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Wednesday, May 17, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
A man you
never knew
Word has reached me,
carried on the wind, that
Bruno Selmi, legendary
owner of Bruno’s Country
Club in Gerlach, Nevada,
has passed on. I had known
that Bruno wasn’t feeling
well, after stopping in for a
visit last year, but am forced
to admit that I was nursing a
strong, and stupid, hope that
he might live on forever.
Some eras in our lives
remain so formative, so rich
with experience, that our
subconscious keeps them in
a special place, preserved in
a kind of memorial amber.
Bruno and his watering hole
featured prominently in the
personal amber rooms for
many of us who once called
the great Nevada Outback
our home.
Bruno was an immi-
grant, arriving in Nevada
in the 1950s without much
int
G
N
I
R
SP
ACTION
English. He bought the
Country Club, in those days
called the Longhorn Saloon,
for a few thousand bucks.
Ultimately, he would own
most of Gerlach, build the
only motel for a hundred
miles in any direction, and
become the de-facto mayor
of a town that never had one.
He was a kind of outback
Al Swearengen, without the
Shakespearean diatribes.
Rather, he was acerbic, and
possessed a razor wit, which
he could — and would —
occasionally unleash.
He was a man you could
never really know.
The truth is, Bruno never
said much at all. He either
liked you or he didn’t, and
if he didn’t he would tell
you — and he meant it — to
get out of his place and go
across the street. Only an
idiot would ask what was
across the street, because the
answer was quite clear: noth-
ing but whistling desert.
If less is more, and it
often is, Bruno’s quiet and
laconic nature helped build
him into the giant he was,
and it may be the reason he
was so universally respected,
even by those who faced his
ire. Because at the bottom of
all that ire was a generous
heart. He was the kind of guy
who would advance a man’s
paycheck from his own till.
When the first Burners
started coming into Bruno’s
— before Burning Man
became the over-hyped and
o
strangely corporatized art-
funk techno blowout it is
now — they were as nervous
and shifty as any troop of
dandies stranded at a frontier
trading post.
Bruno didn’t like them,
once warning a man wearing
a skirt, and with a hockey
puck stuck in his lower lip,
that he should be careful
walking around the des-
ert because the bird he had
wired to the top of his hat
was a game species. I only
know that is true because I
was there when it happened,
saw the fear in the poor
man’s eyes, and heard the
bar break up in laughter. But
I also know that Bruno even-
tually came to like them —
certainly he liked the money
that came with them.
What made Bruno’s such
a great place wasn’t just his
stuffed raviolis on a cold
day, or the generous drinks
he poured. It was the abid-
ing sense, compounded by
all of that open desert, that
we truly were on a lost fron-
tier, and that the world out-
side still held the promise of
rugged exploration and wild
discovery.
The cast of players
who inhabited the Country
Club on a Saturday night
only reinforced the notion.
Miners, cowboys, truckers,
hunters, itinerant singers,
Indians, Mexicans, whites
and Basques, we were
all drawn to Bruno’s in a
kind of marvelous modern
Year-round
FIREWOOD
SALES
— Kindling —
PHOTO BY CRAIG RULLMAN
Bruno’s Country Club — frontier outpost and watering hole.
rendezvous.
It could, and sometimes
did, get rowdy
But the world is always
shrinking, slouching toward
a kind of sad and somnam-
bulant uniformity, and I think
that’s a large part of the rea-
son I hold memories of the
Country Club, and of Bruno
— the master of ceremo-
nies — so dear. His death is,
in many ways, the last door
on the wild frontiers of my
youth slamming shut. Even
as things have changed in
the intervening decades, his
continued life held that door
open for a very long time.
I can foresee a day,
maybe not long from now,
when I will return to the
Country Club, belly up to the
bar, and order a drink from
a sassy bartender with pink
yo-yos stuck in his ears. He
won’t care about anything I
might have to say, any stories
I might tell of another life,
because he was never there
to see just how Western the
Country Club could be on a
Saturday night. He will never
have seen Bruno pull out his
shotgun to restore order.
And I can imagine my
instinctive reaction to the
new guy’s attitude — the
strongest urge to give him
an Augustus McRae style
pistol-whipping.
But I probably won’t.
We’ve graduated from
pistol-whipping surly bar-
tenders, it seems. Instead,
I’ll probably just shrug, stare
at my own reflection in the
mirror, and pull at a mourn-
fully weak bourbon and
seven. And at some point I’ll
rally, and raise a quiet toast
to Bruno Selmi, and all the
other ghosts of yet another
lost frontier.
SAVE
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