The Red Lion

It was the winter of 64-65 that I started hanging out with what I then thought of as "beatniks" at the Red Lion Cafe and Bar (no relation to the hotel chain). This was during the dismal drought in Rock n' Roll before the Beatles and the Stones. I had just been dumped by my girl and had been kicked off the cross country team for smoking under the bleachers during a football game. Oh yes, I almost forgot, I'd also left home after a dispute with my dad; who had justifiably taken a belt to me for the last time. He rarely ever did that but it was an extreme circumstance as I had kept my little sister out on a double date past three in the morning.


The Red Lion bar was off-limits to most of us our age but the small and cozy cafe had a jukebox with Coltrain, Dizzy, Thelonious Monk and Brubeck on the jukebox. The only things served were onion rings and a thing they called Mexican Pillows... a square, deep-fried, donut-batter deal... and coffee.

I met a whole new group of friends at the Red Lion and we formed a clique of outsiders reading poetry by Ferlinghetti, Corso, Kerouac... anything beat... reading Howl out loud and outrageous! ...talking about the politics of beat art and artists...Jackson Pollack and UFO's... Krishnamurti and Alan Watts... talking about the mad ones... the crazy fuckers who had stepped out of button-down society and got with it... whatever it was.


The civil rights movement in the South had picked up and a group called the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee had formed support groups called "Friends of SNCC" for white folks... (Snick we called it). That was before the Black Power movement split off... leaving pacifism in the dust. We had all become active in Snick.. I remember walking around with signs in front of Woolworths for their lunch counter bias in the deep south.


These were exciting yet extreme times... Johnson hadn't yet made a 500,000 troop commitment in Vietnam but the Berkeley Free Speech movement would turn into the Vietnam Day Committee and that was the hot topic among us. We were part of an undercurrent that most of our society hardly knew existed before then... especially in Spokane Washington. It certainly wasn't posted in the Spokesman Review or the Spokane Daily Chronicle. A few G.I's from the Fairchild Airforce Base came in once in a while to pick up on the abundance of young hip chicks. We heard from them... they were interested only in impressing the chicks... about their colorful and sometimes exaggerated deployments.


 I fell madly, head over heels, in love for the first time with an artist, Linda B., during this period. We made love... for me it was really the first time I'd actually "made love". Previous sex was just that... sex yes, love no. I'm not sure what she was getting out of it but to me... Aaah... the sacrament of Mexican Pillows and black coffee... sweet tasting  to the back ground liturgy of music... of David Brubeck's Take Five on the jukebox... hiding out in the bushes in the snow when her folks came home from a ski trip early one time... Brave new world, here I come! What a fine introduction to manhood I'd experienced... thank ya Jesus!