The Unhaunting of the Morrison Hotel

The Morrison Hotel, a Southeast Portland bar lost to time, is our original dive. For the 100th post on Uncharted Dives, the three founding authors return to the location of the MoHo – together. These are their musings…

Whoever said you cannot go home again was a melodramatist. You can go home again. You just have to cover your tracks. Be certain you were not followed. Take a different path home than you did yesterday. Different than the day before that. If your cover is truly blown and you cannot go home again then this is what safe houses are for. 

A safe house like this place. Or, in the least, what was once at these coordinates. This street-level dive in Southeast Portland was the “x marks the spot” location of my safe house. But X today ain’t the spot. Not this dive. Not anymore. Not with the name changed to the deranged: Home, a Bar. Once upon a time, this had been the center of our known world. Morrison Hotel was our Temple of Apollo. Not much is left of those dancing days. Just a couple suspect characters. My co-conspirators. Wara, an imp of the perverse. Izy Badger, the byzantine back-channeler. With these fools here, this is where I hang my hat. Home. This must be the place.  

I haven’t been to this city in ten years. Wara is right. He says it is like being a vampire, an immortal, returning to the haunts of latter centuries to find those civilizations fallen, razed, bulldozed, cleared for contemporary landlords. Is it the will of cities to expand? Portland was known as Stumptown; those tree stumps were the first signs of progress. Progressing to this? Do cities have any more free will than we do? Did the three of us – Wara, Izzy, Vic – choose to leave Portland all those years ago? Or did the world revolve away, from beneath our feet. Wara departing to repopulate California. Isy eating lotus flowers in Laos. Did I choose to leave or was I a stream finding the least resistance down the mountain?

What is the word for self-determination?, I ask the lads. 

Isy Badger leans forward, rubbing his thighs as his eyes search the rafters for crossword clues. Masturbate?, he says. 

No thanks, Wara politely declines, I had a big lunch. 

Even if we are making our own choices, what fucking choices we’ve made! Officially stamped choices. Weddings. Divorces. Deaths. Ten years gone… my last visit was the funeral.  

I knew the Morrison Hotel before I knew these blokes, Ishy & Wara, though it would only be a matter of time before I did meet them. A fateful Halloween. Before I knew them, it was Maggie who I came back for. Maggie made this place home. “Vic the Quick” she called me. Maybe only once. Maggie mostly called me by my full name, eyes squinted, hamming it up, “Vic-tor Nev-er-man”. She liked the way it sounded. Then she listened. The best bartenders have a talent for feigning fascination. Maggie actually listened. Victor Neverman, she would say on my arrival, wiping a space clean for me at the bar. Tell me everything, she would say. And I would. I rarely tell anything to anyone, but I told her. Everything. 

Perhaps it is the absence of Maggie that makes this place feel like an abomination. No, Morrison Hotel still felt like home when Maggie wasn’t working, when it was Dickie ignoring me from behind the bar. What is it then? Maybe it’s the interior; too well lit. It was much darker back in my day. 

Shit, I say with a look around. This is a strange trespass. Who is stranger?, me?, or this Home, a Bar? If this is home, I feel like I’ve found a stranger in my kitchen; a stranger sharing a beer with my wife. A stranger who’s wearing my pants. And I am not into cuckoldry. Not from this angle. 

From the lessons learned portion of this journey, we can say we now know what other worlds call our sun. When they look up from their foreign earths. When they gaze at us, pointing at whichever bizarre constellation you & I dance within, they call the distant star that is our sun, Home, a Bar. 

Fucking alien savages. Fuck off. This is the MoHo.

Jim Has Left the Building

It was like attending a funeral, an open casket.  Where you are confronted with the corpse, recognizable, but grotesque.  Bloated and yet sagging flesh clung to the cheek bones, wrongly colored skin caked with enough makeup to fill a spice container.  From the start it was all wrong.  The music was wrong.  Death metal blaring at a decibel that reminded me that there are poor bastards who live upstairs.  I was up there, once upon time, with the previous chef who rented there.  He was long gone now, as was our whole crew.  Currently, some poor sod is likely watching this musical energy rile up their dog into a neurotic frenzy.  At least this is how I feel. I am the dog drifting into this tomb filled with inappropriate racket.  I look around for the jukebox.   Perhaps it was moved, or maybe we just have the new staff to thank for these selections.  

