003: Ogie's Trailer Park

Location: 1155 Westminster St. Hours: Monday-Thursday 4pm-1am | Friday 3pm-2am | Saturday 12pm-2am | Sunday 12pm-1am | BRUNCH Sat & Sun 12pm-4pm Date of Visit: May 16, 2024.

This is Ogie's Trailer Park.

You've lived in this neighborhood for years, several of them with Ophelia, and yet the first time you go is tonight, when she has just been laid off. She is shocked to learn that you've never been before, stopping dead on the sidewalk to stare at you. Viola despised the vibe at Ogie's. You can imagine, as the night wears on, that it could get loud, and unruly. But today it's a late spring Thursday where it's been pissing rain all day and finally stopped an hour before you left, so that when you walk there, the sun is shining.

You're buying, because she's having a day and you were laid off October of last year. On this particular visit, you're still out of work. You understand what it's like. You're not hurting, either of you, for money, having sold the house you bought together as your forever home just a couple of weeks after you'd been let go.

She was laid off mid-afternoon, because her job didn't have Fridays. She was probably getting paid less than she deserved, but you've always felt that. You remember, eight years ago now, when she was fired from her first proper job out of college, and she drove to your apartment and wept, and then sometime after that moved in permanently. You had to give her an ultimatum to find a real job and pay some of the bills. You didn't say you'd leave her; you couldn't bring yourself, back then, just a scant few months into that relationship, to say you'd leave her if she didn't. But you gave her a year, and then you'd have to have a real deep thought about your future.

Viola left in what you hear now as the echo of that situation. You were laid off a month into the relationship, and you became listless. Because of the house money, you're not destitute, but you can see how if you drew a line charting your course to where you were then, you'd keep dotting it towards ruin (you mention this to your grandmother one day, and then she rats you out to your mother, so now you've made at least two other people anxious from your own anxiety). Viola refused to give you an ultimatum, refused to ask you to change for her. Refused to contemplate another year, another month, with you. And to be honest, given how your relationship with Ophelia went, where it took you another four years to end it, which was probably four years too late, you don't know that you can blame her being unable to risk it.

She did what you couldn't.

At the time, you swung like a pendulum between believing that you could, a confidence underwritten by the desperation to keep the relationship alive, and believing that you never would, a pessimism reinforced by the fact you were watching the relationship die. That you could is knowledge gained only by doing.

So could Ophelia. She met your challenge. Not that she did it all that well, from your perspective; she got a bunch of jobs that also paid less than she was worth and were unlike her graphic design major at all (although, how often did you put your Creative Writing degree with its focus on nonfiction to paying work?) and one was a straight out fly-by-night operation to paint kitsch on glassware that stole wages. Employees who complained would get fired, and then the owners would simply poison their reputation to the other employees, and rope in a couple of new suckers. The RI Department of Labor got involved, but the owners pulled stakes and moved to a neighboring state, which is apparently the way the story often goes. Since leaving Ophelia, the only painted glassware you own is a shot glass with the letter A on it she made. Except you no longer have need of a shot glass.

But she did just enough, and so while you weren't exactly comfortable, you were able to move to a new apartment together, the one here in the West End you lived in with her, above your twin brother and his now-wife. One where you were able to buy a dog. And she set her own ultimatum, when you did move, that she wanted to get engaged within the year. And you did, though there was a brief detour taking care of her when she slipped a disc and needed surgery. Before she was diagnosed, you remember feeling helpless, unable to ease her pain, which had gone on for a month at that point, and knowing a trip to the emergency room was worthless, they'd just thrown aspirin at her after a four hour wait of misery. At one point you ended up putting her socks on her feet in the morning. The day you told her you wanted to end the relationship, she stared at you and said in a small voice, "but you're the one who put my socks on for me." All your love contained in an action you took because she needed help and couldn't do it on her own. Except for the way she looked at you when you looked up after, the smile and shine in her eyes, you don't remember feeling like those moments were special. You felt cruel, and heartless, then.

