Thoughts on Portland Punk Rock and Homelessness

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History

A cultural exhibit staged at the newly renovated downtown Portland branch of the Multnomah County Library System beckoned. The exhibit’s subject? Portland’s seminal punk rock scene circa 1979-1982.

The library had recently reopened after a year of renovations. She had been an old friend to me over the decades. I read periodicals in my broke 20s there and spent many hours researching the Vortex I rock festival story via microfilm.

I parked a block away. Approaching the library, I saw dozens of homeless people populating the famous outdoor concrete benches named after authors renown in the era of the building’s original construction in 1913. These benches were always one of my favorite spots in the Rose City. I ate many lunches sitting upon them back in the day.

When I say populated I mean men and women sleeping, passed out, whacked out, conferring, laughing, fiddling on phones, fixing things, snacking, drinking and whatever people do on the streets to survive.

I walked around the library before entering and surveyed the scene. I estimated 50 homeless people congregating at the benches. One in particular arrested my attention. She was young, alone, sitting on the Alexander Dumas bench in direct sunlight. Her face was scarred but not vacant. We made eye contact and she sort of smiled and I nodded in return. She wanted to say something but didn’t or couldn’t. I pushed through the glass doors into library and climbed the palatial two flights of marble stairs to the exhibit. I could not get the sight of a homeless woman sitting on bench named after Alexander Dumas, a great champion of the wronged and downtrodden, out of mind. It was a crushing juxtaposition. It made me dream of an American Dumas writing on the crisis of American homelessness. How would such a writer approach this tragedy?

The punk rock exhibit was outstanding, enlightening and free! So many of the pioneers from that scene are dead and they barely got into their 50s or 60s. I saw many of these men and women perform in the late 80s and early 90s when rock music was important to me. It sure isn’t anymore.

I know there’s still an underground punk scene in Portland and my first question is: has it taken on Portland’s homeless crisis with music and art and zines? Even pop up shows at encampments? Surely it must, although I’ve yet to read anything along these lines.

It’s right there, everywhere. Many people playing in Portland punk bands probably are homeless or were once homeless or verge on being homeless. There is fiery material in that, I would think. Either on the Left or Right and yes, there were/are Right wing punk rock groups. It was skinhead, white power, anti immigration anger and Portland was a major part of that dangerous PNW scene in the late 80s and early 90s.

After viewing the exhibit, I walked around the library again. I saw a man splayed on the James Fenimore Cooper bench who was contorted beyond description, or at least my powers to describe. For a moment I considered sitting down on a bench, perhaps the Hart Crane or Charles Dickens one, and just stay there for ten minutes and observe, see what happens. But all the benches were full.

Dean the Duck Man

NSP Meditations

Almost very morning since we started walking through the park, Elmer the husky and I have encountered an elderly man circling the duck pond. His only absence occurred when rain, snow or ice presumably kept him away.

At some point we began waving to each other.

Those first months the duck pond was drained but after it filled up in the spring, ducks and geese showed up in numbers. Soon thereafter, I noticed the ducks and geese would follow the man on land and water. I could see from the distance he was feeding them something from his pockets. Sometimes, up to 50 ducks and geese dogged his trail. The sight always delighted me even though I knew visitors were not supposed to feed the waterfowl.

On Memorial Day I saw the man cutting rhododendron flowers with a Bowie knife. They had to be for someone he loved no longer around, or so my creative mind and romantic heart wanted to believe.

A man who cuts flowers with a Bowie knife for someone he loved is someone I must meet!

The man had undoubtedly seen most, if not all, the same strange and sad sights of homelessness I had seen near the duck pond at that early hour. They occur every morning, usually multiple times. The most recent memorable one was a homeless man taking a kind of shower as he meandered through a ball field while sprinklers doused the grass. At one moment, the man stopped, gesticulated, twirled around. I thought he might strip off his clothes, raise his hands to the sky, and go total Shawshank Redemption escape-from-prison-thunderstorm scene.

But he didn’t.

What had the duck man thought of these sights that heretofore had never unfolded in his neighborhood park? I got the impression he had lived around here for a long time.

