I was already twenty dollars down, sitting across from a blackjack dealer named Bea. Bea had grey, permed hair, wore a vest and a bow tie, and spoke like a westerner who had worked her whole life; deliberately and with a drawl. Bea was telling us stories about the old days, how she used work down in Vegas in the 1960s when change falling out of slot machines used to echo up and down the strip. Bea used to party, I could tell. She probably spent some time playing craps with Frank Sinatra, maybe with Dino looking on. I’d like to think she did, and if she told me she had, I would have believed her.
But what I couldn’t believe was that I was in Winnemucca, Nevada, closer to the middle of nowhere than I had ever been in my entire life, and I was actually having a spectacular time.
Earlier that day I had almost given up hope that Winnemucca even existed. Hurtling down that lonesome road at 95 miles an hour, I was regretting the idea I had concocted at 3 a.m. the night before. I hadn’t seen another soul in over 2 hours and I was certain my chariot, the 1996 Nissan Maxima was about to collapse and I was going to die of dehydration, my last hour spent watching buzzards circling my body. I was sure Winnemucca was a mirage, created to lure unsuspecting Oregonians into the desert to feed the wildlife. And the desert is truly isolating, harsh with grandeur and loneliness.
But life prevailed in the desert and the neon lights of Winnemucca appeared, flashing enticements up and down the strip. After the desert, Winnemucca was an oasis of culture; casinos, dive bars, cowboys strolling the street, and Basque restaurants. I stopped in at Ormachea’s, a homely Basque restaurant adorned with kitschy prints my grandmother hangs in her house and a wood-paneled wall singed with local ranch brands. While waiting for our table, we sat at the bar and got some drinks. Winnemucca bartenders do not mess around. Let’s just say a drink that tall and strong for that cheap a price ($3) has never been poured in Bend. The Basques definitely know how to make some food and they know how to make a whole ton of it. I ordered lamb, and out came an entire half of a lamb, accompanied with an enormous plate of French fries, and bowls of beans and rice, and being the proud American I am, I went to town on all the food, not to be defeated.
After this, with bellies full of seasoned lamb and pitchers of cheap wine, we stumbled into the neon soaked nightlife of Winnemucca. After trying a couple of different places, we wound up in a slender dive called Cheers. Despite its name, Kelsey Grammer was fortunately nowhere to be seen and the bar was populated with a good mix of older and young working class people who were all unwinding after a long week. The drinks were even cheaper and stronger here (50 cent PBR bottles and $2.50 well drinks) and I started plugging quarters into their jukebox, possibly the first patron that night who didn’t play a Zeppelin or Stones song. I soon began to network with the bar’s patrons. I turned to my right, and found a lady about 40 with flushed cheeks and tobacco stained teeth, who had just come off work at the casino, and we had a good conversation about the Who and how I look like her son. I then spent a long time talking to an employee of the Bureau of Land Management about local grazing issues. I had no idea the sort of work and effort that went into awarding grazing rights to various interests. Interesting stuff, or at least interesting at 1:30 a.m. after a near mauling from a marauding cougar.
I then went to a casino, Winner’s. Nobody is a winner at Winner’s. I lost a little money at black jack and I almost stormed out when they didn’t have any PBR. But then I met Bea and learned what it meant to party Winnemucca style. Bea doesn’t mess around, and she knows how to party, or at least did know how to party circa 1962, continually sliding drinks in front of me and winking at me when I win. But I realized the only reason Bea was being nice to me, was because she wanted to ply me with drinks and steal my money and I was going nowhere with her matronly looking face. So I left Winner’s, with the sun gathering a haze in the east, and stumbled along, craving corn beef hash and every egg the town had.
