Oregon Tavern Age: The 82nd Avenue River

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

Cars. Dogs. Gambling. That was the talk in the Checkered Flag Tavern on SE 82nd Avenue in Portland.

It was a rainy afternoon on a Wednesday and the US House of Representatives was trying to select a Speaker to preside over future stupidity and madness.

A Foreigner song drifted through the speakers and reruns of football games played silently on screens. A female bartender wearing ripped jeans ran the show and had the hard appearance of someone who had seen it all. If she worked on 82nd Avenue then she had probably had.

I eavesdropped here and there as I began a new journal sitting in a massive circular booth with inexplicable upholstery near a big window that overlooked the various comings and goings of the avenue. These various comings and goings were concrete evidence of the ongoing unraveling of my country and there was nothing like that while sitting in a booth and drinking a beer. It was free anti-entertainment.

Every time I looked out the window, something unfolded involving a homeless person:

Someone carried bags of cans and bottles on foot.

Someone transported cans and bottles via a bicycle-powered can and bottle- conveying contraption.

Someone meandered down the sidewalk in an obvious drug induced stupor.

Someone stood in the middle of 82nd Avenue doing … ?

Some couple wore pajamas vaping something.

Battered RVs and blasted vehicles, domiciles on wheels, bounced by, choking and coughing.

And so on. All of what I observed above happened in the space of three minutes.

I had intended not to write about the homeless but there it was streaming 20 feet away from me in brown and gray, a roiling river of degraded American humanity that never flows downhill and thus never reaches an estuary nor an ocean.

So how could I not have written about it? I could have written about the weird lunch special advertised over the bar, Danish Meatballs, or the other astonishing offerings of sausage items.

Or I could have written about anything else, but when a river such as the one that flows up and down 82nd Avenue, and you are close enough to fish from its bank, you must write about it if you are an American writer with any shred of relevance. To ignore the subject would be to lie by amoral omission.

My river watching was interrupted me as a homeless-looking man passed by mu booth and went out to the smoking porch. The bartender hurried out from behind the bar to confront him. I watched the confrontation but couldn’t hear the conversation. It didn’t last long.

The homeless man left without incident. Several seconds later I saw him bobbing down the current.

I began writing about the river in my journal and then an Elvis song replaced Foreigner and I wondered if I could work the King into the narrative. But which King? The Sun Records version or early Vegas or the fat 42-year-old pill addict who died on an upholstered toilet in Graceland while eating a ham sandwich?

Reader, I think you know which one best serves the editorial interest of my writing about the homeless.

Oregon Homeless Age: OHA

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

The definition of Oregon Homeless Age or OHA is: someone homeless appearing anywhere from 18 to 88 years in age.

A green Ford mini van held together with bungee cords and duct tape idled in front of a dive bar. Every exterior light was cracked or shattered. Its tags were legal when Obama was President.

On the sidewalk in front of the bar rested two can-conveying bicycle contraptions. I’ll never get over the ingenuity of these 21st century jalopies. Some of them need to be displayed in a museum of capitalism or an art gallery run by a street mission. Certainly a fleet of them should be preserved for future scholarly investigation, you know, that era when all American homelessness has vanished from the landscape.

It was noon on a gloomy Monday. I wanted to drink a dark beer and write so there I was.

I entered and was assaulted with heat. I ordered a dark beer in a can and carried it to the back table where I always sit. It stands next to the pinball machine featuring characters and sounds from the Batman TV series of the 60s. All I can say for it is that I get to see Julie Newmar and hear her voice.

The back table is a perfect spot to survey the room. I surveyed and counted five or six OHA people. I’d seen something similar here multiple times the past year. In fact, this joint serves as a de facto service center. Services include beer, liquor, restroom use, cigarette sales, gambling, pool, pinball, shelter, heat, phone charging station, corn dogs.

I started to write.

A OHA man bundled in multiple coats and carrying two plastic bags of cans and bottles entered. As soon has he did, the female bartender lit Marty up with a scolding about not bringing in the bags; he could stash them near the dumpster out back. Marty grunted an apology and left with the bags to run his errand.

Another OHA man entered. He wore a mountaineering backpack bulging with possessions and carried a skateboard. He parked at a table and conferred with another OHA man about what I couldn’t possibly imagine.

An OHA woman blew through the door and shouted hellos. She ordered a shot of vodka and went straight to the slot machines.

An OHA man entered, played a slot machine and was gone in less than a minute.

Marty returned and saddled up to a slot machine.

Another OHA man entered. He was wrapped in garbage bags to repel the elements.

There were now eleven people in the bar and eight were homeless and hanging out. They were quiet. One fell asleep at a table. No one won at the slot machines. Well, except for the state and the joint.

This hall unfolded in front of me inside a dive bar in one of the more affluent neighborhoods of a progressive city that believes in governing. None of the OHAs in here would be even remotely affected by the new homeless crisis policy initiatives costing millions and millions of dollars to house people. This is a type of homeless demographic that I typically interact but almost never rates a mention in the media because they don’t live in high profile encampments. They are largely drifting in and out of sight and occasionally freaking out in public.

Their numbers are growing.

What really has happened to my state, my fellow Oregonians?

I don’t think I’ll ever know.

Scenes from Charleston, Oregon

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History

White flakes of burning oyster shells fall on me like snow. I’ve never walked while oyster flakes fall on me. I’ve got to find a way to use this phenomenon in a story.

I walk Charleston with gulls on a frosty weekday morning. This is a port town, home to a commercial fishing fleet, Coast Guard station and fish processors.

A rooster crows. Orange and blue layers rise in the sky above the mountains.

Several men weave bicycles through empty streets. One is carrying a bag full of cans.

