My
fortunes have always been tied to the waters. The son of a mariner, I’ve lived
in six states and one foreign country, following the tides of cold war and
peace wherever they went. So when Gorbachev tore down the Berlin wall in November
of 1989, I’m not sure he was thinking that all the way through. It’s like he
wasn’t even considering the effect that releasing millions of people from
communist oppression would have on the life of a nineteen year old Navy Brat going
into his Freshman year at Long Beach City College. I’m sure if he’d know that as a direct result
of that decision I would end up on the streets of Seattle six years later in
the midst of a riot with no college degree and a Meth addict as my wingman, he would've thought twice.
Peace can
be bad for business, a truth that we’ve seen borne out in our economy during
the years of peace and the various wars since Gorbachev conceded the
ideological point in 1989. So as we slowly realized that the USSR had always
been just a paint job over a rusting infrastructure, we had to face facts that
there really wasn’t any justification for the mammoth Military-Industrial
Complex that we’d allowed to become a core pillar of our economy. The long and
short of which meant that my Dad lost his job with a Southern California military contractor, and we had to move to the middle
of nowhere, following the tides of Puget Sound and their ferries wherever they went. Which pretty much ended my dream that Long Beach would be the place
that I put down roots after two decades of living like a rolling stone.
I began
trying to get out of Kingston, Washington the day I moved there. It took me a
thousand days to accomplish, and not before I went to my first funeral, picked
up a drug habit that would persist for seven years, and watched any thoughts I
had for higher education go up in smoke. I hadn’t been back since getting out
early in ’94—except once at Christmas time—for almost two years. Other than my parents, Kingston’s
only claim to fame is a ferry terminal. Otherwise it was a podunk town,
population seven-hundred-twenty. Make that seven-hundred-twenty-one when I moved in on the day of my twentieth
birthday, July 6, 1991. There had been more kids than that in my senior class
at Long Beach Poly.
 |
| Beautiful downtown Kingston, jewel of the Middle of Nowhere. |
It was a place of extreme isolation, loneliness, and
rejection for a twenty year old from California. The hysteria surrounding the
emigration of Californians to Washington at the time is hard to exaggerate. It
was often manifest in the vandalism of cars, hurled epithets right out on the
street, and extreme prejudice in hiring practices. Although I had great job experience,
solid references, and could type 85 wpm, I still wound up mopping piss off the
floors in the dementia wards of an Alzheimer’s care facility. This after three months
of searching for work as my only mission in life, beating down the door of the
housekeeping manager, Judy, to get it, and somehow selling her on my lifelong
passion for the field of adult incontinence.
Occasionally
people from my old life would come to visit me in my exile in no man’s land,
but were rarely as entertained as I was by getting high in my parents’
basement. Oddly, they wanted to go places and do things, and since I try to be a good host, I would take them to the only place there was
to go: Seattle. Kingston is forever from
anywhere, on the opposite side of Puget Sound from Seattle, and the best you
could hope for is to leave my parents’ house and be there ninety minutes later, if
everything went like clockwork. Then there was the promise of the same odyssey
on the return trip; which was the main reason I rarely ever went to Seattle and
didn’t really know my way around.
To save money on what was a pretty expensive
outing, with gas, parking, and ferry tolls, I would often leave my vehicle in
the park and ride and just walk onto the ferry.
Unfortunately, that limited what we could do on the Seattle side, once
we were there on foot. During the day I would take people to the Space Needle, or Pike’s Place Market. Sometimes treating them to a cup of Joe at the world’s very first Starbucks, where the mermaid is still proudly letting her boobies fly free on the sign. Boobies aside though, a cup of burnt coffee is pretty much the same anywhere, so it wasn’t that much of a draw.
If we went at night though, the only other choices within walking distance were the Déjà Vu Strip Club and The OK Hotel Café. It didn’t take me long to learn the lesson that I could be sexually frustrated for free anywhere, as opposed to the outrageous cover charge and two-drink minimum that the Déjà Vu demanded, so logic and economics won out over my more prurient interests every time. Which just left The OK.
The OK
Hotel Café is literally the bottom rung of the Seattle music circuit. If you
have a four-track demo tape, you can play there. That's all it takes. It’s under the viaduct on the
south waterfront, near Pioneer Square. At the time the area was a grungy,
hipster shopping area by day, and by night a fringe area with free parking and
a smattering of muggers and call girls, so your options were wide open.
