Even with my ears plugged, I still had a hard time nodding off, though I suspect my sleeplessness had less to do with the noise than with the hopeful scenarios my mind kept spinning, as I tried to wrap my head around the new prospects Portland would offer me in the coming days. I lay awake for hours that night, pondering possibilities, until the muffled cries of a troubled sleeper seeped through my earplugs, repeating the same words over and over.
‘Let go!’ he cried out in the dark. ‘Let go! Let go!’
And, finally, too tired to hold on, that’s just what I did.
CHAPTER 8
My first weeks on the streets of Portland reminded me a lot of my first weeks at college. Twenty years after heading off to Dartmouth, I was once again facing the challenges of making my way in a strange environment, far from home and totally on my own. And that wasn’t the only similarity, either.
Strangely enough, though I was now thirty-eight, I still felt the same mixture of nervousness and exhilaration I’d felt as an insecure teenager. I’d wake up on skid row each morning acutely aware of how much I had yet to learn, and then, with the same curiosity that animated me as a college freshman, I’d eagerly get on with it. Which was a good thing, because I was now confronting the same daunting task that Jay McInerney’s cokehead alter ego faced at the end of Bright Lights, Big City, when he concludes that everything he knows will now have to be relearned from scratch.
Even the little things had to be learned anew. Such as, how to pronounce Oregon without sounding like a clueless New Yorker – or like Steely Dan in ‘Don’t Take Me Alive’, crossing their old man in Ore-gawn.
Listening to the locals during my first few days in Portland, I quickly realised there is no gone in Oregon, and I soon found myself mimicking their pronunciation, which to my ears sounded more like Origun. I knew I’d never be able to pass for an Oregonian, with my Brooklyn accent, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to show the locals a little respect by pronouncing their state’s name correctly. Reliant as I was on their charity, it seemed the least I could do to express my appreciation, so when the pinch-faced woman at the Help Desk in the Social Security offices actually noticed my correct pronunciation and complimented me for it, I had to smile. Did it help speed the processing of my application? Not likely, but who can say? All I know is that my replacement card arrived in the mail before the week was out – much sooner than I’d expected.
Having cleared the first hurdle on the way to restoring my identity – if not yet my respectability – I followed John’s advice and immediately took my card to the Alpha Plasma Center’s nondescript storefront building on Fifth Avenue to register as a new donor. John said if I could pass the required physical, they’d issue me a free photo ID card that I could use as my second piece of identification when I applied for Food Stamps. And the bonus was, as a new donor I’d receive a ten-dollar sign-up fee in addition to the standard eight dollars they paid for a pint of blood.
How John knew so much about the ‘Stab Lab’ was a mystery, given the fact that he claimed to be deathly afraid of needles. As usual, though, his information was accurate in every detail and before the afternoon was over I walked out of there a pint of plasma short, but eighteen dollars to the good.
I’d donated blood to the Red Cross Bloodmobile a few times while I was in college, so I wasn’t a total rookie at having a vein drained. But my Bloodmobile experience in no way prepared me for the impersonal, factory-like operation I encountered on my first visit to the vampires at the plasma centre.
The formidable middle-aged nurse in charge of the intake desk had the build of a Russian shot-putter and the withering demeanour of Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Beneath her heavily lacquered helmet of blonde hair, her facial features hinted at Slavic origin – as did the tongue-twisting string of consonants that were engraved on her name badge.
‘Don’t even bother trying to decipher her name,’ the twitchy meth-freak in line behind me advised. ‘We all just call her Nurse Ratched. Not to her face, of course. We’re not crazy. But, dude, look at her. She’s got the whole scary Nurse Ratched vibe down cold, don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, I can see it,’ I agreed. ‘I wouldn’t want to arm-wrestle her, that’s for damned sure.’
