Oregon Tavern Age: Birthday

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

I occupied my usual back table at Jake’s Place, and occasionally entertaining, occasionally desultory OTA joint in Portland.

Today, on my birthday, it was decidedly desultory.

Earlier in the day, I’d spent a pleasant time with my parents and talked on the phone to some great friends who wished me well.

In Jake’s Place I whipped out my journal, sipped a local IPA, and began to record my birthday thoughts.

I faced the bar. The pinball machines stood behind me. The Batman 60s television series game was making a holy racket, but at least part of the cacophony was the sound of Julie Newmar’s voice as Catwoman.

Four OTA men and one OTA woman sat at the bar. She was drunk and blonde and engaged in semi argument with a man who was massaging her shoulders. It was apparent they knew each other. Another man at the bar interceded and asked massage man to stop. He did not.

Things were beginning to ratchet up. Was I, after 25 years in OTA country, finally going to see my first fight? I didn’t want to. Everyone carries a firearm these days, and I didn’t want to have to hit the deck on my birthday. The carpet in here hasn’t been cleaned since Gerald Ford was president.

The woman calmed the situation and the two men backed away to play video slots and a pinball machine. The woman turned her attention to another OTA man at the bar, two stools down. He was reading a fat novel illuminated by a light contraption plugged into his phone. He was eating a chili dog and drinking a beer, too.

He and the woman got into an argument. I only caught whiffs of their conversation, but it was clear to me she soliciting him in some weird way to take her to his home where he would pay her for sex. They obviously had done this before. Perhaps she was the joint’s quasi hooker or sex worker as they’re called today.

They argued for several minutes and then he decamped for a table. The woman saw another OTA down the bar and slurred out to him. He didn’t answer and watched college basketball on TV.

All of this was going down while Nineties rock was playing, Collective Soul, Green Day, The Offspring. Etc.

The woman turned toward around and looked my direction. Sweet OTA Jesus! She wasn’t going to come over?

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her seeing me writing in my journal.

This strange sight must have dissuaded her possible solicitation because she turned back around and began playing on her phone.

Seeing someone writing in public can threaten like that. It didn’t use to be that way.

I’ve lived long enough to see the transformation and I don’t like it at all, although it did come in handy on my birthday.

Reflections on the Great Recession of 2008-09

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History

When I moved to Newport, Oregon in the spring of 2008, the Great Recession was about ready to rise up and wipe out a large swath of Americans and their futures. I started teaching at Newport High School later that fall, and for the next three years witnessed first hand the devastation that economic calamity wrought. Actually I did more than witness it. I was in the thick of it with my students, several of whom became homeless with their families.

I wrote a column about the Great Recession’s effect on coastal Oregon for a weekly magazine in 2009. I look back on it today and see it was some of my first writing about the crisis of Oregon homelessness. Here is an excerpt:

In the course of promoting my new book, I’ve driven up and down the Oregon Coast a dozen times this summer and consistently encountered the same troubling image: weathered middle aged men walking Highway 101 with all their worldly possessions. I’ve lived on the coast for 13 years and have never seen so many homeless men on the road. I started keeping count in June but finally gave up.

Some sit in the shoulders holding cardboard signs reading “Hungry” or “Need Food.” Sometimes they have a backpack, wagon, suitcase, even a ragged bicycle. A few have dogs. Infrequently, a woman accompanies a man. Life looks damn hard for these men.

The only thing I haven’t seen is a bindle. There is no Jack Kerouac romance of the road for them. There is no John Steinbeck around to chronicle their stories, only a couple of radio and television charlatans who claim to speak politically and spiritually for them. These weathered men have no irony about them whatsoever. You can’t have irony when you’re invisible to the unwashed commentators.

I can spot the difference between a sojourner and a homeless man. A few younger, sturdier men obviously tramp the Oregon Coast on some existential errand or walkabout, most likely returning to something solid, dry. Where the weathered men end up I can’t even imagine.

Please don’t think I’ll sound flippant with what I’m about to write next: At least near the beach these men and their dogs can find some scrap of solace from the ocean, a free bed in the sand, and some of the amenities provided by the Oregon Coast’s vast system of federal, state local and county parks and recreation areas, which have become de facto social service agencies for all kinds of men, women and children dispossessed by the recent economic calamity.

