| news | | | recent | | | archives | | | dispatches | | | goods | | | contributing | | | about |
19 Jan 2008, 21:12
We've changed gears. We've accelerated. We've shifted hard from deliciously divey to dangerously divey. We're in Portland and suffering severely mixed emotions.
While on my tour of the Great Northwestern Trifecta—Portland, Seattle, Vancouver—I devised a schema for rating cities. A city can be graded by compiling three distinct metrics which I've termed Head, Heart, and Hands. If a city is citizen-friendly, providing services such as effective and reliable public transportation, free city-wide wireless internet access, progressive land-use management policies, etc, then it earns Head points. If a city has a unique and undeniable character or charm, a certain grace or a certain funk, a certain something that distinguishes this city from the rest, then it earns Heart points. And if a city has a healthy economy and low unemployment, then it earns Hands points.
I didn't much like Seattle. Seattle didn't seem to have a lot of heart and I like my cities to have a lot of heart. Austin has a lot of heart. New York has a lot of heart. Avignon and Amsterdam have a hell of a lot of heart. And so does Portland.
Seattle's lack of heart had it stricken from my list of liveable cities right away. If Vancouver wasn't in Canada, I might have moved there. Portland, of the three, is the only city to make the grade.
There were delays at customs. They questioned me and about 25 Asian tourists concerning our reasons for entering Canada. Was this a trip for business or for pleasure? Where was I going? Did I know anyone? Why was I traveling alone? How much money did I have on my person? Did I have access to any more? All this and they didn't even stamp my passport.
The sky was dark and the city was illuminated when we arrived at the Greyhound station near downtown Vancouver. I grabbed my bags, neglected to change my currency, and set out walking in the drizzle toward my hostel.
I got lost. But not by much. At an intersection a junkie (more on Vancouver's junkies shortly) told me I looked like someone he knew. This is a response from predatory derelicts that I get regularly. In Nice I was stopped, told I looked like a young American actor, told I was gay, and asked if I had a place to stay that night. I told the guy I had no money and that I was looking for the hostel. He asked, if he led me there, if I would tip him. I reminded him that I had no money and he pointed the way but did not lead me.
So I checked into the C&N Backpackers Hostel later than I wanted. The guy at the desk gave me a map of the city and the rundown. He told me where to go to get a great exchange rate. He told me where I'd find cheap restaurants and expensive clubs and where to go gawk at all the junkies. Vancouver's famous for them.
According to this guy, the government treats the junkies well. They're fed regularly. They don't have to sleep on pavement. They're offered various services for the recovery of the corpus and the spirit. They can shoot up or light up or get ripped however they will on the sidewalks more or less fearlessly. Why? I have no idea. But the junkies have their own district. They're not hostile. You can walk among them at 3 am naked and waving money in the air and not be harrassed, supposedly, though I can't vouch that with 100% confidence.
But this is my guess: they're a tourist attraction. They constitute a kind of sadistic human zoo. They're the biggest, scariest, most in-your-face freakshow available on the west coast for the breed of consumer that trends toward reality TV.
On a side note, reportedly a guy I knew in high school died a junkie and on the streets somewhere in Canada. It might have been in Vancouver.
That night I dined with free internet at a coffee shop. The night before, in Seattle, desperate to avoid another hostel and to finally experience couch surfing with a stranger, I had drunkenly sent out a barrage of emails to potential hosts. One returned positive. But due to schedule complications we were unable to rendezvous that night. And I, shivering in my rain-wet thin wool coat, reluctant to spend a lot of money, and jaded to anonymous downtowns, decided to exit the Sky Rail one after the exit for my hostel, on the outs, and explore there.
I found another coffee shop. I had a chai and explained to two black girls in exquisite long coats how I wound up at their neighborhood cafe. "California, eh? So what brings you to Commercial Drive?" "Utter serendipity." I asked them if they knew of someplace close where I could sit and have some wine. They recommended a few places. I asked if they wanted to accompany me but they were already obliged to an office holiday party.