‘Shit, she could beat down everybody in this room if she felt like it,’ the tweaker grinned, and I didn’t doubt it. Which was likely why the bosses had her working the intake desk. Judging by the motley collection of druggies and winos that appeared to comprise the majority of the centre’s clientele, a deterrent force in the waiting room was definitely necessary. Nobody seemed to pay much mind to the tubby rent-a-cop who patrolled the restrooms for illicit activity. He was little more than window-dressing. Nurse Ratched was the true deterrent in the room, and if her intimidating presence failed to have the desired effect on an unruly donor, she wouldn’t hesitate to reach for the jumbo-size aerosol can of Glade air freshener she kept handy on her desk – which, as the motor-mouth tweaker informed me, does as good a job as Mace when sprayed in your face at close quarters.
Forewarned about Nurse Ratched’s intolerance for anyone who dilly-dallied at the desk or slowed the line down in any way, I made sure to be quick about it when I stepped up to the counter and presented my completed application form and my Social Security card. ‘This is all the ID you have?’ Nurse Ratched asked, giving me an icy once-over with her pale blue eyes.
‘Sorry, ma’am, that’s it,’ I replied. I was about to explain about my lost wallet but thought better of it. Just in time.
‘All right, then,’ she snapped, before I had time to get another word out. ‘Bring your application down the hall and take a seat outside the doctor’s office. When he’s ready, he’ll call you in for a physical. If you pass, you come back to see me and we’ll take a picture for your Alpha ID card. While we’re printing your card, you’ll take a specimen cup to the men’s room and then bring me back a urine sample. Any questions?’
‘No, ma’am,’ I said.
‘Then get a move on,’ she said, before barking, ‘step up!’ to the next man in line.
The frail, rheumy-eyed doctor who performed my physical looked like he’d been abducted from a geriatric ward. I couldn’t help wondering what kind of money the Alpha Center’s owners had to offer to lure him out of retirement. No matter how much they paid him, however, spending three afternoons per week giving alkies and drug addicts medical clearance to use their bodies as ATM machines had to be a depressing way to supplement your pension, and I felt sorry for the old guy. But to his credit, there was nothing slipshod about the basic exam he gave me, and nothing false about the kindly smile he wore throughout the process.
After my physical revealed no problems that would keep me from donating plasma, the doctor called in one of the nurses to draw a sample of my blood to screen for adverse protein levels (which can disqualify you as a donor) and also to determine my blood type (which would later be printed on my donor ID card). While the nurse was busy jabbing me, the doctor peppered me with questions from a questionnaire meant to assess my possible exposure to the AIDS virus. Had I travelled to Haiti or Africa within the past six months? Did I engage in anal intercourse? Had I ever been tattooed or shared a needle with anyone using intravenous drugs?
Rampant as the AIDS epidemic was in the eighties, I’d expected those kinds of questions, naturally. But when he asked if I’d spent time in prison in the past year I was taken by surprise. I don’t know why I’d never thought to consider incarceration a risk factor for AIDS – it made perfect sense, when you thought about it – but until the doctor popped that question I’d never made the connection before, and it left me momentarily flustered. I had to do a quick mental tally of how many months had passed since my release date from Rikers Island before I realised I could truthfully answer, ‘No’. Whereupon the doctor pronounced me fit to be drained and then sent me on my way with a wave of his liver-spotted hand and a kindly, ‘Good luck, young man.’
Back at N
urse Ratched’s station, one of her assistants had me toe the line taped on the floor in front of a tripod-mounted camera, and I had no trouble mustering a smile as she snapped my picture for the photo ID that would now give me access to Food Stamps. Everything was working out just the way John had predicted. And that was surely something to smile about.
All I had to do now was to provide a urine sample, so I retreated to the men’s room with my plastic specimen cup. When I emerged minutes later with the warm cup cradled in my hands, I found myself adopting the same cautious, flatfooted shuffle all the other donors employed when they were ferrying their golden offerings to Nurse Ratched. As I quickly discovered, keeping the piss from sloshing over the edge of the uncapped cup was no easy feat, and for some of the shakier alkies it was a hopeless endeavour – those were the guys you had to give a wide berth while you were standing on the intake line.
