I walked into the Mo Club hungry. Well, not so hungry— but in need of something—and a burger, grilled the old fashioned way, in the dive-looking bar seemed right.
It’s a friendly place if you are with friends. The kind of space that a group can gather in, balance on round bar stools, with the TV fixed on some sports channel, the music blaring so that one must shout or lean in real close to listen to your table mates. But walking in solo and female and over 60 at night is borderline uncomfortable. You don’t fit the usual crowd.
When it’s 9 PM and you’ve walked the streets on First Friday Art Walk with 37 degrees at your back, there comes a moment, after you’ve said goodnight to your vegetarian art buddy, when a burger sounds about right. The Mo Club is on a well-lit, main street in downtown Missoula, and you step in. It feels a little shady if historic, in need of a new coat of paint and a few less beer-advertising signs. I’m not sure if there are any dead animal mounts on the walls.
I first stepped into the club about 2014, with a group of seniors, alumnae of the University of Montana. It was a place revered, obviously, by those who had frequented it in their college days, circa 1970. I, who had attended the University as a rather older (non-traditional they called us) student in 2009, knew nothing of the place. It scared me when I walked by. I had it on my list of scary places not to be entered into whether full daylight or after dark, along with the Oxford.
But the middle-aged, middle-class-respectable oldsters convinced me of its value. Big burgers, adorned only with dill pickles on a toasted bun, with two cheese options. Shakes of several kinds. Beer of many kinds. A simple place really. Nothing fancy, but not very frightening. Four on a scale of ten, three maybe.
Tonight I went in solo. Ordered and paid for my burger without onions, Swiss cheese. $6.00. Took a seat at a high counter and checked my phone while the burger sizzled on the grill. Noticed a bearded man with a black ball cap, with a lettered logo sitting at the bar near the grill. I glanced at the TV. Checked my phone a few more times, looking busy. He looked different from the others.
When my burger arrived I added golden horseradish to my burger instead of spicy mustard, and coaxed out the last of the catsup from the near-empty red squeeze bottle. The horseradish was a mistake. It was not mustard, as I had thought, and it made me sneeze.
The man was slight in stature, his beard black and wiry, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, the most typical Montana apparel possible. I’m sure he had on boots. He looked worn-down and tired, his beer Heineken. He seemed to be waiting for someone, checking his duck-taped phone often, sipping from the green bottle. I noticed when he moved to a stool directly across from me. But we did not speak, as if an invisible barrier existed.
As I finished the burger he looked up. He asked me something, like how it wasn’t as crowded as usual tonight, it being the night before a football game and all. I said yea, I’d noticed. We agreed it was unusual.
His eyes jumped around the room a lot, and I worried whether he fit the profile of a terrorist— whether he was the sort who might come into a bar and shoot things up for no reason. It happens in this new America.
To keep the entire room safe I began asking him questions designed to draw out his story, his raison de etre, his reason for being solo in a student-type bar full of seniors on a Friday night in December.
“I was a journalist,” he said, “and a civil private investigator, worked for homeland security, and some other jobs, and I’m a writer,” he said, as if that would explain everything else. “And I wanted a beer or two,” he said. “I live now in Missoula.”
“I am a writer too,” I said, and we stared at each other.
Writers have a pattern of questioning other writers that is akin to the old 70s line, “What’s your sign?” Only we ask, “What’s your genre?” I expect it now and feel the common ground opening.
For the next hour we talked about genres, writers of particular short stories and longer books. We talked about O. Henry (pseudonym of William Sydney Porter), Hemmingway, Chekov, Solzhenitsyn, Orner, and Falkner; Southern writers, Puerto Rican writers, South American writers, and Montana writers. We talked about the way Montana writers portray the country, the situations, the characters, often leaving out women’s perspectives on work, love, sex, tribulations. We talked historical fiction, long-form poems, fiction vs. non-fiction to tell a compelling story and the value of each in certain situations. He told me he once had a beer with Hunter S. Thompson. I told him of the Hunter S. Thompson quote chiseled into the cement face of the front of the James Bar.
When we had exhausted ourselves with literary touchstones we folded. Shook hands. And walked out separately into the cold night.
Victor Rodriguez, this is why I love Missoula. Thank You.
The Missoula Club 139 W. Main Street Missoula, Montana phone: 406 728-3740
Hours: 7 AM-2AM Daily