Ogden, Utah
Like a twelve-year-old kid racing his bicycle on the edge of the subdivision and dreaming of motocross, Angelo’s would dearly love to be full of bikers. There are posters of big hair women in bikinis posing with shiny bikes; bright red, white and blue ads from mainstream American beers; and stickers on every surface, with messages ranging from the mechanical to the politically poignant, “If guns kill people then spoons made Rosanne fat.” Bud and Bud Lite on tap. Bud, Bud Lite, Coors, Coors Lite and Miller Highlife in bottles. The bartender appears to be a 40-year-old single grandmother who doesn’t bother to act friendly, and I appreciate the honesty.
Who says this isn't a biker bar, and who says there's any really difference between the kid on the bicycle and the man on his hog? The real difference is the bike. I don't see any serious bikers here tonight, but every so often a wide gravely faced man in layers of unwashed cotton and leather slogs through as though Angelo’s Tavern is a dull passage from one side of his life to the other. There are no yuppies here, no trend setters, no students, and definitely no beautiful people.
I’m sitting on a stool in the back with my friend, Becky, head cheerleader from my high school class who appreciates the chance to be out of her home town where her husband awaits inevitable divorce under a restraining order. She and I are half playing pool, half listening to the house band, “Easy Street,” as they put a valiant effort into some of the easier-to-play hits from the seventies.
It’s a big bar, and we’re not alone. A young couple plays 8-ball on the other table, and at least six fellow drinkers, one of them in an Arby’s Roast Beef logo tiara, watch from the legion of kitchen chairs lined up in front of the bandstand. In the middle of the joint, an amateur softball team in matching red T-shirts has taken over two tables and a few pitchers. The name on the back of the shirt we can read from here is “Poop."
Why are we here? There certainly are nicer places where we could get a beer, even in Ogden, Utah. Is it an elitist pleasure we get from hanging out in a dive like this? I’d be disingenuous to deny it, but any of that is really just a bonus. We’re comfortable here. It would be against the nature of Angelo’s to cut it any finer than that.
Becky and I have plenty of high school memories to ruminate, but we’re kept from going overdeep into the seventies by a skinny man with a patchy salt-and-pepper beard who comes around every twenty minutes ostensibly to pick up empties, but obviously to talk with Becky, under the pretense of telling me how nice I should treat a cute girl like her. His breath smells of vomit, but he’s harmless enough and he’s got his own memories of the seventies to regurgitate, most notably his kiss from Stevie Nicks at one of Fleetwood Mac’s Salt Palace shows.
Mr. Salt and Pepper’s innocuous demeanor, however, does highlight the only thing missing in this bar, the latent menace. There is no menace here, but there should be in a place like this; for a skinny guy from out of town with a good looking girl in summer heels and a halter top.
The only hint of anything to be avoided came about an hour ago, in the men’s room, where the women posing with bikes are topless. The middle-aged drunk struggling to pee at the urinal next to mine hit me up for a ride to his place on Monroe, five blocks up 25th street. I was tempted to say, “You have a home?” But instead I said, “I’m sorry man, I have no idea when we’re leaving.” I left him to his job at hand, and heard no more from him.
Easy Street is playing “Dead Roses.” A huge pitcher of Bud is six dollars and the pool is fifty cents a game. Becky and I are just friends; there truly is no place better to go.
