I find myself picking a lot of stories to tell on here that involve some adversity I have been through, small or large. I suppose that is because stories of adversity make for a better yarn, period. That said, I will try and mix more funny stories in. Of course, much of the humor, as is always the way, often comes from the very struggles and adversities that test us.
When shit going wrong piles up, at some point, your psyche and soul tire and you throw your hands up, to your god or otherwise, and ask, "WTF?" or you say, defeated, "Ok. What next? What else ya got?" hands open, arms up to the sky.
The truth is, I have had some epic days of shit going wrong, as the yarn I am about to recount shows, about my apartment flooding as a result of roofers leaving the roof replaced by a tarp after tearing the old roof off...before the materials arrived, the delivery of which was delayed by the holiday weekend (see poem at the end of this entry inspired by this fact) and one of the craziest series of events born from that triggering event of the flood. We are fortunate when the some of the things that go wrong become just a good yarn, aye? Here we are...
1. When it rains...
...it sort of pours, in Portland, Oregon, that is, but not in the sense of torrential rains, at least not very often. More often it is fine misty rain or a consistent drizzle. The thing about that is, the key word is 'consistent' here, water gets you soaked before you even notice it, and the small drops get in everywhere, or slowly soak everything. I lived on the East coast 5 years, that was a whole different kind of rain, it rained hard in big drops and there was big booming, scary thunder (once a thunder clap made me leap across the width of the bed like a giant cat). But occasionally in Portland it does come down hard. One of these times was on Labor Day weekend in 2016.
2016 ended up being a terrible year for the whole country, or at least for those of us who saw this all coming or just knew in their bones that Trump being elected president was a really scary and fucked up thing. That morning after was a doozy, yes? This experience I am telling of, I can see in hindsight that it might have been some kind of warning. But I won't go into that enormous rabbit hole now. You can watch the news for that. I am not saying that I will never discuss it in detail beyond snippets I have already done on here. But I am really chewing over my approach on that subject carefully. More to come as I keep saying, challenging Future Wayne to take it up...Onward.
This tale took place in early September, and I am sure I was stoked at the beginning of the weekend, as I had the holiday off. There were roofers around who had started work on the 4-plex apartment building in the deep SE part of Portland, the Sellwood neighborhood, where I lived.
My neighbors at the time were: above me a young, white and somewhat naive single mother, behind me, a white mellow alcoholic man (a genuinely sweet guy) and upstairs in the back some newer neighbors I didn't interact with much, a young white couple with two young children.
Recently, a woman of privilege bought the building, had external painting done and minor landscaping done and then promptly jacked the rent $200 (I had some noteworthy conversations with her, one of which started with me saying to her, "I don't use the term landlord; you are not a lord, I'm not a serf. It's your building, it's my home, we have a contract." Needless to say, she wasn't a fan of me, and, I wasn't happy at this place. I ended up living in the neighborhood in one of those moments in life where you have to get a place right away and you have to settle).
The Sellwood neighborhood was not a fit for me. 15 years prior to me living there, when it was a working class neighborhood similar to the Seattle neighborhood Ballard in the late '90s(when I lived there), I would have dug Sellwood then, but by the time I moved there, it had been taken over by new money people. I always felt that I was suspect, when walking around, because I didn't have children or a dog. I was surely casing houses to rob! The only good part of this story is that as a result of this flood, I ended up in an apartment I had lived in just before ending up in Sellwood, a place I like and am still in. So there you go, you are safe knowing there is a happy ending.
Photo retrieved from Veitengruber Law's website
2. The day of the flood
I awoke to the sound of water splatting on the floor somewhere, loudly. My roommate was at the time sleeping on a mattress behind my couch (he was in need of a place right away, my place was a 1 bedroom) and as I came out into the living room, he was awakened by the water, some of which was leaking through the ceiling and on to the floor in front of his bed. He was half awake and asked me, softly, "Why is this happening?" He was a bit in shock about the whole thing and became somewhat paralyzed.
Water was also coming through the ceiling above the front door and from the light sockets in the ceiling, so I killed the power in the fuse box right away. Part of my personality is that when shit goes down, I switch into survival mode and become an efficient machine, easily assessing what needs to be done. I am thankful for that quality, as in other less pressing situations, I don't have that!