As dingy as The OK was with its rough,
nicotine-permeated bricks, exposed ductwork, and inchoate art-adorned walls, it
held a significant place in the heart of what had become a burgeoning music
scene. The very first time the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was performed
live was at The OK. Bands like Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and The
Posies cut their teeth there, mostly because it was the only place they could
if they refused to tease their hair and wear spandex-covered codpieces like the
Hair Band douches that were dominating the scene before the advent of Grunge.
The
OK’s history and musical pedigree aside, the standards for entrance were not
high, and you were more likely to hear a grunge-polka band screaming banal obscenities like, “White nigger, black trash!” than you were to find the next Queens of the Stone Age in their nascency. Although it had been featured as a hangout in the movie “Singles” and I’d even seen Ken Stringfellow just chilling there one random night, by and large if you went expecting to find some underground bistro or secret enclave of artistic revolutionaries you were in for a disappointment. It was just a dive. But a dive with late hours and no cover-charge, so if you came to visit me in the 90’s, that’s where I took you. Sorry about that.
That
said, I had no reservations at all about taking Doug the Slug there the night
of Sunday, October 8, 1995. I could not have cared less about entertaining him,
and was looking forward to putting him on a bus at the earliest possible opportunity.
Doug was the only frenemy I’d ever made in life, and having him around was
always a mixed bag at best. He’d twice tried to ditch me when the cops rolled
up on us, only to find himself with a ticket from the first incident and an arrest the second time.
Doug was washed-out and rail-thin, with an unkempt brown shag, more a nest than
a hairstyle. He looked for all the world like a baby-faced version of the
singer Beck, and was a bit apprehensive of everything. His tics made him seem on-edge and guilty all
the time, even when he wasn’t spun out on Meth, which was rare.
We’d
met on a ditch-digging job in Springfield, Oregon shortly after my long-term
girlfriend dumped me in January of ’95. The asshole job foreman referred to him
as Doug the Slug, because he was lazy, slow, and sucked at digging—really, at work of any kind. Eventually, I'd shortened it to Sluggo, because it seemed apt. We never had much in common, except a
penchant for chain-smoking and getting high on our respective vices.
He favored anything that would amp him up, mostly Meth but sometimes Coke and
even Angel Dust. Meanwhile, I'd been stoned or tripping continuously for over four years straight, wall-to-wall. I had wheels, and he had some cash from his Meth sales,
although never very much because he was constantly getting high on his own
supply. Neither one of us had anything else going for him at the time, so we
kind of fell in together.
As such, Sluggo
was the only friend from the most recent chapter of my life I’d been in contact
for the better part of a year. Not entirely by choice. We had a mixed history
of some good times, an unusual number of brushes with the cops, and mooching off each
other when the money was low. He’d sold me some meth a few times, so it wasn’t
like I was staking out any moral high ground in the relationship myself. Even so,
most of what I felt for him was disdain, though tempered by a feeling of
gratitude for a favor he’d done me once, thus burdening me with a sense of obligation
to help him get up out of the ditch his life was in continually.
Eight
months before the night of the Seattle riot, Sluggo had offered an escape from the rapid downward
spiral my life had been in, by inviting me to go to Yellowstone National Park with
him to work for the summer. I wound up going without him because of a
shoplifting charge he had to answer for, although I saw to it he made bail
before I left him in the dust. It seemed the least I could do, and it was
certainly the most I would do in any event.
I thought I’d never see him again,
but he caught up with me in Yellowstone six months later, by which point I’d changed
my name and had a spiritual awakening that had virtually rebooted my entire personality. The months of seclusion from all
friends and family, the immersion into a life of adventure, escape, and
unconditional acceptance by some of the best people I’d ever met had allowed me a
kind of reinvention. I felt like I'd been reborn and set on a new path in life.
 |
| Outlaws Saloon and Pizzeria. Bad Men & Wild Women. Or so the sign used to read. |
But
seeing Sluggo again, and lugging him along with me, was like coming down from a
mountaintop monastery into a garbage dump. There was no explaining to him all
the ways I’d grown and changed, or all the insecurity and self-loathing I’d shed
like a hateful skin. It didn't help that he got fired in less than a week and set up a meth operation just down the hill from Mammoth Hot Springs in a little burgh called Gardiner. Still, I knew I could never repay him for holding that door open for me, whether he meant to or not. So when I heard the scuttlebutt down at Outlaws—a watering hole in Gardiner—that the cops were getting ready to
lower the boom on Sluggo’s small-time Meth operation, I went straight to his place and
made him pack a bag and leave with me right then.
