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The Shenandoah is not a bar. It's not a tavern. It's a beer joint. The kind that does cash-only business and scratches hard for every nickel it turns. And lately, it is about the only place in my life slowed down and dumbed down enough to honestly relax. It takes a couple of hours. Nearly everyone here on this Sunday morning lives or grew up within blocks of the place and feels most at home here -- which is not unlike myself, who used to sell newspapers on the corner here at age 12 and who, if the light is right, can imagine that pale, scruffy youngster shouting Paaaaaapers! NoozPaaaaaapers! Such nostalgia eases the frustrated wildness in old men.
This particular beer joint, deemed the seediest in town by good citizens who've never even set foot in the place, is operated by Denny, an overweight blonde fellow with breasts and earrings. Denny is going through a sex change and lives every minute of it right up front for a fundamentalist Southern town to ogle. The Pentecostal mission two doors down must certainly be praying hard for Denny's soul, especially on Saturday nights, when Denny does what he calls "my show." It's a real smoker, sort of a cross between Charlie Rich and the Righteous Brothers.
Ordering a Bud Light, I see that it is now up to $2.25, a sure sign of inflation and approaching collapse of society if ever there was one. A person on minimum age works an hour for the price of two beers. Meanwhile, a grizzled red-haired old bachelor pulls up onto the stool next to me, a drywall hanger named Wilf, whose grin reveals enough silver in his teeth for the Lone Ranger to make a couple dozen bullets. Sitting next to Wilf can be a good thing or an aggravating thing, depending. See, the drunker he gets the more educated he claims to be. Last night Wilf was all the way up to being a Harvard graduate. Which is to say he was bullet-proof drunk. But this morning here he is, sitting up and taking nourishment and talking about the one thing that verifies sanity and trustworthiness, in fact the onlssy truly important thing at this time of year in the American South -- garden tomatoes. "My tomaters are doing real good. I've got more than I have had in years. It's been hot, tomaters like that." In one of typically stupid lefty slipups, wherein we tend to spout knee-jerk bullshit instead of taking part in real conversations about real subjects such as tomatoes, I venture that the excessive heat this summer may be due to global warming. To which he replies, "Well then, I don't have no problem with global warmin."
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