Once I’d submitted my sample, I was told to take a seat in the waiting room until my urine had been tested, and as I sat there in one of the plastic bucket seats that had obviously been chosen for their uncomfortable design (‘NO SLEEPING!’ signs were posted all around the waiting area), I overheard a couple of tramps complaining about Nurse Ratched’s iron-handed control over the ceiling-mounted TV in the waiting area.
‘Doesn’t the bitch realise we already get all the ear-beating we can take at the Rescue Mission? Why do we have to listen to the same preachy bullshit from that phony Pat Robertson? Every time I come in here, she’s got the box tuned to The 700 Club. Does she really think anyone comes to the Stab Lab to find Jesus? Give me a fucking break!’
‘I hear you, brother,’ the second tramp agreed. ‘Why don’t you go ask her to change the channel?’
‘Forget that,’ the first tramp replied. ‘I’ve seen guys try it and it never works. She just says no, then buries their paperwork at the bottom of the pile. It takes long enough to get out of here with your blood money already. Cross that bitch and you’ll be sitting here forever. I’ve got better things to do with my time.’
By the time the afternoon was over, I discovered the tramp was right about how long it took to walk out of there with cash in hand. Donating plasma turned out to be a much more involved process than pumping out a pint of blood in your local Red Cross Bloodmobile. First off, it took nearly twenty minutes before my urine was tested and my donor ID card was ready for pick-up. After that, I was escorted back to the donation room, where a couple of dozen hospital beds were lined up in tightly spaced rows. Except for the few beds that were being sanitised and lined with paper top-sheets before being put back to use, the rest of the beds were filled with glum-faced donors, who sat propped up by pillows, with plastic tubing snaking from one arm to a portable vacuum pump machine on a rolling cart parked at their bedside.
‘What’s with all the rubber balls?’ I asked the nurse who was leading me to an open bed. Almost every donor in the place was rhythmically squeezing one of those sponge-rubber balls you see in the doggy-toy aisle at Walmart, and my first impression was that I’d stumbled into some sort of weird workout class. Loser Calisthenics, maybe. But the nurse explained that squeezing a ball with the hand of your ‘bleed arm’ helped speed the flow of blood, allowing you to fill your collection bag more quickly.
‘It’s your choice, of course,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to use a ball if you don’t want to. Some donors prefer to just open and close their fist. But if you want a ball, I’ll go grab one for you.’
What the hell? I thought. Might as well get this over with as soon as possible. So I asked for a ball, but it still took me nearly forty minutes to pump out a full bag of blood. Then I raised my hand as I’d been instructed, and one of the roving nurses came over to my bedside and disconnected me from the vacuum machine, before collecting my bag of blood and hustling away to the onsite lab that was set up behind a glass wall at the front of the donation room.
According to the information pamphlet I’d been given with my application forms, the whole blood is then run through a special high-speed centrifuge that separates the plasma from the platelets. The process is called plasmapheresis, Greek for ‘taking away plasma’. Once the plasma has been extracted, the remaining blood goes back into your original bag and is brought back to your bedside to be reinfused into your bloodstream, along with a saline solution to replace the fluids lost during the plasma extraction.
Reinfusion is a slower process, dependent solely on gravity, and there is nothing you can do to speed it up. It must have taken nearly an hour before the last red droplets worked their way down the clear tube into my vein, and by then I was more than ready to get out of there. But I still had to wait another quarter-hour before one of the harried nurses on the understaffed crew got around to removing the needle-tipped tube from the crook of my arm – and it wasn’t until she finished bandaging my puncture wound with a smiley-face Band-Aid that I was finally free to head for the cashier’s window with the chit I’d been given to collect my pay.
Even when I got to the cashier at last, I had to jump through still more hoops before I could get paid. First, I had to sign a ledger acknowledging payment for my donation. Then the cashier wrote out a receipt she said I’d need as proof of income if I was enrolled in the Food Stamps programme. This was a wrinkle John Anyway hadn’t mentioned, but I pocketed the receipt she gave me and then held out one hand as instructed, while the cashier rubber-stamped the Alpha Center logo on the back of my hand with ultraviolet-sensitive ink.