I called and left a voicemail with the building owner. I called the fire department. I went upstairs to check on the young single mother. She was totally panicking, at the door holding her crying toddler. She pointed at the ceiling and it was swelled and sagging. I told her I called the fire department and that she needed to get out of there now in case the ceiling collapsed. The other neighbors weren't home at the time, if I remember correctly.
The firemen arrived, went on the roof, came down and told me about the inadequate tarping that had been done as the source of the flooding. The owner of the roofing company, a man named José, got in touch with me, apologized for what had happened and explained that his crew screwed up and tore off the roof before the materials had arrived.
After the rain stopped, the building owner had someone come and assess the damage and how long it would take to fix. She told me at first that we could stay in the building while work was being done but we had to move things away from the walls and cover them with tarps. But after a thorough assessment, it was decided that we would have to move out temporarily, or of course permanently, if we decided that, and it was a no brainer to go that route, as it was going to take months to fix properly, and they would have to tear out the entire ceiling to do so, and, as I had wanted to move out anyway (the positive here was obviously not appreciated at the time).
As a side note to add to the 'when it rains it pours,' 'if something can go wrong it will' vibe of this tale, I was at work the day I got the call from the building owner that we had to actually move out, and it was another day of down-pouring rain, and I arrived to news that a beloved colleague had died that morning, and that I didn't get the job I had been working in as a 4 month temporary position (I co-wrote a training manual and ended up training the person who was hired, that kind of shit), and I literally walked between buses and to my apartment, the very one which I had to vacate, in driving rain under bleak, gray skies.
Jose offered to put me up (my then temporary roommate wasn't on the lease) in a hotel and said he would find one for me that accepted cats, as I had (still have) a tabby cat (who was freaking out about all this a bit, of course). I thanked him, he said he would call me with options. In the meantime, we needed to pack up our lives and move them into storage.
Luckily for me, I had been paying renters insurance, which in part saved my ass. I highly recommend getting renters insurance, it's cheap (about $16 a month) and it pays off big time in these unforeseen situations. The roofing contractor Jose was also handling finding and paying for hotels for tenants. He was obviously concerned about the reputation of his company, but blamed this entirely on his crew. My thinking was that it is his company, he clearly wasn't monitoring things closely enough. That said, he was nothing but gracious and helpful to me throughout the whole experience. Jose gave me some hotel options and hired a moving company to come get our things to take to temporary storage.
One of the hotel options was a Motel 6 not far from the apartment, we put that aside as a back up option while he tried some other hotels. As I have a cat, it was a little challenging, as most hotels, even when they do allow pets, only do so for a short period of stay and very few offer long term pet stay. It was not certain how long I would have to stay, a fact that made this whole ordeal bit harder to face. But there we were.
3. The movers and shakers and breakers
We had been working every free moment to pack up all of our things, the vast majority of which were mine as my roommate had most of his things in storage in another state (he had only recently moved back to Portland). The day of the move came and the movers showed up, the guy doing the talking was a large white guy in his early 30s whom I later found out owned the company.
The movers were loading my things and my neighbors' things into one truck to take to different storage spaces. My large kitchen window faced the driveway, the movers had backed the truck into the driveway and I could see the workers loading our stuff into the truck. Then they got into the cab and appeared to be leaving, but I could see that the back of the truck had not been shut. The truck began rolling out of the driveway as I rushed out the door to tell them the back was open. They couldn't hear me and turned on to the busy road as I was running behind the truck (and not very well, because of my numb leg) waving my arms and hoping the driver would see me in the side mirror. As I ran behind them, my tall antique office chair and a metal filing cabinet of my neighbor's fell out of the truck (the cabinet got banged up). The driver finally saw me and slowed to a stop, pulling over at the curb.
The owner of the moving company came out from the passenger side and was apologizing profusely (this is when I found out he owned the company, as he mentioned this in his apology), saying "This has NEVER happened before..." I found myself having to calm him down. My chair was old and tough, though (never once have I used those two words back to back, kinda cool, really...) so it wasn't even damaged. They loaded the truck, shut the back, and rolled on.
