A couple of years after we graduated from high school, I was laying around up in my small apartment on a Sunday afternoon. I can’t recall for sure, but I was probably recovering from a party when I heard a couple of rocks hit the small window facing the back parking lot. Looking out, I saw Al Powell and Joel Conner standing down there holding up beer cans and waving me down. Phones were optional back then, you pretty much had to be ready for anything at any time.
I stuck my head out the window and yelled hello down there. Honestly, the beer did not sound so good at that moment.
“C’mon with us!” Al yelled back up, nodding to one of the little old ladies that also lived in the apartment house, which was downtown, across from the old phone company building. “Daddy’s got a new Mercedes he wants to show us.”
“Huh?” Big Red Powell, as most of you know, was a larger than life man who was always doing something of that sort. He had owned and lost a few restaurants by that time, having just recently closed the doors to “Big Red’s Pizza” housed in the old Gaston Mall and where during high school we all swarmed to after ball games and generally used as a spot to mingle with everyone else, both Ashbrook and Huss high’s were usually represented well, often with a scuffle or two out in the parking lot. That Big Red had actually gone out and bought a Mercedes was not much of a shock.
I downed a couple more aspirin and went on down there, jumping in the back seat of Al’s old ’67 Plymouth: a tank of a car that had to be over twenty feet long and nearly as wide as the average highway lane in those days. “What’s going on again?”
“It’s daddy. He said he’s bought him a new one,” Al told me as we pulled out and headed down New Hope Road.
“Where’s it at?” I asked.
“Down at the river,” Joel and Al both said.
I wondered why it was not over at the house in the old neighborhood, but shrugged and worked on pushing my headache away as we drove down there.
In those days, Lake Wylie didn’t have much to offer in the way of commercial development. At the bridge of course, were a couple of well known restaurants we were all familiar with, but little else was there, save for weeds and woods and gravel drives that led off toward the little cabins and houses that many people we knew owned and kept around the lake.
We pulled into the parking lot of one old place that had been there for years: a dilapidated bait and tackle shop, in which the last owner had evidently lived in the back of. It was all plywood and peeling paint, but there were a couple of contractor’s pick up trucks parked in front along side Big Red’s Pontiac Bonneville. “Where’s the Mercedes?” I said as Al opened his door.
“This is it,” he told both of us.
“What are you talking about?”
“You remember how daddy always said he was gonna open a joint down here at the river?” Al reminded us. We both nodded; it was an oft told story that we’d heard so much over the years that we had written it off as just talk.
Then I recalled something Big Red had mentioned: “He said he was gonna call it ‘The River Rat’?”
“That’s the one!” Al said slamming his door and walking up the rickety ramp that led in the front door.
Joel and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows, then got out and followed Al in.
Red was behind a makeshift bar with a draft beer in his hand. He had his teeth out and was grinning at us when we came inside. “You boys get you a beer and a hammer!”
There were a couple of small handled sledges sitting on the counter top. The top had just been installed and the rest of the bar was still being constructed around where Red stood. “What do you boys think of it?”
“You’re really gonna do it, Red?” We said as we drew a draft. My head ache was forgotten by then.
He nodded and pointed at the back of the place where a maze of old walls stood. “I need them walls punched out back yonder,” Red said, looking at Joel, who grinned, picked up a hammer and nodded. I started to grab a hammer too but Al stopped me, holding out a black marker.
“We need you to do something else, Scotty.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
Red pushed a sheet of paper over to me and I looked at it. There was a design on it: a large cartoon rat, sitting in a bathtub equipped with an outboard motor. The rat wore a grin and was holding a beer. “Think you can draw that on the bar for me?”
I nodded. “Sure, you want it just like it is on the paper?”
“I’d kinda like it if you could put a ski rope on the back and another rat back there skiing.”
“I can do that.”
“Good boy,” Red said. “Get to it then.”
While Joel and Al knocked down walls in the back, I sat there and drew that cartoon, one that hundreds of you have sat in front of and had drinks or smoked over. Once I was done, the guys building the bar went to work with polyurethane, coating the drawing over until it was under a quarter inch thick varnish.
I did not sign it, because it was not my original design, although the skier in the back and the rope were all mine.
A few months later, Al called me and asked if I wanted to learn how to tend bar. Red had obtained the liquor license and they hired a woman to come in and train. I was in between pretty much everything at that time, so I jumped in with both feet.
For two of the best years of my life, I worked the weekends at the old Rat and got to know so many people that the faces now all seem to jump out of my memory. When Al bought Mama C’s old trailer on the river, I used to spend the weekends down there partying. He bought a boat, eventually, and I painted the logo on the back of that, and we would spend all the money we earned in tips running around on the river on Mondays, the day when everything else was closed.
Yesterday, I got word that the institution we have all known as the River Rat is closing its doors for the last time. Who can help getting nostalgic hearing that, and having been part of it from the beginning?
I never became as familiar with the New Rat. We’ve been there a few times over the years, but time and distance have kept me out of there more than I would have wished. Several of my old friends go there often; even just recently I saw facebook pix of many of the old gang hanging out at the bar.
Age comes with the passing of things and, sadly friends.
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