Virginia City Blues

“Virginia City ain’t much,” Charle Bukowski wrote during a bender in 1971.

A strip of dust and clapboard slapped onto the side of a hill, its bars leaning into one another like drunks. The mountains sat fat and heavy in the distance as if daring anyone to call them majestic.

C Street was the spine of it all, a narrow backbone that carried the weight of whatever dignity this place could muster. No escalators, no elevators, no need for them.

If you wanted to go up, you climbed. If you wanted to come down, gravity took care of it.

But Virginia City had something. Something raw.

You didn’t have to explain yourself there. Nobody cared about your secrets because they had their own to tend to.

A man could walk into the Delta Saloon with a parrot on his shoulder or a poem in his pocket, and nobody would bat an eye. It wasn’t about indifference; it was about respect.

People knew that life got strange sometimes, and the best way to keep it moving was to leave well enough alone.

I ended up there after Reno kicked me out again. I’d been on a two-week jag, whiskey for breakfast, gin for dessert. I was down to my last twenty bucks and tired of people looking at me like I was supposed to apologize for it.

Virginia City was an accident, the kind of accident I always seemed to stumble into, but this one fit.

The air smelled of creosote and something older, like the ghosts of miners still sweating it out under the earth. I found a room above a bar where the floors slanted so badly you could roll a quarter from one side to the other. The rent was cheap, and the bartender downstairs let me run a tab as long as I didn’t bother the tourists.

The thing about Virginia City was that nobody tried to fix you. In L.A., everyone wanted you to go to a meeting, shower, or find a purpose. Here, you could sit on a stoop with a bottle of Thunderbird and talk to the pigeons if that’s what you needed to do.

Nobody called it crazy. They called it Tuesday.

C Street had a rhythm. In the mornings, it was the clatter of delivery trucks, their drivers hauling kegs and crates like it mattered.

By noon, the tourists came, spilling out of buses in their straw hats and sneakers, snapping pictures of buildings they didn’t understand. By evening, the locals reclaimed it, filling the bars with their smoke, laughter, and arguments about nothing that mattered.

One night, I was at the Silver Dollar. The place was a dive, all sticky tables and jukebox noise, but the beer was cold, and the bartender didn’t ask stupid questions.

A guy sat down, older and wearing a hat that had seen more miles than he probably had. He looked like he belonged in a cowboy movie but had forgotten his lines.

“Looks like you’ve been here a while,” he said.

“Long enough,” I replied.

“Good place,” he said. “People leave you alone.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They don’t try to fix you.”

He nodded and lit a cigarette. We didn’t say much else.

That’s how it was there. You didn’t need to fill the silences. Sometimes they said more than the words ever could.

I stayed in Virginia City until the money ran out. When it did, I packed my bag and walked down C Street one last time. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. There was no point.

The town wasn’t about connections. It was about space—the kind where you could stretch out and let your rough edges show. I wish I could say I learned something there, but that would be a lie.

Virginia City doesn’t teach you anything. It just lets you be. And maybe that’s the best lesson of all.