Shelter from the storm

PSU, Portland State University. Don’t fret never having heard of it, I hadn’t either when I applied. I only applied to schools in places I wanted to live; Portland, OR and Albuquerque, NM. I was married the day we left, not a great idea, we had celebrated into the night and excited to get on our way we drove a few hundred miles north and none to sober. PSU because she was afraid of snakes. Didn’t know until we got there that she was afraid of bridges too. Portland has two big rivers and a lot of bridges. Ok, I guess I knew a day or two before when we crossed Snake River in Idaho. I could have told her that Portland had a lot of bridges.

Portland State is a commuter college just west of center downtown Portland. It’s on the Tail end of the South Park Blocks. There is a bunch of city in between the South and North Park Blocks. Um, take my present for past tense, I haven’t been to downtown Portland in a long time and a lot has changed I hear. An old music club near PSU was shut down this year, The Candlelight. It was not a hangout for PSU students, more of a hangout for musicians.

I took my lunch in the Park Blocks often, even when I lived a block from the outside-eating-your-lunch place. The place for eating looked a bit like an amphitheater without the shell, benches went horizontal, then the next row was a few feet lower, all in a semi-circle to a stage like concrete platform at sidewalk level. Ok, the benches started off at sidewalk level and followed the descent, heading north, of the sidewalk. Most days at noon, nine months of the year, these evangelists would take the concrete platform and yell Jesus shit. Some folks came to heckle, some to sit in the shade of the trees, some to eat lunch. The latter two mostly ignored the evangelists or laughed at the hecklers. Usually the hecklers were trying to be funny.

I heard this kid on the platform yelling about gambling for Jesus’ clothes after the crucifixion.  He was yelling about how evil a motherfucker would have to be to set a value to priceless artifacts. I had finished my burrito and it was an hour until my next class. I stood up and walked towards them. I was literally full of beans and didn’t feel like yelling. I explained the story to him as I understood it, quiet enough not to be heard by the lunchers, shaders or hecklers, not to be gentle to anyone except my stomach. I honestly don’t know how I know that story, it’s not in the KJV and I stopped studying that when I was eight. Apocrypha maybe? A Dylan song? I pointed out to the guy that there weren’t any Christians at that time so clothes weren’t artifacts. They were gambling for his clothes because they were broke ass peasants under the Roman boot and clothes were a commodity. Romans gambled with money. Romans invented Christianity as we know it, five hundred years later with fucking Constantine.

I could have been dead wrong. It’s possible we both know that story from a Dylan song and that Dylan just made it up so he could rhyme clothes with lethal dose (Blood on the tracks circa 1972-ish, shelter from the storm … “… Was in a hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes, a bargain for salvation, I said gimme a lethal dose …” Why the kid and I thought that was part of the Christ story is beyond me. I think it’s really part of the Easter tale, but I don’t know why I think that.). The kid balked because I talked softly but with great confidence. For some reason or other the evangelists thought all the students there were smart sinners. Having grown up in a college town and living in it again, I’m always under the impression that college students are idiots. Christ knows I was. Ahem, perhaps Dylan knows.

These guys worked five times as hard as a preacher; an hour a day at least five days a week. Of course, they tagged each other in, so, unless one guy or gal was really on fire with the holy spirit the longest sermon was like fifteen minutes. Everyone else on the platform were handing out pamphlets or shouting at hecklers. It was one of the cool things about Portland in the old days; disparate groups of wide eyed zealots of one kind or other (usually not religious or not overtly religious) shouting crazy shit and the crowd talking and laughing and sometimes looking or engaging like one does at a low rent zoo. It made for a town of hipsters with that sort of detached attitude known as cool, but in the bad old days it wasn’t pretentious, it was just getting along.

My two favorite neighborhoods, each one had a child of mine delivered at our address’s, were gentrified long before I even left Portland. They used to be bohemian neighborhoods. How do you tell a bohemian from a hipster? I guess you have to wait until they talk. If you’re lucky the hipster is wearing something ironic but expensive, bohemians just sort of tossed on what was laying around in their closet or, you know, yours, and likely threw it on last night. But, for the most part, they kind of look the same on the outside. Hipsters and bohemians, not calling them homogenous groups, just saying there’s kind of a dress code; it’s got to be wacky, vintage, ironic or all three. Like a pork pie hat, a where’s the beef t-shirt under a tweed jacket and some kind of pants or skirt. Or, you know, pork pie pants, where’s the beef hat and a tweed t-shirt.

This boyfriend of my niece, by marriage, used to wear a truncated fedora and carry around a fifth of Jack to look hip. He might have looked hip to his friends, to me he looked like he was working hard on becoming an alcoholic. I think I told him the snobbiest thing I know about Jack, perhaps the only person I ever told this; It’s not a bourbon, bourbon, like, say, champagne, has to come from a very specific region. With Bourbon it’s Bourbon county Kentucky. That’s not where Jack is from. Says so right on the bottle. Even assholes in bars using cheesy pick up lines while winking and saying “it’s a numbers game” know better than to order a bourbon and coke, even though it’s cheaper not to order call liquor and Jack isn’t really worth the price difference. Dude told me I was jealous and what was I drinking. This was at a bar b que at my house. Beer, I said. He raised an eyebrow. Negra Modelo, I said. He told me he’d never heard of it and walked away smugly. I never saw him again. I don’t know if it’s because she dumped him that night or thought it was best not to bring him near her crazy aunt and uncle. Either/ or was a wise choice.

I’d met the guy a handful of times before. Nowhere closer than Vegas allowed open containers. Whereas walking around my front lawn with a bottle of jack was fine (though etiquette suggested you share it) the other places he brought that bottle of Jack set up a confrontation for everybody with John law. I can’t recall if he was legal drinking age or not.

Shit, I’ve rambled on longer than I had planned. Just happy my fingers are working and my head isn’t abuzz with white noise.