Don’t tell me I exaggerate; I hit the various beaches near my home at dawn every morning and have seen plenty of weathered men sleeping in the dunes and willows. Although I could easily take their photographs and perhaps better document their plight, I will not do so; it feels wrong to me. To walk past these men and do nothing is a profoundly distressing experience to begin my day, but generally, that’s what I do, walk on by.

In recent weeks, I’ve given a $20 bill here and there to a few weathered men. (I also donate to various social service agencies.) I’ve also stashed cans of dog food in the truck and dole them out when I see a homeless man on the road with a dog. He gets the $20 if he promises to take care of the dog. Sure, I know some of the money goes for booze. But not all of it.

When the hard rains come, I suspect the beach will provide little psychic and absolutely no physical comfort for the weathered men. At that point, they’ll mostly disappear from my sight as I cruise Highway 101. I don’t have a poignant or prescriptive ending for this column. It just ends.

*****

In the course of writing this newsletter, I have frequently reflected on those first three years teaching at Newport High School when the Great Recession pulverized many of my students. I now know through study that almost five million Americans lost their homes in that sub prime mortgage swindle/crisis and that 200 people anywhere in America would line up early in the morning for five openings at a Walmart, including Newport.

It isn’t remarked on all that often in the media how the Great Recession became one of the significant causes of the contemporary homeless catastrophe. Men and women who got hollowed out by it back then never really recovered. I have served many of these men and women, now in there 50s and 60s, at the street mission and food pantry. I have overhead their stories of dislocation from that era. They weren’t able to rally, along came drug abuse, deprivation and other problems, and now they are living outdoors and many are not really looking to live indoors again. I have heard them tell me that.

In the throes of the Great Recession, the Lincoln County School District created a homeless outreach position to connect students and their families to very limited resources. The district’s busses began picking up students at campgrounds and budget motels. Schools started programs where students took home backpacks full of food on Fridays and returned the backpacks on Monday. I was advising the monthly Newport High Schools news magazine and we ran a regular features on homeless students. One columnist wrote exclusively on the subject. I walked my journalism students to the nearby food bank and we interviewed patrons, many of them newly homeless or about to be homeless.

The 2009-10 academic year was also when I spent $7200 of my own money on various items for my students. I know the exact figure because it was the first and only time I itemized such expenditures (in my journal). Most of the money went for power bars, fruit, candy, donuts, bagels, etc, that I stocked in my classroom. I was always the first teacher in the building and students would often arrive at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning to eat something before the free breakfast was served because they were hungry. It was during this time that I sometimes had students fall asleep in class and many of them began to look gaunt in the face, obvious symptoms of hunger.

I remember one student in particular, Dylan Huff, whose dad was a alcoholic, and had lost his job, as so many did back then. They lived in a house without insulation, power or running water. If I recall correctly, it was a house with an interior ripped down to the studs.

Dylan would routinely knock on my classroom window and I would let him in. He’d eat, drink the oceans of Yuban I poured for students, warm up, use the restrooms to wash himself, and then get on the computer to access the Internet. We didn’t talk that much because he knew I had teaching work to do. He did write a poem about living in that house that winter and it was published in the school literary review. I’ll never forge that poem. It was called “Colors” and it should have won a standalone Pulitzer Prize.

As I look back on my role of teacher then, I realize now that I should have had my writers dig more into the homeless/poverty issue that was all around them. It was a missed opportunity. I do hope current teachers are exploring these same issues with their students. I know I would have been. How could a teacher not?

Smoky Returns

NSP Meditations, Writing

As regular readers of this blog might recall, I speculated a while back that I might have run out of ideas for literary projects. With the forthcoming publication of two of my books this spring, I had nothing pressing on the horizon, something that hadn’t occurred in over 20 years.

All of that changed a couple weeks ago and it came to me in a dream and an unexpected email the next morning.

Fifteen years ago I struck up a friendship with a man named Smoky Epley. He had recently been released after serving 27 years in federal prison for a string of bank robberies in Oregon. We had connected after he read a review I wrote of a 1973 book called Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary

Smoky had contributed 20 pieces to the review and knocked me out with his talent.

