The Green Lantern
December 2nd, 2009
Somewhere on Hwy 109 between Ocean Shores and Pacific Beach is this side-of-the-road tavern called the Green Lantern. From what I hear, the G.L. has been around since the 1920’s and it’s been serving up your average American breakfast and your basic beers and burgers combo ever since. Inside there is a pool table, soft-tip darts, shuffle board and oodles Anheuser Busch posters that say things like, “Hunters Welcome.”
I first came across the Green Lantern, when my good friends Betsy & Kim invited me to their beach cabin for a couple of days of kicking the sand around. On the morning of our departure, they insisted on taking me to eat breakfast at the G.L. – where they said they had a “special surprise” for me. As a former resident of the Oregon coast, I noticed nothing different about the joint – it looked exactly how all the other small coastal taverns look. For a second, I thought they brought me there for a little piece of hometown nostalgia. Oh so naive.
As we were waiting for our breakfast, B&K encouraged me to go check out the bathroom. Not knowing what to expect (mounted deer head in the stalls?), I headed in there with some trepidation. I slowly creaked open the door but saw nothing but a normal dingy bar bathroom. But as soon as I closed the door behind me, smack dab in the middle of the wall was a large poster of an “almost naked” man. And when I say “almost naked” I actually mean that he was completely naked, except for the wooden ivy leaf (on a hinge) over his full monty.
Now all of us come to some big crossroads in our life – a Robert Frost moment where the road diverges and we must choose, “Do I look under the leaf?” “Do I leave it alone and walk out the door?” What good could come from this? I doubt that the answer to the universe is hidden under there and hell, I’ve seen a penis before. But there I stood, feeling sick and inconsolable about what to do. It was as if my life would be over if I didn’t get to see what lay hidden behind that leaf.
So with hands trembling and despite my better judgment, I reached for the tip of the leaf to see if I could sneak a peek under it. No luck, I couldn’t see a thing. It was beginning to be clear that this decision would have to be big. Confident. Either I was going to go all the way or I needed to pack up and go home.
Not one to be labeled a wuss, I firmly took hold of the leaf and with one fail swoop, I lifted it up. Then heard a loud, “BUR-R-R-I-N-N-G-G!! BUR-R-R-I-N-N-G-G!! BUR-R-R-I-N-N-G-G!!”
And then an eruption of laughter outside the bathroom door.
Apparently this was an old tavern trick that all the locals know about already. When you lift the leaf, it basically triggers a loud door bell throughout the tavern. SO EVERYONE CAN KNOW THAT YOU WERE THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO LOOKS UNDER LEAVES IN ORDER TO SEE A PICTURE OF A PENIS. PERVERT! PERVERT!
And to add insult to injury, you then get to walk out the bathroom door, into the dining hall and SEE EVERYONE LAUGH AT YOU.
Yep.
And after all that – I don’t even fucking remember was actually under the leaf.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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