She's thriving without you, and to some extent because of you, because you did help her figure out how to run a household and manage her own life and take an equal partnership. But also because the two of you were wrong for each other. You can stay friends, you think, with someone you believe you are absolutely wrong for. And now, three years after the fact, she agrees with you, although she'd also reached that point three days after you'd told her you were ending things even if she hadn’t quite reconciled her heart to the idea that early. You were never right for each other. She enjoys being polyamorous, and for you it was always theoretical, just a thing that sounded like a fun idea when you were 26 and when you were 32 was just too much extra work to take on. Especially given how depressed you were throughout. 

In an idle moment, sitting there at Ogie's, you wonder if you hadn't been depressed with her, would you still be with her? Would you have kept on making that mistake? Leaving her felt like turning a page, like you were going to get happy. Your mother's first question upon telling her that your relationship was over was, "do you think you're making a mistake?" She'd ask it at least twice more. But leaving was never a mistake. Staying was. But you had no conception of how long it would take you to find happiness in the moment you left her. You'd make the trade now, having lived it, but if you hadn't lived it, would it have been worth it? Or would you have told yourself you were throwing your life away?

So here, tonight, you're paying for drinks and dinner. She gets a cocktail, and you order a non-alcoholic beer, and when you do, it seems like the bartender is disdainful of it, but it might just be that your social anxiety is wearing her face for a moment, that it means nothing to her and too much to you. It tells you the worst thoughts about yourself as though they were the truth, and with slight of hand puts them in the heads of strangers who have never even thought them.

You can see why Ophelia likes this place. To you, what you see is what you get—the place advertises itself as trailer park kitsch and it delivers, in bright blues and oranges and '60s modernist furniture. Right now, there's only a scant few couples inside and a few regulars standing outside and smoking.

To order food at Ogie's, you must go to Granny Boo's kitchen, further into the establishment, and whose charges show on your card as a completely different business. Administratively, you suppose it makes sense; if you could order from the bar, they'd have to bring it to you. But here, you go to the window, you get yourself a little table marker with a random state's license plate in miniature on it, and then they call the state when your order is ready.

Ophelia has chosen to go here specifically because they have a salad and because she likes their tater tots (which they serve instead of French fries). Struggling with weight has been a constant thing for her, and you've done your best to be supportive when she is dieting, supportive when she's not, and trying to not let it grind her down. You've always been beanpole thin, except for when you were depressed. When money got tight with Ophelia early on, you stopped buying two six packs every week and you shed so many pounds that her grandmother asked you if you were okay. You can't eat when you're heartbroken or anxious, your appetite goes away. So when Viola left you and you got sober, you ended up losing over 25 pounds. The depression diet, your psychiatrist calls it. Your GP doesn't even remark upon it.

You indulge yourself with a fried chicken sandwich, breaded in Doritos, apparently, and served with a red onion gastrique, which is to say sweet red onions that appear to have been halfway caramelized and then pickled. The Doritos present a peculiar texture; the crisp breading is slightly uneven, and once the stability of the bun has been sufficiently compromised by eating, the chicken with its attendant bacon glued on with cheese, slips out between the gastrique and the lettuce and tomato. You finish your chicken with a fork. It's the best part of the sandwich by far, which to you is how it should be. A show starring fried chicken should not have it stolen by some additional flavor. It should be like Ogie's: what you see is what you get.

You'll end up going to Ogie's twice more to knit, once with a whole group, and the week after just you and one other woman. It is a terrible time to knit, the summer, muggy. The people working wool quit early. You knit cotton, working on a blanket for your nephew you fail to finish in time for his birth, then slip home and return with your dog, who ingratiates herself with the knitting ladies better than you ever could. 

Ophelia chose Saga. You were looking for the perfect, flawless dog for your first dog, and Saga will always look mangy from where bacteria and fungi ate her fur away as she lay in tainted water in Hurricane Harvey until she was rescued. But Ophelia convinced you to look at her again, and then you met her, and she was perfect all the same. She's only more so now.

You tell Ophelia to do what you did in the wake of Viola's leaving: stay busy. Get hobbies. Push yourself to do the things you wanted to do but never make time for, because you have time now. You don't know if she hears you. It's nearly 7pm now, and Ogie's is filling up with a louder clientele. You pay the bill, and you leave, and the weather is still changeable. She goes to wherever she's going to go next, and you go home to Saga.

This is Ogie's.