The cops busted the place forty-five minutes later while we watched from the terrace at Outlaw's, tilting
back a couple of Black Dog Ales at Outlaws. Nothing like celebrating a bullet dodged with some brewskis at ten in the morning. It wasn’t at all dramatic, the
landlord just let the three cops into his apartment when he didn’t answer the
door, no guns drawn or anything. Hell, one of the cops had clipboard. Those three cops probably accounted for the entire police presence in little Gardiner, but it was still pretty anticlimactic. With nowhere to
go, Sluggo asked if he could just blow town with me. I said he could, then
charged him five hundred bucks and his pair of rollerblades to ride with me on
my way out of Dodge.
Because fuck him, that’s why.
 |
| Tiny little Gardiner, MT on the Yellowstone River. |
Sluggo and
I pulled into Kingston early in the morning of October 8. A snowstorm had
been dogging us all the way from Montana and through Idaho where my truck had
broken down, forcing us to stay in Coeur d’Alene overnight while I made
repairs, which gave the storm a leg up on us. After yet another run-in with the
cops, just inside the city limits of Spokane, we were
on our way again, but inside the teeth of the blizzard. Lucky for us, it became a massive squall of rain as we reached the desert plains, though it stayed with us all the way to the Olympic
Peninsula, trying to wash us away the whole time.
Unbeknownst to Sluggo, I was planning to stay with my folks for a
couple of weeks while sending him on his merry way back to his Grandparents in Springfield
on a bus. I wasn’t sure where home was going to be after my life in hiding, but
I needed somewhere to decompress and I didn’t want Sluggo hanging on and dragging me back
down into the ashes from which I’d arisen.
Like everyone, he got a load of the
nothing going on in Kingston and immediately wanted to go do something else,
haranguing me about his boredom and how lame Kingston was. So it was off to
Seattle, although this time we took my truck because I had plans Sluggo could
know nothing about.
The
ferry crossing at night is a beautiful thing. The cabin lights cast a glowing
fringe on the water all around the ship that makes the ferry look like it’s drifting on a pool of light, delivering it’s passengers to the shores of Elysium. Seattle after dark is a gem, rightly described as the Emerald City, every bit as mesmerizing as the lights of Vegas, minus the cynical edge of hustlers transacting in appetites. The fury of the rain had spent itself by the time we made the crossing and the sky was clear and sparkling, like the clouds were too exhausted by their attempt to eradicate us to remain. The air tasted clean, the deluge having washed out the unique mélange of marine air, hydrocarbons, and hot electricity that is Seattle’s scent. The streets were slick and velvety like a newly minted currency, awash in the halos of street lamps, but curiously empty. Granted, it was a Sunday night, but in a town of two million there’s always somebody out and about. Not so on October 8, 1995.
I’d
spent the previous eight months in yet another exile, but one of my own making this time. I
traveled from Oregon to California, to Washington, to Wyoming and Montana, with
a mere two phone calls and one letter passing between me and anyone I knew,
like a man in hiding. So I was slightly relieved to find Seattle all but empty, having dreaded the crush of people after my monastic retreat. It had left me detached from the hustle and flow of
everyday life, so days of the week felt like strange distinctions that I wasn't really equipped to register. I only knew it was Sunday because my Dad had warned
me not to miss the last ferry because the Sunday schedule is abbreviated and it
would be easy to get trapped in Seattle. Aside from that, I felt totally
removed from what the world was doing.
I had no idea what Summer blockbusters
I’d missed, or what political chicanery was threatening the very foundations of
our democracy. I did know that Jerry Garcia and Wolfman Jack were dead, but
that only reminded me that I was out of weed. Which in turn made me glad for a
second that Sluggo was around, because he could always spot who was holding in
any crowd and wasn't shy about making inquiries to purchase. Not that there was anyone around to hit up on
the slick, eerily empty streets. I wasn’t sure how to feel about hanging out
with Sluggo sober, since it had never happened before, but there was nothing to
be done about it. So I lead the way south along the viaduct, past darkened
industrial spaces broken up by a patchwork of oddly-themed pubs, all vying for their share of the waterfront booze buck, and toward The
OK.
