Western Poets

The Milltown Union Bar Revisited

By Charles Finn, Guest Writer, 1-07-11

	Poet Richard Hugo.

You need never leave. Money or a story
brings booze. The elk head is grinning
and the goat says go so tenderly
you can hear him through the glass. If you weep
deer heads weep. Sing and the orphanage
announces plans for your release. A train goes by
and the ditches jump. You were nothing
going in and now you kiss your hand.

-- Richard Hugo from his poem, “The Milltown Union Bar.”

A few short months after arriving in Montana, I made a point of stopping at The Milltown Union Bar, the working-class watering hole immortalized by Richard Hugo in his poem by that name. The bar, as it was in Hugo’s time, is really called Harold’s, “Harold’s Dine Drink and Dance” the sign reads. Driving west on Interstate 90 toward Missoula you see it at the exit for Bonner and barely need to wet your lips and twist your wrist 10 degrees in order to slice off the highway and circle down the ramp in its direction.

Pulling into the parking lot that first afternoon, pickups outnumbered cars five to one, but that doesn’t say much. In Montana, churches boast the same ratios, and Harold’s, when it comes right down to it, is just another kind of church with a different way of praying, devoid of the trapping of organized religion, but not without its stations of the cross. Like churches everywhere, it’s a place where the same dust motes hang in the same slant of light and the same preachers tell the same stories over and over again, whether people are listening or not. The difference is at Harold’s you can imagine a Jim Beam smile catching your eye in the mirror, or a “Hi stranger” hand landing well up your thigh. It’s also a place where the regulars (their own loosely knit congregation) come looking for salvation, and yet whole lives get lost here, sunk in the amber light like the worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle. It’s not uncommon to hear heartfelt confessions at Harold’s, or prayers. Penitence is everywhere. The analogy of a church can be taken too far of course, and I don’t want to appear sacrilegious, but one can’t escape the feeling that in America at the start of the 21st century, communion wafers have been replaced with pretzels, the blood of Christ with a Bud.

I opened the door and parted the cloud of blue smoke with my chest. Six censers of Marlboros rotated to point at me and then slowly swung back. Locals the world over can size up an outsider before they get three steps to the bar. With a friend, I passed behind the row of men and two women seated facing a tabernacle of whiskey and vermouth. It grew pyramid fashion four shelves high, obscuring the mirror behind it. I knew Hugo spent a good many years gazing into that mirror, trying to figure out if the face he saw reflected was the face of someone he could love.

A poet (or anyone for that matter) can love something whether it’s lovable or not; a face, a person, a house, a dog. For a period of time, Hugo chose a bar to love, loved it for its bad art and good owner, its unpretentious stink and disheveled customers—those honest drunks as he called them, simple folk, simple in the best sense of the word. Which is the charm, the down home honest charm of Harold’s and thousands of places like it. Show up once and the bartender takes your order. Show up a second time and she remembers your name and asks if you want the same thing. On the third visit she starts pouring before you sit down, and that’s when you fall in love with the place.

Harold’s was made famous because Hugo felt at home here, felt he didn’t have to defend himself like he might in the halls of academia. For the record, then, and if you are listening Richard, the mountain goat and big horn sheep are still here, but that’s about it. The elk head is gone, if laughing I don’t know, and the paintings, all of them, sold to a fan. Rest assured that the drunks are here and as plentiful as ever (will they ever be in short supply?) They won’t be the same ones, but maybe the sons of some of the people you knew.

I’m sure it’s my imagination, but in every Harold’s I’ve ever been in violence lingers, pools like the ugly vapors in the men’s room. Men with hot tempers gravitate to bars like this, but these same men have short memories and big hearts, damn big hearts, hearts of gold, and in my experience are much more likely of extending forgiveness having been in need of it so often themselves. They are also the people who will be off their bar stools and out the door to help you jump start your car at thirty below and won’t take a nickel for it.

“But if you want to come back in and buy me a beer...”

