Portland and Hostel Company

left: Pics in this entry were taken in downtown Portland and the Hawthorne area.

I flew out to Portland two weeks ago for my friend Gregg's wedding. I had never visited Portland before, so I tried to skate/bike around as much of the city as possible to get a feel for it.

If Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, Tom Waits, Noam Chomsky, and a bum ever got together, pooled their assets, and designed a city, they'd come up with something like Portland. It's progressive, it's bike-friendly, it's peppered with dozens of brew-pubs filled to their rafters with fabulous beer, it's home to hordes of bums who love its year-round temperate climate, and it's a sanctuary for roaming packs of bespectacled intellectuals who hold the latest literary releases in their clutches just as soldiers hold their shields. If you're interested in being interested, a lover of beer and beer-related things, and into being active, Portland is your Mecca.

I checked into a hostel on Hawthorne Street, a place made famous by its single-story storefront buildings that sell everything from veggie burritos to leather bondage suits. Looking for pedestrians without tattoos on Hawthorne is like trying to catch a glimpse of a spotted owl in Manhattan. Cafes and brew-pubs with outdoor seating spill their guts onto the sidewalks and snag unsuspecting passerbys with menu hooks. The street is the main artery of a funky residential area populated with people who paint their houses bright greens and purples and grow corn in their front yards. Surburbia beware: Hawthorne will eat you.

The hostel I stayed at on Hawthorne had a style of its own that both welcomed guests of all walks of life while also preserving the funky vibe of its host street. Out back, where I stayed, sits a quaint "tent yard", an area filled with hostel-owned tents that guests can rent for about $15 a night. The communal kitchen is connected to a communal dining room where guests can sit on long wooden benches around a single table to eat and shoot the shit. An "eco-roof" made of live mosses and grasses covers the first story of the hostel and makes everyone under it feel like some sort of garden gnome. The place is cool and it attracts just the type of folks you'd expect to be interested in tent yards, communal eating, and eco-building: travelers.

Melvin and Bean (names changed to protect the funny) were sitting on plastic chairs on the hostel porch and staring bleary-eyed out into the street when I sat next to them with my breakfast. Like drunken lizards, they lounged in the sun on plastic lawn chairs and tried to rub their eyes clean of the bloodshot capillaries that made them look hungover. Their efforts were futile. They both wore faded thrift shop T-shirts that advertised someone else's corporate picnic, someone else's local basketball championship team. They looked as if they were skinny not by choice but by circumstance and wore their patchy facial hair with pubescent awkwardness. After a few moments, Bean spoke up.

"Hey, can't beat this weather, huh?" He pointed up at a spot in the sky as if all the day's weather was seeping from a hole above us.

"Yeah, it's as good as it gets. The past few days have been great," I said.

"I'm from Alaska and I'm just happy to be in a place where the sun sets when she's supposed ta' and the sky gets black when she's supposed ta'! You know what I mean? Where you from?"

And so it went. We introduced ourselves, talked about Greyhound buses and what it's like to sit next to someone with "40 lb. arms" when they get sleepy, and we eventually decided to meet at a bar across the street later that afternoon for happy hour. "They got $1.50 Buds and the place has bar stools shaped like thrones--we figure it can't be that bad!" Melvin explained. We shook hands and parted ways for the day.

left: Hawthorne Street

At 4:30 p.m., I pushed open a heavy, vinyl-covered door and stepped into a dank, bare-bones bar that draws in some of Hawthorne's weirder, more pot-bellied visitors. Sure enough, the bar stools were teal, throne-like seats complete with pillows and arm rests. Every "stool" was filled with a red-faced guy with dirt under his fingertips. A tired bartender with saggy breasts in a tank top watched the football game on the overhead TV. Dusty neon beer signs lined the walls; some were lit up, some were not. Circular pool hall lights hung like discarded halos in the smokey air and lit up the faces of clusters of seated men below. The few female customers that were scattered amongst the groups of men had hearty laughs, smoked, and wore too much make-up. I spotted my two new friends and made my way over to their table.

"Jesus, you guys sure picked a dive!" I whispered. "I like it, but christ, we're the only ones in here who aren't drunks, over 50, and/or divorced."

