I might have enjoyed ‘The Pickle Gallery’ more when I drank. Sober living has made the reprieve of the occasional destination bar more of a slog- a trial in which I fight with an inner voice that tells me I must order some minimum amount of alcohol-adjacent items in order to justify my existence at a venue centered around drinking. ‘The Pickle Gallery’ makes it easier than most. There’s a kitchen, at least, and I arrive before noon which is not on accident. Arriving before noon is one of the silent excuses I make for not drinking. Sometimes I’ll nod to the camper outside, to the warm pavement, as though to say I’d love to drink, I really would, but you know how it is. Gotta drive. Gotta think of the law, those bastards. Can’t get another point on my record.
I’ve never understood how the points on a license worked. Maybe that’s a system for a different state. Regardless, I tell them everything but that I don’t drink and I don’t know why.
‘Some bars collect license plates. Others tack dollars or women’s underwear to their ceiling. ‘The Pickle Gallery’ is the Crease’s best-known dive and it collects those pieces of its customers that have fallen off early. A thumb in formaldehyde. A jar of powdered placenta. A basket of teeth and a tack-board of umbilical cords, flattened and age-crisped like flowers pressed in a book. There is a corner dedicated to hair and fingernails but its placement indicates the relative weakness of the contribution. ‘The Pickle Gallery’ wants substance, and though their collection may have started small, it has become something altogether ghoulish over time.’
The Guide fails to mention the vinegar stench of the place, which makes it difficult to eat the food I do order. It doesn’t say that the bar is illuminated from sources behind the walls of its collection, light filtering brown-green through suspended, chemical decay. The floor creaks as the woman behind the bar moves between bottles and its shifting wood rattles the jars. They tinkle together and their contents sway, a dozen right hands suddenly beauty-queen waving. A layer of skin sloughs off a brined skull in the shelf ahead of me, joining a jelly-fish clump of scalp and hair beneath it.
That can’t have left its owner early. I wonder, as I often do, about the legality of the collection and remind myself that I’m wanted in several states for a variety of misdemeanors, most of which involve a failure to pay parking or speeding tickets and the further failure to learn my lesson about proper parking or speed.
Several more employees join the woman at the bar over the course of the next half hour and, at noon, they reach a critical mass and the jar shuffling begins. Forming a neat line, the men and women begin to pull specimens from the shelves and hand them off into the back where, presumably, they are wedged into vacant places along the venue’s original walls. Unseen employees push new jars forward from behind, filling the gaps in quick succession. The spectacle is impressive for its efficiency alone, but the goal for people like me is to experience what has been called ‘The Sour Float,’ a sort of vertigo brought on by the lights and the movement of the liquid.
Sure enough, a grim aurora spills over the floor and the room begins to spin. Several of those men and women who preceded me here slump to the ground, dizzy and content. I see them and resist the same euphoria. Who know when they last cleaned the floor?
Among them I note those bleached splotches where jars have inevitably fallen and I wonder what happens to those parts that escape. Rot comes for all things I suppose.
Everything ends eventually.
-traveler
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