I passed the place twice before going inside. The street was fascinating enough. As I was walking, a middle-aged man let the joint between his lips dangle while he unwrapped what was in his hand and offered to sell me a hand-painted rosetta pine cone. A young couple was standing a ways off the sidewalk, as if waiting for a cab. The guy suddenly says "aww, fuck off" and throws his cell phone into the street. Another guy, balancing many grocery bags and a conversation in his cell phone, all with one arm, bends over to retrieve something that fell from one of the bags and drops his phone, which explodes. He says "aww, fuck off" and walks on. While I'm looking at my map another junkie asks if I want to see Bon Jovi, who, can you believe it?, was in town that night. I tell him no. He says "Well, can I have your rail ticket, then?"
The next day I checked out, leaving my bags behind the front desk, telling the clerk that I might be back but I need to go check about a girl.
But before that I need to eat and check my email to see if said girl has written me back. So I take the rail into town and, because it's finally and gloriously sunny, I decide to walk down to South Granville, across the bridge, and adventure for breakfast there.
At this point I still hadn't exchanged any of my currency. But the rate is close enough to 1-to-1 that the cafe I found accepted my US dollars and gave me Canadian change.
The girl had responded, inviting me to a game of soccer and brunch after the game. I just had to meet her at the field.
So I hopped on the bus. The ride took us through the junkie district. On the corner of Main and Hastings, junkie central, there were two teenage girls distributing cookies and juice boxes from a large cardboard box.
Christine and I just missed each other. No one was playing soccer at the park. I found an open wireless connection and wrote her. She replied, saying sorry. So I returned to the hostel. Ca va.
That evening, over a too-expensive light dinner of clam chowder and grilled tiger prawns, I decided to buy my family socks for Christmas. I wanted to get them something from my favorite of the cities I visited. But my sister wanted something from Canada. I discovered a Portland-based online sock shop, and I had already bought them prints to hang from the nation's only 3D art museum (also in Portland). And I found a wine shop near the overpriced seafood place where I ate dinner. Christmas would be warm and boozy that year.
At the wine shop I bought a bottle of British Columbia riesling, which was gross, and bottle of something sparkling infused with Patagonian strawberries, which was candy. And it rained on me as I walked back across the Granville bridge into downtown, the fourth time I walked that bridge that day. So I decided not to pay for my rail ticket back to the hostel.
Where I put the sparking strawberry stuff in the refrigerator and resigned myself to a quiet evening of reading and drinking alone. But, while waiting for the bottle to chill, I was interrupted by Ronny.
Ronny is in his thirties. He and his family were born in Canada. His mother married an American and moved to Brooklyn. His sister did the same. By their sponsorship he was able to live in the US for 20 years. He never went to college. He was never able to pursue business ventures with his entreprenurial friends because he was not a citizen. He's traveled far and long and has a missed my plane story to break your heart. He hates Canada but moved to Vancouver, just arrived that afternoon, because it's the only reasonable place to live, in his opinion, if one has no other option than to live in Canada.
Ronny loves the US. He applied for citizenship and knows more about our history and geography than I might ever know. But he's on a list. At the rate of immigration bureaucracy, he might be on that list for 12–15 more years.
We popped the bottle of Patagonian strawberry champagne and overflowed it on the hardwood floor of the common room. We drank it and talked for hours. And then we decided to go get gyros.
We trekked up through the junkie district. We did not get gyros. Ronny bought a very expensive pack of generic cigarettes and resolved it would be his last pack, generic or otherwise. We found another hostel, more expensive than C&N, that had a kitchen serving and many other novelties that C&N could not afford or prioritize. They served booze. We ordered burgers with fries and a pitcher of Hefeweizen. And the cashier substantiated one complaint against Canadians, a typically Canadian trait that Ronny came to disdain after living for so long in the US.
"All right, that'll be $23.50."
"Can you split that on two credit cards?"
"Nope."
"No?"
"Nope."
"Well, we can't really split it evenly with cash..."
"Well, then you should get your money situation in order and come back when you're ready."
