The Oregon: Year One - Racist Bob

With yesterday being the seventh anniversary of Day One at The Oregon, I thought I would wax nostalgic about that day. This is how the mighty saga began. It is what shaped us from just a bunch of random guys living together into the crazy bunch of idiots on The Louisville Police Departments “Dangerous if they weren’t such lazy jerks” list. This is Genesis of The Book of Oregon. Or Batman Begins. Whichever you prefer.

It was the first Friday in March, 2001. I had worked until 2 a.m. the night before at the factory and went home to get a good nights rest. Moving day was here. I was excited to be on my own, making my own decisions. If pudding was what I felt like having for dinner, pudding would be my entrée. So I wake up at around 11 and get showered and dressed. Then I load my car with all the stuff that I wouldn’t need the strength and Viking-like brawn of the Warner boys and make the drive across town to The Oregon.

So I go over there to wait for the cable guy to show up. My mother was already there because the cable company gave me an 8-4 window for my appointment. Yep, 8 fucking hours. That’s what they consider a ‘window’. And since the bank wouldn’t give up the keys until Friday morning, there was no sleeping there hobo style on a pile of shit from my backseat and waiting for Duder McDudeface to show up and hook the Sci-Fi network and Comedy Central into the magic picture box and make the shakes go away. So I had to have my mother as a proxy sitting there reading since eight in the morning, waiting for me to get my sleepy ass over there and start moving shit.

I get there at around 11:30, prop the back door open and start to move shit in. About seven or eight items into my towels and cookery load this tubby old guy knocks on the back door. He’s got long scraggly grayish hair. And mutton chops. Like Chester A. Arthur. Mother fucker was a “good ole’ boy” from the looks of him. He introduces himself as Bob, the guy who lived in the house behind this one. He just wanted to make sure we were people actually moving in, and not breaking in to smash up the place. We were there to do both, actually. What we later realized was that he wasn’t checking to see if we were moving in, he was checking to see if we were of the Caucasian persuasion.

Racist Bob was what we later knew him by. From that first day when he introduced himself and then went on to tell us he was glad it was just a bunch of 20 something boys and not “fags, spicks or niggers” moving into his neighborhood and making the place racially impure. My mother and I just looked at him in amazement and said “Nice to meet you Bob.” He then went into a monologue about minorities. About how we, as white people, were better than “they” were. Then he went on to explain who “they” were. He started rambling off racial slurs like he was writing a book. A book if words for ethnic groups I didn’t even know about. I even threw in a few that didn’t even really make sense or, to the best of my knowledge, exist. “Yeah Bob; be glad we aren’t a bunch of Donkey Kong’s moving in to scum up the town!” “Goddamn right!” he replied. My mother looked at me as if to say “Honey, don’t tease the racists. They usually own guns.”

That was how we came to know Racist Bob. Racist as he was, he really had no problems with any of our shenanigans. Set up a slip and slide in the rain and slide into his yard? Not a problem. “Boy’s will be boy’s” he’d shout at us. Then he’d shout at his wife to finish mowing the yard before the rain came down any harder. He’d ambush us on the way to Dairy Mart and tell us long boring stories that went nowhere. A trip that would have taken 5 minutes could take as long as an hour if Racist Bob was out drinking beer in the yard. If he caught you on the way back? You officially had an eleven pack of frosty longneck bottles to bring back to the house.

We’d sit on the back porch on warmer days and watch him and his wife argue. See, one of them would always be mowing the yard. And the other one wouldn’t like how they were doing it. So there would be yelling, and someone would get shoved from behind the mower. Then the yeller would take over for about 10 or so minutes. The cycle would go on until the yard was finished. You could hear them yell from our front room. So you’d grab something cold from the fridge and sit on the steps and watch Domestic Violence become a very real possibility. Occasionally one of us would yell “She missed a spot, Bob!” and watch him start yelling as he shot us a glimpse of his Confederate flag shirt as he waved us a “Thanks, boys!” wave and shot both of his six-guns into the air with reckless abandon. Racist Bob, you were our entertainment on hot sunny days.

When everyone on the block got together and signed a petition to get us kicked out, who had our backs? That’s right. Racist Bob. Seems in his misspent youth he and a bunch of his buddies rented an old farm house and got drunk and rowdy on a pretty regular basis. Finding someone drunkenly swimming in his pool at 4 a.m. naked was a bit of nostalgia for the old bigot. He threw all his stars and bars mega-power behind his convictions and gave a very passionate speech at City Hall, and convinced the Mayor HIMSELF to let us stay. Ok, that very last part never really happened. But I guarantee you pictured it. And most of you giggled. For real though, he talked a lot of the people down since we never really bothered him. He even came over once to warn us that a guy down the road had turned us in for lighting off fireworks one afternoon. Plus he knew he could hit us up for a beer from time to time. As long as no one in the building had too much of a tan.

Thanks for reading, but that’s it for now, kids

Dr. R.