Pudding River - An Excerpt

     

       The flash came and was gone in an instant. In cracks and booms, the pissing sky clapped strobes, shaking the ground, the thunder an airborne earthquake. In the pop of light, briefly, the streaking rain was given a frame between the high rise buildings, like grainy television, a feast of the senses for those who cared. And beyond the concrete dune of the Waterfront Park surged the river, bloody, mud brown, suffocating with oily slicks of weekend getaway boats, sighing with the heaving of the wake. The meekest moon, a daily deity, shrugged at the sun behind the thunderclouds and was silent, burnt out, invisible, extinguished by the storm.

        The hobo bacchanal had only just wound down underneath the West end of the Burnside Bridge, with Abe and Jim having spoken their final spooky missives to their shadows, in the silhouettes of the Old Town brick, to each other, to the lost pedestrians who’d stumbled post-saloon jaunt toward their camp. They weren’t supposed to be here, this makeshift bridge shelter. Abe and Jim, that is. Or anyone else. But it was raining, and someone from the crew’d come upon a few three-quarter-gone fifths of booze somewhere near the bowels of the Belmont boulevards earlier in the day.

Little victories were grounds for big celebrations. Big celebrations sometimes brought along big trouble, but tonight’s good cheer was harmless, fun.

        Abe, the Wordsmith they called him, had rationed the booze out to the crew when the sun fell low over the West hills to Beaverton and the Pacific beyond earlier in the evening. The second-hand nightcap would supplement bellies full of malt liquor, discarded donuts and the last gooey droplets from the free honey packets Abe’d stolen from a sidewalk coffee stand. Give them the highs before the inevitable crashing lows. Let them hearts dance around a while before they drop into their boots to rest, and moan to rise another day. It’s always easier to fall than fly.

       Then the thunder’d sent its sonic boom to explode in the concrete acoustics of the bridge encampment, a blast as raucous as the silence only the deaf know, and it’d sent those just laid down to slumber into a jolting panic, the tatters of their sleeping bags now assaulted by diagonal rain in the dawn of the new day Northwest.

       There were about 10 of them here, homeless, resting, living under the cloak of the bridge when no one was looking. The blast from the lightning and thunder shook them from their sleep, a violent alarm clock with no snooze button. Even Abe and Jim, who’d laid down to sleep just minutes before, were shocked into a blinking stupor by the force. They’d been awake the longest, drunkest the longest, and horizontal the shortest amount of time, and were therefore most susceptible to being startled.

       The rest of the crew — Scribbler, Barbie, Light Lion, Olaf, Dolly, a few fringe types — erected themselves at 90 degree angles from their cardboard mattresses, newspaper sheets, beer-box pillows, frightened, but quickly assessed the source of the disturbance, and commenced to rest again.

This was not a raid. No one had to leave. They were safe amongst each other.

Abe shrieked into the clamor with a wheeze.

       Since Baloney Joe’s had closed years earlier, the little crew had migrated west, first closer to Chinatown, into the fledgling bosom of the Pearl, where the alleys still held the stain of the Skid Row urinations, where warehouses and bodegas were now boutique dress shops and rustic cafes. Thanks to the corralling of the unsightly street folk away from incoming Californians, it didn’t take long for Abe, Jim and the crew to retreat back toward the river, into the open arms of the Grotto, as they’d settled on calling it.

       To be accurate, there was no crew. No doctrine espousing rules and regulations, no unspoken gang credo or any tangible sense of obligation to each other — outside of the vague, silent bond between Abe and Jim. The rest of them lingered in the background, like extras in a scene filmed on a busy street in the East Village, staggering, following, listening. Earpieces for Abe’s many rants.

Jim did not speak. Could, but didn’t. He gestured with thoughtful, bushy eyebrows, grayed by the soot of a wicked world, by a life spent lurking in the dumpster. He was a tall, silent sage, big booted, hairy-eared with a big Roman nose and eyes green like the Doug Fir forests he loved to walk through en route on one of his aimless, months-long hikes. Walking Jim, they called him. When they called Jim that, he just smirked. His was a temperament not easily rattled.

       Abe and Jim’d come up with the name “the Grotto,” Abe vocalizing it, Jim nodding. Firstly, it was a moniker by which they’d hoped to lure in women to keep them warm, the famous Grotto of the Playboy Mansion serving as the blueprint for such a decree. Conjuring nicknames was a vehicle by which they could suspend their disbelief; pretend their situations were temporary and that the realities they’d endured for the last seven — eight, nine, 10 — years were just a hiccup, a stumble on overgrown roots in the sidewalk, with quick recovery, slight embarrassment, but in the end a keep on keepin’ on.

The Grotto was one of maybe six locales wherein the crew would inhabit for hours at a time, sometimes days when the weather was bad.

       The weather was always bad, and there was no better place to escape it than the Grotto. Shelter’s required too much intimacy, too many forms, too much coddling.

It admitted defeat.

       Abe’s pride, a bottomless reservoir fueled by idiot savant cynicism and a hive’s worth of honey, kept him from joining the ranks of what he viewed as the “petit bourgeoisie of the New Order”—ye of the pristine wave of Portland outcasts. The armchair hobos. The affluent teenaged gutter punks slumming it to stick it to their parents.

