Donnie from the Old Crow Book Club stood outside the grocery store selling the newspaper that advocates for the homeless, but doesn’t practice the kind of journalism that’s needed to address the crisis.

It was both a surprise and relief to see Donnie because I’d heard he was back in detox (fifth or sixth time). The last time I’d seen him, over a week ago, he seemed near death and splayed on the sidewalk in a mega alcoholic stupor. He hadn’t even recognized me when I called out.

Donnie was talking with a customer and I slipped behind him into the store unnoticed.

I purchased groceries and exited the store. Donnie saw me and waved. I walked up to buy a paper.

Donnie was a man transformed. What an appearance! He wore slacks and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked ten years younger. His hair, to quote Warren Zevon in “Werewolves of London,” was perfect.

I mentioned his vastly improved physical stature. He said he’d stopped drinking and found transitional housing. He could only stay there six months then he would transition into permanent housing as long as he met the minimum income requirement. He was 57 years old and received no state or federal income assistance of any kind. He hadn’t worked in years. I doubted he had the stamina to work.

Donnie would have to find a job and work full time to keep his subsidized apartment.

I asked him, “Can you do it?”

I’m pretty much point blank with the club members these days. The candor feels so much better than milquetoast concern. Candor gets us somewhere.

“Yes,” he said.

“Would you pump gas?”

“Yes.”

“Would you stock shelves at the grocery store?”

“Yes. I’ll do anything.”

“Have you really stopped drinking? You’ve said it before.”

“I know. I think this time it sticks. I’m going to meetings and a counselor all the time.”

Christ! I was grilling a homeless man in recovery in public!

I gave him five bucks for the newspaper. Donnie thanked me and said, “I’m reading one of your other books, The Gigging Life. I love it. It’s better than The Old Crow Book Club.”

DONNIE THE CRITIC! YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!

He continued: “I got something important from the book. I’m out here gigging the paper and trying to gig that I can get better with sobriety and talk to people about it.”

I’d gigged my books and stories a thousand times over 200,000 miles across Oregon and here was a man roughly my age who was gigging to show he could lick the demons and others could too.

“You need more Old Crow books?” I said

“Yes,” he said. “And I wanted to tell you, I left a copy of the book in detox. Everyone was reading it in there.”

Top that Ernest Hemingway! They ain’t reading The Sun Also Rises in there!

I hustled to the car, stashed my groceries, and retrieved three copies.

Donnie was engaged with another customer when I returned, an older man wearing shorts who was accompanied by a woman I recognized as former Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts. The Governor kept walking to the store as the man talked with Donnie. He then pulled out an envelope from his back pocket and handed it to Donnie. It had all the markings of a payoff!

The man followed the Governor into the store.

What was going on? I asked Donnie about the envelope. He gave me the lowdown: the man carried envelopes with a $20 bill tucked inside and distributed them everywhere he went around the neighborhood, typically to homeless men and women performing some kind of public service, not panhandling.

I told Donnie to give the Governor one of the Old Crow books when she emerged from the store. Gig it goddammit!

“I’ll do it!” he said. “I know just what to say.”

Of that I had no doubt. Since the Old Crow book came out, I have learned that the homeless men and women who are my friends gig my books with more zany originality than anyone I know.

Well, maybe not so much originality. They are gigging right out of the classic playbook of the New York newsboys/newsies in the heydays of the Hearst/Pulitzer penny press. “Extra! Extra! Read all about the Old Crow Book Club! Get your free copy here! Extra! Extra!”

A few weeks later, Donnie was standing outside the grocery store selling the newspaper it was incredible what sobriety had done for his appearance. A summer tan and a striped dress shirt added a special dash of panache. The man definitely has a new mojo going on.

I was on my bicycle and stopped to purchase a copy of the newspaper. He told me he wanted to read another book of mine and I promised I’d rustle one up. But which one?

A man appeared to my right. He carried a skateboard and had no teeth. His face was creased. He wore a faded red ball cap with Chevy emblazoned across the bill. He exuded a definite homeless vibe and I couldn’t begin to guess his age.

