Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  When the kitchen doors opened, the line surged forward and the first forty or fifty people filed into the dining room. The line then stuttered to a halt, and John told me that was all the people the place could handle in one sitting. Those of us left out in the rain had to wait our turn for an empty seat at the tables. After about twenty minutes, the first wave began to trickle back outside and, as they did, the burly staff member stationed at the door started barking out numbers, and by dribs and drabs the rest of us were called inside.

  It took us nearly half an hour to reach the head of the line, but as soon as we stepped inside, I could tell the wait was worthwhile. One whiff of baked ham and boiled potatoes was all it took to trigger instant flashbacks to Christmas dinners at my Irish grandmother’s tiny two-bedroom apartment on 81st Street in Bay Ridge. To this day, I still remember those impossibly crowded family gatherings with a certain residual awe. How Nana managed to shoehorn two dozen of us into such a tight space was nothing short of amazing. Whenever a fresh batch of relatives would arrive at the door, one of the grown-ups would always shout, ‘Get out the room-stretcher!’ Though none of us kids ever got to see this mythical tool in action, we didn’t doubt its existence. After all, if reindeer could fly, anything was possible.

  ‘Anyway,’ John said, interrupting my reverie, ‘the Blanchet House has the best free lunch in Portland. Everybody eats here.’

  Everybody? By the look of things, I’d say that was an understatement. Everybody and his cousin would be more like it. Even a logistical genius like my grandmother couldn’t have wedged another body into the Blanchet House dining room. The crowd at the tables was elbow-to-elbow, filling the room with the syncopated rhythm of silverware clicking on hard plastic plates, and to me it was a siren’s song. My mouth was watering and I couldn’t wait to get in on the action.

  When I saw one of the volunteers waving us toward a table in the back, I nudged John and told him, ‘Let’s get to it!’

  ‘Anyway, hold up a second. I’ve got to drop this first,’ he said, shucking off his rope-tied bedroll and adding it to the pile of duffle bags and backpacks that lined the baseboard beneath the front window. The Blanchet House had the same rule as the Oz: no baggage at the dining tables.

  ‘Take those two seats in the corner,’ the volunteer told us, and pointed to two empty chairs at a two-top table that was tucked against the pony wall dividing the dining area from the cook’s line. The table we were assigned to was right next to the dishwashing station, and from where we sat we had a close-up view of a tattooed guy with junkie-thin arms running dishes through a vintage two-door Hobart washer.

  The noisy old dish machine looked as hard-used as its operator, and every time he popped the doors to load a rack of dishes I saw a cloud of steam escape and billow up to the pressed-tin ceiling. When the steam hit the tin, it condensed into raindrops, and we happened to be sitting right under the leading edge of the squall line. The ceiling above our table was weeping like a Mexican Madonna, and as the warm drops sprinkled down on us I couldn’t resist razzing John about it.

  ‘Check it out, John,’ I grinned, catching a droplet on my upturned palm. ‘They put us by the water feature. You must really have some pull around here.’

  John looked baffled by my attempt at humour, and for a moment he just stared at me like I was the one with the scrambled control box. Then he calmly replied, ‘Anyway, so what? We’re already wet, aren’t we?’

  ‘Can’t argue with that,’ I had to concede, chastened by John’s humble outlook. Like most veterans of the streets, he knew better than to sweat the small stuff. We were hungry, and there was a hot meal coming our way. At that moment, what else really mattered?

  Fortunately, the Blanchet House staff was well-drilled and quick on their feet, and we didn’t have to wait long for our share of the feast.

  ‘Here you go, fellas,’ our waiter said, slapping down two plates of baked ham, mashed potatoes and green beans. I dug right in, and every bite brought a pleasant shock of recognition. Incredibly, everything tasted just the way my nana used to make it: the ham was overbaked and slightly dry, the mashed potatoes were lumpy and the greyish-green beans were perfectly rubbery – and as I sat there cleaning my plate, I couldn’t remember a meal I’d ever enjoyed more.

  ‘You were right. This place puts out quite the spread,’ I said to John on the way out. ‘I can see why it’s so popular.’