Today was the day to meet him. I’d seen a beaver in the creek and a blue heron perched on a fence; I’d also seen two men splayed on the grass in the park. Their contortions defied description but reminded me of images I’d seen somewhere from history.

The bracing juxtaposition, almost in real time, for some reason enlivened me to intersect with the man.

Elmer and I changed course. The man saw me approaching and waved.

We met. We introduced ourselves. His name is Dean. Dean the Duck Man! Thirty ducks stood behind him clucking as we talked. Dean’s trick? Peanuts.

‘You have quite the entourage,” I said.

He smiled.

I was ready to ask him about the homeless in the park, and then didn’t. It wasn’t the right time. Maybe it never would be. Such a subject at that hour in this setting might undermine or even destroy Dean’s vibe. Not everyone wants to there on this subject.

New Second Edition Updated E-book of The Old Crow Book Club

NSP Meditations, Writing

Readers:

I have just released a e-book updated second edition of The Old Crow Book Club, my book about homeless men and women in my Portland neighborhood. It was originally published in the spring of 2023, but the story of Mark’s homelessness and the Old Crow Book Club continued in 2024…with a happy ending.

The book is available for $5.99 via Amazon at:

The description for the first edition is below. Thanks for all your support of an independent writer. Every sale helps.

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members’ stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The End of Kelp Stories on the Oregon Coast

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

The Sunday Oregonian recently ran a long investigative piece on the disappearing kelp beds along the Oregon Coast due to warming in the Pacific. The story broke my heart because I have many great stories associated with kelp washed ashore on the state’s socialist beaches. So do many others. In another decade, that kind of story will be extinct.

Below is one of my favorites, from 2006 or 2007 when I was living south of Newport and encountered kelp at the wrack line in abidance after every big storm:

On a rare rainless afternoon in winter, I walked my neighbor’s dog, Crazy Country Maddie, down the beach. We dodged dozens of huge entangled piles of kelp at the wrack line and they vaguely reminded me of creatures from a Jules Verne novel.

A quarter mile into our jaunt, something distant to the north captured my attention: a strand of kelp originating at the base of a cliff that snaked 75 yards westward to the ocean before ending atop a drift log partially submerged in sand.

Curious, I jogged over to investigate. Five minutes later I found myself sprinting back to the house with Maddie to retrieve my camera. I simply had to document the most marvelous engineering project I’ve encountered in all my relentless rambling down Oregon Coast’s publicly-owned beaches.

It was a magisterial work of public art, a fountain made entirely of kelp that must have taken all day to conceive and construct, cost nothing, and had approximately 15 minutes left to survive before the incoming tide demolished it.

How many people noticed the fountain that afternoon? I might have been the only one. I went home, wrote up the story of my discovery….and a few weeks after it was published….

I was ordering a beer at the Salty Dawg in Waldport when a man from my neighborhood came up and said, “The guy that made the kelp fountain is here with me.”

“What? Here? I’ve got to meet him,” I said. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to meet a living Oregonian more.

Every once and a great while, a writer is fortunate to unravel a beautiful mystery by virtue of writing about it for publication.

I walked up to a table decorated with bloody marys and gentlemen fishermen. Outside, all things crabbing on Alsea Bay were going down in noisy, colorful splendor. My neighbor introduced me to Geof and I learned the inspiring story of this magisterial work of public art that the tide swept away 15 minutes after I viewed it. To my total astonishment, Geof wasn’t a former engineer and didn’t claim any special aesthetic sensibility.

An hour later, I opened an email at home and read:

Hi Matt:

 We read your article about the kelp fountain constructed on Thanksgiving Day by my husband, son, daughter and grandchildren. The fountain was the concept of my husband, Geof, who enjoys using whatever is available on the beach to create a project that our family can do altogether. Construction required about two to three hours and everyone contributed, even our littlest guy. We want our grandchildren to enjoy their time at the beach and their Grandpa’s imagination makes it happen. The kids wrote their last name in the sand to sign their work.

 We loved your article and thanks for appreciating a project that made our Thanksgiving special.