Ronny hates Canadian customer service. He loves that, in the US, you can bitch and shriek and demand to speak to supervisors and people will fetch their supervisors and, if you bitch effectively and have a point and if the supervisor has any heart at all, then your issue will most likely be expedited, quite possibly without charge. That's not how it works in Canada. Ronny had some complications with his phone bill. He called to bitch about it. Not only did the customer service representative refuse to get her supervisor, but he told him "look, sorry, but it stays" and hung up on him.
While we were eating, a kid who was thrown out of the dining room for being drunk snuck back in to retrieve his coat and scarf—kicked out of his hostel, he might have to spend the cold cold night cuddling junkies. But the doorman caught him, grabbed his collar and literally drug him to the front door and threw him out again. Later, the kid appeared on the sidewalk near the door. The doorman opened the door and stood in front of it, pointing and yelling. The kid looked like he would've weeped if it wouldn't have blurred his sight of his assailant. Doorman took a few steps in the kid's direction. Kid bolted.
Back at C&N, Ronny told me that wanted to be a club DJ. We talked about old dance music and I filled his mp3 player with old Underworld, BT, Chicane. He took a video of me drunk and nostalging over my old love of dance music. That video will not appear here.
The next morning I woke later than I wanted and scrambled to buy my family's socks online before my bus left. Ronny walked me to the bus station, like an old Jewish grandmama, and we wished each other better luck and quicker success than our experience allows as possible.
Again, there were delays at customs. I smuggled the bottle of riesling across undetected, but we were forced to wait in the bus for two hours before we were even allowed into the building. So I didn't eat that day until Seattle, around 18:30. We were so late that I had to transfer my bags myself before I could go down the block and order my chicken quesadillas.
I should have suspected or recognized that something was abnormal with my baggage registration. Because I was so late showing up to the station in Vancouver, the dude that's supposed to tag my bags didn't tag them correctly. When I arrived in Visalia, my bags were not beneath the bus.
A few phone calls located them back in Seattle. They made the ride to back Portland with me but, seeing the tagged destination as Seattle, the handlers sent them back. My bags arrived in Visalia five days after I did.
Fast forward a month and, because I've resolved to never again ride the bus across the country, I'm tagging my two largest bags at the Amtrak station in Hanford, CA. The plan was to take the train into Sacramento, where Neil and I would spend the night drinking whiskey and talking til dawn in a deliciously divey motel before my flight to Portland the following afternoon.
And that's exactly how it happened. We were ejected from our room—the desk clerk called and the housekeeping lady barged in and left the door open because we failed to check out on time—after around four hours of sleep. We repaired to a Togo's, poked at our sandwiches, and I was at the airport precisely an hour before my 14:00 flight.
My naive optimism complicated my arrival in Portland. I neglected to book a bed or a room for the weekend and by the time I called the only two hostels in town, waiting in the airport, neither of them had an open bed. So, after I landed, I googled discount hotels. I found the Joyce Hotel, downtown. I called about a room and was told that they could only hold it for a couple hours—would I arrive before 6 pm? Yes I would, I said. I tried to give my credit card number and full name but was interrupted after "Richard". "It's ok," he said.
It's ok and it's not ok. The Joyce Hotel is a dangerously divey junkie retreat. The free meal that's advertised on the bullet-proof glass at the check-in desk is courtesy of a nearby soup kitchen. You can assume the availability of a dozen whores at any hour. You can assume a constant harmony of loud sex and verbal barbarity. You can assume an overdose a night. I've been in Portland, my new home, for six hours now and I'm a little scared to leave my room. Fortunately, though, I brought my steeltoes.
I'm seeing three rooms tomorrow and, with any luck, when I check out Monday, noon, it'll be for one of them. I'm through being itinerant. I'm ready to root and settle in and reprioritize projects over traveling and it'd be nice to make some money. I'm tired of being poor and I'm tired of not having a room of my own. This move feels like a good one. If I can look past my first weekend here in the Joyce Hotel, that is.
Feel like commenting?
your name
link?
Who is the current US president?