He emailed me after reading the review, published in the Oregonian in 2008, and we struck up a friendship and I arranged for a gig together to reintroduce him to literary society. That event was truly incredible; Smoky turned in the most riveting literary performance I’ve ever witnessed.

We lost touch for two years but then reconnected after Smoky was arrested for forging a check and sent to state prison for two years. Upon his release, we met up.

I encouraged Smoky to write his memoirs and he sent me 19 installments of a book he called Auto. They stopped after an operation for cancer. He died in 2013.

I have been sitting on Smoky’s manuscript and transcription of a lengthy interview I conducted with him for a decade. I had always wanted to publish it but things dramatically changed in my life seven years ago and I lost sight of the project.

Then I had this dream and Smoky appeared. I remember nothing of the dream except he was there and wearing a fedora.

The next morning, a long lost friend of Smoky’s emailed me that she’d recently had a dream about Smoky and found my writing about him on the internet and wanted to know how he was.

It was an extraordinary coincidence and after responding to Smoky’s friend, I took a walk in bitter cold to contemplate it.

The outline and substance of a book about Smoky came to me during that walk. Ten days later, I had written 20,000 words on Smoky and prepared his manuscript and other writing for publication.

Expect the book out this fall. Working title: The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley by Smoky Epley and Matt Love.

I am glad I pay attention to my dreams. More people should and follow up on the allusions and invitations dreams invariably offer. It was seem so foolish not to.

Scenes of Steve Prefontaine (Scene 6)

Fiction, NSP Meditations, Sports

Over a decade later, the teacher was no longer a teacher. He wasn’t anything. He had made a mistake in two sentences of written communication and lost everything. The State annihilated his past and present; he had no future. The mob had stoned him to death on social media. He had considered suicide; he was encouraged to commit suicide. His closest friend had vanished without a word. Other friends vanished, too. His dog died. The Christian nuts came out of the rotten woodwork and urged him to repent and convert.

He was on the existential lam, not running away, but to nowhere. He was driving south down Highway 101 and rain and wind were delivering uppercuts and body blows to his vehicle. He pulled into Coos Bay to ride out the storm. He got out of the vehicle and started walking. It was early afternoon and he had no idea where he was going. The Coos Art Museum came into view. He walked in and upstairs to the Prefontaine Memorial Gallery. No one was there. He examined the memorabilia and then sat down and started reading the register. He read for two hours. No one entered the room.

Guts. Guts. Guts. He knew he had to keep running to see who had the most guts. Not running away to nowhere. Running toward something different, good, better. Running into new people, new Oregon places, new dogs, new jobs, new stories. Find a new gift. Invent one. Run like Pre raced, although there was no known finish line.

It was the only way he would ever survive.

Several years later, the man was driving south down Highway 101 again on his way to a disheveled RV park near Gold Beach. He was living in an ancient Winnebago there, still thinking about Pre every now and then, still running with guts and finding new life as a construction worker and tree planter.

As always, he stopped in Coos Bay to visit the museum and commune with Pre. In the register, someone had come to say goodbye to Pre because he was dying of cancer: “Thanks Pre, for all your inspiration in my life. I tried to live it well.”

This time, the man also decided to visit a tiny public plaza a few blocks from the museum and admire the 40-foot high triptych mural of Pre emblazoned with his quote, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.”

It was a dry and cold afternoon. The plaza had potted flowers, benches and picnic tables. At the base of the mural, the man beheld two young men, about Pre’s age when he competed in the Olympics, 30 feet from one another, splayed, with blankets over them, surrounded by their scattered possessions. The man couldn’t determine if they were asleep or passed out or something else.

The awful juxtaposition of these young men and the mural broke the man’s heart. Had they read Pre’s words? Did they know who he was? Were they from Coos Bay? Had they attended Pre’s high school? Had their grandparents passed Pre in the halls? What were their gifts to the world? Was it too late for them to discover their gifts?

Could Pre inspire these two men? Was there any juice left in his story in the era where homeless men and women lived in tents and under tarps in the very places where Pre trained as a kid?

The man was going to find out. He would teach once again. He sat down on the bench and waited for the men to rouse. When they did, he would introduce himself and offer to help in some way, maybe order a pizza delivered to the plaza. They would eat together at the table, underneath the mural and the quote, and the teacher would ask them about Pre and then take it from there.