Kathy Clayton

When I received this email, which also included a photograph of the construction crew, Geof had not yet told his wife that he had met me in the bar. There was a synchronicity about all of this that frequently happens to me in connection to my beach adventures. I have no explanation for them whatsoever and don’t know why they keep occurring.

I do know something, though. I know that every family that find themselves celebrating Thanksgiving at the Oregon Coast should eat a hearty meal, give thanks to Oregon’s unprecedented legacy of publicly-owned beaches, and go build a kelp fountain or fort together. You can always watch highlights of the Dallas Cowboy game later…or not at all.

The Parable of the Lost Sheep and a Fentanyl Smoker

Lost and Found, NSP Meditations

There he was again, the same young man smoking fentanyl in public. This time—a dugout of a ball field in the park. A woman sat next to him and they passed a foil strip and lighter back and forth. Songbirds sang and sprinklers sprinkled. Two geese waddled in a field. I observed this scene with Elmer at 5:20 in the morning.

Is this man too far lost to try and help? Is his one addicted and homeless life worth the prodigious effort and expense when minimal effort and expense spent elsewhere could help other homeless people who want off the streets and aren’t smoking fentanyl in public and wearing boxes on their heads?

For those unfamiliar with the New Testament’s Parable of the Lost Sheep, it goes like this: Jesus, responding to criticism that he received sinners and ate with them, said, “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it?”

Once the shepherd finds the lost sheep, he rejoices and asks his neighbors to rejoice with him. Jesus concluded the parable, “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

I have a special connection to the Parable of the Lost Sheep. For almost two decades of teaching creative writing and English, I used it as a writing prompt, often for a semester in-class final. Students typically had 30 minutes to write a 150-word response in longhand explaining their decision in the shepherd scenario: should he leave the safe 99 and look for the lost one?

I always wrote on it, too. Toward the end of the period, we would each read aloud a representative passage from our response. The classes were usually split 50/50 on having the shepherd search for the lost sheep, with an occasional clever politician wanting it both ways, such as having the shepherd build a fence around the flock before leaving or taking them with him. In my mind, there is no having it both ways in the Parable of the Lost Sheep: the shepherd assumes risk and goes searching—or he does not. There is no guarantee of success.

In all those years, I never had a single student who didn’t complete the assignment or share a passage. The prompt invariably produced the most interesting writing of any given class, and I saved many of the best pieces for reasons I can’t explain. I also saved many of my responses.

One time, back in 2009 or 2010, I opened with: “Who in this world has not gone astray and found themselves lost? Lost in addiction? Lost in depression? Lost in delusion? Lost in poverty? Lost in love?”

“Wouldn’t everyone in this class want someone to come looking for them if they became lost in body or spirit? It’s what most of you write about every day in your journal.” I wrote that ending paragraph for another response, in 2004 or 2005.

I conjured the Parable of the Lost Sheep the other morning after seeing the man smoking fentanyl yet again in a public place. Indeed, I have never NOT seen him smoking fentanyl in public. I would have loved to have presented the scenario of this homeless man to my students in the context of the parable. The prompt would have been: do we (forget the shepherd and flock paternalism metaphor) as a society (or me as individual) search for this lost man, who really isn’t that hard to find, and try to render aid, or do we let him wander, lost in addiction, insanity, astray from everything decent in the world, whatever the circumstances of his fall, and let him die in front of us, because he will surely be dead at this rate very soon? Is that a self inflicted mercy killing?

Yes, a bit long winded a moral dilemma than Jesus framed it for the sinners in his presence. And there’s also that irritating problem of policy regarding searching and helping a man who is in no position to decide if he needs help or not. If anything, the Parable of the Lost Sheep is not about policies to help find the sheep gone astray!

Or is it? Polices matter. The people who administer them matter even more. Effective policies addressing the crisis of homelessness administered with alacrity can save lives. I’ve seen this up close and observed how one of these policies implemented on the ground by an outstanding city employee helped save my homeless friend Mark’s life, one man whose life had certainly gone astray.