Donnie introduced him as ****. Donnie told **** that I was the author of The Old Crow Book Club. **** hopped a bit in the air and did a little jig. For the next five minutes he riffed. Here’s what I recall.

He loved the book!

It was fucking awesome.

He’d read it three fucking times!

He said I’d got it fucking right, brother!

It was the only book he read.

It was going to be huge.

It was going global.(What? Not viral?)

His friends in Idaho wanted copies!

He’d been homeless in the neighborhood for almost 25 years. September 17^th would be his 25^th anniversary.

He had a job helping out a cabinet maker in the neighborhood.

He drank alcohol and smoked pot. Never touched the hard shit.

He didn’t steal or trespass.

He had a story to write but didn’t want to use his name.

(I asked him I could write about him, promising anonymity. He said no but here I am. When a homeless man in your neighborhood reads your book about the homeless people in his neighborhood—three times!–and hops in the air and does a little jig when he meets you, well, damn right you are going to write about it!

**** stopped riffing. I asked how he knew my book was going global. He looked at me as if I’d asked the dumbest question in the world.

“I believe you,” I said.

“You should, brother.”

I gave him three bucks as a donation for improving my mental health. He initially refused but I kept insisting.

“Take the money, you son-of-a-bitch!” I roared.

He laughed and took the money. I bicycled away in absolute bliss. There is nothing like riding a bike when you are happy. You never ride in a straight line.

A bartender in my local watering hole remarked she’d recently visited a vintage typewriter shop with a friend and how much the place excited her. The friend purchased a machine and she wanted one, too.

Well, I said, I have three typewriters at home that I don’t use. Would you like one? She jumped up and clapped. YES!

I described the three models and she made her choice. After finishing my beer and the letter I was writing, I drove home, retrieved the typewriter from the garage, and returned to the joint. I presented the typewriter in its case and she was positively giddy. She said she wanted to get back into writing poetry and I said typewriters are great for that because it’s so easy to space words and punctuation—by using your hands. Not a cursor!

The episode reminded me of my history with typewriters:

My high school graduation present from my mother was an electric typewriter that I used all the way through grad school.

Cranking out notes on a typewriter when I was traveling the Alaska Highway in a camper with Ray, my great dog. This trip was an attempt to become a writer. It failed then, but bore much fruit later because of the nature of the failure.

The typewriters I always gave to the editors of the school newspapers and literary reviews I advised over the years. I wonder how many still have them.

Th typewriters that I often used as teaching tools in my classrooms.

I believe it is time for me to begin using typewriters again.

So, I visited the typewriter shop the bartender had mentioned, bought a new ribbon from the groovy sideburned proprietor (with typewriters tattooed on his arms) and even considered buying a little German portable, but refrained.

Exactly what I will write on my typewriter is unknown to me. I do believe I’ll hold a daily morning session on the deck with a little coffee and jazz on the radio. We’ll see where it goes.

I know it will make a pleasant sound for the neighbors.

It is a weekday afternoon and I am sitting on the back deck drinking a vodka soda. A breeze is whipping through the sprawling apple tree and a lone squirrel just harassed me for peanuts. The jazz station is playing on a radio I’ve owned for almost 40 years.

Why vodka soda? I have no idea. I just went to the liquor store and said to myself: “I want a vodka soda on an 85-degree day.” There you have it.

On my walk through the neighborhood to the liquor store, I came across a box of mostly CDs. I inspected them. Almost all were death/gore metal from the 90s. Someone was giving up their youth right there on the sidewalk. Nothing interested me in the collection.

I recently bought a CD compilation of mostly hair metal songs from the 80s for 99 cents. I never listened to this music during its heyday or now. But listening to these songs the other day as I drove around running errands, I was struck by its amusing debauchery, massive guitars and keyboards, and (now) cartoonish misogyny. I was actually laughing aloud at some of the lyrics, which were written in all seriousness back then. Ratt’s “Lay Me Out” is so over the top sexist and degrading that you wonder about the young men who wrote it 35-40 years ago. That kind of young man is on the internet today. Not in the 80s. Some of them were playing metal and loving every minute it.