  ‘Anyway, the Blanchet is closed on Sundays. Tomorrow you have to go across the river to St Francis Church. The food there’s pretty good, too.’

  ‘St Francis Church on Sundays? I’ll have to remember that.’

  Despite the cold drizzle that had been falling most of the day, Portland was beginning to grow on me. After scraping by on short rations for the past few weeks, it was a comfort to realise I’d landed in a town that wouldn’t let me starve. A big comfort. Especially to someone like me, born with a metabolism that burnt through calories like they were jet fuel. I’d always been called skinny as a kid. In recent years, though, my coke habit had left me looking practically emaciated, and if Portland could help me pack on a few pounds, so much the better.

  ‘Anyway, after lunch I mostly go can-hunting till suppertime,’ John said. ‘You can come with me if you want, and I’ll show you where the recycling centre is.’

  Rooting through dumpsters right after lunch didn’t sound very appealing, so I told John I’d take a rain check. Now that my belly was full, all I really wanted was to find a warm place to dry out and I asked John if he could point me in the direction of the public library, but he insisted on walking me there so I wouldn’t get lost. With John on point, we cut through Old Town’s narrow Chinatown, crossed Burnside Street and headed south into downtown Portland, bound for the library’s main branch at Tenth Avenue and Yamhill Street. Along the way, John pulled a plastic grocery bag from his coat pocket and started checking every trash bin we passed for cast-off treasure. Any aluminum can he found went right into his wrinkled Safeway bag. He ignored the returnable bottles. Too heavy to haul around, he said. ‘Anyway, I leave the bottles for the shopping-cart guys.’

  Even while he was foraging for nickels, John kept up his tour guide’s patter, and by the time we reached our destination I’d already learned a thing or two about the Portland Public Library. According to John, it’s the oldest public library in Oregon, and a fairly bum-friendly place to hang out. He told me that as long as you didn’t talk to yourself too loudly or nod off in your chair, the library’s security guards wouldn’t usually hassle you – and in John’s considered opinion, this made them finer human beings than the goons who patrolled the bus station and the Galleria shopping mall.

  ‘Anyway, it’s a pretty nice library,’ John said, and when we got there a few minutes later I saw he was right, as usual. The library’s three-storey Georgian-style building was clad in weathered sandstone and took up the entire block between Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue on Yamhill Street. I was eager to get inside and out of the rain, but before we parted company John took my elbow and asked me if I thought I could find my way back to the Rescue Mission on my own. When I assured him I could, he told me he’d meet up with me there at six for supper. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘come early, so you can sign up for a bed before supper. The Rescue Mission lets you sleep there three nights per month. Anyway, ask them to sign you up for a mailbox slot, too. Then you’ll have a place for Social Security to send your new card.’

  ‘Always thinking, aren’t you, John?’ I smiled. I thanked him for showing me around and wished him good luck can-hunting, then bounded up the wide front steps and got my first look at the library’s beautifully crafted interior, an open-plan space gleaming with polished marble floors and burnished walnut woodwork. Suddenly, I was back in familiar territory. My mother’s love of books when I was growing up was infectious, and throughout my childhood her weekly visits to the local public library were a lot more faithful than her sporadic attendance at Sunday Mass. So loitering with intent among the
stacks of a well-stocked library has always been my favourite way to while away a rainy afternoon. Which was serendipitous, I supposed, now that I found myself in such a famously rainy town as Portland.

  Hoping to get a better feel for the neighbourhood that was now my adopted home, I spent the next few hours rummaging through the local history section, digging for information about the Burnside District. My sleuthing took me back to the decades after the Civil War, when the popular nickname for Portland was ‘Stumptown’ and Burnside Street was one of the busiest skid roads in the Pacific Northwest. During its heyday as a vital conduit for transporting timber from the forests to the docks, Burnside Street was clogged day and night with teams of draught horses pulling massive logs over its skid-lined surface (the wood skids were greased with fish oil) in an endless, slow procession toward the Willamette River. It must have been an impressive spectacle. But once the railroads expanded west, the iron horse pushed the draught horse out of the logging business, and by the end of the century the big show was over.

