Grizzly Junction: A Restaurant For Bears

    After six months, it was clear that Grizzly Junction was doomed to fail. The restaurant business is a tough one; the restaurant business for bears is damn near impossible, a lesson that Pinky Wright, proprietor of the nation’s first bear restaurant was learning the hard way.
    The restaurant itself hardly resembled the gleaming edifice that drew bears of every sort to Portland for the grand opening in early April. Piles of berry-marked bear feces spangled the floor now, and claw marks tore through the oak doors. “I swear,” one of the employees overheard Pinky saying one evening, “I thought bears knew how to use doors.”
    The door conundrum was but a fraction of Pinky’s troubles. The bears seemed to have no respect for the one plate per customer policy of the trash buffet, and all but ignored the poached salmon--of which Pinky was particularly proud.
    Then there were the rogue bears, who, ignorant or dismissive of the clearly posted hours of service sign, routinely smashed in the windows at Grizzly Junction for a late-night snack. After the first incidence of a break-in, Pinky found the culprits sleeping inside, and called the police. The police told him to call the Parks Department, and, an hour or so later, a group of men and women in green uniforms took the rogue bears out in a net, and released them into the wild. They returned the next night, undeterred.
    The bears that did pay were poor tippers, and those were rare. More often, this or that grizzly or black bear would rise from his place at the table, let out a guttural moan and take to clawing at the door as if to say, “How do I get out of this place?” Pinky would confront them and, sometimes, they’d stare back at him, confused; but more often, they’d really maul the shit out of him.   
    So maybe it was the maulings; maybe it was the bear’s inability to use a door, or their lax and stingy approach to tipping.
    In any case, in late October, Pinky came to the heartrending decision to close the doors of Grizzly Junction forever. As the men loaded the still-pristine urinals into a truck, as he watched his life’s work being gutted and torn asunder, Pinky cried.
    Just then, a leviathan grizzly ambled over to him and grunted softly. Pinky looked up, and the bear stood erect on his hind legs, towering over Pinky yet looking in his eyes as if to say, “Thank you, Pinky. On behalf of all bears--thank you.”
    Pinky reached to shake the bear’s considerable paw. The bear looked confused at first, and then reached out, and mauled him.