I’ve been thinking more about my post Portland life when that day comes. I see the Coast but I also see a creek. I have a certain gritty town in mind but maybe it won’t be viable when I do leave the city.

I’m currently reading three books I discovered in street libraries: The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, The Norton Book of Modern Fairy Tales and Burr by Gore Vidal. The ancient Chinese poetry is so wonderfully sparse and loaded with crystal clear images because their written language is comprised of visual images. Very little of what I have read so far of these ancient poems contain disguised interior digressions because the poets were looking at the visuals in their world for meanings and metaphors. Virtually every poem I read opens the door to me from the first line. No opacity. No legerdemain. When the poet makes statements or ask questions, you know it.

An old girlfriend of 30 years ago reached out the other day via email. She said she’d been reading the blog and found my writings about the homeless compelling. She also described herself as having some kind of midlife crisis. I responded and she wrote back one more time and then disappeared. I wrote a couple more times and heard nothing so I took the hint. I wonder what was going on there? Why don’t more people follow up when they reach out? I don’t understand this.

Speaking of the blog, I’ve written before that it might be coming to the end of the line, and then it doesn’t. Lately, I’ve begun to feel that way again. Six years is a long time to maintain a blog when a blog is almost an ancient media platform. We’ll see. Perhaps it’s time to admit that the blog served a useful purpose, move on, and concentrate exclusively on the Substack newsletter about Oregon’s homeless crisis, which you can subscribe for free at:

https://mattlove.substack.com/

Please do.

I have decided to continue playing golf. I picked up a few more clubs at the thrift store to round out a set and plan on playing a few courses from my youth this fall and report back to Dad.

The stories involving members of The Old Crow Book Club continue. They are becoming vastly richer than the ones from the original book. If you haven’t purchased a copy, I strongly urge you to do so, via this blog, read it, and distribute in a street library near your home. This is the main way the book is being distributed and the results have been absolutely wondrous. Don’t you want to be a part of that? And support this unique literary social service project that has brought me more joy than anything I’ve ever written and that includes the book about Vortex I?

My good friend Don dropped by the house and presented his killer Trek road bicycle as a gift. He could no longer ride and thought I might put it to good use. I will.

Then we retired to a nearby dive bar, Jake’s Place, where a friend of his, Dave, would join us for a beer. Don writes an incredible blog called The Beerchaser (thebeerchaser.com/) where he has profiled over 400 joints across the region and is one of the great unheralded writers in Oregon.

Don, like I do, recognize these joints for the rich storyteller factories they are. You never get fantastic stories emanating from brew pubs or wine shops.

I had chosen Jake’s Place because I wanted Don to profile it for Beerchaser. But not for any interesting historical reason or a celebrity sighting back in the day, such as when Andy Gibb and Victoria Principal may or may not have stopped into a dive bar in Astoria in the 80s.

Jake’s was my choice because of Cassie, the weekday bartender (open at 9:00 in the morning!) who I had observed for over a year dealing with the various homeless people of the neighborhood who routinely wandered into the joint and utilized it as a defacto service center once they spent a buck in the slot machines or bought a beer with change. Cassie always dealt with these customers with a no-nonsense style laced with kindness and compassion. She also was the only bartender I’d ever seen who dusted the blinds of a window, in Jake’s case, the only window.

Don and I had talked at length about the crisis of Oregon’s homeless and he’d been an enthusiastic supporter of The Old Crow Book Club.

I met Dave outside the joint. We went inside and took up residence at my usual table in the back of the room. There were a few customers but the place was mostly dead and not a single homeless person was there, a rare occurrence indeed.

I went up to the bar and ordered. I asked Cassie when she had time to visit us and meet my friends, one of whom was a writer who wrote about joints like Jake’s Place. She said she’d be right over.

A minute later she was sitting at our table. What followed was a 20-minute conversation between us with Don, Dave and me asking he questions about the joint, her life, and her strategies with serving the homeless who come into the bar.