Sluggo
was lagging behind, always slightly out of breath from smoking, drugs, and a
life of general dissipation that had begun years before my own, and was taking
its toll on a guy too young to be wheezing like he did. We were almost halfway
there when, as if on cue, people began pouring out onto the street from bars on
the viaduct and harbor sides of the street, en masse. The mystery of the
missing Seattleites had been solved; they were all at some communal
liver-punishing event we knew nothing about. The
obviously drunken crowds were universally raucous and single-minded in their
ebullient migration out into the streets like a horde of jovial zombies.
They were streaming out doors on both sides of the street up and down the
viaduct, boiling across the sidewalks, past the parked cars and out into lanes
of traffic with abandon, shouting and hollering with drunken gusto.
 |
| The OK Hotel Cafe, before it was gutted by an earthquake. |
There
were no flash-mobs in 1995, so the inexplicable emergence of this crowd of
heckling ruffians was at once amusing and alarming. Finding ourselves
instantly in the midst of this raucousness of people hooting, hollering, and
drumming on car hoods was like being air-dropped into the middle of a party on its way to
police intervention. As buoyant and cheery as they seemed, there were just so
many of them, and they were kind of insensate in their haphazard celebrations,
disregarding obstacles and polite boundaries completely.
I grabbed Sluggo by
the arm and began to power-slalom through the crowd, rebounding like a pinball
off inebriated revelers, who almost all failed to even take notice. A couple of
times I even thrust my fist into the air with a hoot and holler, so we could
blend in until we figured out what the hell we were supposed to be so happy
about. When we finally broke free of the gaggle of them and were nearing The
OK, we saw that another much larger group was approaching from the South. Much,
much larger.
“What
the hell is happening?” Sluggo asked in his reedy quaver. Looking around for a
place to duck out of the path of these hooligans I was about to shrug my
ignorance when someone answered his question.
“The
Mariners won, man! Beat the Yankees in game 5! We took the pennant!” the
reveler exuded. Then with an ominous sounding level of annoyance he turned on Sluggo and asked, “Where you been, man, living in a cave?” Like Sluggo’s ignorance was an insult to the very
dignity of the Mariners' victory.
“Pretty
much,” I responded, herding Sluggo along and away from the drunken agitator. “Go
Mariners!” I called on the way past him, not quite connecting on the hi-five I
offered up as a distraction, which seemed to sate his anger. “Hell, yeah!” he
responded and turned back to whatever shenanigans awaited him. We headed away
and toward The OK, which was also toward the wave of thousands coming up the
viaduct toward us.
Sluggo asked, “Where are all these people coming from? What’s down there?”
I thought for a second then said, “Mariner’s Stadium. The game must have
just let out.”
We made it to the entrance of The OK just as the river of stadium fans intersected with the bar crowds. We hopped up the step into the
relative safe harbor of The OK’s entrance alcove just ahead of the crushing mix of hi-fiving and chest bumping hooligans as they greeted each other with raucous cheers.
I said, “Shit, this is gonna get wild!”
And it
did. The pedestrians far outnumbered the cars, but there were still plenty of
vehicles trying to wend their way home from the game. Everyone seemed affable
enough about the ensuing traffic jam, and I had the sense that most all the
horn honking was celebratory and not in annoyance with all the hijinks. Sluggo
and I stood one step up off the sidewalk on the alcove stoop of The OK, a
single stride away from the fray, but strangely removed by those mere
inches. For one desperate moment I
became powerfully agoraphobic, realizing that there were more people on the
street in front of me right then than lived in all the places I’d been the
previous eight months put together.
I turned from the scene in an effort to stifle
the rising tide of anxiety, pretending to read the playbill beside the entrance to The OK. The double doors were of smoked glass, so opaque as to be black, and cast no reflections. I lit up a Camel Wide, taking a long, deep drag and allowing the nicotine to work its magic as I willed the anxiety to pass. For a minute I ruminated about life in a world where bats, balls, and hometown pride were worthy of an amiable riot in the streets. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the idea that I was supposed to care about it all again. I wondered if I even could, after wandering places of vast silence where none of my plans or anyone’s ideas about life meant anything. A place where wild things ruled.
Then Sluggo said this unlikely sentence:“Hey,
isn’t that Eddie Vedder?”
After a
moment to process the fact that he’d actually said what I thought, I turned and
scanned the parade of people going by on the sidewalk and running hither and
yon in the street. Without pointing–a bit of restraint that Sluggo could always
be counted on to demonstrate–he said, “Just standing there by the parking
meter.”