‘The ink stays visible under a black light for three full days,’ she explained, in answer to my quizzical look. ‘Three days is the minimum safe interval allowed between plasma donations. The ink keeps donors from cheating the system by selling their blood at a different plasma centre before their three-day waiting period is up.’ Ah, that explains it. I’d been wondering why Nurse Ratched had examined my hands with a black-light wand before she’d issued me a specimen cup.
By the time I finally collected my cash and walked back out to the waiting room, I’d been at the Stab Lab for nearly three and a half hours, and the eighteen dollars in my pocket no longer seemed like easy money. But at two hundred dollars per pint – the amount I’d heard plasma centres like Alpha charged the big pharma companies who bought the bulk of the plasma collected from down-and-outers like me – it was definitely easy money for the vampire elite. As always, the rich get richer. The rest of us just roll up our sleeves for the needle.
Perhaps because I felt ripped off as I walked back out into the drizzling rain on Burnside Street, I suddenly recalled an old Brazilian proverb that Henry Miller liked to quote: Quand merda tiver valor, pobre nasce sem cu. ‘When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.’
Still, it was hard to stay disgruntled for long. For the first time in weeks, I had money in my pocket that I’d earned instead of panhandled, and I was eager to go spend some of it. The hours I’d spent sitting around the Stab Lab had given me plenty of opportunity to plan my shopping list, and as I hobbled west down Burnside Street I knew exactly what I wanted to pick up before heading out to John Anyway’s campsite, where I’d been crashing ever since my allotted nights at the Rescue Mission had run out.
At the local bodega around the corner from the Stab Lab, I picked up mouthwash, Bugler tobacco, a box of Devil Dogs and two quarts of milk. Then, side-stepping the usual cluster of winos trolling for change outside the bodega’s doorway, I headed down the block to one of the neighbourhood’s ubiquitous pawn shops. This particular shop had an old pocket transistor radio displayed in its window that I’d been eyeing every time I passed. I figured a little music would go a long way toward relieving the Spartan dreariness of John’s camp in the evenings, so I stepped inside to see how much they wanted for it. After a little haggling with the owner, I got the price down to two bucks instead of the three he’d quoted and left the shop smiling, feeling like I’d gotten my blood money’s worth.
The last stop on my shopping spree was further west on Burnside, at Port
land’s famous bookstore, Powell’s City of Books, where I picked up fresh batteries for the radio and a dog-eared paperback copy of George Orwell’s hardship memoir Down and Out in Paris and London. It’s the first book Eric Blair published under his famous nom de plume, and I’d been meaning to read it for years but had never gotten around to it. Now seemed the perfect opportunity, given my situation. And what better companion could you ask for in an Orwellian setting like the Stab Lab than George Orwell himself? If there’d been plasma centres back in his tramping days, he’d no doubt have rolled up his sleeve for the needle too. I was curious to see how much, or how little, life on skid row today resembled life at the bottom of the barrel back in the late twenties. It would make for interesting reading at my next session with the bloodsuckers at Alpha.
Loitering beneath the entrance awning as I left Powell’s, I sheltered from the rain for a moment and rolled a smoke before setting off into the steady drizzle that seemed to be Portland’s default weather setting in winter. Now came the hard part – the hike to camp.
Because John Anyway valued his privacy, he’d chosen a campsite further from Old Town than most tramps were willing to hike. It was out beyond the Pearl District, on the fringe of an industrial area on the northwest side of town, beneath one of the 405 Freeway’s overpass bridges. Normally, hiking a mile and a half wouldn’t have fazed me, but with my blistered heels still in such bad shape, hobbling out there at night was a painful exercise. Nonetheless, like John, I was willing to put in the extra effort just for the peace of mind of knowing we weren’t likely to be hassled by cops or attacked in our sleep in such an isolated spot – which made it easier to relax your guard and close your eyes at night. (Guys on the street were still talking about the two tramps who’d been stomped half to death in a riverside campsite several months before I hit town, so John’s seemingly paranoid insistence that we keep our campsite’s location a secret actually made good sense.)
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