In short order, we learned:

Jake’s had once been a biker bar. Cassie was from the neighborhood and used fake ID when she was 17 to patronize Jake’s as her first bar. Her mother (!) was the evening bartender. Cassie had once been homeless herself, years ago, after having a baby and giving it up to the father. She treated the homeless people who came in with unconditional love and she’d had only one problem with the homeless in the four years she’d worked at Jake’s Place. A man kept asking her to turn up the music, then turn it down, then turn it up, then turn it down…and he was finally asked to leave. He left considerable winnings behind on a slot machine. Cassie punched out the ticket but held onto it in case the man returned. He did. She told him about the winning ticket. He told her to keep it.

Dad is set to mark his first year in assisted living. It’s going so well and his health and spirits are thriving. He’s also managed to make friends, namely a pair of mild Trumpian males who have shifted their loyalties to DeSantis. They typically avoid political discussions, but I have a feeling Dad might win the two men over from the dark side by the time the election rolls around.

I visit Dad four or five times a week and we discuss current events, my house maintenance projects, poetry, his personal history, and the state of the facility and its frequent staffing issues.

Not once have I felt it a chore to visit. I feel fortunate to have this unique opportunity to spend time with him and discover what goes on inside an assisted living center for middle-income seniors.

What goes on is fascinating but I rarely write about it.

The other day, however, I observed something between two residents that truly moved me so much emotionally that I thought it worth writing about here.

I was standing outside the facility on a hot afternoon, waiting to meet Dad’s pedicurist.

A males resident in a wheelchair was facing the sun. Sitting in a chair next to him was a female resident. He extricated a Hershey’s chocolate bar from his shirt pocket and extended it toward her. He said something as he did this but I didn’t catch it. He was so frail he could barely hold up the bar.

I noticed the candy bar drooping toward the ground, obviously melted.

The woman grabbed it as if she was shaking a hand. She began to unwrap it.

Have you ever tried unwrapping a melted chocolate bar? I have, several times. It is nearly impossible.

The woman managed to unwrap half it of, and took a bite, or was it a drink? She said thank you and handed it back to him.

Mark from the Old Crow Book Club sat on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store, reading a fat paperback, probably that damn Dune again.

Great! I hadn’t seen him in a couple weeks and wanted an update so I slowed my vehicle down, found a parking spot, and walked toward him.

I said hello and Mark greeted me with his typical gusto. A can of Sprite and a container of fried chicken and roasted potatoes rested near him. It was the first time I’d ever see him drinking something other than alcohol. I took that as an encouraging sign.

An elderly Asian woman wearing a mask came up to Mark and handed him a couple of bucks. He thanked her.

I remarked about the Sprite and Mark said, “I’m trying to drink less and eat a little better.”

That was good to hear. I didn’t ask him about housing. Had he tried a fifth time to secure it and failed again?

“Matt,” said Mark, “there’s something I want to discuss with you.”

“Sure, what is it?” I said, figuring it was something in connection to the publication or distribution of The Old Crow Book Club.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” said Mark, “a woman in the neighborhood. I think you two would get along.”

WHAT?

“Are you setting me up on a date?” I said.

“Yes I am,” said Mark.

WHAT? A homeless man was playing matchmaker for me? Preposterous!

Mark said the woman was very attractive, in her 40s, and in some kind of social service field.

I asked if she’d read the book. Mark said he thought she had, or at least started it.

Jacob from the book club approached. I told him Mark was trying to set me up on a blind date. Jacob laughed and asked Mark who it was. Mark said her name.

“She’s hot!” said Jacob.

WHAT?

I thought about the proposition for a second and said, “Why not?”

And indeed, why not? One never knows where anything will lead when it comes to members of the book club but everything so far connected to them had enhanced my life almost beyond measure.

I gave Mark my business card and said to give it to the woman and we’d see what happens.

The Matchmaker smiled and I walked away.

Two days later I was walking home after having coffee with a prominent Oregon writer who had read The Old Crow Book Club. She had reached out via email to set up a meeting. She lived about a half mile from me and had discovered the book because a week ago Jacob gave her a copy in front of the grocery store and insisted she had to read it.

