There are a lot of pharmacies in this town. Only a handful of vendors, but each have at least two to four pharmacies within five miles of where I’m typing. I have pet names for them. The one I went to today is the voodoo priestess Rite Aid (not to be confused with the Voodoo priest CVS). I swear to all that’s unholy the woman is an apple core doll on a pogo stick antimated with demon blood. She looks Haitian but has a strong eastern bloc accent. Um, I think she still works there, I don’t go back to the pharmacy part of the store because she scares the shit out of me. She’d scare the shit out of you too if I had the nerve to take a picture, but she’s much scarier in person. I think the first and only time I bought from the pharmacy section I wanted some NyQuil, the real stuff (it had been prescription only in Oregon for years).
I raised my eyebrows when she asked for my ID (because my eyeballs were frozen in horror). She sucked air through her teeth and asked my blood type. She wasn’t smiling.
So, I picked up another wrist splint there, I’ve figured out a rotation of wrist and wrist/thumbs splints work best. Rite aid for some reason or the other has the best collection of splints and braces and shit like that. The Voodoo priestess rite aid is closest. My friends are a little shocked I go in there at all, though none will give you a straight answer as to why.
So I’m taking my little rite aid bag to the car because along the same little strip is the funky used video store and I want to stop in there. There’s this guy in the parking lot who just starts telling me what a bad day he’s having. I knew what was coming; I lived in Portland. In retrospect the guy probably was really having the sort of shitty day he was having and he was so slow to the punchline that I told him I didn’t have any cash money. It felt a little nostalgic. I was nice enough not to press him for a back story, because, he probably didn’t really have one.
So I pick up a few videos tell my own short con that I always forget to get my card punched which gets me a few extra punches and those guys are always trying to give me incentives so I figure it was a nice gesture on my part. I was told, too, that if I got one more it’d be free, so I picked up Donnie Darko which I’ve seen a billion times but not recently. That led to the subject of blindness and the guy at the counter tells me a story about blind bob and deaf doug and a bartender passing notes for the two to speak. He tells the story like a guy who doesn’t have a lot of interesting things happen to him. I almost asked him to describe blind bob.
When I was a kid there was this guy we called Indian Bob on account of that’s what he wanted to be called. He might have had some indian in him, he definitely had rodeo clown in him. He used to hustle pool for drinks, he had some code about playing for real money; he wasn’t going to hustle a college kid, he only played money games with people who knew how good he was and how good they were. He taught me how to hustle pool without getting beat up. I didn’t play much and don’t play at all these days (incidentally when someone says that on a game of skill like pool or chess, don’t bet, you’re being hustled, but, seriously, I haven’t played in a long time). I liked watching Indian Bob work a room.
He’d broken every bone in his body at least once so I’m not sure how old he was then (43 to 38 years ago) he seemed ancient. The blind bob in the story had passed away last year. Indian Bob was the kind of guy who might have stayed in town and definitely gone blind and surely would hang out in bars swapping yarns through a bartender. I didn’t know how to ask the video store guy without going into my whole carny barker patter which always makes me think of Indian Bob too. He put on a show when hustling drinks like he was the house entertainment. One of the many tricks to not getting beat up; low stakes, high entertainment value, almost silly so people didn’t feel conned out of their money. He never, for instance, acted drunk, I mean too drunk to play. He was drunk often, but he was very good at the game, he didn’t act like his being drunk was a handicap. I never saw anyone feel cheated by him. I did see people buy him a drink just to see him play. I would have but, um, I was a minor.
There used to be pool halls around here, real pool halls, and even snooty pool halls. I don’t mean clean ones with respectable gentlemen, the snooty ones were still smokey and sleazy, but they had snooker tables too, and the long green felt kind that you rent by the hour not by the quarter with the straight pool abacus and tournements that’d bring in real players. Indian bob was far from the best I’ve ever seen, but he knew his limits and he was certainly the best most of those college kids were ever going to play. In that respect he might have been the winningest player I ever saw.
He’d broken the fingers in his hands so many times that he could make these impossible bridges for the cue, bending knuckles at angles that hurt just to look at. I don’t remember why I knew him so well, I was a kid. There isn’t a lot to do during a harsh northern winter, even less when they won’t serve you, I guess I just knew him from hanging out. The best time to catch him was after a few drinks and in-between games. He told great rodeo clown stories.
Ok, back into the splint for these paws. Be safe out there.
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