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       Abe was called Abe Wordsmith on account of his pontificating nature. He’d been a paratrooper in the 82^nd Airborne during Vietnam, in the 3^rd Brigade, or so he’d like to tell folks whenever they became entwined in one of his long-winded lyrical vomitings. Per Abe, his role in the Tet Offensive — including combat duties in the Huế-Phu Bai area of the I Corps sector, later to Saigon and into the Iron Triangle, where his bravery resulted in the saving of untold numbers of civilian lives on nothing but three hours sleep in a week — was crucial. With the crooked accent of his United States Army Veterans cap worn like a badge of honor, Abe’s disposition erupted like the ‘chutes of his Army days, flapping in a stuttered wind, like popcorn rattling in the bottom of a pot, his intrigues, observations, lectures and pop quizzes, his knowledge of 1940s German vocal ensembles, of General Custer and physics bursting in fantastic tics and winks, woohoos! and lemme tell ya somethings. All of it betrayed, or rather masked, a central truth.

       No one knew for sure what Abe was trying to say.

       Abe looked like and spoke precisely like Gregory Corso, was mistaken for him all the time, both toothless New Yorkers built on Brooklyn visions, able to stir the stoic world into a tart cocktail. Abe was a cultured old-time wino, brimming with equal parts thoughtful playfulness and downright crass sexual innuendo. He was bewitched by women, but had abandoned the physical and emotional mechanics to convey anything more than invitations to the Grotto, or somewhere closer — “and bring yuh sistuh!” he’d say — or inquiring the birthdates of those females walking by in the parks where Abe went to socialize. He knew his astrological signs by heart, and would gift a brusque reading in the time it took for them to put a skip in their steps past his warbled advance.

       With no women around to jam his senses into a jelly, something inside Abe shifted, tectonic-like. His heart and brain aligned, causing tremors, defying anatomy’s geographical laws. His libido would vanish, or hide, or sleep, and the sun would again rise over the horizons of his ribcage to illuminate, brighten, provide the life to him. And he shared it with whoever was within earshot.

       “I want you tuh look up ‘that sky and you tell me why dat sky’ suh blue,” sayeth Abe to a young man walking his bike through the branchy shade of Laurelhurst Park on a marshmallow sky day.

       With no answer, Abe clawed in:

       “Well first you must know what blue sky laws are,” he’d begin. “And drinking the elixuh from the land of the sky blue water. Minnesota, something for everyone. Everyman. The tale of two cities…”

       And like that, Abe was ignored, if not pitied entirely. His responses were Rimbaud on Ritalin, cracking at the seams, poetic and nonsensical and rambling, and fatally insightful.

       “Terse ennui,” Abe would call the lethargy of the people he’d encounter. It irritated him, the plight of the populace flocking to live in “Cementville,” looming on the synthetic banks of the Pudding River — his term of everlasting endearment to the serpent Willamette — like the scummy run-off eastern cesspool of the North River and its asphyxiating view of the sky scrapers of the New York City he remembered from youth.

       It was all a mess. And he’d figure it out in his own way at some point. He was making friends in people like Jim, acquaintances in pen pals who’d stuck around long enough to listen to his sermons of insanity. Every day a new beginning. Every night a nuisance.

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       “Big bold dares! Baudelaire I dare say, in repose by posing bypass alley!” rumbled Abe, clacking a whittled walking stick twice-a-step down the maudlin cobblestone walks of Fifth Avenue, trucker hat pulled low over his brow, tonguing his toothless gums, his lower jaw tucked tight to the top like an old witch. Pedestrian commuters hold their stony glares straight ahead, pretending not to see, hear, smell Abe. Not to notice him at all. Forget he exists, or pretend – or worse, wish – he didn’t. He is a Northwest fog, rolling in to cloud the earth, but destined to recede, to disappear. Young women wearing Debbie Gibson fedoras and too much makeup fidget to find their headphones, to block out the noise. Old women feign window shopping in the touristy gift shops and wintry café displays. The Abe in the reflection of the windows is less threatening, somehow illusory. Street cleaners operate the trash tongs to pinch billions of cigarette butts and haul them in the garbage can, working around Abe’s clackety clamor, around his feet, apparently undisturbed by his presence, unyielding to his fantastically frantic orations. He is a piece of the landscaping of the busy metropolis, a tree, a stoplight, a sidewalk. A garbage can. The application of a distraction – digging for change in a pocket, becoming suddenly hyper-aware and curious in the headline of a passing news periodical, looking straight up the side of a tall high rise to watch the window-washers work - suffices as an excuse for passersby not to have to acknowledge Abe’s existence. We do not hear, see, smell, touch that with which we are unaware.

       “Since when du duh buses charge for du bus ride? Dis here’s Fareless Sqwayuh I told um! Not a drop to duh bastehds will I in good conscience bequeath, for ‘twas, twat Tet Offensive tenure gave me light. Duh poowell table pwurple language is evident! Jus’ think widout duh words tuh read! The ear’s a fool!”

       On and on, the words escaped Abe’s squished face, to him hymns of wanderlust, of wizardly words for a decaying world. To everyone else, it was the white noise pulsing just beyond the fringes of a ham radio – something that was there. A person in the world…