Scenes of Steve Prefontaine (Scene 5)

Fiction, NSP Meditations, Sports

Shuck never missed a day of Senor English. But that didn’t translate to academic success. She struggled with reading novels and her writing was often ungrammatical and full of clichés.

That spring Shuck was poised to repeat as state 1500-meter champion and she wanted to break the meet record while doing so. Word got out around campus that Western Oregon State University had offered her a full ride scholarship. It was a small school with no track and field legacy.

In class one day, the teacher congratulated Shuck on the achievement.

“I’m turning it down,” she said. “I want to go to the U of O like Pre did. I want to run at Hayward Field and I don’t care if I get my ass kicked.”

“They didn’t offer you anything?” said the teacher.

“Nothing. I contacted the coaches and they never responded. I’m going to walk on and try to make the teams.”

“You’re giving up a full ride. That’s worth about a hundred grand. This is your ticket. You earned it.”

“I don’t care. What would Pre do?”

“Pre would walk on and run everyone into the ground.”

“That’s right.”

Shuck clapped her hands and said, “I’m going to apply for scholarships to afford it. I’m already filling them out. I should get a good financial aid package, too.”

“You’re going to have to write great essays to win those scholarships.”

“I know.”

A couple days later, Shuck visited the teacher after the last bell rang on a Friday She said she’d come across the Wilson Foundation Scholarship Fund. It annually awarded five, four-year scholarships to any public Oregon institution of higher learning of the recipient’s choice. The recipient had to be low-income and reside in a rural county.

The teacher had heard of it. The Foundation was atonement for the Wilsons, a family of Southern Oregon timber barons dating back to the 19th century who had massacred more Oregon watersheds than all the other timber baron families combined.

Shuck handed the teacher the application. It was mighty thick.

“Will you write me a recommendation?” she said.

“Of course,” he said. “I’d be honored.”

“Thank you.”

“When do you need it by?”

“Next week. The deadline is Wednesday.”

“I can swing it. Have you started the personal essay?”

“Yes.”

“Show it to me.”

Shuck extricated it from her backpack and handed one typed page to him.

He read it right in front of her which is about the hardest thing a student can endure from an English teacher.

The essay was a disaster. No opening hook. Errors galore. Nothing but a list of achievements, all athletic. There was no mention of the only reason she wanted to attend the University of Oregon. There was no mention of Pre.

“This isn’t going to work,” said the teacher.

“I know. It sucks. I can’t write.”

Shuck started crying. The teacher didn’t know what to say. Teachers aren’t trained for that.

“Will you write it for me?” she said.

“What? I can’t do that,” said the teacher. “That would be totally unethical. Fraud. I could lose my teaching license if it came out.”

“I’m never going to U of O unless you do it. It’s my dream. It’s why I run. I’ve never run to win. I just wanted to see if I had the guts to keep going.”

She started crying harder. But she didn’t leave.

This was the toughest ethical decision the teacher had ever faced.

She had quoted Pre! She didn’t even know she had. She was Pre!

“I’ll do it,” he said. “But this goes to your grave.”

“Thank you. Thank you.” The crying didn’t stop.

“Do you still have the responses to the running prompts from the first day?” said the teacher.

“Yes,” Shuck managed to gurgle out.

She dug into her backpack and came up with it.

“I want to use some of your language from those responses,” said the teacher.

“Okay.”

He told her about the register in the Prefontaine Memorial Gallery. He asked her what she would write in it. Shuck started talking and the teacher cut her off.

“No, write it right now,” he said.

He gave her a piece of paper and pen. She sat down and wrote for three minutes and handed it to him. He didn’t read it—yet.

“Now I want you to go for a run on the beach,” said the teacher. “I mean really rip one out, record pace, and record on your cellphone what running means to you as you’re running.”

“I don’t have a phone,” said Shuck.

He laughed. He didn’t have a cellphone either. Now he was really going to write the essay!

The teacher reached into a desk drawer and produced a micro cassette recorder he sometimes used to record writing ideas and memorable quotes. He explained the device and had Shuck practice a couple of times. She got the hang of it.

“When should I do this?” said Shuck.

“Right now!”

“I have to go to work.”

“Call in sick.”

“I’ve never missed a shift.”

“You will today. And wear the STOP PRE shirt.”