  Even in its most prosperous phase, however, the Burnside District was never the sort of place you’d take the family for a Sunday stroll. By all accounts, in its wild youth Burnside Street served as a kind of moral Mason–Dixon line that separated the God-fearing folks on the south side of town from the Satan-lovers to the north. In those days, the neighbourhood north of Burnside was considered dangerous territory, full of saloons and brothels and gambling houses frequented by hard-drinking, hard-fighting loggers and merchant seamen. In short, it boasted all the parasitic vices you’d expect to find in a frontier boom town, and then some.

  If you were lucky enough not to get maimed in a bar fight, or swindled in a gambling hall, or dosed with the clap by a woman of easy virtue, there was still the chance you could find yourself dropping through a trap door into the secret tunnel system that ran beneath Burnside Street, where a shanghai gang would be waiting to snatch you up and bundle you off through the subterranean passageways to the docks. And before you knew whose blackjack had hit you, you’d find yourself in the hold of a ship, taking a trip you never saw coming.

  The neighbourhood’s unsavoury reputation persisted even after the skid road was dismantled and paved over, and decades later, when the Great Depression hit, the Burnside District naturally became a catch-basin for the steady stream of down-and-out drifters who poured into town on the freight trains that passed through the Old Town yards. Jobless and broke, they wandered the streets of Portland, hoping (like me) that this would be the place that changed their luck – but for most of them, all Portland offered was a change of scenery.

  A fortunate few found jobs on the Works Progress Administration’s big project to widen Burnside Street – a major feat of engineering at the time. The old skid road was only twenty feet wide, too narrow for a major thoroughfare in a modern city. The WPA’s plan was to expand the street by forty feet, but first the engineers had to figure out how to carve out the extra space without demolishing the buildings that already lined both sides of the street. The solution they came up with was to surgically remove twenty feet from the rear of each building before jacking up the faade, lowering it onto rollers, and then pushing it back to rejoin its truncated body (had my nana’s room-stretcher actually existed, it would have been the perfect tool for the job).

  The Burnside expansion project took years to complete, and it put a lot of men to work, but for every drifter who was lucky enough to land a job with the WPA, there were hundreds more who struck out. The unlucky ones wound up sleeping in hobo jungles on the banks of the Willamette and standing in line at free soup kitchens to keep from starving. It was during this bleak period in the thirties that the term skid row was coined, and Burnside Street, the former ‘skid road’, is the prototype – the stubble-faced, pissed-his-pants granddaddy skid row of them all.

  It was nearly sundown when I left the library, and I was glad to see that the rain had let up because my clothes were finally dry after the hours I’d spent in the overheated reading room. Retracing John’s route, I hiked back down Yamhill to Burnside Street and then cut east to the Rescue Mission, where my trusty guide was already saving me a spot on the dinner line. But before I joined him in the line, I stepped inside to register for a bed and a mail slot, just as John had suggested. Everything went according to plan, and when I stepped back outside I felt more hopeful about my future than at any time since I’d fled my troubles back in New York. For the next three nights, at least, I had a warm, dry place to sleep, and food was no longer a problem, so things were definitely looking up. Come Monday, I’d start the process of restoring my ID papers by filing for a replacement Social Security card, and once I had my new card in hand I’d be eligible for Food Stamps, and – as John pointed out – I’d be able to register at the plasma centre, too, and start selling my blood for pocket change. I’d been living minute-to-minute for so long I’d forgotten what a pleasure it is to make a plan and see it through. Portland had reminded me of what I’d been missing. Which was one more reason to be grateful that my trip to San Francisco had taken a detour into the Northwest.

  Unlike the abbreviated chapel service we’d breezed through before breakfast, the evening service at the Rescue Mission that night was a full-blown example of the sort of ‘ear-beating’ I’d heard so many tramps complain about during my time on the road. Preacher Floyd was up on the stage again and beside him at the dais stood a young married couple who’d been brought in as guest speakers. It was a Saturday night, but the couple were dressed in their Sunday best. After Preacher Floyd started us off with a group singalong of ‘Amazing Grace’, he introduced the husband and wife and invited them to tell us their story – and, as soon as they began, I had the eeriest feeling that God was fucking with me.

