The Rudder Room
Drinking like it’s 1970.
I feel bad even talking about the Rudder Room. It’s one of those places from a better time, a pub from an era before phones had replaced cigarettes at the bar (though you still can’t smoke there), before we hesitated to talk to strangers out of fear of some social awkwardness, of a chance encounter with someone who might make us feel uncomfortable. I don’t want too many people to know about it, so I feel pretty safe writing about it on this rarely read site.
The entrance to the Rudder Rom
I try to drop in whenever I’m in Oxnard, California to visit my mom. It’s a place that’s best in the afternoon, when a shot and a beer can hold you over until dinner. You’ll find it at the end of Hollywood Beach, behind a nondescript storefront, one without any other businesses nearby. When you go inside, it feels like 1970 and I imagine many of its customers have been coming there since then. It’s the diviest of dives, a beach bar for old locals, all of whom know each other and all of whom know to only bring cash. The walls are plastered with decades-old mementos and there are two pool tables in the back. While I was there I had a Coors and sat next to an older, leathered woman who told me, when I asked to sit beside her, “I do bite.” The bartender had curly gray hair and a Scottish accent and was taking the piss out of all of his regulars.
The Rudder Room
Behind him is a wide window and that's where this place gets really interesting, because through that window you can see the beach and the Pacific ocean. Outside are benches and chairs where you can look out–on a clear day–to the Channel Islands. Sometimes you’ll even find a colony of sea lions. The last time I was there, I just saw the one straggler and he got pretty pissed at me for coming too close during nap time.
Angry Sea Lion
Again, I feel bad for even talking about it, because I don’t want it to become anything but what it is. I don’t want the modern world with all of its closed-off, please-don’t-bother-me decorum to touch it. I want it to go in there and feel like it will be 1970 forever.