Why not laundry? A 24-hour laundromat was a block away.

I walked to the laundromat in a light snow with my basket. I brought along a novel and pint of Jim Beam. It was my custom to drizzle a little whiskey into the 25-cent coffee purchased from the ancient machine whenever I did my laundry because that’s what writers did and I thought of myself as a writer even though I hadn’t written anything for publication.

Typically no one was ever around in the laundromat, so it was to my great surprise upon entering, when I beheld a bearded older man wearing a dirty coat, sitting slumped in a chair, and looking out the window to the falling snow. He had several bundles of possessions around him and was not doing any laundry.

We sort of nodded to each other when I entered.

In Portland of 1989 on the east side of the Willamette River, seeing such a homeless man never happened. I don’t think they were even called homeless back then: transients, bums, vagrants, winos, drifters, etc.

But the homeless crisis was in motion then and starting to receive national attention. (Thank you President Ronald Reagan for starting it all.) Who would have ever thought it would come to dominate Portland life and political discussion and my writing life three decades later?

I got my laundry going. I purchased a coffee and spiked it. It occurred to me that the old man could use a cup to ward off the chill and the Christmas Eve blues so I asked if he wanted one. He perked up and said yes. He excused himself to go to the restroom. When the coffee cup filled up, I took it out of the machine, dumped three quarters of the contents into a sink, and topped it off with Jim Beam.

The old man emerged from the restroom. He returned to his seat. His cup of coffee rested on a table near him. He acknowledged the gift and sipped it.

I will never forget as long as I live the expression in his eyes when he took that first taste. Marty Feldman comes to mind. Or Betty Davis.

He glanced at me and nodded. We never exchanged another word. I did my laundry, read, drank my coffee and whiskey, and walked home in the snow. I no longer recall what I did the rest of the evening.

I thought it a charming little Christmas story. A few days later I told Angela about it, thinking she would love the sentiment. She burst into anger and harangued me for providing alcohol to such a man. He was probably an alcoholic and you gave him booze? On Christmas!

Her blunt reaction shocked me. I could never predict anything she ever did, which is probably why I liked her so much.

We obviously didn’t make it, although we did try a few times over the next three decades. Every time I hear the Spin Doctor’s “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong on the radio when I’m driving, I think of Angela and smile. It was my song for her. I don’t think I ever told her that.

A couple years ago, we tried again and were astonished to discover that our attraction and sexual chemistry were even greater. Her temper played a part again in the dissolution, but I was to blame as well. It’s never one person’s fault in these matters of the heart, at least in my lifetime.

It was Christmas Break. The year was 1989, my first year of teaching, and I’d barely made it to the vacation. I was totally overwhelmed and exhausted by the amount of energy expended teaching full time, over 150 students a day. (It would take another 20 years to learn how to manage my pace and become a better teacher, but that’s another story I’ve already written.)

I lived alone in a cavernous two-bedroom apartment on SE Belmont in Portland. It featured a balcony, huge windows, hardwood floors and a monster claw foot tub (no shower). Rent: $350 a month. It was way more room than I needed, but after my live-in girlfriend and I had broken up the previous year, there was little enthusiasm to leave.

It was a great place and had the advantage of towering over a Thai restaurant that many considered the hottest food joint in town. Johnny, a young Thai kid, owned and operated the restaurant and justifiably earned the nickname of Crazy Johnny because virtually every night he was screaming at a customer in the parking lot for one perceived affront or another. “You fucking cocksucker, son-of-a-bitch, motherfucker. You never come back here asshole shithead!”

The restaurant had no telephone so Johnny conducted business at the payphone below the balcony and was consonantly screaming in Thai, pounding the receiver everywhere, and kicking the hell out of the glass. It was all wonderful fun to hear and observe. He must have gone through three phone booths in my three years living there.

As I said, I barely made it to break. My first Monday off I read Neil Sheehan’s Vietnam War classic A Bright Shining Lie in one setting. That book was over 600 pages long.

Slowly I emerged from hibernation and started seeing the woman I was loosely dating, Angela, then a stunning 21-year-old junior at Seattle Pacific who was majoring in literature if memory serves me right, which it often doesn’t writing memoirs of this kind.