4. Cats are home-based motherfuckers
I had rented a small car to move items I felt were more fragile, and to move my roommate's items to a friend's house about 10 miles south of where we were. Jose had found me a hotel near where I work in deep SW Portland that took pets. This was located about a 20 minute drive away. It was a sweltering hot day, one of those last gasps of Summer in early September. I had to take my cat away from the house and I was stressing about this generally because a) he was not an old cat but not young either and b) due to his poor judgement skills when chasing things, I had made the hard decision to make him an indoor cat as he would have long before run out into the street into traffic chasing a squirrel and died had I not (that doesn't mean I don't always feel guilty about it) so he was very rooted in the home base, even more-so than most cats, and this was the longest time lived in the same apartment (5 years). As a result, he was very stressed about the scenario. He wasn't even good with driving less than 5 minutes up the street to the vet! So I was on a mission to get him to the hotel and settled as fast as humanly possible.
We, being me and my cat Denni, arrived at the hotel Jose had set up, out by where I work. I had been on the phone with the car rental place while driving in stressful traffic the whole way there, low blood sugar, trying to extend my drop-off time, but it turned out where I rented from was closing soon, and I sat in the parking lot of the hotel while the client rep was dealing with her system acting up and it finally crashed, she got silent and said, "My system went down. You will have to call back in ten minutes." CLICK.(the first of many "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" outbursts happened then).
I waited in line in the hotel lobby and when finally I was able to talk to the incredibly snooty woman working the desk, she informed me that they didn't take pets at that hotel. What?
I called Jose, hot, low blood sugared, frustrated, I wasn't happy at all about the situation, he insisted that the person he spoke to told him they took pets, and when I told this to the clerk, she said, in a flat tone, "It musta been a new girl who didn't know what she was talking about." In my mind I want to see her as having said that through chewing gum, but I don't think that is true, that is when our minds go all Hollywood on us and shit.
Jose said he would find me something else and he did, but it was the aforementioned Motel 6 in a neighborhood that was pretty crazy unsafe at night. I saw some shit, I tell you what, that I will get to. I wasn't happy to be staying in a crappy hotel because some assholes tore a roof off before the...yeah.
But that is what happened. I was still stressing, driving to the hotel, about having to pay for a whole other day for the car rental, and I was characteristically broke as fuck. They called me back, and said I could return the car to the airport (why the hell hadn't they just told me that earlier? Only they and a god or the gods know), which was good and bad news, as transit back to the hotel would be an hour and a half. But there I was. So I drove as fast as allowed (ok maybe a little faster, maybe...) because...
...I had to get my poor cat to the hotel! He was NOT happy, as you can imagine. It had been an ordeal of hours. Maybe ordeal is a strong word. Things get relative. This is just an essay about shitty days, mind you.
I arrived at the Motel 6, which was behind a strip club and a construction site, with a payday loan place and a liquor store nearby. A neighborhood that was vastly different during the day than at night, there was a high school, a burrito truck, but at night the streets crawled with folks with drug and mental issues. And my new home housed some of these folks. More on that below...
I went into the room and set up the litter box food and water bowls and then brought Denni in. He immediately hid under the bed, as I knew he would. I had some flashes back to a cat I drove across the country with when I moved back to the Northwest from the East coast in 2008, a similar scene played out over several nights and caused the drive to be even longer, we had one long adventure and then he left me after two weeks in Portland, RIP Noose! I digress, but worth it for that little guy, he was special. And so is Denni, who ended up being a trooper through this experience we shared. Only cat people give a shit, but they understand; Cats are home-based motherfuckers. Period.
Image retrieved from the Colombia River Mental Health Services website
As I was leaving to return the rental car, I heard a couple in the room next door in a heated, loud argument. I would experience that on a scary scale later.
Traffic was picking up and I had to get this car to the airport. I was driving down a busy four lane road and I heard a ticking noise coming from a tire...or tires? Shit. I pulled over at a gas station. When I looked at the tires and saw the roofing nails I was double pissed because my own car (which I owned until I got in a head on collision in 2014, another bad day! There is another entry in this blog on that) had gotten a flat from roofing nails and I had complained to them about it. And also, this was the roofers double fucking me when you think about it! I got on the horn with the car rental place and they sent a tow truck to get the car. I sat on the hood of the car, trying to decompress, and waited for the truck to arrive. If I remember correctly, I was thinking of the sidewalk near me where my recent ex and I had carved our initials and hearts into wet cement like love-struck teenagers.