The meeting went spectacularly well. She told me how much she admired the book, asked questions about it, and we brainstormed various strategies to help the homeless in our neighborhood. On that point, we both agreed: there need s to be a lot more neighborhood grass roots action to alleviate the crisis and a lot less downtown bureaucracy.

I was crossing the street when I saw Jacob down the block. I waved him over and we struck up a conversation. He was still on the streets, still wanted off the streets, still wanted to work, but couldn’t see a way out at the moment. He said he’d just seen Mark a little tipsy in front of the grocery store and bought him some ice cream to sober him up.

Mark appeared. He sat down on the sidewalk. He said he needed more copies of the book to distribute. So did Jacob. I said I’d hit them up next time we met.

Mark said he hadn’t had a chance to give my card to the prospective match. He was actually on his way to a spot a few blocks away where he always ran into her. He extricated the card and twirled it like a sharper. There was good mischief in his eyes.

“C’mon Mark,” I said. “She’s not going to do anything.”

“We’ll see,” he said.

It was time to go. I said so, said goodbye, turned, and began walking away…

and then…

The song “Matchmaker” from Fiddler on the Roof exploded into my consciousness and I found myself knowing all the lyrics! This was beyond otherworldly because I had never seen the movie and saw the play exactly one time, a high school production, 30 years ago. It wasn’t possible!

Then again, it was. I knew the song, and indeed every tune from the musical because my sister must have played the record of the movie soundtrack 200,000 times in my youth. And I loathe musicals!

I whipped around to Mark and began singing “Matchmaker” with full-on Broadway panache.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,
Make me a match,
Find me a find,
Catch me a catch
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Look through your book,
And make me a perfect match

Then Mark joined in! He knew the song, too!

We crooned a couple of verses and then I turned around, kicked up my heels, and walked away singing “If I Were a Rich Man.” Behind me, I could hear Mark and Jacob laughing.

At 8:00 that evening, I received a text from a number I didn’t recognize. It read:

Hi Matt,

This is **** and I’m a friend of Mark. I’m smiling. Oh those guys!

I responded.

We agreed to meet later that weekend.

I met the proposed match at a dog-themed coffee shop at ten in the morning.

We talked and talked, mostly about members of the Old Crow Book Club and their influence upon us. She had met them before I did, not long after moving into the neighborhood four years ago. She was walking a neighbor’s puppy down by the river, when the puppy broke loose and started running away. She flew into a panic and saw a gathering of homeless men. She ran up to them. One of them was Sean, a charter member of the club. She relayed the story and Sean took off running after the puppy without saying a word. He rescued it.

She met Mark not long afterward and they forged a friendship and talked on the streets on almost a weekly basis. It was exactly what had happened to me.

Fast forward to now. She had almost completed a two-week training/study program (not online) through a nonprofit organization to become certified as an outreach worker for the homeless in the Portland area. She had no previous social service experience. She did have a degree in psychology and it was finally time to put it to use after all these years. She was going to apply for a job through the nonprofit and wanted something out in the field. That’s where the need was greatest. Just look around us! There were so many unfilled positions of this type because the pay was so low. She didn’t care about the money, however, she had other means that I didn’t ask about. Oh, and she was writing a book, too.

This dramatic career change had come about because she’d met members of the book club, particularly Mark. She realized she wanted to get more involved in helping alleviate this crisis than just befriending homeless people, although that might be the best start all of us could undertake.

It occurred to me that stories such as hers (and mine) were happening all over Portland and Oregon and the nation.

The great Oregon poet William Stafford once wrote, “Justice will take a million intricate moves.”

Let me update that quote for the homeless crisis in America: solving it will take a million intricate moves by ordinary people. By those with housing, and those with not. A million moves every single day that are guided by competent officialdom or entirely devised by freelancers. It’s already happening.

As for the potential match set up by Mark the Matchmaker…I think I may have found something much better: a collaborator in the cause.