1988: Even Beaver Gets the Blues

To say that Beaver’s marriage didn’t work would be like saying that the launch of the Challenger space shuttle went a little bit wrong. Joe “Beaver” Clarendon and Laurie Sue Kenopensky make it through eight months and then kapow, there goes my baby, somebody help me pick up the fuckin pieces.

The Beav is basically a happy guy, any of his hang-out buddies would tell you that, but this is his dark time. He doesn’t see any of his old friends (the ones he thinks of as his real friends) except for the one week in November when they are together every year, and last November he and Laurie Sue had still been hanging on. By a thread, granted, but still hanging on. Now he spends a lot of his time-too much, he knows-in the bars of Portland’s Old Port district, The Porthole and The Seaman’s Club and The Free Street Pub. He is drinking too much and smoking too much of the old rope-a-dope and come most mornings he doesn’t like to look at himself in the bathroom mirror; his red-rimmed eyes skitter away from his reflection and he thinks I ought to quit the clubs. Pretty soon I’m gonna have a problem the way Pete’s got one. Jesus-Christ-bananas.

Quit the clubs, quit the partying, good fuckin idea, and then he’s back again, kiss my bender and how ya doin. This Thursday it’s the Free Street, and damned if there isn’t a beer in his hand, a joint in his pocket, and some old instrumental, sounds a little bit like The Ventures, pouring from the juke. He can’t quite remember the name of this one, which was popular before his time. Still, he knows it; he listens a lot to the Portland oldies station since he got divorced. Oldies are soothing. A lot of the new stuff… Laurie Sue knew and liked a lot of it, but Beaver doesn’t get it.

The Free Street is mostly empty, maybe half a dozen guys at the bar and another half a dozen shooting eightball in the back, Beaver and three of his hang-out buddies in one of the booths, drinking draft Millers and cutting a greasy deck of cards to see who pays for each round.