Still, one can’t ignore the hard luck laminated in these fake mahogany walls, the brightest light they’ve been exposed to filtered through cheap gin and green glass. The veneer of the bar top doesn’t help either, chipped on the edges like the shoulders of the men who belly up to it. But good will abounds, making perfect the contradictions of this boozy world, not spinning out of control, but spinning, spinning indeed, reeling with no door jamb in sight to lean upon.

When I go to Harold’s, I make sure to wear my flannel shirt with the elbows gone, and I bring my face, “the world has beaten me down face” so that I fit right in. The beauty of this face, and all the ones I watch and see reflected in the mirror, is that they are full of laughter and spirit, real spirit, the kind that can stand up to abuse. The men and women who frequent Harold’s don’t get to wear their dignity without reason. They fought hard for it, failed miserably most of the time, but keep bouncing back. Unless you’ve lived or traveled with aboriginal cultures, these are the kindest people you’re ever likely to meet.

Now I’m no drinker, my talents lie elsewhere, but I’ve bent my elbow enough to know the popularity of whiskey isn’t purely because it numbs the mind. Alcohol burns going down. A lot like life, it makes you feel good and bad at the same time. Places like Harold’s are, among other things, display cases for such reality. If you want to see what fortitude looks like just step through the door. If you want to see what self-pity can do to a man, order another.

Hugo fought the then owner, Harold Herndon, over every “improvement” made in his time, and sadly, the improvements since then have only gotten worse. The walls of today’s bar are covered in bright posters advertising domestic brands of beer (not through the auspices of silicone breasts and airbrushed thighs, but the rougher, more macho side of things; rodeos, race cars). A pair of televisions hang in the corners at each end of the bar, and another one on top of a cooler. That first evening, I didn’t feel like a barfly, but my eyes sure did. They would circle away, circle away, but always returned to settle on the flickering images. Mindlessly I watched. Mindlessly I’d take another sip of beer. There are lots of ways to stay mindless these days, and more than a few of them go on in the parking lot I’m sure, but if you need four more there are the casino machines just inside the door, above them the ram’s head in what I found to be fine juxtaposition. I’m sure Hugo would be disgusted at their electronic presences, preferring to shoot the shit with a person instead of a machine.

People still come here to shoot the shit and are as good at it as ever. “Money or a story” could buy you a drink, Hugo said, and the same is true today. The clientele are the usual mix of mill workers, truckers, carpenters; people with an innate sense of story. It’s the gospel truth according to Billy Bob and “Here Endeth the Lesson” as told by Karen the bartender. There’s a lot of hellfire and brimstone in these stories, and the usual four letter vocabulary. The old-timers are the only ones who really know how to swear, creative enough that it doesn’t sound profane. But there’s a roughness in the younger men’s words and manners, which is why it always surprises me when they bank the cue ball off the side rail to sink the eight. Forearms like telephone poles, bellies like whales, these men have such a soft touch. But do they kiss their wives with the same tenderness is what I want to know.

Hugo saw the humanity here, the struggle to make something out of nothing, and I think he was right to love the place. He called it home, and said you could love here. How can one dispute that? And yet how can one reconcile it with the line-crossing drive home, or the pay check that never makes it to the bank? There’s just never one side to things, or people. In the little time I spent in Harold’s, I never saw it in its proper light, not because the light is so dim, soulless in that annoying way florescence is, but because I come too full of preconceived ideas and bad poetry; my own. Because I can’t tell one honest drunk from another. I wish more of Hugo’s bar remained, I’d like for those deer heads to weep with me. Harold’s is falling victim to the homogenization that all America—all the world—is suffering from. Time is change, hell I know that, not money, but what I’ve come to understand is I can look past all this change and make Harold’s into anything I want; home, hell or otherwise. I can romanticize it or piss on it. Nothing is fair, that’s for damn sure, and I’d never pretend it was otherwise. Harold’s is a great place. The verdict is still out on me. Hugo knew what he was talking about, and I can kiss my hand coming or going.

This essay first appeared in Open Spaces (Vol 6 issue 4, 2004) and was reprinted in Missoula Living (Aug/Sept 2007).

Charles Finn is the editor of High Desert Journal, a print and online journal of the arts and literature of the Interior west.

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