rotgut billy’s blind pig
Some of you Geezers out there might know what a Blind Pig is … and no, it’s not a myopic hog. Since there’s no bar or tavern licensed by the State down here, the South End has had to revert to the lessons of Prohibition once more. Meaning, we keep our drinking establishments underground, what the dry gulchers called in 1920, a Blind Pig. Knock on the door — if they recognize you or you’re with a pal they do, you can belly up to Rotgut Billy’s Basement Bar.
Course, Billy doesn’t have it in his basement — it’s his barn, once the home of Herefords and a couple of draft horses. Probably no pigs, 20/20 vision or otherwise. It sits back behind his house and his house is back along a rutted lane off the highway, down a dirt road dead end. Nobody goes down that road without an inkling and a thirst.
It’s not like Billy’s making money — he hasn’t got enough customers. And he mostly just covers his costs. The jukebox is his old Radio Shack stereo. The neon isn’t a beer sign, it’s a pink flamingo from a motel in Utah he picked up at a second hand store. He’s got a pool table you need an alitmeter to calculate the warpage and there’s a battered steel dart board in the back corner where wayward projectiles land harmlessly against the walls.
Billy has a few of us who make homebrew so sometimes the storebought bottles get upgraded to high gravity heavy nettle, jalapena ales, chocolate stouts and any other experiments we care to inflict on the patrons. Occasionally we’ll bring in pizzas and cheesy nachos Billy heats up in a little toaster over behind the bar. The bar’s a nice hunk of old growth he slabbed off a 300 year old fir that fell in the storm of ’79 that knocked out the Hood Canal floating bridge and raised hell on the island here.
Folks ask me all the time if Rotgut Billy’s really exists. I tell em if it didn’t, we’d have to open it up anyway, but yeah, Billy’s is an institution, a beacon of entrepreneurial panache without the profit motive, half drinking establishment and half social club. For Billy, since his wife died, it’s pretty much his life. He doesn’t serve us when we’ve started to slip over the line. We’re family and he looks after his family. Those same folks shake their heads and wonder why the County sheriff hasn’t closed his operation down.
It’s a fair question, one we boyz have debated for years. The only answer we got is the deputies let it go even though they’re pretty sure what transpires at the barn, figuring, I suppose, it’s better to get sloshed close to home than drive drunk miles to the closest tavern. Maybe they just see Billy as the lesser of two evils. I guess a lot of things are like that down here….
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