Angela and I had a tempestuous on/off relationship but there was something unique in our attraction and sexual chemistry that I haven’t experienced too many times in my life, if ever. She is also the only woman I’ve ever known with a terrible temper and the only woman who has ever slapped me across the face. (It hurt! It was right out of the noir films!) I will never forget the time she erupted in anger when we met at a campground near Mt. Rainier. She was pissed because she thought we were meeting halfway, and, as it turned out, she had to drive two thirds of the distance. It was during that outing that she also castigated me when I told her I suffered more emotional pain when my childhood dog died over the passing of my grandfather. I tried explaining but she wouldn’t have any of it.

Despite all our tensions, I was crazy for her and her then terrible taste in music! (Breathe—”Hands to Heaven,” our song!) I mean, she read William Faulkner and sashayed in faded Levi’s like nothing I have ever seen when she walked. She smoked cloves like a movie star and the Clackamas River still remembers her sunbathing there in a Polo one-piece swimsuit.

On Christmas Eve, after a low-key celebration with my father and sister, I returned to the apartment with nothing to do but grade papers that I had stupidly brought home over the break. I started grading then stopped. No! Not on Christmas Eve! That’s absurd!

I was feeling antsy. I needed something to do.

Gray and grayer outside. I’m in my local Oregon Tavern Age joint drinking a dark beer. John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” plays. That song seems so naive today and almost dangerous considering what’s going in American small towns in the so called heartland.

I’m reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and marveling how ornate the writing is and how the novelist frequently makes short digressions to expound intimate personal philosophies. I guess I do that in my fiction but they are never really personal, mostly social or political.

I bought a Playboy from 1972 for five bucks the other day. Usually a vintage edition goes for $15-20. This one had the centerfold ripped off, hence the cheaper price. No big deal. I always read Playboy for the articles.

What a time machine reading this “men’s” magazine. Many of the liquor ads featured men reading books. There was 7000-word interview with a former American army counterintelligence officer who described all the secret assassination programs in Vietnam that he refused to participate in. There were letters from incarcerated men who were serving 30 years for possession of marijuana. There were four short stories! Sexist cartoons. There was a long article about the New England Patriots preseason camp where the players lived in college dorms and drank every night before practice. I dug the ads from 8-track players and record clubs. There was a feature on how a Democrat could win his party’s

nomination for President. You had to play dirty and also give away cool merchandise to the convention delegates, like monogrammed nail clippers (Hubert Humphrey’s campaign).

I missed that heyday and I wish I hadn’t. It seems so much ragtag, richer and preferable than what our current culture offers. Of course Henry Kissinger was around and committing war crimes and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dad and I had a good laugh the other day. He lived longer than Henry Kissinger. We had a bet going on that!

I saw an elderly homeless man riding a pink kids bicycle while carrying a bag of cans and swigging from a fifth of Jack Daniels. It was a poem that I didn’t have to write.

I put up the vintage outdoor Christmas blow-mold statues. They look sort of goofy and mismatched but if they cheer one person up, why not?

Absolutely nothing is happening in this joint. Good.

Wait, something just happened. A homeless man bundled in layers just walked in. He ordered a bloody mary and is now playing a slot machine.

Tom Petty is now playing. I can’t believe he’s dead and Dick Cheney is alive.

I’ve been thinking about my writing goals for 2024. They haven’t yet come into focus. I wonder if the subject of homelessness will continue to pervade my creative mind like it has done the past three years.

I wrote fiction at a table in my OTA joint and listened to the fictions of the four people behind me who were slumming and discussing all their trophy homes and vacations and destination restaurants and…everything about them was consumerism. The more conspicuous the better.

An older Black man played pool and drank a draft beer. He moved like silk might in a billowing wind. He wore sunglasses, a tan three-piece suit with a wide striped tie and a fedora. There was a doo rag under the fedora. The suit was two sizes too big for him. He wore the biggest gold watch I have ever seen. It looked like a sundial!

He was right off the set of a knockoff Shaft movie from 70s. (RIP Richard Roundtree.)

Every five minutes or so, a Black OTA woman wearing a scowl and a green knit stocking cap would enter the joint, twitch, gesture, and call the female bartender a bitch, then leave. It made no sense. It was reality show drama and I can’t stand that bullshit.

Another Black man played slots with aggression. He was losing and pounding the shit out of the machine. Nobody cared. The state owned them and they could repair them.

Football played on television. Men’s brains were being concussed for entertainment.

The weather outside was ideal for raking leaves and my yard needed raking.

The squirrels weren’t going to do it!

Oh those damn squirrels. They are my great friends!

