Basura: Memories of the Embassy and Marge and Ott

“If I were going to do that, (keep a journal) I’d strap a video camera to my head. For me, memoir is an act of memory, and not an act of history. It’s remembered experience; it’s not lived experience. There are all kinds of theories about ways we remember, and I have no doubt that I have better long term memory than most people.

I wrote this book and gave it to all my friends. No one said, ‘That didn’t happen,” or, ‘that didn’t happen that way.’ People told me things I didn’t remember, or they augmented events, or told me how they felt, in ways that I had no way of knowing. But memoir is a corrupt form. Memory informs imaginations, and imagination informs memory. So when people ask me how I remember all this stuff, I always say, ‘Well, obviously, I don’t; I just think I do,’ which is true.” — Mary Karr, author of The Liar’s Club, and other well recent memoirs, in an interview by Terry Gross on PBS’s Fresh Air, and the collected transcripts of Fresh Air.

When I returned to Grand Valley State College, I was a 21-year-old sophomore. The one true (and repeatable) thing the recruiter had told me, after my freshman year, was that the GI Bill would cover tuition, room and board, books, and maybe a few dollars for beer money.  It did.

The Embassy sat west of the GV campus a few miles, on the north side of M-45.  The bar displayed a Christmas tree, decorated with lights. It was a permanent feature.  The tree, of course, did not live up to the name evergreen, and had lost all of its needles eons ago. But it made the place easy to find.

While still in the military, at Great Lakes Naval Hospital, I turned 21.  By April, I had gotten into Casual Company, enough recovered from my wounds to be ambulatory to increasing degrees. I wasn’t fit enough to return to duty yet, but no longer needed inpatient hospitalization. I found that it was a fairly easy hitchhike from Waukegan, Ill.,to Allendale, Mich., and the campus of GV. I had some old friends at the college, and had an interest in finding some new ones. 

Once, in May, my friend Steve and I hatched a plan where we could both go to the bar. Steve didn’t turn 21 until July. Steve had dark brown hair and blue eyes. We went to the Embassy together, but he waited outside when I went in and ordered a draft. I showed my military ID card. The owner, Ott as I came to know him, pulled a nice frothy cold beer from the tap and presented it to me. Great. It was delicious.

After ten minutes or so, in came Steve. He and I were totally slick, and gave no signs of knowing each other. He sat at the bar, but a couple stools over, and ordered a beer. Ott asked for his ID. Steve pulled out a driver’s license and presented it for inspection. Ott looked at for long moment, and then turned to his wife and co-owner, Marge, and said, “Marge, call the state police. We have a problem here.” Steve rose to his feet, as if he might vault the bar to retrieve the ID. Ott tossed it onto the bar, and said, “Get out of here. Don’t come back until you’re BOTH 21.”

We hadn’t thought that he’d actually look at the IDs. In July, we did go back, and were welcomed as if we were the good customers we quickly became. 

Ott and Marge did a lot of business with the college kids, and, at times, with some of the faculty.  They also had lots of locals, and Ott made it plain that whether you were college or local, you were completely welcome. Have a good time, he said, but if you want to raise hell, go somewhere else. 

One year the Campus Crusade for Christ mounted an evangelism effort to “Put the Christ Back in Christmas.” There were posters all over campus, it seemed like a sort of big thing for those who were into that sort of thing. It didn’t hold much appeal for me, though.   had nothing against holiday celebrations, and decided there should be something for those of us who weren’t on board with the whole religiosity thing.

It was the time of year that Ott and Marge took their annual few weeks in Florida. They closed the bar, and scheduled the re-opening of the Embassy Bar for Feb. 2. 

My friends and I put up posters all over GV urging folks to “Put The Hog Back in Groundhog’s Day.” The idea was to go to the Embassy for hot dogs and beers. The sign on the wall proclaimed

“The Best OTT Dogs in OTTawa County, by quite a MARGEin.”

People arrived early at the Embassy on Feb 2, and stayed late. Ott and Marge sold a lot of OTT dogs, and pulled a lot of draft beers. 

I suppose I should say that Ott always wanted to know exactly who the driver was. Whenever a group of young people sat at one of the big round tables, Ott would come over and ask, “Who is the driver?” Once he knew the answer, he would provide that person with soft drinks on the house for as long as the group stayed. He’d keep an eye on the driver; he was strict about the idea of designated driver before the term was in common use.   

For some reason, Ott kept an oddity, a biological specimen, behind the bar.  It was in a large glass jar, perhaps once having held peanut butter. In it, in formaldehyde, was a testicle from a bull. It was huge, as one might expect.  Upon request, he would pull it out from a low shelf behind the bar and place it on the bar to display.

As if this wasn’t weird enough, he would, after a few moments, he would spin the jar 180 degrees, to reveal that there was a smiling face carved into it. It was bizarre, worthy of Ripley’s. It was part of bringing someone new to The Embassy.

