Daves' Delicatessen no longer exists. That is a crime and a crying shame. I've heard that Dave and Shirley started up another place after the Blue Mouse Block was torn down, but that happened after I'd moved away.
At the time I'm talking about, Daves' Deli was located on 3rd and Morrison, down in the seedy numbers of downtown Portland, Oregon, three blocks up from the Willamette river. On the one hand it was just down the street from the hippie-lefty Looking Glass Bookstore, which was cool. Unfortunately it also happened to be right around the corner from the Blue Mouse Theater*, notorious at that time for playing triple-X movies. (Incidentally this place had the single coolest sign* I have ever seen or will ever see period... a long vertical strip of neon and painted tin, blue on blue, reading
B
L
U
E
M
O
U
S
E
with small, villainous-looking mice that scampered and flickered all around the margins from the time the sun went down until 5 am. By God, I would pay money to see that sign again. It lit my way home from many a party out where I had no business being.)
Anyway. Daves'.
Daves' was on a dogleg, open on the 3rd Street side to the barroom, making a right angle behind the pawn shop and exiting onto Morrison through the cafeteria.
The bar was called The Ranch Room...wagon wheel lights, longhorn mounts, heavy on the rustic, sticky on the upholstery. All the stewbums that could stagger up from Burnside that far sat in the booths and eyeballed the perverts waiting for the matinee to start next door while both parties drank and smoked like chimneys.
On the Morrison street side the door opened between two big windows with a gold star of David painted on on each one, one side saying 'Daves' Delicatessen' in Hebrew, the other in English. Daves' wife had a whole garden full of plants in each window, all of them struggling along in the pale rainy light and the steamy, cigarette- flavored air. Stacks of rumpled Nickel ads were crammed between the pots.
During the morning and early afternoon the old people claimed the seats just inside the Morrison street windows so they could see to read the paper. Later in the afternoon when I rolled in they were usually long gone and I would snag the booth and pore over the left-behind Yiddish newspapers, which might as well have been in Chinese for all I knew. I got the biggest kick out of seeing things like Lampheres Furniture or Tom Pedersons' Ford ads in Hebrew.
The place was one long line from the 3rd street door: coat rack, cigarette machine and small table to the left where the help would break, and then the line. Next came three little two-tops running center, and across the aisle booths lining the far wall all the way down to the cash register. Anemic pothos and variegated spider plants garlanded with fuzzy brown cobwebs swung high overhead, and old rope encircled pictures of cowboy brands decorated the walls up into the gloom.
For the entire time I went there the steam line was the domain of a small and very gay gentleman in countermans' whites, bald as an egg, who ran up and down up and down all day long like a parrot in a cage, never missing a customer, never spilling a drop. This guy had panache. He moved like Fred Astaire and he talked a running line of b.s. like a vaudeville sidekick.
When Dave ran the kitchen and his wife Shirley ran the till the jokes and commentary were non-stop. A lot of what was said back and forth between the kitchen, the register and the steam line got huge laughs from the regular clientele, and it's only now that I look back on it that I realize that there was some was pretty racy stuff flying back and forth across the dining room. Sometimes it all lapsed into Yiddish, and the altercockers* up by the door liked that a lot. Half the time you walked in the whole place would be a riot of laughter...Shirley whooping and leaning on the cash register, some old guy next to the door smacking himself on the leg with his Yiddish version of the Oregonian and about ready to have a heart attack, he was laughing so hard.
They called me 'sweetheart'. Everyone did.
I used to have dinner there when I was feeling low. It helped that the place was on my bus route, a half a block down from the open air market where I transferred onto the #30.
I had hot potato knishes with brown gravy, green beans, matzoh ball soup, corn with pimentos and peas, and a Dr. Browns soda. There is nothing nicer on a rainy evening than a hot potato knish. (It was a big ball of mashed potato, browned on the outside, with some yummy meatloaf inside and brown gravy over top of it. It was one of those foods that you were so greedy for and grateful to eat when it arrived that it was gone before you could figure out what was in it, or I'd be making it to this day. Ak, I could kick myself!) I'd eat huge huge bagels with cream cheese piled on so thick it was ridiculous. I had Reuben sandwiches and corned beef on rye and fondant-dusted Monte Christos (oh Heaven!) with a big ol honkin slice of dill pickle laying next to it, half-in the cole slaw. I had matzoh ball soup here for the first time, and lingered so long nipping tiny pieces off the sunny matzoh balls trying to make it last that I missed my bus. I wish I'd had the noodle kugel. The counterman was always trying to get me to try it, but back then I though it was too noodley looking. Same with the borscht; too purple. I know; I'm a doof.
I seem to remember this place best in association with the Rocky Horror Picture show**. The first time I ever heard about it, I was sitting there eating a corned beef sandwich with Sonnyboy.
In the evening after work I would sit there in the front booth and watch the people rush back and forth outside with their umbrellas. The warm room was as long and narrow as a freight car, the light shady amber from the nicotened fixtures. I'd puzzle over my Yiddish newspaper and look out through the steamy windows and watch the rain come down. The evening would fall and the lights would come on. The steam would run down the windows and the traffic lights would change red to green through the little rivers of water, and in the background the cups and bowls clattered and the coffee poured and good smells rose from the line. Shirley would wander by and put her hand on my shoulder in passing and smile at me, and move on. Dave would sit with the counterman at the break table and smoke, greeting people as they came in. I would drink my soda and wipe up the gravy with a piece of bread, and feel like I belonged someplace.
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*I seem to remember this place briefly being called 'Victor' before it became The Blue Mouse. Am I high? Anyone know? This had to have been around 1965 or so. Here's a link:
http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/portland_theaters.html
...Scroll to the very last picture on this page. Daves Delicatessen was on the right, where the sign above the window says 'sundries'. The entrance to the Ranch Room was to the left, right next to the theatres' loggia, under the sign that says 'toiletries'. When I knew the place, the space in the corner with the pillar in the entry was a pawn shop.
You can't see the dancing mousies in this picture. They were picked out in neon tubing and were suspended by the metal framework you can make out surrounding the sign.
-Well, I care.
**I don't know if I've got the spelling right, and I don't know if that means something off color or not either, but thats my recollection of the phrase.
***Here's another mammary:
...fine; it's a building.
This is the place where (I used to stand in the freezing rain at 12:30 pm to see Tim Curry look better than me in makeup) I used to go and see the Rocky Horror Picture Show! Six times! God! Think of the toast!
