“He didn’t want to waste time with people who had enough money to take a vacation anywhere in the country they wanted and then came to a hotel without a bar and spent their time sitting on the porch in rocking chairs.”
— ERNEST HEMINGWAY, “THE LAST GOOD COUNTRY”
“I’ve died four times. Never give up.”
— KIRK, noted resident of the PINEHURST INN
I’d like to begin this broadcast with a shoutout to Jameson Draper, who emailed me this time last year to recommend a place he called “the quintessential Northern Michigan town.” The town of Indian River (pop. 2,210) sits along a river of the same name, connecting a pair of inland lakes chock-full of trout, perch, walleye, and a state-record sum of sturgeon. And that was all well and good, but what grabbed me was the next part: “Have a pizza and a Labatt at the Pinehurst Inn, but be weary of whatever ‘coke’ the bikers that live in the corners give you. The owner cosplays an unintelligible Elvis; he goes by ‘Alvis.’ I’m pretty sure the second floor is a halfway house.”
It strikes me as perfectly reasonable—obligatory, even, from a journalistic standpoint, through which I am so wont to launder my addiction to carousing—to drive six hours just to visit some weird bar. And with some research, it was clear that the Pinehurst was indeed vibrating on a whole different frequency. “There are dive bars so densely packed with visual, historical, rational, and emotional stimuli that boiling the experience down to a few paragraphs feels impossible. Pinehurst Inn Bar & Grill in Indian River, Michigan fits every bit of that description,” wrote a review on Scoundrel’s Field Guide, a trusty compendium of great American dive bars. “It’s a pizza place, it’s a hotel, it’s a boat dock, it’s a dive bar, it’s a dance floor, it’s small town, it’s ramshackle, it’s so many things that it’s tempting to stop writing because words won’t do the place justice.”
Alvis had owned the joint since sometime in the ‘80s—a former inn (a rather nice one, from the looks of the old postcards) along the banks of Indian River, which he’d barely renovated but to paint the walls a lurid crimson and replace the hardwood floor with red-and-black checkerboard tiles. He’d lived upstairs since then, too, descending on Friday and Saturday evenings in an Elvis suit that would later be described to me as “piss-stained” to perform a set of cover songs described as “Elvis, kinda.” He was not the dead-cool Elvis of the ‘68 Comeback Special, but the pill-bloated Superman of the late Las Vegas years, during which he performed “as the transcendental Sun King that Ralph Waldo Emerson only dreamed about,” pantomiming nightly the fact of his own existence. (The quote is from Greil Marcus in Mystery Train, the best book ever written about American music.)
I needed no further motivation to book three nights at a small Indian River cabin which, on the 94° afternoon of my arrival, proved to be without air conditioning and inhabited by wasps. A rare June heat wave had settled over the Midwest to which even the Northwoods were evidently not immune. It was approaching midnight by the time I reached the Pinehurst, heading moth-like towards a faded sign that glowed “BAR” in the dark. Still the heat hung in the night air, clinging to the crumbling walls of the dilapidated building, as were hundreds of sleeping mayflies, the repulsive ancient insects who hatch in enormous numbers from the river in May and June to fuck for a few hours, then keel over and die. “BEST PIZZA ON THE PLANET? YOU DECIDE,” read a hand-painted sign above the hallway to the bar. Besides it was another entrance—a doorway with no door, a dark portal to a staircase from which was emanating an unmistakably sinister energy. From deep inside the bar streamed brothel-red light and the thump of late-aughts recession pop, desperately insisting this was the best night of our lives.
“I’ve been here since 9 am!” groaned the sweaty pizza cook, currently pulling double duty as the bartender. It’d been so hot in the kitchen, she explained while pouring shots of an elaborate concoction involving Blue Curaçao and Jaeger, that she’d cooked in just her sports bra for most of the day, lifting her tank top to reveal second-degree burns below her armpits. The space was like a sleazier version of Twin Peaks’ extra-dimensional Red Room, with a shabby stage on one end, dusty piano and broken Elvis pinball game on the other. I downed the tooth-rottingly sweet shot, noticing that the pool table seemed to be fluttering—or was I tripping? Upon closer investigation, its surface was indeed covered with a hundred trembling mayflies, wasting away the final moments of their cursed lives. “Party rock is in the house tonight!” blared the jukebox music over tinny speakers as the cook poured the remaining half-dozen stragglers a round of Jaeger bombs.