Bean smiled and looked over at Melvin. "You might want to speak for yourself on that one, buddy!" He elbowed Melvin.

"What--you're drunks? Well, you know what I mean, I---"

"Not drunks. The whole divorced thing, ask Melvin about it, right Mel?" Bean laughed and blew a cloud of cigarette smoke up into the skirt of the light above us.

"You guys are only 21. Mel, you've been married and divorced already? Are you serious?"

"Well, not really. Well, kinda. You see this?" Melvin held out his right hand so I could see the thin, black band of ink tattooed around his ring finger, a tattoo I hadn't noticed until that moment.

"Yeah."

"Well, this is the result of a drunken night in Vegas. I went there six months ago for my 21st birthday party. To make a long story short, I met a chick, a friend of a friend, and we got wasted and decided to get married at three in the morning. We went to a chapel, paid our $45, got married, and headed straight for a tattoo shop to get these. I wasn't even attracted to the girl, I just figured it would be a fun thing to do."

"No way. Did you regret the tattoo thing the next day?"

"Oh yeah, I regretted all of it the next day. But, listen to this," Mel leaned in close. "So, I waited to get the divorce started because I had to save up the $200 I needed to get all the paperwork done. A month ago, as I start getting all the divorce stuff in order, I get a call from this chick's mom. Don't ask me how she found my number; I guess she looked me up on the internet or something. She says that her daughter has gone missing and that she's filed a police report. She wants to know if I've seen her, if I've seen my 'wife'. When she said the word 'wife', I got scared."

"Holy shit."

"Yeah, all the sudden it hit me: My wife has disappeared and I could easily be a suspect. Honestly, I don't want to date any girls or even hook-up with any girls until they find this chick. Some eager rookie cop somewhere would love to close a case like this by spinning some young-love-triangle-gone-wrong story."

"Holy shit, man. What are you going to do?"

"Keep prayin' she turns up somewhere. Alive."

Bean started laughing and put his hands together, closed his eyes, and started praying to the dusty light above us. After he ended his prayer, he picked up his glass, and with a smile on his face stretched taut from ear to ear, he declared, "Cheers to Melvin's missing wife! May she be found alive! May he never be contacted about her whereabouts again!!"

The pitchers of beer flowed the way they always do when served up with good conversation: fast and cold. The guys smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and shared each and every one they lit up. "We only smoke when we travel together, and even then, we smoke maybe 10 a day." Bean explained as he exhaled and passed a roach-sized butt to Mel.

Mel corrected him. "No, not even 10 most days. And, actually we each only smoke four or five at the most because we share each cigarette." Mel's cigarette went out and when he noticed the cherry had lost its glow, Bean reached up and relit it for him.

They had a friendship that could deflect the fallout of even the strongest of arguments. They quipped like everything they said had been rehearsed ahead of time. Had they been a gay couple, they would have stayed happy and grown old together and made other couples, straight or gay, jealous.

We got drunk, closed our tab, and wobbled back across the street to the hostel.

"Later tonight, after I take a serious nap, we should go see a band at a bar somewhere," Bean suggested.

"Yeah, I'm up for it. A nap sounds good. Wake me up," I said.

"Cool."

They climbed into their narrow two-person tent that was pitched next to mine, and within moments, snoring filled the tent yard.

Later that night, we took the bus into downtown Portland to see a band we read about in the local paper. After the show, after learning we had missed the last bus back to Hawthorne, we started walking a few miles uphill to the hostel. As we walked, as two guys I just met earlier in the day cracked jokes and talked about their plans for the coming year, I couldn't help but smile. I thought about how many other nights like this might be in my future, how many other people I'd meet before I died. How learning the stories that illuminated other peoples' lives helped illuminate mine. How stories were these recycled bundles of energy that people drew from and passed on so other people could absorb them.

I said goodnight to Mel and Bean and laid down in my tent. With my face flushed from the middle-of-the-night uphill walk and the beer I drank, I stared up through the screen window in my tent at a cloud of insects circling the street light above. Moths and beetles and flies of all sorts cut through the chill of the night without a peep and waved me into a deep, dreamless sleep that seemed to end just moments after it started. I opened my eyes to bright sunshine.