            The music was just the first incongruence.  The wall which divided the bar from the dining room had been demolished, and with it, any sense of intimacy from either room.  That corridor between bar and wall tables had held countless, crowded revelries as we the regulars held court.    I follow Isy and Vic as we weave our procession to a high table in the middle of the brave new and very wide open prairie. Now we were all outsiders, exposed in a vast, well-lit room.  As we moved, I passed over the exact spot where I met Vic for the first time, and yet now, it seemed something else.  The sands of time had fallen, and the hourglass had been flipped.  

            The bathrooms were no longer gendered, not that that had hindered us from using either one back in our time.  I chose what had been the men’s room.  Still the same toilet I installed years ago.  Repairs back then, when there was occasion, were bartered with the owner for an open tab for the night.  I’d like to think we both won with this arrangement.  Well, perhaps not every time.  The instance when I got a call because the front window had taken a brick from some yahoo.  After plywooding up the hole I drank the equivalent of a two man crew in compensation…I did lose that next day to a hangover.   Maggie had tried to cut me off that night, and to be fair, I should have listened to her counsel…instead I sloppily invoked the deal I had struck with her superior and consequently, had to do an apology tour the next day.  Ah, the times this place has seen.  The exposed wooden lathe, up high in the corner, where we had all signed our names in sharpie, was covered over with drywall and a smear of paint.  I had a deep archeological desire to rip it off and expose that precious vestige from the past.  Unsurprisingly, the artwork had been changed out in this bathroom, but not for the better.   With a heavy sigh, I zipped up while fading back and taking it all in.   While washing up at the sink, the doorknob sounded of a forceful attempt of entry, but the lock held. 

            This was once a magnificent Boston sports bar during a golden era, where we all crowded around the one TV hanging over the front cooler.  Serendipitously, tonight, the Sox were on as they were playing Seattle, though relegated to a single TV that would have you facing the street.  The old, long black curtains remained as part of the sale.  They fit the ambiance like a stitched together body part that would gain only Dr. Frankenstein’s admiration.  Additional TV’s had been installed, all at ceiling height, as if the identity of a sports bar were being pursued in an unqualified manner.  As for any of the games…no sound, no subtitles, just the thrashing guitar and damaged vocal chords persisting on.  There is a new cast of characters sitting in our old places at the bar, a new bartender, blond, tattooed, and happy to call you “hun”, “love”, or “sweets” like she was on loan from the strip club or perhaps a diner. I remembered the wary way Dickie would take the order from a new patron, cold almost; a contrast from the antics he joined in with the rest of us while he was minding bar.  Perhaps unconsciously he was waiting for them to be accepted by the fold before making them feel too welcome.  That was the grasp we had on this place.  This bar was my living room once, and now here I am the outsider, with no intention to be accepted by this new generation.

 Vic and Isy put in their food order while I can’t decide and blondie heads to the back to check on availability.  I want to save her the trip back and forth and yell “Chicken Caesar Salad”, futilely in the wake of the music.  Oh well, I tried.  “Was that you yelling at me?” she asked with a smile on her return.  “Chicken Caesar Salad” I repeat shout to be heard, assuming she wants my order.  “You know not to do that right?” she comments as she paces in front of us, and I realize she is peeved and the smile is sinister.  “There is No way i could hear you over the music…RUDE!” she finally blurts out and walks away into the bar’s corral.  

Stunned,  I lean before my private gravestone at the opening of the sitting and standing bars.  Where once it was my love pouring drinks and sneaking in smooches to my left, family cooking food to my right, and my best friends hollering the celebration of life all up and down the bar.  But my sentimental reflections were cut short before they could even really begin.  I returned to our table with a bad taste in my mouth.  “No act of kindness goes unpunished, eh?” Vic says, slapping my back along the way.  

The bright flashes of “Big Buck Hunter” silhouette a sitting Isy, filling his immediate background.  His eyes sparkle as he notices it has been moved in front of what had been the darkest booth.  “Remember all the after-hours we spent around those couple of tables?” he asked, thumbing what I knew to be that back corner buried behind the arcade cabinet.  

Another deep sigh, then I answer him with an outstretched lager, and we all cheers within the shell of the greatest bar of our youth.