There
were two figures standing at the curb, barely five feet from us and, besides
ourselves, the only others in sight that were not in a frenzy of motion. The
figure to the left, a tall, bearded man with striking eyes and long black hair,
who looked like the Guru you’d want to find at the top of the mountain, was Kim
Thayil, the lead guitarist of Soundgarden. To the right, leaning on the
parking meter was a shorter man, his head tilted down and partially obscured by
an authentic New York Yankees batting helmet, the hard plastic ones they wear at the plate. Not a fan-store knock-off, mind you; this one looked like it'd been kiped right from the Yanks' dugout. With his hair tucked up under the helmet, it overshadowed him such that
it made for an effective disguise, albeit a dangerous one on this particular
night. I would’ve looked right past him, as literally thousands of people were
doing right at that second, but somehow Sluggo had seen him straight away
for what he was: Eddie Vedder, hiding in plain sight.
Sluggo knew of my lifelong affection for Eddie, and the faux tension between his favorite band, Nirvana, and my favorite band, Pearl Jam, was a constant source of bickering between us. But in that second, he didn’t care about our running debate and just wanted me to have a nice moment with someone that he knew I loved.
“Dude,
go talk to him.”
I
looked at Sluggo for a minute and then asked, “What could I possibly say to him
that he hasn’t heard ten thousand times, just today?”
“Who
cares? This is your chance! Don’t blow it.”
But I
felt a strong aversion to being “that guy,” so instead I leaned back against the
blackened glass of the doors of The OK and pulled on my smoke for a minute. I’ve
never worked so hard at appearing blasé as I did for that minute while trying
to scrutinize them purely from my peripheral vision. Eddie and Kim were looking up and down the street, clearly scanning the crowd for someone. Kim must have seen him, because he raised his hand to signal somebody and called out “Scully!” As I saw their friend weaving his way toward them through the crowd, I realized that my moment was slipping away.
Just then, Eddie began to go through a pantomime of what
every smoker that’s ever lived would recognize as the search for an errant
lighter, absently patting at the pockets of his jacket and jeans. Without
thinking, I pulled my scarred, ancient zippo from its ready home in my left
pocket like a gunslinger with an instinctive urge to draw. I skipped down
the step and over to Eddie in a single stride and executed my signature
slap-snap trick to light my Zippo and brought the flame up to chase the tip of
his smoke. We made eye contact for the briefest of moments over the guttering
flame that we sheltered between us in our cupped hands, protecting it against an October chill on the waterfront breeze.
“Nice hat,” was all I said.
He smirked around his smoke and gave with a knowing bob of his chin in acknowledgement. “Thanks,
brother,” he rumbled in a scratchy baritone. Not wanting to ruin a singular moment with
fawning sycophancy, I turned a crisp about-face on my heel and went back over
to Sluggo on the stoop.
“That’s
it?” Sluggo asked, in exasperation. “After all these years?”
There’s
no explaining the sublime geometry of a perfect moment to someone who doesn’t
see it. You either get it or you don’t. So I just said, “Yup.”
“They’re
leaving, we should follow them,” he suggested.
I didn’t turn to watch them go.
“No, man. Let them have their night, and we’ll
have ours.” I pulled hard on my Wide one last time then let it drop to the stoop,
twisting it under the heel of my Doc, because this was the kind of joint where
people stabbed them out on the shitty formica tabletops and no one even blinked. “Besides, we wouldn’t want to miss…" I squinted to actually read the playbill this time, "Squirrel...Nut...Zippers?”
“That
does not sound promising,” Sluggo said, craning his neck to watch anonymous fame
disappear into the melee, never to be seen again.
“No,” I
said as I pulled on the blackened door of The OK. “It sure doesn’t.”
And
they weren’t. The jazzy-polka-ska-fusion octet pretty much stank up the joint,
which is really saying something for The OK. I’m not sure even being high would've mitigated the punishment of listening to them for that hour,
but it couldn’t have hurt. It'd be a couple of years before those zany kids
got their act together to put out their one-hit wonder, "Hell."
By the time they did, I
was sober and Doug was out of my life for good.
When we
emerged from the dank, smoky hole of The OK the general rowdiness of the street
had dissipated, though there was still a noticeable swell of people out late
on a school night. A contingent of revelers who didn’t want their moment to
end, although it did just a few days later when the Mariners were eliminated
from World Series contention. True to his inerrant Spider-Sense, Sluggo almost
instantly found a dude that was holding, and I bought a nice, fat sack with the cash
I’d gouged Sluggo for to give him the ride home.
