So, I’ve enthused about Portland, and I’ve been transformed by Oregon’s wildernesses, and I’ve written here about these after one fashion or another. And it has been largely groovy and life changing, blah blah blah – you’re probably sick of hearing about it. But there’s this other component to our Oregon experience – one I’ve been trying to ignore.

Trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be any ignoring… it… right… NOW.

I mean, how can you when a burn-out junkie is trying to talk his strung-out Courtney Love lookalike down from her kicking/screaming withdrawl/OD/badshit meltdown in our parking lot?

Okay, admittedly, burn-out boy is being quiet and rational, and isn’t swearing as much as I would be if I were in his place. But what am I saying? I’d never been in his place. But he keeps going back to her. But for Courtney over there – leaning against the dumpster, pulling her hair out and moaning like an ass-shot she-bear – she’s probably shit her pants – burn-out boy is plutonium and she’s a fucking geiger counter. Screeching and flailing any time he comes within detection. Seriously. Burn-out boy? Walk away.

Dude, let the bitch OD in peace already.

I suppose it’s admirable, in some twisted codependent way, that burn-out boy is sticking with his bitch – rabid shrieking skank that she is. Honor among thieves, and all that. Er, junkies. (Cue: Patrick Swayze singing “I’ve had the time of my life.”) Considering our other neighbors’ better-expressed qualities, burn-out boy’s humanity is touching (in that, well-everyone-else-around-here-beats-his-bitch-but-you-so-I-guess-you’re-all-right kind of way). By contrast, there’re the neighbors across the street in the house with the tattered roof and the scraggy pine in their front yard. Kids running wild at 1am, oldies blaring at top volume as soon as the sun comes down, and there, in the middle of it all, Ma and Pa Clampett are having their third brawl in the span of a week. Seriously, it the four weeks we’ve been here, I can’t imagine how there’s anything left in their house to break, and the screaming transcends spoken language entirely and enters an entirely new realm of pure vitriolic expression (although they could be fighting after they’ve stuck their teeth in the Pepsodent for the night). But there they go – they’ve found something else to shatter. Oh, and look: the kids are back in the house and now they’re joining in on the fun. The family that abuses together…

Ends up on a corner’s slab or working cosmetics at Wal-mart.

There’s the Mexican family on the corner – they don’t get involved, but they do sit in their front lawn and laugh hysterically at the drama as it unfolds. I suppose this is an unqualifiedly sane response to the circumstances unfolding around them. You could, like me, stew angrily in your tiny apartment; or you could rise above the chaos and laugh between beers at the puny humans. Or subhumans. Convert that annoyance into entertainment – Romans at the colosseum.

Sitting in my office now, a completely new chorus arises from an entirely different quadrant of the neighborhood. “You fucking whore. You fucking bitch.” More unintelligible screaming. Love on the wane. From another window, Elton John singing, “Can you feel the love tonight?”

Even the cats – not ours, the ones that roam the alleys – join the chorus of brotherly malice and run in a screaming pack through the alley as they rip each other the shreds.

So, while the Mexicans sit like Gods on Olympus, judging, and not getting involved – except very understandably to toss a well-placed beer can into one of the vipers’ nests before things have a chance to settle down – you, burn-out boy are sticking by your woman, who in her smack-tantrum – between anguished cries of “Why won’t you fuck me?” so heartfelt that they shake the very foundations of our existence and bring the Gods/Mexicans to tears (because they’re laughing so hard) – curses your name with such impassioned and creative venom, because…

Because why? I mean, I want to really buy this ballad of burn-out boy humanity horseshit, but I have to face facts. You’re not trying to coax her away from the parking lot and talk her down because you love her, or even because you feel like she needs your protection, or maybe even because you feel some degree of guilt for selling her the smack you cut with rat poison to begin with.

She’s your best ho and you’ve got to get her straight in time for that gang-bang you’ve got lined up in the alley behind the keno bar in twenty minutes.

Hm.

Good luck with that.

I’d tell your Johns to watch their eyes if I were you.

~

So, yeah. Portland rocks. Except our block of it. That would be what I’ve been trying to ignore. I’ve stayed in mental hospitals less loony. I’m hoping things get quieter when the rain picks up.

anecdotal /2008-08-02 by brandon e. heckman/

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