Down the bar, a white-haired fellow, whose neck dangled with a vast collection of yellowed animal teeth, held up a shaky middle finger: “When people ask me where I’m from in Michigan, I tell ‘em, right here!” (On the famous Michigan hand map, Indian River indeed sits right where you would flip the bird.) His name was Kirk, 67-year-old native of Petoskey—a former boat captain, explosive detonator, and coke dealer, who’d been to jail in 30 different states, plus Puerto Rico. Now he lived above the Pinehurst, waiting for his social security check to hit every two weeks. The mottled purple skin of his arms, he explained, was due to a recent stroke, which had left him pronounced dead four times, followed by a six-month coma. As for the Porky Pig impression he broke into every few minutes, the hospital at which he’d vegetated had just two TV channels: “Fox News, and the cartoon channel. But I’m a Democrat.” The doctor told him that he’d never walk again, not counting on the pains he’d take to stagger across the room in the interest of fucking his girlfriend (who’d drained his savings account during the coma, but nevertheless). “She said, ‘Kirk, you’ll die if we have sex!’ Well, that was fine by me,” he shrugged. “I coulda came and went at the same time!”
This was Hemingway country—the part of Michigan where the Oak Park, Illinois native spent his first 21 summers fishing, hunting, and drinking amongst lumberjacks, bootleggers, and Ojibwe Indians. “Absolutely the best trout fishing in the country. No exaggeration,” he wrote to a friend later of the Petoskey backlands. “It’s a great place to laze around and swim and fish when you want to. And the best place in the world to do nothing. It is beautiful country. And nobody knows about it but us.” His memories from that time would be channeled into what would become his Nick Adams stories—manly adventures in the Northern Michigan wilds starring the swashbuckling stand-in for young Hemingway himself. The woodlands near Petoskey are the setting for stories like “The Last Good Country,” where Adams and his sister abscond into the woods to live off trout and wild blackberries and evade Nick’s myriad opps. “Summer People” and “Up in Michigan” take place in nearby Horton Bay, where he did some of his best fishing on Lake Charlevoix; both stories include mention of an inn known as the Pinehurst—not the one in Indian River, but a Pinehurst nonetheless.
It was a lovely morning now. The sky was high and clear blue and no clouds had come yet. Nick was happy with his sister and he thought, no matter how this thing comes out we might as well have a good happy time. He had already learned there was only one day at a time and that it was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far.
— “THE LAST GOOD COUNTRY”
As it happens, I am a writer raised in Oak Park, Illinois inclined towards backwoods Midwest adventures and, oh, let’s say intemperance. But it was too hot to go fishing, or to do much of anything besides drink beer in bars. I’d spent my second afternoon in Michigan tooling between a handful of drinking and dining establishments deemed SCSG-approved (more on those at the bottom of this post), but the Pinehurst’s siren song echoed through my mind. Tonight the music on the jukebox was the hot country hits of the ‘80s and ‘90s, selected by a Swedish expat who fancied himself a redneck. He seemed to have a lot to say on the subject of America, though I could barely catch the half of it through his Scandinavian accent, growing thicker by the moment as his words began to slur. From his pocket he produced a pair of knives, demonstrating their sharpness by shaving off six inches of another man’s arm hair. I was getting the impression that he’d killed a man in Sweden and had chosen Indian River as a place to disappear.
Tonight’s bartender, Kali, had a long black ponytail and two front teeth still hanging in there long after the rest had gone. She’d been at work since 9 am today, and seemed to have been drinking Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Fire for approximately as long. She hailed from Northern California, where she’d dated E-40’s cousin and ran enough drugs and guns across the country to land herself in prison until sometime last year. “I’ve been sober for a year now. Off drugs, I mean,” she declared, pouring up our fourth round of Tennessee Fire shots in an hour. In the corner, the Swedish murderer was stewing as a young Jamaican man sang live renditions of his surprisingly good dancehall music. Skulking off into the parking lot, the wasted Swede reemerged ten minutes later in full Viking regalia—horned helmet, blonde wig, chainmail vest—blasting Metallica from his own portable speaker. But no one paid attention, enraptured by the Jamaican fellow’s sparkling performance, and within 15 minutes the Viking was asleep, helmet pressed against the bar.
I slept my way through most of my third Michigan afternoon, then enjoyed one of the stranger dinners of my life at the nearby Dam Site Inn, a supper club with Space Age barstools and a Naugahyde-upholstered bar where gluey noodles, buttered peas, and unseasoned fried chicken is served to members of the Silent Generation. The meal had cast a weird Lynchian glow over the evening, and as I parked outside the Pinehurst while dusk fell over the river, I had a feeling like anything could happen. From the dark portal to the stairway emerged Kirk in his tooth necklace, immediately launching into a yarn about his years detonating explosives from helicopters for oil companies in the west. The trick was to keep the dynamite 200 feet below the chopper’s blades, or else the static electricity would detonate it prematurely.