  I mean, what were the odds that my very first experience of a true Mission ear-beating would turn out to be delivered by two former coke addicts? I’d never given much credence to the Protestants’ claims that theirs was a ‘personal Savior’, but listening to that young couple describe the depths they had sunk to while hooked on cocaine certainly felt like a personal message aimed squarely at me, and to keep from squirming in my pew I had to keep telling myself it was just a coincidence that they’d shown up that night to ‘testify’.

  The couple claimed that near the end, before they admitted they were powerless without God’s help, their habit was costing them twenty thousand dollars a year. They lost their jobs. The bank foreclosed on their house and left them homeless. Their families disowned them. Of course, none of the harrowing details they recounted came as any surprise to me. In fact, it was all too painfully familiar, and it was a relief when their twenty minutes at the podium finally ended with their testimony that they’d been lifted up out of the pit by the hand of God. Which prompted a grudging round of ‘Amens’ from the hungry congregation. Like me, all the other tramps in the room were probably hoping we’d heard enough ear-beating to earn our supper.

  But Preacher Floyd wasn’t done with us yet, and to our dismay he launched into what promised to be a lengthy sermon about the miracles God performs every day in the lives of those who pray for the gift of His grace. Five minutes into the preacher’s sermon, however, one of the winos in the pew behind me nodded off and, as he slumped over in his seat, his mickey of Mad Dog slipped out of his overcoat pocket and shattered on the chapel’s concrete floor, sending glass shards flying everywhere, like shrapnel from a Claymore mine.

  Immediately, two of the Mission’s sharp-eyed ushers descended upon the offender, hauled him out of the pew and hustled him toward the exit at the back of the chapel. As he was escorted out, the poor bastard just kept moaning, ‘I broke my mickey! I broke my mickey!’ Which naturally prompted scattered snickering from his fellow tramps. Fortunately, the interruption seemed to fluster Reverend Floyd and he cut his sermon short. Next thing we knew, he was telling us to open our songbooks to the closing hymn. After we’d all mumbled through a less-than-rousing rendition of ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’, o
ur ear-beating finally came to an end – leaving us free at last to follow our noses toward the aroma of fresh-baked lasagne that had been wafting into the chapel from the adjacent kitchen and tormenting us all for the past forty-five minutes.

  John and I found two seats at the same table and enjoyed our meal together before he said goodnight and hit the streets for the hike to his ‘secret campsite’ beneath an overpass somewhere in the industrial area out on the northwestern fringe of Old Town, where he chose to sleep on nights when it wasn’t too cold. ‘Anyway, I can show you where it is once you’ve used up your three nights at the Mission. Then if you need to camp out, you’ll have a spot. Look for me at breakfast time. I’ll be back in the morning.’

  The remainder of the evening followed much the same routine I’d been through while staying at the Ozanam Inn in New Orleans. I got to take my first shower in over a week and, later, one of the volunteers at the Clothing Exchange window hooked me up with a complete set of clean clothes – brand new tube socks and cotton boxers, plus a decent pair of used blue jeans and a faded green sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo of the Oregon Ducks. I particularly appreciated the sweatshirt, figuring there might be advantages to passing for a local somewhere down the line. If only I’d been able to score a better-fitting pair of shoes, I’d have been totally set. But the clerk said I’d have to hit the St Vincent de Paul thrift shop for footwear – the Mission exchange didn’t have enough room to stock used shoes.

  Except for the fact that the Rescue Mission issued ass-draughty hospital gowns instead of pyjamas to its overnight guests (a cringe-worthy fashion faux pas that exposed more of God’s handiwork than anyone was happy to see), the biggest difference between the Oz and its Portland counterpart was the size of the crowd in the dormitory. The Mission dorm was set up with bunk beds, automatically doubling its capacity. Which also, unfortunately, meant doubling the amount of coughing and snoring and night cries that echoed all around me in the darkness after lights-out. But I’d learned my lesson in New Orleans, and I made sure not to climb up into one of the sagging upper bunks until I’d fitted myself with a set of toilet-tissue earplugs.