Read Online The Burg and Other Seattle Scenes by Jerome Gold - Free Book Online Page B

Roy’s empty table, ask me, “Where’s Roy?” then leave, often before I can answer. One man stood before the table when someone else was eating there, and told him: “You’re not Roy.” A woman saw that no one was sitting at his table, walked over to it as if he might suddenly appear if only she got closer, started to say something to me, then went to another part of the restaurant where anotherwoman was waiting for her. Just before they left, she started for the table again, again looked at me, then walked outside with her companion. Some of us regulars are so regular as to be counted among the Burg’s attractions.
    In Missoula, Montana there used to be a place called Eddie’s Club. It catered to the old-timers—those who had worked for the Burlington Northern in the Thirties and the Forest Service in the Forties and who lived now in the residential hotels in the center of town—as well as to university students, smoke jumpers, writers and artists and just about anybody who wanted to sit and talk or drink or make a little trouble. In a way, the Burg reminds me of Eddie’s, but without the drinking and with a lot less trouble. Perhaps it is the light. For a bar, especially, Eddie’s was exceptionally well lighted, with banks of fluorescent tubing providing such an intensity of illumination that you could not find a shadow in the place except under the pool tables.
    The Burg does not use fluorescence, but if light is the stuff of vitality, it has both in common with Eddie’s, the Burg relying on overhead lamps at night and the lamps in concert with an echelon of broad, west-facing windows during the day. These two sources of light are sufficient to read or write by, and the softer light is less conducive, I think, to a sneak punch to the back of the head than the lighting at Eddie’s was.
    Eddie’s sustained loyalty among its patrons, as the Burg does, and had photographs of the oldest of them in a row on the wall facing the bar. These were not snapshots or even storefront studio photos, but were taken by Lee Nye, a photographer who might have gained a national reputation hadhe been willing to leave Montana for New York or Los Angeles. When one of the old-timers died, the bartender stuck a gold star on the glass fronting his photograph. In Eddie’s, you lived in the moment as you contemplated eternity.
    I do not recommend the Burg photograph its older patrons, or award a star to each of the departed. Eddie’s was in Montana, a rural state where death either by violence or natural cause is acknowledged. The Burg is in Seattle where, like most of the country, we try to deny death’s inevitability. But we have suffered our losses. The retired Boeing engineer died of heart failure a few years ago, as did Wes Wehr. Cancer took another retiree. In his obituary, his family noted that he enjoyed his daily visit to Burgermaster until shortly before he died. Another retiree succumbed to cancer not long ago, but her daughter and grandson still drop in occasionally. I learned only recently that the woman with muscular dystrophy had died.
    Others have simply disappeared. I do not know what became of the composer. Some died when it was not their time. There were Pat and George, and not long ago, there was a young man, not a patron but a former counterman, remembered for his extraordinary smile, who was shot to death.
    Life, as we know, is the more precious for its transitoriness. The land Burgermaster is built on is owned by Safeway. Several years ago, the Burg’s owner informed his employees that Safeway had raised the rent, beginning January first of the coming year, and that the Burg would close on December 31. This particular restaurant was the flagship of a small chain—it had opened almost half a century before—but hetold his staff that he would not keep it open in order to lose money. Safeway was adamant. One of the staff told some of us regulars