At the same time I forbade him
from buying any Meth from the guy, both because I didn’t want to have it in the
vehicle with us in case we had yet another of our legendary run-ins with the law,
and because I genuinely wanted him to quit what was quite obviously destroying
his life. He bitched about that for a while, as we wandered the streets in seemingly aimless fashion for a time.
I
treated him to a couple of beers from the stash of his money in my pocket, and
then pulled the whammy on him when we got to the bus station unannounced,
at which point he just about hit the roof. I couldn’t have cared less. I bought
him a bus ticket back to Eugene, told him I'd mail him his meager knapsack of stuff, then clapped him on the
shoulder as a by-your-leave and made for the door. I tried not to see it as
karma when I missed the last ferry of the night, and had to freeze my ass off sleeping
in my truck in the dock parking lot.
 |
| Oregano, or weed. You be the judge. |
I
killed some time trying to get high off of what turned out to be a very generous
bag of Oregano that I’d paid fifty bucks for. My compliments to whomever rolled
and manicured the freshly picked sprigs into such a convincing facsimile of tasty
buds. Sincerely. Scammed by some random
hustler, I just laughed it off with a little equanimity, thinking that I
probably prevented Sluggo from snorting some lines of Borax when I put the
kibosh on his intended purchase of what would no doubt have turned out to be a
skillful counterfeit as well. Who knows,
I might have even saved his life, or at least his sinuses anyway. I never got around
to telling him about it, but there probably wasn’t much point.
By the
time I got back to my folks place it was almost 7:00 AM, Monday morning. I
sacked out from the crappy night’s sleep in my truck, and when I woke up my Mom
greeted me with the news that she had found my “stash” when she went to wash
the nicotine reek out of my jacket. She was pretty upset at first, especially
as I laughed uproariously and told her she had to try it. She was aghast at my
impertinence until she found out it was Oregano. At which point she made the most expensive Pesto in the history of the world, and laughed at me, not knowing she ate fifty of Sluggo's bucks. It was delicious.
I
returned to Eugene a month later into the open arms of lost friends, like Moses
coming back down the mountain. In time I even roped Sluggo into hanging out
with me again, this time amongst a better class of people, in hopes of being a good
influence on him. We got together sporadically for a while, until he pretty
much ruined the following New Year’s Eve–’96 into ’97–with his drunken belligerence and projectile vomiting. Which, coincidentally, was at a totally different hellhole by the name of The OK, in Springfield, Oregon.
 |
| Yet another OK. A generous description |
I 86’ed him for good not long after, when he boasted to
me of leveraging sexual favors from recently graduated high school girls, using
wine coolers he would buy them with their own money, and then refuse to give to
them until he’d had his way. That was all I could take. I may not have staked
out any moral high ground in that relationship, but even I knew that when you
find yourself down in a ditch, at some point you gotta stop digging. But he was just
so dedicated to staying in that particular ditch the rest of his days, that eventually
I realized I couldn’t save him. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, when you realize
that you really can’t save anyone at all. Makes you realize how lucky you are
if you even find that grace yourself.
I came across him one last time in ’98, a thousand days after the night of the Seattle riot, when I’d put down those roots at long last and had been sober for almost three months. He was literally in a shallow ditch on the side of the road, walking along in it because there were no sidewalks in the industrial wastes west of town where the roads were choked by semis parked along both shoulders, while forklifts and industrial traffic dominated the streets. I’d found a decent job driving truck out in that neck of the woods, and was on my way home when I spotted him. I pulled over and gave him a lift. Gratis this time.
For a minute I was
actually glad to see him, thinking we might compare notes on how the years had passed. Then I saw that he was just
completed faded; so spun out on Meth that the black of his pupils completely swallowed
his eyes until they looked like holes in his face. I knew that no time at all had
passed for him. He was a little scruffier, and more worn around the edges, but
it could have been a day—instead of a year and a half—for all that had
changed in his life. I gave him a ride to where he was going, which seemed to
be nowhere, and never saw him again.
For two
guys who started out digging their respective ditches together and following
the same roads to the same places side-by-side, it’s hard to fathom how we wound up at such
different ends. I guess it’s true what they say, those that seek shall find. And
it seems that those that won’t, remain lost all of their days. Either way, you
can’t stay in hiding forever. Change may be an automatic function of time and
entropy, but progress is not.
