A Night with TomKat in Denison, Iowa…

On the plane to Omaha, there was another Luka. He worked for a different non-profit in The Lou. Quickly, we found out that not only would we be sharing the flight to Omaha with one another, but would both be spending Wednesday night in Denison, IA. (Which given the size of the state and the size of the town was somewhat of irony in and of itself.) We agreed to meet for dinner after our visits.

A late dinner at a great, Mexican food restaurant with a special on margaritas was followed by wandering the town square looking for bars. For a small town, Denison has a surprising large number of beer-joints in the town square. We selected one based on absolutely no reason at all.

Dimly lit, with a pool table in back and slot machines, J.R.’s probably resembled every other bar we could have gone in that evening. We ordered some beer and instantly fell in love with the place. $1.25 a draft is a steal in The Lou, but the normal price in Denison, not happy hour, but the price every day from seven in the morning until midnight-two on the weekends.

The barkeep was twenty-seven and bragging about her daughter who just turned four. The picture she offered from her in her wallet showed a smiling girl with jet-black hair-a pride and joy. The grandmother was in the bar as well, drinking with a friend. The three of them joked with one another only in the way family can.

Another twenty some lady named A came in and played the slot machines in silence and sucking down coke after coke. Only through the barkeep did we learn A was a bartender at another place, and after blowing ten dollars, A was out the door. The American dream was dead for her another night.

But the person who made the evening was TomKat. (Named this long before Mr. Cruise jumped on any couches.) He wore a denim shirt unbuttoned halfway with a bandana wrapped around his head Karate Kid style. He proudly slurred that he was a garbologist (a garbage man for the laymen) and displayed a broken gold pocket watch he had found just that day in the trash.

He took and instant liking to us and us to him. We bought him drinks and heard his stories from his Navy days. Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippians, he had been around the world three times. Girls were one of his favorite subjects. The Philippians was were he had the best time and if we requested he would show us, where the best girls danced in town. He winked that they brought them in from Des Moines. While Lenny Kravitz played over the jukebox, he air guitered his way around A who could have cared less. He even shouted that the barkeep should perhaps show us something. She dismissed him as a horse did a fly and nodded as we asked is she was used to him.

TomKat’s face lit up twice. Once when he proudly showed us his laminated picture of his two sons, he spoke about how proud he was of them both and what great kids they were. The second was when he talked about his lady friend and how she smiled all the time, even when she slept. They were his reasons for being.

We finally left a little after 11:00. The bartender had gone, and the owners replaced her. They didn’t even care that we took one of the signs down as souvenir of the evening. TomKat waved as we left, said how everybody was his friend and would love to have us back anytime.