I looked up from my revelry to see two cars coming into the wide driveway that were on course to collide, in such a way as to hit me and the rental car, that is to say, I was directly in their trajectory! Keep in mind not only was I in a head on collision in a car, but I had been hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk (causing a disability and PTSD for life, again, the same entry mentioned above covers it, same road 4 blocks away, 5 years earlier, wacky stuff) so my PTSD was jumping as I dashed away from the potential impact zone. But the two drivers managed to just stop in time before hitting each other, and me. I didn't pee myself, but I was pretty close!
6. Hotel, motel, it's no Holiday Inn...
The tow truck driver arrived and as he was hooking up the car, a bus came and I rushed to catch it back to the motel. At the motel, I had to look to find Denni, who was still hiding. He seemed to have not calmed much, and it was clear why. The fight that I had heard when I left earlier had ramped up. It was a man and a woman screaming at each other at the top of their lungs, so viciously that I feared one of them might shoot the other and I would be accidentally shot through the wall or something. It was that bad. So bad that the next night, the police came and took the man away.
Seeing a police car in this motel parking lot was common, I came to find, as there were a number of people living there in extended stay who were in very bad places in their lives. There were prostitutes turning tricks, junkies renting a place to shoot in. But I came to find that the state of Oregon seemed to have a deal with Motel 6 to house people in transitional housing. I met a Somalian family who were staying in a room because their house had burned down. So it was a mixed bag of folks, along with the usual travelers you see at a motel. I would end up living there for a month, in one small room with my cat. I was glad to have it.
Venturing out at night became something I did only as it was necessary, as my first venture out to the convenience store was eye opening. It seemed on every corner was lurking someone with severe mental and or drug issues. People muttering to themselves, or, yelling, like the 30 something white guy in nothing but filthy, torn jeans who had pushed his grocery cart full of trash up to a fenced off vacant lot. He stood at the gate, raised his arms, and let out a loud, primal scream of despair. I have lived in Seattle and in Boston, and I have seen some crazy shit. This hit me in a new way. I felt horror from and pity for this guy.
My friend who told me about a mutual friend's house with an apartment for rent in it who told me about it when I moved there before knew of my situation and called me and said he was speaking to that friend again and he was looking for new tenants. I was so relieved, as the hunt for an apartment was depressing because rent had skyrocketed in the 5 years I had been living in Sellwood and it wasn't looking good for living anywhere near the city itself. My roommate was also able to move in. We are still here to this day, at least for a year longer starting February. I have cherished it every day, and I will view having a place to live differently for the rest of my life. I can't even imagine what it is like for people who find themselves homeless for years or for their life, often due to circumstances out of their control.
I heard word that our former apartment had run up against city inspectors and they had found mold in the walls. Whenever I was in Sellwood for errands, I would go by the place out of curiosity. It stood empty for at least 6 months after.
At least I got a poem out of the whole experience (and a blog entry!)...
José the Roofer
The rule is; you don't tear the roof off if the materials haven't arrived.
A month of sunny days is not a promise of no rain.
Water runs down walls through water pipes to light bulbs; hot, bright, electric glass sacks waiting to explode.
Families put to motels. Men of long hair put to motels, one of whom had moved into the apartment 35 years ago.
The rule is, freak out a bit, it's okay,
but don't freeze. Unparalyze.
Pack your things.
Feel sorry later.
You don't tear the roof off if the materials haven't arrived.
Let light in only through windows.
For if light comes in elsewhere, so will water.
Inspect the studs before pinning on the chalk skin.
But it's too late. The microbes are in your stomach flora, invading slowly, like the Celts. Jose the roofer said, “There is no water leaking. All is healed save for the entombed lung spores hungry for impoverished lungs. Count the days left. Plan it out. You live in a motel room with your cat. Don't get ahead of yourself. Rebuild your life, but don't get ahead of yourself. You don't rip the roof off if the materials haven't arrived.”
Make sure the water rolls away and drips down to the soil.
Keep the mold farm dry and quiet.
Entomb it again. Shhhh. (Don't tell new tenants).
Replace the rotten studs,
pray to your God(s) they stay unrotten.
And now for the usual photos, a random grab bag from the last week.
Love to Folks and Critters,
Wayne
All photos below by Wayne R. Flower
Adjusting my tiny drums
I decided not to wear a costume this Halloween and just go as myself
Central Industrial District, by where I rehearse - the light was magical that evening
Panorama distortion of the balcony at the building where I rehearse (click for a better view)
Irony is carving a tree into a tree...
Awesome mural I randomly spotted walking to catch a bus
