that took place in individual lives not because of the Moon
but coincident to it. This
was pre-Pill, you must recall. Girls got pregnant with clocklike
regularity and an abortion was the answer, most of the time. It cost
around $200, which was a lot of money at that time, the equal or more
than in-state tuition at the UW. I remember going to the First Avenue
pawnshops and getting some coin for the hock of my typewriter, my
wristwatch, selling some books, my phonograph player. I was still short
of my large share of the cost of one with a girl I truly loved and was
poorer than I. So I went to the Moon in search of moola. Jim
and Jack owned the Moon then. (Funny, they were never mentioned in the
documentary, though their barmaid Audrey was brought to several lips.) I
wrote out a check for $50 I didn’t have and handed it to Jim, I guess
it was, and he looked me unsmilingly in the eye and cashed it for me. I
think we both knew it would bounce. His kindly message to me about how the check had kited, bounced like a tennis ball it, contained no malice, no threat, no chastisement. I paid him back in three months time. (Bless you, Jack or Jim, wherever you are, no doubt in Bartenders Heaven.)
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I
would agree, the Blue Moon was king of the local taverns, but there were
many princes, taverns that held popular sway and were not avoided. As
Huston aptly said, we moved among them, as the ram among his hinds.
(No, I said that.) True, there were fights. Jack and I had one
pathetic one at The Century tavern, when my girl, Cheryl, walked in with
Gus Zanites, not me, and Jack said to me, “Well, if it had to be
anyone, I’m glad it is Gus,” and I threw my fresh schooner in his
face. God
that was satisfying. Jack started throwing featherlike punches and I,
half-lit, no fighter, either, caught them in my open hands like
softballs, chortling all the while. Then Jack went truly amuck. He was
always doing this and it didn’t mean a thing; we all knew this. People
were holding him and he was demanding, as he always was, to be let go.
“Yes,” I urged, “let him go.” And they did, and we tumbled
through and over a booth or two, glass and wood a-flying, beer allover
the place, the bartender, Ben, hiding behind the counter, and they sent
us outside, expelled, but we made our peace, pooled our money, and Jack
dared to go back in and bought a case to go. Not
the Moon, you say? All right then, here is a famous Moon story. Saturday
tavern-closing time was midnight because of Seattle’s blue laws. You
couldn’t buy a bottle or a drink of whiskey anywhere. It was the time
of bootleggers. So people drank up, bought beer to go, as midnight
approached and we all were afraid of turning into pumpkins. I was
married now, but still a beer drinker.
The Moon was seedier than ever, and downright tough, dangerous,
not a place you wanted to take a woman you liked a lot or loved, not
unless she was a streetfighter. Mine wasn’t. So we drunk at Al’s up
the street, further to the West on NE 45th Street, where they
had Bavarian-style schooners and Pabst on tap. The
place had closed. We were driving slowly East in heavy traffic, the time
about five after midnight, for everybody’s tavern had closed about the
same time. We pulled opposite the Moon, a car behind and one in front of
us, as the light at Roosevelt Way held red. A small mob stood in front
of the Moon’s canopied entrance. Now,
there used to be fights at the Blue Moon tavern, and at the other
taverns in Seattle. Closing time was critical in fight
history, for some people were not drunk enough, and the place was
closing down, and others were too drunk, and others were bored with the
prospect of a long dry night ahead, for beer and wine couldn’t be
bought in stores, either. Hippies (new then), frat boys (PhiGs, Lambda
Chi Alphas, Thetas (or was it Betas, I forget?), Avenuites, street
people (though nobody ever called them that) would fight with whomever
stood up and came forward. Since everybody had to leave at once, and few
would leave early, the aisles of the Moon were packed tight; I think
there would have been more fights, but everybody’s arms were pinned
tight to his sides and he
could not raise a fist to throw a punch. And the general direction of
the mob was toward the street and out into the world at large. (That is
not exactly what we called it, but it is what it truly was.) I
sensed the Saturday night fights were about to begin in front of the
Moon as we hovered there. My car moved at about one mile per hour. The
visibility was startlingly clear. I saw Richard Gilkey, who I knew
slightly. He as an ex-Marine, a bit older, and had developed the
peculiar (at least to me) habit of not only painting well but liking to
fight whomever was his target for the night. As the evening wore on and
approached closing time, he got more tense and paranoid. He had a rep
(rap?) as a street fighter, a peculiar breed who could search out and
quickly find his suitable kin, and they would square off, lock horns (as
it were), and wait to see who would throw the first punch, for the first
punch was apt to be the winning punch. There was a trick to breaking the
other guy’s nose with a quickly thrown right hook; with a broken nose,
I am told, nobody wants to fight. All you want to do is go away and
start to heal. (It takes a long time, I am told.) This
was not Richard’s way. (He was always Richard, just as Hugo was often
Dick, but not the other way round.) Oh, I think Richard got in the first
punch from the way the guy went down. He dropped like a sack off a
loading dock. Quickly, but not all that quickly, the guy got to his
feet. I saw it all, through that moment of accentuated clarity
that a fight always brings, even if afterwards you may not be sure of
what you saw. Nearly 50 years later I am certain as to what I saw. Richard
(not Dick; never Dick) caught him with an upper cut of the kind Joe
Louis made famous. “Throw him the upper cut, Joe,” used to be the
cry, a couple of years earlier. Gilkey threw it. It caught to poor sap
on the point of the chin just as he reached the vertical again. The guy
arched backwards, prescribing a perfect semi-circle. It was cement out
there. No shoulder or back broke the guy’s fall. No, he landed on his
cranium, the back part, the rear of his skull. No,
I did not hear the guy’s head hit the sidewalk. I’m sure I didn’t.
I own up to not hearing it at all. For if I did my story (pathetic as it
is) would be incredible. Nobody would believe it. But in the ear of my
mind, in my secret core of hearts, I did. O I did. I
did not hear the sirens either—the first from the ambulance, the
second from the nearby squad car that was assuredly cruising in
anticipation of an altercation certainly happening. But I learned about
it through the telephone grapevine before noon of the following day. It
went something like this: The
guy went to the hospital with a fractured skull; he no doubt had jaw
injuries but they were hushed over in the newspaper accounts. Gilkey was
arrested, held on bail, and Carolyn Kiser, the poet-to-be, was
telephoned by someone in the know, and posted his bond, and he was
released to, what?, paint and drink and fight. I take it he paid the
fine, or Carolyn did, for she had Bullitt money, Bullit connections, and
the incident was over. It probably never got to the docket. I
have other Moon stories, and Northlake stories, and Red Robin (there was
but one such tavern, and it didn’t serve food, only pitchers of beer
and cellophane-wrapped snacks) stories, and there were other taverns
that will go historically and literarily unnamed, as well they should
go, and I wrote about some of them for a Seattle-area magazine that was
doomed to go under from long before it published its first issue, edited
proverbially on a kitchen table, and I wrote other stories for The
Weekly, The Argus, View Northwest and even Esquire, back
there in the mid-70s, but this is my Moon story, and I will end it with
a single quote from the palimpsest on the stinking men’s room wall,
that in one way best describes those nearly innocent years: “Milton is the only True God And
Arnold Stein is his prophet.” Prof. Stein being the terror of the English Department and anybody who wanted to get a Ph.D. from their small factory of closed minds. Anon
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