I followed Kirk inside the bar, where Kali had already set out our shots of Tennessee Fire; somehow she was even drunker tonight than yesterday. Then she poured into my open hands roughly 15 dollars in quarters. “I need you to get me this much worth of food,” she said, pointing to the toy vending machines beside the bathroom, one of which, on closer look, dispensed capsules housing tiny plastic hamburgers and pizzas for 50 cents. “You want me to spend… all this on plastic food?” I wondered, quarters raining from my hands, to which she nodded curtly like the question was insane. On my knees, I spent 10 minutes feeding coins in the machine, returning with a bounty of mini hot dogs and ice creams which Kali solemnly accepted without any explanation. Behind the bar, a two-year-old with a mullet had suddenly appeared, giddily waving a small American flag. “His mom skipped out last year to back-up dance for Lil Wayne,” his father somberly explained.
Two drinks in now, Kirk regaled me with the story of how he got a million dollars. In his 20s, he lived next door to an ancient Ukrainian woman whom he’d invite over for coffee every morning. When she died, it was discovered that the woman had in her possession several Norman Rockwell paintings which her will bequeathed to Kirk, making him a millionaire. Immediately he quit his job and bought a motorcycle, and would spend the next year on the road, a million dollars in cash inside the saddle bags. It was sometime after that ran out that he became a coke dealer, and after that, a crackhead. He’d sell coke to a local guy who’d sell it right back to him after cooking it into crack, though eventually, the fellow taught Kirk how to cook the crack himself: “I’d be mowing my yard at 4 am with flashlights taped to my head.” He insisted that a tattoo over his ass crack read “CRACK KILLS,” though whether that was true or not is above my pay grade. Stepping outside for a cigarette which he’d borrowed from me, he pulled a mayfly from the peeling walls, popped it in his mouth, and swallowed hard.
The bar was packed tonight with an assortment of unsavory-looking men and lizard women who seemed like they’d evaporate into a puff of smoke the moment that they set foot outside the blood-red room. But in the corner, one figure caught my eye—a greasy-looking man with overgrown sideburns, his polyester shirt unbuttoned to about his navel, nursing his drink alone. I approached with trepidation: “I’m sorry, but are you… Alvis?” The man nodded almost bashfully, sweat pouring down his face. I was so starstruck—or I suppose it could’ve been the Tennessee Fire—that I blacked out most of the contents of our conversation but for his favorite Elvis performance: “If I Can Dream” from the ‘68 Comeback Special.
EDITOR’S NOTE: You may have noticed that my schedule did not allow for me to witness Alvis live. Have no fear—SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE will return to the Pinehurst later this summer to catch a couple Alvis performances and interview Kirk at length. Don’t touch that dial!
MORE NORTHERN MICHIGAN ENCHANTMENT & AMUSEMENT…
LEGS INN
This century-old restaurant is equal parts old country dining hall, architectural fairy tale, and Twin Peaks fever dream, built by artist and Polish immigrant Stanley Smolak in the late 1920s on the bluffs along Lake Michigan. Odawa Indians and other Cross Village residents helped build the place using local timber and stones, while Smolak used tree roots, limbs and driftwood to carve surrealist creatures into furniture and sculptures that fill the space, along with totem poles and taxidermy in abundance. The food is excellent, the bartenders are cool, and naturally, it’s alleged to be haunted.
RON’S BAR & BACKYARD
This Petoskey dive describes itself as “the most American bar in America,” a tagline that both intrigued me and came with certain implications. So it was a pleasant surprise when Ron’s Bar turned out to skew more libertarian than straight-up MAGA. What was once an auto mechanic shop became the bar as it exists today in 2021, thanks to the efforts of a man called Honest Ron, who the website describes thusly: “Athlete. Singer. International Statesman. Ventriloquist. Warrior. Quilter. Romantic. Philanthropist. Culinary Savant. These are just a few of the titles Honest Ron enjoys after a lifetime of high achievement. These days he prefers one title above all others. Patriot.”
DAM SITE INN
If you hate good food but enjoy a good laugh, I encourage you to dine at this staple of Pellston, Michigan since 1953. If you prefer your food seasoned, maybe stop by for a Grasshopper in its time-capsuled bar, abounding with Eero Saarinen furniture and unfriendly bartenders.
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SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 34
“An American flag, hanging with the stripes vertical and the stars at the bottom left.”
SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 60
I was sitting in the barroom of Blanck’s Supper Club a month ago, enjoying a brandy old-fashioned for which, as change for my five dollar bill, I got back a shiny half dollar coin, and watching the Fond du Lac news. The weather report was mostly clear, with fog near Lake Winnebago. There’d been a deadly crash in Appleto…