March 15, 2021

If there was one bar in which I could have at one time been considered a regular, it was this dive off of Forest Hill Avenue called The Forest. (At the time I liked the place so much and was such a frequent visitor that we ended up having our after-reception wedding reception there. That was quite a fun time…)

The Forest was dark, had a great jukebox, decent beers, an interesting (if slightly seedy) customer base, and the most amazing chicken Philly sandwiches you ever ate. Plus, the lady who ran it sold her own blue cheese dressing behind the bar for cash only and you could almost eat that shit with a spoon it was so good.

Further, the bar was almost perfectly equidistant between my (then) girlfriend’s (now wife’s) house and my apartment across the James River.

My friend Chowder worked there. That in itself was strange since everybody in the bar smoked and Chowder had asthma. (I never once walked out of that place without smelling like an ashtray.)

Chowder started off working at O’Toole’s about a block away but later switched to The Forest when they offered better hours. That was kind of sad as O’Toole’s had the best St. Patrick’s Day parties in Richmond and I’d go out there that night and get hammered on Guinness and really embarrass myself.

Once after yelling for the bagpipers to play “Scotland The Fucking Brave!” one too many times they told me to shut up or get out.

At this period of my life I was living off of The Boulevard right near the Sig Eps National Headquarters in a $350.00 per month one bedroom hovel with an evil alley cat that I’d named Scuzzlebutt.

The building I was in had a total of four apartments and the 22 year old girl who lived below me not only had about a dozen cats, she was a chain smoker, a pot smoker, and she was a Phone Sex operator. (Remember those, denizens of the Time Before The Internet?)

She was so sick of me calling downstairs to ask her not to smoke so much pot or to keep her music down or to not let her friends park in my parking spot that the night after she moved out she and her friends bent both of the windshield wipers on my 1994 Ford Thunderbird up at 90 degree angles.

I had no money and was working a shit job for Fastenal in an un-airconditioned warehouse stacking boxes of industrial supplies and lifting bundles of rebar.

I had a college degree with good grades, an honorable discharge after a stint in the 82nd Airborne, and a Master’s Degree and I would spend my days counting nuts and bolts. By hand.

So, having a friend who worked in a bar was certainly a boon as he would often give me a free beer or two.

As it was, I could barely afford to buy one or two beers on any given night before running out of money and having to head home.

I remember I went to The Forest the last night I was in RVA before moving up to NOVA to begin my career with DS.

I tried to tell the regulars what I was planning on doing and I just kept looking at them realizing they were never going anywhere. This is where they would stay.

Sure enough, when I returned the conquering hero several years later, many of the same faces greeted me.

After we moved to Northern Virginia, I’d occasionally poke my head in to say hello to Chowder, but either my tastes had gotten more refined, or the bar’s formerly charming habitués were looking a bit more grim and threadbare.

The last time I walked in the place looked and smelled so bad that I had a single beer and walked out, vowing never to return again.

As I mentioned, one of the best features of the bar was its jukebox, which was the semi-old fashioned kind that only accepted dollar bills and had the actual CDs displayed along with the CD’s cover and song listings.

I credit The Forest’s jukebox with turning me on to Country & Western, Americana, and a lot of Soul music.

I’d never actually heard Hank Williams or Waylon Jennings, and didn’t really appreciate how good Otis Redding was.

But something about listening to that music in a dark, smoky bar, while slightly buzzed really allowed the notes and melody to go straight into my cerebral cortex in a way listening to music previously had not.

You got two plays for $1 or 12 for $5.

If I had $10 rolling around in my pocket, I was going to take over that jukebox the entire night.

I had the same general songs I’d sometimes play, but I always ended with one in particular – Creedence Clearwater Revival’s version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”

Their version is so masterful, it’s almost hypnotic. I would listen to the first 3/4ths, enjoying myself and singing along, and then start packing up when the lyrics ended and Fogarty began soloing.

I used to have the song on a running mix tape I made and I could tell whether I was running fast or slow based upon where I was geographically in relation to where I was in the song.

But you want to know the real reason I always played that song last before saying goodnight to everyone and walking out the door?

At eleven minutes and four seconds it was the longest song on the jukebox.

When you’re broke you want to get the biggest bang for your buck possible.

For someone who has never smoked pot and has never taken any type of illegal drug or opiate, I have a strange relationship with The Doors.

Growing up, I thought they were a bunch of weirdos, but I loved their music.

All the Classic Rock stations in RVA like XL102 would play them relentlessly and I could recognize “Light My Fire” and “Touch Me” within two notes on the radio. But I really loved “Break On Through.”

Every time you’d go into a Spencer’s or Sam Goodie’s there’d be a poster of Jim Morrison looking like Christ beckoning you towards him with the words “American Poet” printed beneath him.

My high school AP English teacher (who looked like Glenn Close and with whom I was in love) made us read Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and then we watched “Apocalypse Now!” in order to compare how the themes had transferred across mediums.

That was one of the most profound experiences of my life, to see the deep meaning and stunning beauty that both film and literature could contain, and the opening scene set to “The End” was every bit as shocking and horribly beautiful as one could imagine at that age.

I remember being 17 and lonely and not having a girlfriend and not knowing how to get one and driving my car out to my Dad’s office park in Innsbrook where I laid down the back seat, put “The Crystal Ship” on my knockoff Sony Walkman, and stared up at the stars wondering what I was going to do with my life.

Even as an adult, I played one Doors song so many times in my blue minivan when I was driving around Northern Virginia with my kids looking for some way to keep them occupied while their mother slept at home because she’d just finished working the night shift at the hospital that they would command me to play it whenever it rained.

“‘Riders On The Storm,’ Daddy! Play ‘Riders On The Storm!'”

I went through Fraternity Rush in the Autumn of 1990 and we had Initiation Week around January 1991.

One of the non-secret aspects of that experience was that for the entire week we had to take a vow of silence and not speak to anyone except during the initiation rituals, which were held in the evenings. We all had to live in the fraternity house, and I’m pretty sure they just threw a bunch of mattresses on the floor in the back room and we slept in sleeping bags.

It was very quiet back there and frankly after my school work was done it got to be a little boring.

All through that week when I was looking for something to do, I’d try to recite all of the words to “When The Music’s Over” in my head without making a mistake. If I made an error, I had to start over.

“Cancel my subscription to the resurrection
Send my credentials to the house of detention
I got some friends inside…”

Was a quite effective and enjoyable way of passing the time.

Even amidst the silence I found I still had music in my head.