Thanks for the memories, Portland...

This is an example of an Absurd Reality. More to come.








I had finally finished a long day building doors for a display that would go up in Niketown out in LA or someplace. A day of plywood and veneer, sawdust, bondo and repetition. Still broken from a nasty car wreck, I knew that if I didn't bust my ass I'd be out the door. The owners of that particular shop did not screw around, they liked to grind guys up. Twelve or thirteen hours a day six or seven days a week were the usual. If anyone let themselves slow down they'd be laid off. Most guys lasted about two weeks. Now, eight hours later, I was happy just to get out of the rain and head home on the streetcar. There were plenty of empty seats in the back, which struck me as odd, but like I said, I was tired and in a reasonable amount of pain. Fractured ribs don't knit much in a couple of weeks, and settling into that hard plastic seat was the highlight of my day. 


Finally off my feet, I had a moment's rest when a potent, stinging odor hit me like a left handed bitchslap. Few things are as unmistakable as the smell of professionally cultivated crotch rot. Terms like trench foot, chilblains and gangrene came immediately to mind. I checked my boots, wondering what the hell I stepped in. Nothing there. The soles were clean from the rain. Then the thought that I’d sat down in whatever it was picked me up out of my seat. I was sure for a second that I’d turn and see a rogue turd left behind like an unwrapped gift... 

It wouldn’t have been the first loitering shit I had found while taking advantage of public transportation.

But there was nothing there either, and spinning out of my seat sent knives of pain through my left side. I sat back down stiffly, too exhausted to consider walking home in the rain.

There were three other guys in the back half of the bus.  I wanted to figure out which of them was the culprit. One unconscious drunk, and two strung out looking homeless guys layered in filthy clothing. They were aging street kids whose narcotic hobbies had turned ugly and dragged them into their mid twenties.  To call them kids was inaccurate, these were professional bums who had grown up in the street. They were scratching and squirming and stinking like low hell.

Common wisdom holds that smells fade as the nose gets used to them.  Not that time. It just got worse. I started to worry that it might sink into my clothes and the pores in my skin. I could picture strangers gagging as they passed me in the street. 

The Portland hills crept by while the stink went to stalemate with my fatigue. 

At every stop I watched other boobs walk into that acrid cloud. They would find a seat eagerly, just like I did, and then it would hit them. They would glance around in disgust until they laid eyes on the source. Lips screwed down into colorless, puckered anuses. Noses wrinkled and eyes narrowed to slits… 

Then it got even worse.

One of the amphetamine enthusiasts let loose a barely audible shit. Silence rode on top of the ambient street noise, the usual chatter of the evening rush hour went dead as the second wave of foulness crept through the car. I watched as people turned pale (well more pale than the seasonal pallor all Portlander's share nine months of the year) in the tainted air. I erupted into laughter. Most people would not find being in a closed space with a guy shitting uncontrollably funny at all.  But I couldn't keep myself from busting up, the absurdity of the situation was too intense not to appreciate.

The other passengers covered their mouths like the smell might cling to their teeth. They gagged and got as far as they could from the men in the corner. Every peal of laughter caught in my ribs like burning splinters. From my perspective, the scene was devolving into an impossible irony. 

Embarrassed, the spindly meth-head shifted his weight. The conversation the two of them had been having stopped abruptly. People corkscrewed out of their seats and instinctually crowded the door, eager for the streetcar to stop.  Tears cut my eyes as I realized that this guy in the corner was more than a junkie rotting in his own feces. He was a visceral reminder of our own mortality. Nobody on that bus could inhale without knowing that they were in the presence of slow death. The urge to flee that came over my fellow passengers was hard wired, primal. Evolution drives our mutual fear of decay. And the panicked reaction these well fed urbanites had was perfectly natural. We stopped moving, the doors opened and the lot of them hustled into the rain to wait for the next streetcar.

Of course, they were replaced by another batch of unsuspecting victims.  They hopped into empty seats, gagged, identified the origin of their disgust and ran for the door.  I must have been lost in the moment because my broken ribs and stiff back were all that was left of my pain. In retrospect, I think my impulse to run from the stink of gentle decay was softened by my recent exposure to death. Surviving a head on collision earned me the right to laugh at those squeamish urbanites. 

Through my manic outburst I noticed the tidy passengers at the door were staring at me. So were the two soggy addicts in the corner. A bus full of stink and every eye was on me.  I couldn’t help but wonder if that moment, right then, was a black cosmic joke handcrafted to my morbid sense of humor. I was starting to openly cry with laughter. 

At that moment it seemed to me that fate put every one of us together on that bus to remind us how close death always is. What turned that situation from one of instinctual fear into a tearful, jubilant catharsis was my accident. Seventeen days earlier, I’d flipped a coin to decide if I should drive to the mountains or the seashore.  I had wanted to clear my head. The quarter landed tails and I went west to the Pacific. Pure, random destiny put me in the path of a suicidal pill addict. After a few hours at the beach I turned around to drive home in the drizzling near dark. She had been going west and I had been heading east.  Months later I found out that she had eaten a handful of painkillers before going on that drive. She had probably passed out right before she crossed the center line. 

We were both doing sixty. I got to live. She didn’t. 

So there I was, sitting in a dense cloud of one of the worst smells I'd ever come across, laughing my ass off. Between the pain and the irony of it all, I found the situation disturbingly ecstatic. I was without a choice or a way to stop laughing at the absurdity of life and death, shit and pain. I guess that laughter was born out of pure appreciation. Getting on that reeking streetcar was a sort of backhanded blessing. After all, not too many people get to be so blatantly reminded of their Second Chance. 

It’s a fond and repugnant memory to this day.