Happy Thanksgiving, Ray Davis.

Ok, I know. But this is a *real* entry. Not a lame list to buy time until I feel put together enough to write. No promises or commitments about future writing or story sharing, but for today it will be like old times with adventures.

So, Thanksgiving. Awesome.

Ferris, Pookie and I have a Thanksgiving tradition. I guess the more accurate way to say that would be to say that this year we did something for the second year in a row, and thus proclaimed it a tradition. Next year I will probably flake and go to San Francisco for Thanksgiving, thereby ruining a new found tradition. But you never know. Anyway, the adventure really begins last year on Thanksgiving Day.

My family can be quite overpowering with the "you WILL feel the holiday love" stuff. Often, if you spend an entire day of holiday with my family, sometime in the evening you begin to get the itch to get out and get some space. Just a little breathing room out from underneath the blanket of holiday-ness. Obviously by this I mean "you want to be in a bar with a beer." So, last year, as the evening moved on, Ferris, Honeydunce, Pookie and I went out to find a bar.

We were surprised -- no, given that we're in borderland Appalachia, we were SHOCKED -- that there didn't seem to be any bars open on Thanksgiving evening. Finally, after about 45 minutes of driving, we found a bar that had blessedly left its doors open to stragglers on Thanksgiving. The Myford Hotel in Charleroi, PA.

Charleroi used to be called the "Magic City" back in the days of the operating steel mills. Now, it's referred to as the "Tragic City." That clever play on words should tell you everything you need to know, but I'll lay it out for you anyway: most of "downtown" has boarded up windows, the population is largely over the age of 80 and you seriously fear for those people over the age of 80 because the other portion of the population is largely very desperate youth who would steal from senior citizens, there are very few jobs available, but you can see underneath all of this that once this was an American Dream town. It's very sad.

The Myford Hotel is the kind of hotel where heroin junkies and crackheads go to die. On Thanksgiving, it's where heroin junkies and crackheads go to die and a few random locals go without realizing that it's where heroin junkies and crackheads go to die. There are three signs hanging behind the bar in the Myford Hotel.

The first sign is a list of people who are not to be served. Last year when we went in, we mocked that "Skippy Y." was on the list - no last name, but we're sure everybody in town knows who "Skippy Y." is. The list was rewritten in clear Sharpee marker this year. "Skippy Y." is still banned from the Myford Hotel. So are about 17 other people, including an apparent husband and wife duo.

The second sign tells you clearly: LAST CALL: 1:45AM. DOORS SHUT: 2:15AM. I promise you they are NOT playing with shoving your drunken ass onto Fallowfield Avenue at 2:15am. This is because the bartenders are two women in their fifties who wear sweatpants and Steelers sweatshirts to work (probably every night) and, despite their proximity to being able to claim Social Security and winter hibernation fat, they could TAKE YOU DOWN.

The third signs is as follows: ABSOLUTELY NO drugs on premises. (Dealing or Using).

So to be clear, it's not just that you can't get high in there. You are also not supposed to come in there and deal. Not every bar makes that distinction, I guess.

Our first year celebrating Thanksgiving night at the Myford had left a warm feeling in our hearts, so we decided to go back this year. Ok, a big part of that was needing a break from home. But it was a planned venture to go back. That officially makes it tradition.

The first thing we notice upon entering the Myford is that "Skippy Y." is *still* banned. The second thing that happens is that the battle axe behind the bar cards us and then tells us we look like we never age. To be fair, we don't look that young, but in the Tragic City, in the Myford Hotel, age comes quickly to the residents.

Then the battle axe behind the bar looks at us and says, "You were here last year on Thanksgiving. You had pizza. There was a person from Ohio with you, too." THIS IS ALMOST TRUE. We don't think we had pizza, though the memory is hazy. But we were there, and Honeydunce was with us, and she is from Ohio. This is not so much that we are so awesome that we are memorable for the better part of the year. This is more that we're pretty sure that the same twenty people drink in the Myford Hotel every night. You'd remember the outsiders. That makes us the outsiders.

There are pretty much two drink choices in the Myford Hotel: Iron City (or IC Light) and Old Milwaukee. We take the lesser of the two evils with the Old Milwaukee. I drink about two sips through the entire night. Nothing will help in your effort to not drink faster than having to drink Old Milwaukee. I do smoke though, because that's what you do there. We spend the first half of the night being happy about the jukebox. It has the complete Motley Crue catalog. Also Soul Asylum, Aerosmith, Skynard and lots of Alman Brothers. In an effort to be funny, as Pookie heads over to the jukebox for the first time I yell across the bar, "See if there's any Lady Gaga." Ferris hides his head in his hands. The battle axe behind the bar stares me down.

As a side note, I had forgotten how awesome "Girl, Don't Go Away Mad. Girl Just Go Away." is a lyric.

Anyway, the night passes fairly uneventfully for the first hour or two as we play our "my three jukebox selections are better than yours" game. And then Ray Davis comes to join us.

Ray Davis has not done drugs for the last year and a half and is working the program. Maybe. Ray Davis is six feet four inches of solid muscle in a torn flannel shirt, a goofy floppy hat, ripped jeans and work boots. Ray Davis has lost most of his front teeth, but that's because before he didn't do drugs for a year and a half (maybe), he did do them for fourteen years. He did them all. Crack, cocaine, heroin, pills, weed. Ray Davis loves Jacksonville, Florida. He loves music, roofing and (probably) his two sons. Mostly, Ray Davis loves to tell you his stories. And if you are a person like me, or like Pookie, or like Ferris, who likes to collect people and their stories, then Ray Davis is a man you love.

