EVERYONE KNOWS JASON
By David Frank

—As the sun sets, our writer walks into the Deadwood to watch the 3rd and final presidential debate. Little does he know that he's about to grab a seat next to a major regular of the Deadwood.

The mid-October evening is turning nippy as I stroll into the Deadwood with leaves plastered on my sweatshirt from the wind. A few buddies of mine had been telling me for a while that the Deadwood was my kind of place—laid back and lacking a dance floor—yet, I’d never found my way there before. And another pal had told me that the Deadwood was a good place for watching the presidential debates. TVs turned up, jukebox killed, and a bar full of screaming liberals like myself.

The Deadwood is a dark place. Not just because the lights are barely pushing out ten watts, but the place is smeared in dark tones. Everything from the booths to the walls are black, or a shade or two from it. It's rather wide-open in the sense that you can see from end of the building to the other. The floor plan is mostly composed of big booths and tables (with the exception of a wall-length bar and two cubbyhole rooms in the back—one for playing pool, and the other, which is closer to the bar, houses pinball machines and bathrooms).

I walk to the bar’s end where I see a couple of empty stools. However, as I get closer I realize there’s a jacket covering the next to last stool. So, I’m forced to take the lonely outside. It’s 6:30 and the special for dollar fifty domestic pints is coming to end. A square-framed man with thinning blond hair and wearing gym-shorts comes up to the jacket-covered stool next to me with a slight stumble in his step. He sits down and looks at me.

“ Hey, how’s it going,” I ask.

“ It’s going good, man,” he says in loud slurred speech.
Jason Full explaining the mysteries of life.

He tells me for no particular reason about some democrats who were registering voters in the pedestrian mall earlier that day. It seems that before my arrival this man and the bartender were arguing over whether it was okay for people affiliated with political parties to help with registration efforts. My neighbor believed it didn’t matter if these people were associated with a party, “I’ll vote for who ever I want.”

The bartender finally comes my way. He’s a young slender man with a shaved head, a goatee, and expensive looking ink covering most of his arms. The man next to me says the bartender’s name is Frank. I ask for a pint of Bud-heavy, and even though it’s a little past the end of “angry hour,” Frank still charges me the special’s price. Good man.
I introduce myself to the man next to me and he says his name is Jason Full.

“I’ve seen you hear before,” he says.

“No, probably not. I’ve never been here before,” I say.

“What? I swear I’ve seen you here before man,” he says, “Well man, this bar is fucking great. It’s a regular bar for regular guys…like me.”

“How many times do you come here,” I ask.

Jason straightens his back up and gets near my face. “Why do you wanna know?”

“How long have you come is what I meant.”

“Oh, since I was underage,” Jason says with a laugh. I find out Jason graduated from one of the Iowa City high schools in ‘89.

Then a short heavy-set woman in her mid-thirties comes up to the end of the bar with some stuffed peppers. She’s dancing to some bouncy rock music from the jukebox. Unlike most bars in the Iowa City area, the jukebox isn’t so loud that your brainpan implodes. You can hear it, but you can still carry on conversation. Animal from The Muppets straddles the jukebox. And he’s not alone in pop-culture decorations. The visage of Homer Simpson resides throughout the place.

The Deadwood also has rats. Rats and fish. There’s a giant black statue of a rabid rat sitting on the counter behind the bar. And fish of all kinds and sizes clutter the bar’s wall. From the ceiling hangs a giant rat with a noose tied around it neck. It’s a strong warning for real rats that may find their way into the establishment.

The dancing woman offers Jason a pepper. He shoves it into his mouth. “It’s not hot,” he yells immediately. Seconds later his position changes as his face stiffens and his arm shoots out for his pint of beer. “Fuck, Sally. It’s not hot, but it’s good.” Sally laughs and walks away.

“I know good food. That wasn’t hot, but it was good,” Jason turns to me and says before letting me know he cooks at Hill's Bar and Grill.”

Jason may know good food, but it seems everyone at the Deadwood knows Jason. Everyone calls him out by name with a relaxed tone that relays the possibility that they may have sat on a stool next to him more than once. He spits out topics randomly and changes them on the turn of a dime. Throughout the night he claims to speak Chinese—which I doubt—and gives me a long lecture on evolution from Home Erectus to Home Sapiens and how that relates to the ability to adopt to environment to our “new” ability to change environment. “I’m a scientist,” he says. In good humor, Frank and another bartender, known as Mofo, accuse Jason of being a “Satanist Terrorist” who’s in league with Osama Bin Laden after Jason says he'll believe in God when he sees some "goddamn empirical data."

A black woman in an orange shirt walks past me as makes her way towards the bathroom and shouts to someone, “I’m here for the debate and baseball.”

Ah, yes, the Yanks play the Red Sox tonight in the play offs. According to Frank the game will be on the bar’s left TV and the debate will be on the right side. Which is perfect. Jason and I have front row seats to a sport that actually means something. There may be no physical contact, but truly, words in Presidential debates can break the dreams of many.

It’s getting nearer to the debate, which starts at 8:00. Jason screams, “I’m a Kerry man! Are you?”

I nod and we clank our glasses together.

His shoulders jerk upwards. “I got the hiccups and it’s all your fault Frank.”
With no transition other than the bump and jump train of thought of a drunk’s logic, Jason says, “I’ve had my share of life’s setbacks.”

I almost double take. An absolute drunk’s cliché that I thought I’d never here in reality…but then again, earlier in the night Jason threatened to kick everyone’s ass in the bar. So should I be all that surprised?

I take his bait and wonder what sad sad trip he can lay on me. “I almost died, twice,” he says. A car accident in the mid-nineties sent Jason into a coma for 9 days (later in the night, I ask a woman who happened to be a former Deadwood employee about Jason, she confirmed this story and said that he suffered head trauma from it).

“ That’s not all man, that’s not all,” Jason says, “I had cancer too, a few years ago.”

“ What kind?”

“ Colon, I had chemo for 2 years.”

“ Is it all gone, did it do its job.”

Jason nods. Takes a sip of his Leinkugel’s Red. And for once during the entire night, he doesn’t say anything for a minute or two.

Then later on, before he leaves for the night, Jason grabs a canvas bag that had been lying on the floor near his stool. He shuffles some things around in it, and before he closes it, I see multiple pieces of paper covered in hand-written Chinese characters.

•The Debate