Like my
close, personal friend Eddie Vedder has sung to me on more than one dark and
stormy night:
“In
hiding, I swallowed my breath and went deep, I was diving. I surfaced when all
of my being was enlightened.”
Thanks,
brother. Nice hat.
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The shop sits on the far side of a blockade of industrial complexes and factories that feed the local bars and strip clubs at quitting time. This warren takes up a considerable chunk of midtown between Main St. and the
Freeway, forcing everyone to circumvent. There are these huge cooling ponds for some function of the monstrous pulp mill, outgassing in great plumes so that it kind of stinks over there when the wind blows wrong, which it always does.This
back route is a convenient way to jump past the occasionally ill-timed
railroad cars that jam up traffic both coming and going to work, but you
have to watch out for the pettibones, crummies, and log trucks that
have pretty much pulverized the macadam into cracked desert hardpan. One
nice thing is that the school bus never runs back there, so once I make
it past the first three residential blocks I’m in the clear..jpg)
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Once I’ve run the gauntlet of kids, feral cats,
and zombified carpoolers honking their invitations to start the morning,
I reach one of only two stop signs that separate me from work, at the
intersection of 40th and Industrial Avenue (Yeah, it’s actually called
that. How imaginative). From thence, I punch it up to Warp velocities, trying not to spill too much coffee in my lap as I sprint for the shop, because if I’m even a minute late there’s nowhere to park. Before that though, I still have to
clear that last residential corner without pegging one of the warring factions of tweens
waiting at the end of the line for their ride. At Industrial, I have to
make either a left or a right to detour around this impassable
demilitarized-industrial complex. Left is the shortest route, so I look that way first
every morning, which is when I see him. Whitey.
Whitey is
a stocky kid, at least 10 but probably not 12. Fair skinned, blondish
hair, with a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and
cheeks. Every single day he wears a sports jersey as his shirt for
school. Hockey, basketball, football, he doesn’t seem to discriminate,
always a different name and number stenciled across his back. I’ve never
seen the same jersey twice, and sometimes he wears just the jersey when
he really ought to be wearing a jacket or hoodie because it's cold out.
Which tells me that he’s glommed onto sports as the identity he’s going
to wear as his armor. He’s almost always standing alone on that
industrial dead end corner with his big, over-the-ears style headphones,
and appears to be mumbling the lyrics as he shuffles his feet and bobs
along to the music only he can hear. Some days it calls to mind clear,
sweet memories of my own days at the bus stop, listening to Huey Lewis
and caterwauling about how I wanted a new drug.
Day after day I see
Whitey standing under the inexplicably still-illuminated street light,
check out what team he’s rooting for, then make my left and we’re
Northwest bound and down. It’s gotten to be such a habit now that I
kind of think of him as a little buddy—a landmark of sorts—but I resist
the urge to wave since guys who drive giant, windowless vans should
make no attempt to connect with a child in any way. It’s just not done.
My very existence is a cause for withering stares from every mother,
regardless of my harmless intentions. Nothing to be done about it.
The 1982 version
of Whitey was a kid named Darren Matotte. They have the same
build, the same kind of absent-minded demeanor, as though they were
paying little attention to their surroundings. A vagueness about
their eyes that might make you think they were kind of dim. It didn’t
even matter if it was true; at that age if it seems true, it is true.
You need a label, and you’re going to get one, come hell or high water.
God knows, I got mine. Pretty nerdy, maybe a little cuteness, but way too much
dork quotient to be allowed out of the friend zone. A lot of nicknames
stuck to me back then, none of them especially endearing. Got stuffed
into a few lockers, whipcracked with some towels in the locker room,
etc. The comic books, the Star Wars quotes, the occasional sound effect
of blasters and lightsabers to punctuate whatever I was doing. No good
could come of any of that in this world. Oh, the humanity.
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I was talking to a
friend on the phone the other day, bouncing ideas off of each other for a
script he’s working on, and he said he thought I was better at understanding people and their motivations than anyone else he
knows. I told him it was because I’d stopped needing to believe I was
one of the good guys. That I could afford to just look at myself and
others, see the strengths and flaws we live with, and feel compassion
for us all. I said that 40 was the best thing that ever
happened to me because—without condemning or condoning anything—I can simply accept us, just as we are. At last. 
Try not to be too big of a dick, Whitey. It’s a helluva vig when it comes due.
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