Because Ray Davis has lots of stories.

Ray Davis wants to tell you about how he builds roofs for a living. He loves roofing. He can talk for fifteen minutes about shingles and lining them up and making them perfect. He knows his roofing. If Ray Davis really hasn't done drugs for the last year and a half, he may be filling his empty hole with roofing. Ray Davis ends his fifteen minute sermon about the perfect feeling of creating a perfectly aligned roof by looking at me and saying this: "I don't want to disrespect you because you're a lady and all, so I'm not going to say this. Nah, I'll just say it once, but just once. When I hold a nail gun, I get a woody. It's about the power, you know? Like, for you it would be like if you were riding on the back of a motorcycle, you know how the vibrations get to you? Yeah, but I don't want to disrespect you, but..." (and here, Ray Davis looks up into space, presumably thinking about the feel of a nail gun in his hands, and there is a moment of awkwardness.)

(Just, also, for the record, I have ridden on the back of many motorcycles --depending on who's reading right now, possibly even yours -- and that has never been my reaction. Except for once, and that had nothing to do with the bike but instead with the adrenaline-dosed fear of death when we ran through not one but TWO red lights in North Beach during rush hour).

Ray Davis also has a story about his birth. We've rehashed it a couple of times, but we're still not sure we understand it. It includes all of the following components in some way:
- Ray Davis has a twin sister, yet she is not mentioned directly in the story of his birth
- Ray Davis' mother may or may not have known she was pregnant. There's discussion of that TLC show "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant," but we're not really sure that's what he was trying to tell us.
- Ray Davis' mom is a huge woman (Ray Davis would tell you 340 pounds, but that may be an exaggeration) and has an equally large sister.
- Ray Davis' mom drank liquor while actually giving birth.

From there, you can piece some kind of story together. It will probably be similar to what we pieced together.

Ray Davis has a story about how when he was a child, social services tried to take him away from his unfit mother, but his mother was sleeping with the sheriff and so instead the sheriff adopted all of the children. The sad part of me thinks that that story is most likely a bad memory covered up with a fantasy memory until the fantasy memory becomes the story.

Ray Davis left Jacksonville, Florida and came back to the Tragic City because he has two sons in high school. One is a basketball player. One is a ladies' man. And the sad part of me wonders if they don't wish he were still in Jacksonville. Because he has been off drugs for a year and a half (maybe).

Ray Davis did heroin with his sister for a year. She is dying of AIDS. Not from the heroin, but from some guy she slept with. The sad part of me deduces the statistical likelihood that Ray Davis is wrong about how she caught it.

Once, Ray Davis was buying some crack cocaine in Jacksonville. To prove he wasn't a cop, he had to strip naked and wear a blindfold to the place where he was buying crack. He did this seven times before they let him come in clothed and without a blindfold. The logical part of me wonders, "Seven times? At what point after the first time would most people say 'Getting naked and blindfolded to go into a drug den is fucked up and dangerous. There are easier ways to get some rock.'"

Ray Davis smiles a big stubby smile when he talks about music. He went to see Nickleback and Daughtry last summer. He sings for us. The part of me that hopes hopes that Ray Davis really was clean for a year and a half when he went to see that concert and really did smile like that because the music made him happy.

When you ask Ray Davis what drug, of all the drugs he's ever done, messes you up the most, he doesn't even hesitate. "Crack Cocaine." I'm surprised when he says this, because we all know that I think heroin is the devil's breast milk and even thinking about what it's done to people I loved makes me want to fold myself in half and pack myself away. But Ray Davis says that I'm wrong. "Heroin addicts are just sick. They can go to a methadone clinic and get right if they want. Crack cocaine though, that'll make you do crazy shit to get it. A woman will sell her body. A man will do crazy things. It doesn't just mess up the person, it messes up everything." Ray Davis is probably right.

As the night wraps up, Ray Davis starts to tell us about who at the bar is and isn't a drug user. "See that woman, third one from the end? She's got a crack problem. She's trying to score right now. Half an hour from now, they'll all be down in the alley behind here getting rock" And even as he says that, she picks up her ringing cell phone and loudly proclaims to the party on the other end "I NEED you!"

It's not very long after that that something about the vibe in that bar changes. It's like you can feel that it's about to get to a level that you don't want to be there for. Even without the Ray Davis play-by-play breakdown of who was a hooker, a pimp, a user and a dealer, you could feel the shift in the way people talked and acted. It was no longer going to be okay to be the outsider in that bar. After 11pm on Thanksgiving, pretty little white children who had homes and turkeys and parents and holiday lights to go home to should go home to those things. The people who were in that bar didn't need to be reminded that we were there by choices -- as a break -- because that would only serve to remind them that they weren't there by choice.

And that's the Thanksgiving lesson, right? Maybe a year ago I would have said that what I was supposed to be walking out of there being thankful for was that I would never end up like the people in that bar. But I've spent part of this year learning that it doesn't take much of a turn of a screw for things to be as you never thought that they would be, so I won't say never. But I understand what we're supposed to be thankful for now: we're supposed to be thankful for the fact that we're in that bar where heroin junkies and crackheads go to die by choice. For a lot of the people in there, that wasn't a choice. That was where they had to be because there wasn't anywhere else. For us, we were taking a break because the people in our home love us too much for us to be around it all the time for an entire day. That's what we're supposed to be thankful for.

Ray Davis hit us up for beer money before we left. For what we got out of those stories, it was worth the price of and Old Milwaukee.

Happy Thanksgiving.