Been a busy last few days. Monday was a good day of getting ready to leave for the Portsmouth reading on Tuesday. Tuesday was a wonderful day. Good trip along side the river way and through the part of the country I used to call my back yard. It reminded me of the Ohio Valley gothic and that I have been carrying it in my head and in my bones and blood most of my life. Driving east from Cincinnati, we rolled out Ohio Route 32, which carries you from Cincinnati to Belpre, across the Ohio from Parkersburg, West Virginia. It’s sometimes called The Appalachian Highway, which, if you know anything about the Appalachian Mountains, means you’re driving headlong into the foothills of the Appalachia the further east you go and until you cross the river into By Gawd West Virginia. It’s 110 Miles from Cincy to Portsmouth, and we made pretty good time.
The reading was amazing and reinforced in me that I am on the road I need to be on. Art flourishes where it is sowed, and encouraged. Traveling with my fellow caballeros, Frogg Corpse and Tommy Bays, I remembered how much I like being out on the road with people I can trust. Our reception was welcome and I hope to return in the future. It was in a place called THE LANDING, which is a cool coffee shop, vintage clothing, old vinyl records, and skateboard shop. It’s the sort of place that small towns grow best because it’s a true labor of love and also a necessity for survival.
We were invited to hang out after, but none of us had eaten, so we found a pizza place that was still open, but barely just.
I’m a sucker for classic bar decor. I think about Freddie’s on Broadway in Louisville, the best hole-in-the-wall dive this town ever grew. It never tried to be something it wasn’t. Freddie was in his 90’s, half blind, and mostly deaf. His approach to race relations were unapologetically unaffected by the fact that his girlfriends were women of color, mostly in their late 20s. The bartenders only took cash, though someone had thought to put in an ATM back in a corner where a pinball machine had been once, and probably a knock off version of Asteroids after that. The walls were covered in the old style boxing posters, the kind that were drawn, that all look a little like the carny posters from a television filming set, back when TV was three stations and PBS, when the antenna was correctly bent.
The Pizza Pub in Portsmouth, Ohio is one of those places, in same spectrum as The Landing, that exists out of need and grew a character based on everyone’s grandpa’s unofficial garage bar. The walls were covered bar with mirrors and hangings advertising every beer and liquor that’s been or was since I was in my 20’s… that touch of old school nostalgia with the flair of someone who grew up in the 80’s and remembers when there were two refrigerators in the garage on in the mud room: one with enough food to survive a new ice age another with almost as much beer. But the pizza was really good. They built that place around a brick oven, and gawd bless ‘em for it. It makes all the difference in the world, and don’t ever let any cheap corporate fuck tell you different.
After that, we made our way to a wonderful fire pit and hung out with some of coolest folks you’ll ever meet along the river. The world is remaking itself in small towns along the world’s great wound, the Ohio River. And don’t let anybody try and tell you different on that, either.
To quote wiser people than me: “Never let the bastards win.”
That Ohio Valley Gothic got its hold
before that winter in February
when I made my entrance
two days late and chased from the start
by weak lungs and bad feet
and a heart that bleeds
entirely too easily.
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Poet. Essayist. Fictioner. Steamboat fireman. Bit of a grackle.