Most of the Grand Valley people were city folk, like me, and sometimes would exclaim something like, “Oh wow! A cow’s ball!” Short summaries of bovine anatomy would ensue, and I always wished I’d had the opportunity to show the specimen to my Dynamic Anatomy and Physiology professor, a great guy who would have loved it.

Eventually, Ott tired of pulling that thing out upon request, and he gave it to me. It sat in a place of honor on a board we used as a makeshift bookshelf atop a radiator at the bachelor apartment we had on Straight Street, that great street, in Old GR Town (where they do things they don’t do on Monroe). 

The Embassy wasn’t a static sort of bar. There was a pool table. There was a shuffleboard table. There was coin operated driving machine, suitable for an arcade, where players would be scored on how well they could use the steering wheel and other controls to drive along the screen display, dodging hazards and keeping on the road. You’d sit on an attached chair behind the steering wheel, foot on the accelerator, and drive, eyes on the screen, avoiding stuff in the road.  Echoes of the driving machine reverberated at a later date.  For the sake of new readers of TownBroadcast, a reprint from Basura archives is reprinted below.

There was a good juke box, which had the added attraction of a big (for the time) screen that would display videos, long before the time of MTV. The big favorite was something called “Coconuts,” which featured a very buxom woman reclining and swinging in a hammock. The hammock was loosely strung, perhaps, and seemed to afford little modesty for the lounging lady, who was dressed, sort of, in the bottom half of a bikini bathing costume.

The choice of sound track, peculiar, we thought, was Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence. While the future Mrs. Basura was a big fan of the driving game, I played a lot of pool. And it was underneath that very pool table that the aforementioned future Mrs. Basura and Marge, took shelter during a tornado warning. “C’mon, Emmy,” Marge said, “let’s get under the pool table where it’ll be safe.  I’ll bring a bottle.”

While the guys went about their manly business, the lady and the college girl crawled under the pool table, with beverages and much laughter.

Ott and Marge were like grandparents to us all. As Ott tried to keep us safe (from ourselves) with his unwavering insistence on a sober driver, Marge had tried to keep a young college girl safe from the whims of nature. That much she could do.  She did it with a smile, and the two of them giggled and laughed from under the pool table until the warning was lifted.  

 (From the “Basura” archives of TownBroadcast)

Road Guts

(Back in the Stoned Age)

A friend from Arizona forwarded an article about a strange happening.  People had found what appeared to me some sort of meat on the ground.  University biology professors were enlisted to try to determine more about it.

After a couple of odd theories had been rejected, the profs decided that the explanation appeared to relate to behavioral aspects of vultures (both turkey vultures and black vultures).  Vultures are known to sometimes fly as high as 37,000 to 40,000 feet (jetliners cruise at around 35,000 feet).

Unlike raptors, vultures sometimes fly in groups of 100 or more. They also sometimes vomit spontaneously, and may do so as a group. This is observed when a predator approaches feeding vultures, and they empty the contents of their stomachs, in an apparent maneuver to lighten their body weight to facilitate a quick takeoff. It is known that this occurs during flight, as well, for reasons that are not understood.

These tendencies seemed to explain the mysterious meat on the ground.  I thought it interesting, and it reminded me of a particular afternoon back during college days – one that had nothing to do with birds.

In 1968, as a 21-year-old sophomore at Grand Valley State, three of us headed to the Embassy Bar for a cool one on a hot afternoon. I drove, and Mary Ellen (girlfriend then, wife now) and I were joined by JV.

As we rattled our way down a gravel road at 40 miles an hour, JV impressed us by rolling a perfect joint. We smoked his quite excellent marijuana, finishing it as we pulled into the parking lot of the Embassy.

We had a beer or two, maybe a hot dog, and then left to return to campus.   We were still very high from the weed, although my driving was not in any way impaired (at least by our standards of the time). 

We returned by way of M-45, a paved road with a speed limit of 55 mph.  Suddenly we came to a huge pair of lungs in the road. I swerved around the lungs. A little further down there was a big trachea. Again, I took evasive action. As we proceeded, there were more guts. Including guts; there were intestines in the road.

We dodged one messy pile of wet meat after another, and wondered if we were hallucinating. There was enough of this stuff to make me wonder if it would be slippery enough to make the Merury (a Mercury with a damaged name plate) skid if I drove through it. There was no other traffic, so swerving around it was easy.  

Eventually, we overtook a slow moving stake truck. The back tailgate was swinging open, hanging from one shaky looking hinge. The truck had been loaded with offal from a slaughterhouse, and was being transported somewhere else for disposal. Awful offal. The truck, as we passed it, had a logo on the side of a slaughterhouse. Inside the cab was a young man, tapping the steering wheel with one hand, and singing along to the music that blasted from the radio. Perhaps he was high too.  It was, after all, 1968. 

The next year I took a biology course named Dynamic Anatomy & Physiology. The professor started the class by telling us how fortunate we were to be in a rural setting. “There’s a slaughterhouse nearby,” he said, “and we’ll be able to obtain lots of specimens for dissection.”