My two comrades return from ordering at the bar and immediately slump over in their chairs. They are already waving the surrender flag with their drooping eyes. I look around the bar for who to blame. This can’t be our fault. We can’t return to a place where we once burned like white furnace stars and be this listless. They are jet lagged and haggard, sure. But we all have the day off tomorrow and are sitting in apollo’s shadow. Yet my two trusty companions hunch like they’ve been unplugged from their power source. What happened to them? 

The music overhead sounds like Sepultura on steroids. Making conversation nearly impossible. Once upon a time, conversation is all we did in this place. One long conversation….. for two years? Three? The conversation started before I returned from Korea. The echo’s of this room vibrated across the Pacific and called me back. Were it not for this bar I might still be in Asia. 

Vic interrupts my recollections. He doesn’t trust the bathrooms. He says all the toilets have been moved since he was last in the joint. Hey, I installed those toilets, says Wara. Perking up for a moment with pride. I grab my beer and ponder this. I’ve never known anyone who’s installed a toilet.

Wara holds up his elbow and scratches it. Something about this town. He says. The pacific northwest mountain air. The rain that polishes the streets. It cures my ailments. 

Ah yes, the great overland journey west. Vic says. His eyes are on the TV but he is staring through it. Where you finally cannot go further. Wara and I are old world Americans. Our ancestors settled in the snow and swamps, Isy’s lineage kept going ’til the Pacific. Running from something. Or towards it?

What keeps us running all these years later? I ask. 

Vic finishes his beer and grabs his reserve while he thinks.

The rolling stone gathers no moss. He offers, raising his glass for a cheers. “First one today”. He says over the clang. 

It also grows no roots. Wara counters. He instinctively glances behind the bar as he says this, where his roots were once firmly attached. 

I follow his gaze and scan across our former common room. It felt like someone had applied a groucho marx disguise to the place. The mustache-nose bit would feel no one who recalled its prior splendor. It’s as if new ownership identified each of the bar’s finest qualities, and then turned them down with a dimmer knob. Except the lighting. That was up. Way up. We all squinted to try and see the good.

Oswald Spengler called them the “fellaheen”. The people who adapt and survive from one civilization to the next without becoming part of anything. Remaining separate from the great movements of history. Living on its ruins.

That is how my family ended up here. I say. Escaping one ruin to the next. Well, and good farmland.

On the walk home up Belmont the boys are dazzled at the array of  new developments. It has been many years since this stumble was a nightly occurrence. They lose track of where they are, not because of ruins, but expansive growth. Buildings have sprouted up over the years and remade the city. 

If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything, the saying goes. This city stood for everything and now it’s barely standing. It’s taller, but lost its grounding. A town obsessed with identities now has a slew of rotten ones it’s trying to shake. 

People find great sport in kicking a place while it’s down. Says Vic. Being up that high for so many years almost begs for it. 

Speaking of being high, I say,  there’s the window to Mantown, I point at our old apartment building across the street on 15th. They lock on the corner unit as we continue up the hill. A memory like bottled smoke. I can see the recollections form above their heads like thought bubbbles as we continue walking. I allow them silence to process. That living room window was a late-night portal into a different dimension. Since the apartment doors were inconveniently located in the complex and no one had keys, the window became our favored entry point. An easy step down from the street level window, through the raised blinds and onto a weak-kneed orange sectional where: viola! A Narnia for Neandrathals.

Not long ago I unexpectedly relocated to this neighborhood. I spent my afternoons jogging in the same  cemetery Vic strolled through when he lived here. I privately cursed my proximity to so many of my own cemeteries. To Mantown. To the MoHo. I became convinced that certain places on the planet can have too many memories. Too many meanings. They haunt you.

I somehow knew that the air would be kicked out of Vic and Wara when we re-visited the bar. That they’d be doubled over to protect their hearts. I already had the scar tissue. I’d become calcified.  “If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet,” George Bernard Shaw says, “you’d best take it out and teach it to dance.” Eventually, I insisted on making these graveyards gleeful again. I considered them reclamation projects. Anywhere that ached with the melody of too many associations I resuscitated. Made a new memory. With new people. Who knew nothing of the past. I became the fellaheen. Living on the ruins. Dancing with skeletons.

Not at the MoHo though. I don’t even recall what I ordered that night. Just that my left eye felt swollen and my two friends were folded like laundry the whole time we were there. We took no pictures. There was nothing to be remembered. 

I looked around the bar one last time as I left. I’ll never come back here, I thought to myself.
None of us will.

Original Artwork by Janet Grissett

Album cover courtesy of the Doors