I’d always written on the Ninety and the Nine prompt with my students, so why stop now? I sat down to write and…nothing…my mind was static.

Almost everything I write for publication is written in my head while walking. Then, upon returning home, I sit down at the computer and write what I’ve composed.

For three consecutive mornings, I placed the prompt at the forefront of my mind and set out with Elmer to write it up. As Wallace Stevens once wrote, “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

Or in my case, a walk around the duck pond and past the shipwrecked Oldsmobile SUV where I’d seen a man wearing a box over his head smoking fentanyl.

The next two days, a few ideas coalesced as Elmer and I walked in the early morning, but I didn’t write on them. The prompt was proving very difficult to pin down. I shifted my beliefs constantly, something that never occurred when writing on the prompt with my students; I always knew the answer then.

Why was that?

The afternoon of the second day mulling over the prompt, Elmer and I took an afternoon walk through the park and from 30 yards away I saw two men emerge from the back seat of the Oldsmobile and start walking away. Whether one of them was the box-wearing man, who knew? I’d never seen his face.

One of them carried something under his arm that I instantly identified it because I’d been married to an artist—a large sketch pad for line drawings or watercolor paintings.

The fentanyl smoker who wore a box on his head while getting high was an artist? An aspiring one?

For a brief moment I considered jogging over to see about purchasing a piece of art, but I didn’t have my wallet with me and the mood didn’t seem right to me.

As Elmer headed the opposite direction of the two men, it hit me why I was stalled writing on the prompt. In previous writings on the Parable of the Lost Sheep, the sheep represented an obvious metaphor for a human being gone astray, and thus an abstraction. All those years ago, I had instructed my students to write about a lost metaphorical sheep, not someone corporeal, important and in distress from their lives. What a fool!

The new prompt related directly to someone in my neighborhood I encountered on a semi-regular basis, a person totally deranged by an insidious drug that would kill him sooner than later. He was not an abstraction. He often slumped over ten feet away from me. I knew his face. He had an origin story where he never aspired to this state of delusion and devastation. He probably had a family out there somewhere, maybe even a kid.

I didn’t know him, but I knew another man, a former methamphetamine and fentanyl addict who spent time living on the streets and in prison. By own his admittance, he should probably be dead, but he survived, cleaned up with the help of family, sheer will and a dog, earned a degree, was attending graduate school to become a digital storyteller, administered a shower program for the homeless out of downtown Portland church, and became a close friend as a result of a mutual friend who put us together because of my writing about the homeless.

At one point in his life, he had been very much like the fentanyl man in my neighborhood, like many fentanyl men and women everywhere in America.

I know one homeless man in the neighborhood who uses fentanyl. I knew him as a kind, rational and gentle man who kept a very low profile and went out of his way to assist other homeless people, namely by fixing their vehicles. He once owned a dog grooming parlor in the neighborhood. He was a charter member of the Old Crow Book Club and I considered him a friend.

A year or so ago, word reached me he was using fentanyl. I never observed this myself, but his subsequent weird behavior in my presence and our bizarre conversations demonstrated his mind was wasting away. One time when I found him lucid in front of a convenience store, I braced him about his use of fentanyl. I’d never done anything like that before. Others got in his face, too.

He quit.

Now he’s using again, and his nephew, also homeless in the neighborhood, recently informed me he had to administer several doses of Narcan to revive him. He’s that close to dying and leaving behind a daughter, a brother, sister, and a niece and nephew.

I knew this man pre-fentanyl. He is most assuredly worth trying to save now. But I also know familiarity shouldn’t be required to help someone.

The prompt again: do we as a society (or me as an individual) search for this lost man, who really isn’t that hard to find, and try to render aid, or do we let him wander, lost in addiction, insanity, astray from everything decent in the world, whatever the circumstances of his fall, and let him die in front of us, because he will surely be dead at this rate very soon?

My response: yes. That’s it. When I answer no, time to walk into ocean and return as rain.

So I said yes. That means policies matter, as do the people who formulate and implement them.

Jesus didn’t go into policy about finding the lost sheep. He just talked about celebrating once it’s found.

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