“Are you Matt, the guy who wrote the Old Crow book?” said a tall man in his 40s. He held a leash to a stoic white dog.

I was sitting with a friend in a coffee shop, about ready to leave because the terrible pop music blaring made reading a manuscript impossible.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

He introduced himself and said he lived in the neighborhood. After reading The Old Crow Book Club, he used the contact information inside to send me an email saying how important the book was to him.

I remembered the email as pretty extraordinary. The man described his vexing relationship to several members of the book club, particularly Donnie. He had been sick of seeing him passed out on the sidewalk, blocking the path for his two grade-school aged daughters. They liked walking to the convenience store without their dad to purchase treats and he didn’t know if it was safe with drunken homeless men around. He confronted Donnie and yelled at him. They’d almost come to blows. Then he happened across the book from Mark and purchased it via the internet. Reading about Donnie, Mark and Jacob, the man told me, had helped him understand their plight a bit better and enabled him to release his anger. He wasn’t an angry man; that’s not what he wanted to teach his daughters about the homeless. But Donnie’s antics had pushed him to the brink. The book had helped a lot with that. He thanked me for writing it.

This I learned from his email a few months ago. Now I had met him in person. He said he recognized me from my time talking with Mark.

I asked the man about his dog. It was a rescue from Fresno. The man seemed like he wanted to talk so I prompted him and we talked. Five minutes later, he had narrated a story related to the homeless in our neighborhood.

It went like this:

A few years before the pandemic, after a long absence from Portland, he had moved back to the area with his family to the neighborhood where he had grown up. He finally had earned enough money to buy a home. It was a fixer near the park where I walk every day.

In the coming years, a homeless encampment emerged near his house. It was practically across the street. The city did nothing. His stress and frustration mounted. Then the pandemic hit and the encampment grew to include a collection of over 20 RVs, vehicles, plywood shanties, tents and one colossal and bizarre complex made of wood. There were comings and goings all night. Cops had to be called multiple times. There was always screaming and people yelling at light poles. Two portable toilets were constantly vandalized. Some of the residents used hard drugs and lit open fires on the street. The residents destroyed the riparian area of a creek flowing behind the encampment. There was garbage everywhere and rats thrived.

The city did nothing.

I knew this encampment well, because I walked or bicycled through it every morning for almost two years. I even met several of its residents. Most were weird, but friendly. A few were obviously fentanyl zombies, and one time, a man armed with a knife told me to, “fuck off, there’s nothing to see here,” on one of my visits.

But it was impossible not to look because it was something I had never seen up close. It was something I thought impossible to exist in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of Portland.

The encampment had worn down the man’s spirit. His mental health spiraled. He became so depressed that he sought out counseling to deal with his feelings about the presence of the encampment. He didn’t know what to do. He was turning him into something he didn’t recognize or like.

A year ago, the city finally swept the encampment (an incident I witnessed and documented in a previous installment of the newsletter and in the book).

That clearance had certainly improved the man’s mental health, but it seemed to me as he wound down the story, that he was still wrestling with the experience. What had gone down in his mind during the darkest days of the chaos and misery he interacted with on a daily basis? How did it impact raising his two daughters?

I had to leave, not to find another coffee shop to read the manuscript, but to think about what I just heard. It was one of the more fascinating stories about the homeless crisis in Oregon I’d encountered. It was a story totally unknown to me. It had never appeared in print or online in all the hundreds of thousands of words I’d read about the crisis. I had read multiple accounts of frustrated and angry homeowners and businesses whose neighborhoods and livelihoods had been degraded or ruined because of homeless encampments, but I hadn’t read anything about the negative psychological experience of someone who had lived across the street from one. What does happen to an elderly woman living alone in a home and various derelict RVs with their noisy generators and piles of inexplicable shit have been parked in front of her home for THREE YEARS? That is a story worth exploring and the homeless advocates should consider doing so. Their believers need to read about it.

As I was writing up the encounter in the coffee shop, it occurred to me that I often felt utterly despondent when I witnessed certain tragic scenes of homelessness, many of which I have posted about on this platform. My dad has warned me repeatedly to try and take a break from the observations and caring or otherwise my mental health might suffer, perhaps permanently, and that is simply something I can’t allow to happen to me. My responsibilities are immense.

I rejected his advice when he initially brought it up, and continue to reject it. I don’t want to be inured to this crisis. I want to continue to assist in whatever ways I can. I think the man with the white dog does as well.