I notice a large restaurant facing the bay. It’s not level. It will never be level again.

Boats and more boats stacked here and there on tireless trailers and rotting sawhorses. They’ll never go to sea again.

I pass an RV park that is beyond my abilities as a writer to describe. I’ve never seen one so cramped, blasted and forlorn. Two sights stand out: crooked pallet fences and weird statuary gardens. This park is like a still life that some artist assembled and arranged to paint the perfect portrait of capitalism’s destruction of certain Americans

Three old men from the park walk their dogs. Flakes fall on them and it produces the strangest snow globe I’ve ever seen.

It’s low tide and the mud flats are shimmering, waiting for clammers.

I haven’t been in Charleston in years. I remember the time I performed a literary gig here. I remember the time I visited with a friend who was wearing green shorts and ruminating on acid. I like the grit and grime of Charleston and might consider making a new start here one day.

Waiting at the Airport

NSP Meditations, Poetry

An old bearded man sorts though his travel documents. One is a passport. It’s not American.

He drags on a Marlboro in front of an airport.

His backpacks rest on a steel bench.

He extricates a phone and checks something.

Inside the airport, Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money” drifts through the rafters. It’s a song about a noble, industrious stripper/prostitute. They sure don’t write em’ like that anymore!

Wrens dart and dash on the sidewalk, eating seeds floated in from somewhere, riding exhaust fumes.

The man begins pulling gadgets out of one the backpacks. He checks his phone again. He lights another Marlboro.

Maybe a ride is on the way. Maybe not. Maybe he’s one of those travelers who flies to distant foreign lands and walks off the plane and out of the airport and into Cairo or Los Angeles.

I did both. My 13-mile walk out of the Los Angeles International Airport has become family legend.

The man repacks his gadgets and stashes his phone. He lights another Marlboro. He gears up his backpacks and walks away from my sight.

I wait for my friend to arrive from a flooded and fruited plain.

I wonder who’ll crawl through the rubble of this airport centuries from now.

Charging

NSP Meditations

It is a cold Monday morning. I am sitting in a warm public library reading the current issue of The Atlantic. Two older men sitting at tables 20 feet away are charging phones at stations and staring at the ceiling. I recognize them as regulars at the street ministry I volunteer at.

A young bearded and tattooed homeless man walks in and sits at a table ten feet away. He has a large backpack and another large bag. He is wearing a ball cap and sunglasses. While I read an essay about the irrelevancy of the British monarchy, the man extricates two smart phones, a lap top and two handheld gaming devices. He then plugs all of them into a station. He is charging to survive or maintain or enable (or insert your verb of choice here) his life.

It occurs to me that probably a hundred thousand homeless men and women are doing exactly the same charging at libraries at this very moment all across the nation.

This is all very strange to observe, but I observe it. Someone living on the streets has five high tech devices and at least three of them are expensive. All connect to the internet. I guess it isn’t all that strange to observe because in my experience of interacting with homeless people, I would estimate 80 percent have smart phones. Almost every one I’ve seen in use has been entertaining with games, social media, shows, YouTube videos, etc., but one man was trying to access unclaimed tax returns (unsuccessfully), another was trying to set up a medical appointment (unsuccessfully), and another was trying to gain access to some Pandemic-related payment (unsuccessfully).

By now, I should be accustomed to seeing homeless men and women using high tech gadgets, but I still find it somewhat bracing. It’s hard to fathom that they are generating massive profits for tech companies while living as homeless. You talk about the ultimate in 21st century capitalism! But ultimate what?

Bob Cratchit’s EBITDA

NSP Meditations

(I recently applied for a ghostwriting job and one of the application’s requirements was to write 500 words on an acronym, EBITDA. I’d never seen it before but looked it up and then wrote the following below.)

Everyone knows the happy, inspiring conclusion to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: Scrooge is utterly transformed, Tiny Tim lives, Bob Cratchit gets a hefty raise and permission to add more coal to the stove and heat up the frigid office of Scrooge’s accounting business. Yes, it all turned out very well indeed, the best story ever with honest accountants and money managers at its narrative core. Certainly not what you got with Enron, Lehman Brothers, FTX, Covid relief fund auditors or President Trump’s recently released tax returns.

But what happened at the office of Scrooge and Marley after the happy ending? Cratchit still had to compute sums and subtractions with a quill pen and keep everything scrupulously accurate in thick ledgers by the dim light of a whale oil lamp.

Dickens wrote up this untitled story but never published it for reasons not entirely clear to scholars. Perhaps it was because no story about how a principled Victorian-era accountant who invented the process (and acronym) to calculate “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), not even one with ghosts and plum pudding, could possibly entertain any reader.

Really, though it was a great story with a classic Dickens hard luck character, a prostitute named Gerty Shankelskin, that Scrooge got off the streets and into the home for wayward women he founded. There was also a stray mutt and a big fire that nearly burned down St. Paul’s Cathedral. And always the ledgers, stacks and stacks of ledgers that were more accurate and accessible than software and blockchains in the cloud.

It is every fan of Dickens and law-abiding accountants everywhere that hopes to see the story published and rescue their profession from a general negative impression in popular culture.

Bob Cratchit invented the modern corporate accounting process in that office, EBITDA, by hand, with pen and ink, on paper, wearing a green eye shade and a waistcoat, sipping tea, smoking a pipe, by himself. (Scrooge was too busy serving the downtrodden of London to assist.) It all goes to show you that a superb and timeless writer like Dickens could take something seemingly as dull as corporate accounting and bring it to life, and more importantly, bring those people who work in such a business to the world’s attention. If only more writers did that today with the world of work. Everyone needs to know more about this subject.

(Note to reader: I got the job)

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