“Okay. How do I get this back to you?”

“Wrap it in a paper bag and leave it at the base of the flag pole in the parking lot. I’ll pick it up tomorrow morning.”

“Okay.”

Shuck flew out the door.

The bag was there the next morning. The teacher listened to it while doing his laundry at the laundromat. He took notes on her best riffs. He read her responses to the running prompts. The teacher wrote the essay. The foundation notified Shuck that she was one of ten finalists for the five scholarships. She aced the personal interview and won a full ride to the University of Oregon. She made the cross country and track and field teams, but never won a race. She graduated with a degree in sports medicine.

The teacher later recalled it was the most important piece of writing he would ever write and only two people would ever know who wrote it.

Scenes of Steve Prefontaine (Scene 4)

Fiction, NSP Meditations, Sports

The next day, the teacher read passages aloud to the class from some of the essays without revealing the writers’ names. One student had written, “I can’t sacrifice my gift because I don’t know what it is and this school has never helped me discover it. Will I ever discover my gift? What happens to people who never do?”

After a discussion about the fact or fiction of the idea that each person has a unique gift and that its discovery can bring that gift to fruition, the teacher took roll. He called out the names and made corrections to his roster as the students voiced their preferred first names.

“Charlonda Fielder,” said the teacher.

“Everyone calls me Shuck,” said a girl in the front row. She was blonde, wiry and her face was speckled with glitter.

“Shuck?” said the teacher.

It was then the teacher noticed she was wearing a baggy, threadbare STOP PRE T-shirt. He did a double take. Then a third.

“Where in the world did you get that T-shirt?” said the teacher.

“My junior high track coach gave it to me. His dad watched Pre run in college and it was his shirt.”

“You’re a runner?”

One of the boys interjected that Shuck was the defending state cross country champion and had also finished first in the 1500-meter run at state.

“So you know all about Pre?” said the teacher.

“I do. As soon as I graduate I’m getting a STOP PRE tattoo.”

The teacher was dumbfounded. Pre lived! Maybe he would inspire Shuck to run right out of Lincoln Shitty, as the students called it, and do something spectacular with her life.

In short order, faculty members filled the teacher in on Shuck’s personal story. She lived with her grandmother because her mother was a meth addict who was in and out of county jail. The mother was homeless and often seen wandering around town cursing at power poles, panhandling and prostituting. Shuck worked full time in the evenings at the Indian casino. How she found time to train at a championship level perplexed the teacher so one day he asked her. She told him she ran after her shift at the casino, ran through the streets and down the beaches of Lincoln City. She got home at two in the morning, slept a few hours, and then went to school.

That fall, Shuck repeated as the state cross country champion and was voted onto the football homecoming court. On the misty Friday night of the homecoming game, the teacher was patrolling the perimeter of the field on assigned duty. He didn’t mind the task. He got to watch the game from ground level and didn’t have to chaperone the dance.

At halftime, the school staged the homecoming king and queen coronation. Shuck was a member of the court and stood on the 50-yard line with the others waiting for the announcement of the winners over the PA

Fog began drifting in from the end zones. A local dignitary was emceeing the ceremony and delivering his canned jokes with flair. The teacher heard the dignitary announce Shuck as homecoming queen. Behind him, a chain link fence rattled and a hoarse cheer went up, “Way to go Charlonda! Fuck yeah!”

He turned around and saw an emaciated woman with stringy blonde hair, smiling, shaking the fence, really going at it with abandon, with both hands, and hopping up and down. She wore tattered pink sweats and a white hoodie. She was alone.

The teacher was intrigued so he walked up a grassy incline to the fence. The woman saw him and exclaimed, “My daughter won! She’s homecoming queen!”

“That’s great, congratulations,” said the teacher. “Why aren’t you inside the stadium with her?”

“The school banned me. This is as close as I get.”

“I’m sorry about that. Shuck is my student. In Senior English.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Not bad. I think she’ll be ready for college.”

The woman released the fence and gathered herself. The teacher noticed her face: it was the surface of the Moon.

“College?” she said. “She’s going to college?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

A battered pickup from the 70s came into view behind the woman. Headlights lit her up. A horn honked. Then again.

“I gotta go,” she said.

“Sure,” said the teacher. “Have a good Friday night.”

With that, she was gone.

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