A 20-year-old game show plays on television in Portland OTA country. A female OTA bartender watches.

I drink a gin and tonic and work on an essay about surrealism and homelessness. It’s one of the more complex pieces of writing I’ve ever attempted. I’m not pulling it off.

Surely, I am the only writer in America at the moment writing about surrealism and homelessness in a dive bar on a weekday.

Is that a good thing? Samuel Johnson wrote, “Only a fool doesn’t write for money.”

He was probably right.

It’s deader than a door nail in here. Where’s the degenerate regular who is always bitching about the inadequacy of her sex life? I need another profane monologue from her.

I just received a text message from a health care conglomerate trying to commit Medicare fraud in connection to my dad’s medical care after a recent minor fall. They want more tests and more tests and more doctor visits. Dad needs a Perry Mason doctor with a black bag who makes house calls.

Surrealism. A word uttered all the time in all the media platforms and no one knows what it really means. I do. I’ve studied it for decades and taught surrealism-themed writing workshop to high school students, teachers and aspiring writers.

It is not a synonym for bizarre or something that happened that couldn’t possibly have happened.

I am writing about the scenes of homelessness I encounter in the early mornings on my walks through the park with Elmer. Some of them have braced to me to the point of knocking me over. Do these scenes qualify as surreal according to the classic definition from a century ago when the artist movement began in France? In the essay, I am arguing they are not. Does it matter? Who knows? I do know that this essay will most likely conclude the new book I am writing as a follow-up to the Old Crow Book Club. It came about the same way as Old Crow; I just walked into it, this time with my great new dog who is becoming a charming literary sidekick.

I taste the gin and tonic. No tonic. They always make gin and tonics like that in this joint.

Time for a break from writing. I need some degenerates in here for company. I like writing about degenerates. Their antics occasionally make me laugh. I need more laughter in my life. Don’t we all. These are not funny times. I don’t seem to meet funny people anymore.

One of my favorite bartenders in my neighborhood OTA dive stood behind the bar and filled me in on the latest stories about the homeless men and women who patronize the joint, wander dazed and confused outside, congregate and/or pass out at the bus stop across the street, or use the picnic tables as a kind of pit stop before going on to do whatever it is they do all day. (This is the least reported story of the homeless crisis in America: what do homeless people, addled or non addled, do all day?)

We were alone. Not even a single person playing the slot machines.

This bartender and I usually talk about the soups we make. But today we conversed about the homeless in the neighborhood and the various deaths from overdoses that had occurred in recent months. These were men she had known in her capacity as a bartender, including one man named Marty.

Over a year ago, I’d written a poem about Marty, a regular in a coffee shop across the street from my dad’s assisted living center. I’d observed Marty dozens of times and he always kept to himself, ordered a coffee, then left. Sometimes other regulars bought him a coffee or a pastry. He was probably 60 years old.

The bartender told me that Marty had been found dead after running naked through the halls of a nearby apartment building. He had apparently died of a heart attack brought on by methamphetamine and fentanyl. He had also suffered extreme head trauma from smashing his head into the walls of the apartment building.

I had written a poem about him in his better days. Two stanzas read:

Marty, the shop’s homeless mascot

just rolled his folded blankets, sleeping bag and outerwear out the door.

In all my years of observing

Martys around Oregon,

I have never seen one with folded anything.

New homeless and women had recently appeared in the neighborhood. They were a much harder looking lot than previous migrations and exhibiting increasingly more bizarre behavior.

There has been zero outreach from the city and county to this encampment-free population from as far as I could tell, and I do have members of the Old Crow Book Club who keep me informed on such matters.

The bartender told me that management had recently started stocking Narcan in case customers suffering from a fentanyl overdose needed resuscitation.

She’d already used two sprayers the past week and she only worked two days a week from 9-5. On her own volition, she had driven to Central City Concern and picked up more Narcan—a lot more.

Just the other day, she and another customer pumped four hits of Narcan into a homeless man outside the bar. They saved his life, the paramedics showed up to treat him, an ambulance took him to a hospital and…

…the next day he was outside the bar and overdosed again and she administered another dose of Narcan to revive him.

This was all insane.

Insane that a bartender was a front line health care worker.

Insane that the homeless man suffering from extreme addiction was released from the hospital (probably given a ride back to the neighborhood).

Insane that there is no sobering center in the county where the man would have been confined for at least a week and assessed.

Insane that the man used fentanyl again after almost dying the previous day.

Insane that this was going down in one of the tonier neighborhoods in Portland.

Insane that I plan on now carrying Narcan on my 5:30 morning walks with Elmer the husky.

Insane that I will undoubtedly have to use it soon.

Insane how broken American culture has become that all the above is perfectly normal.

I asked the bartender if she thought she would live long enough to see the homeless crisis somehow go away, implying a solution. I didn’t say improve.

“No,” she said.

I agreed and that hurt.

We stopped talking about the homeless crisis and I asked about her gazpacho recipe. I plan on making my first attempt at one this summer.

“What? You slice in a honeydew melon?” I said.

“Yeah, my secret sauce.”

Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” played on the jukebox in a degenerate OTA joint in Portland.

I sat at a table and drank a well gin and tonic that had no gin.

“Evergreen?” Barbra Streisand? It didn’t feel like the right soundtrack to accompany the obese and tattooed OTA woman sitting at the bar drinking a bloody mary, shot of whiskey and beer chaser. On my last visit she delivered a bitch soliloquy about how she couldn’t find any good cock to suck or pussy to lick. This time she was bitching about the high price of fast food.

The Rose Festival Parade aired soundless on television. It has definitely evolved to reflect the demographic changes in Oregon. Good. Besides, anyone participating in the parade or watching from sidelines at least got off their asses to moved out into the world.

As I watched the parade, it occurred to me that I disn’t have a Rose Festival story, or a Timberline Lodge one for that matter.

An OTA regular I’ve dubbed Fat Rick waddled past to me to his table. He was wearing his traditional lime green mumu.

An OTA man at the bar ordered another drink and said he didn’t want to get too fucked up because he had some concrete to pour later.

It was noon on a Saturday.

The joint felt entombed. I needed fresh reinforcements of degenerate if anything interesting of storytelling value was going to happen. Fat Rick and the sex starved bisexual bison weren’t cutting it.

I wondered when I’d stop writing about OTA country. I’d declared it dead years ago thanks to Herr Dump.

Still, pockets of resistance remained and I’ll relish them while I can.

The door squeaked opened behind me. A man sporting a weird crew cut, tattoos and wearing a tank top, shorts and sandals entered. He was and was not OTA.

He went up to the bar. Everyone hailed him. They joked about his antics. He’d blacked out at the joint last night, quite possibly shit himself, and here was 12 hours later ordering a double vodka soda.

Hello reinforcements! Once more into the OTA breach!

I finished my gin and tonic and walked out to the potholed parking lot half-filled with beaters that had either no license plates or expired tags.

The smell of pot nearly knocked me over. A cloud of smoke drifted through. I looked around to see where it was coming from. I saw three young men sitting on the covered porch of a dilapidated house next door to the joint. They were ripping bong hits and inhaling joints.

I reached my car. Elmer had his head out a rear window and sniffed eagerly at the air. His eyes looked a little strange. He was stoned! My husky was high!

I laughed, petted his head, got in the car, and drove away.