SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Excelsior, 9:31am
Studio sessions usually last about 11.5-12 hours a day. This includes all three meals, so it's not as brutal as it sounds. But come 7:30pm, I would take a few nights here and there to explore (and quietly observe) Portland. I've been hanging out with friends here and there, but being by myself in the city is where the social litmus test comes out in its most primeval colors.
So far, Portland is still distinct, slightly eccentric, sleepy and bizarre in the right context. But it is certainly becoming a boomtown, FAST. The usual overheard dialogue in bars and waffleshacks and greasy dollar mess halls has shifted from lax and cultural, and now shares verbal real estate with a simmering brew of fear and resentment: gentrification, rent increase, the disappearance of said culture and laid back attitude, rich man rolling thunder from every corner of earth, particularly California. The resentment towards Californians is laughable, to be honest. Half the time I just snidely respond in kind.
"If you're shitting on all the cool people who got kicked out of Cali, wait 'til all the billionaire assholes come rolling through!"
"Thank God you guys thought ahead and have the best rent control laws in the country. RIght? Hello? Guys?"
From my skewed and clearly insulated perspective, everyone was coming to San Francisco in search of their own personal experiences with The Spirit of The City, as I called it. People flocking from all over the country, from sexual and religious oppression, looking to go a little buck wild and free themselves of their former shells.
What exactly is "The Spirit"? It's probably a lot like the Spirit of the 90's®. And I am sure everyone has a different name for it. But The Spirit works for me.
The Spirit is sitting down in a noisy bar, being warmly greeted by random strangers about half a nose down your glass of beer, and then watching that conversation expand and pull a few more strangers immediately surrounding you into a giant mutant social gathering of ridiculous proportions.
The Spirit is wandering onto a desolate beach only to be greeted by a flock of nudists who all want to share a joint with you. Or walking in on a couple having sex behind a decommissioned gun turret, and them inviting you to watch. Or accidentally booking a hotel at a hippie retreat center and spending half the weekend naked in the pool with elderly lesbians and Santa Cruz neo-FlowerPower couples.
The Spirit is being invited by your upstairs neighbor to a suspect strip club for his rapper boss's album release party, chickening out at the last minute, but ending up at a rooftop party across town after losing at dice to a couple of drunk riot girls who then "kidnap" you to try and find good acid in ANOTHER corner of town.
The Spirit is random people showing up to your bonfire at 3am on a Tuesday night with a case of shitty beer and a good attitude. (Check the CA Park Laws to see when they banned bonfires after 1030pm in San Francisco. Yep, I'm old.)
The Spirit is going to your favorite record store, reading a book on a bench or drawing in your sketchbook in the park and then getting approached by a street teamster with a flier to a show, ending up AT that show, and then getting burritos afterward with the friends of the guy (or gal) who handed you that original flier.
The Spirit is a celebration of rhythmic propinquity, of people yearning with all their hearts to try and find all the kindness in others, and inviting them to indulge in their senses of adventure. And for the record, all of those examples that I just listed have, in actuality, happened to me.
The Spirit is not dead, by a longshot. If you do not want it to be. But that Spirit as a whole, due to whatever reasons we all want to attribute it to: technology, changing of the guard, gentrification, etc.... is in a dormant, defeated stasis all over the West Coast.
For a good while now I had come to believe that The Spirit of The City was exclusive to San Francisco. I experienced it, however, in Seattle earlier in the 2000s, and definitely in Portland. And for this reason, I now call it The Spirit of the West Coast. Genuine moments with genuine strangers who just want to invite you into the world of random and excitement.
Of all these cities, Portland's was easily the most genuine. But in the two weeks I had been here, I was beginning to feel a creeping sensation that all those scary change factors were starting to mutate PDX into something else, something less friendly, less genuine and authentic. In some places it was totally gone. "Fuck, it's like I'm back in San Francisco", I would scowl, and move on.
But in other places, The Spirit was back in small doses. I was writing the last of the script one night at a bar blaring speed metal, a fair trade considering how "expensive" the beer was. Before I knew it, the entire table was full of random strangers, a couple on a failing date, a lone Hawaiian gal with a prosthetic leg covered in beer stickers, and two older guys who just wanted to relax after a day of work.
Turns out we were all Bay Area exiles. And it was in that moment that I realized this "creeping sensation" I was talking about was a slightly modified variant of GUILT. I coudn't quite put my finger on it at the moment.
Clinton & SE 26th
9:45pm
I was told that Dot's Cafe was a good decent place for everything that I in particular am looking for in a bar... atmosphere, crowd, price, whatever. It was all right on the Dot (Sorry, bad pun, had to do it). So i decided to venture over to Clinton, armed with a sketchbook and new shoes.
Never made it to Dot's. On my way crossing the street, a voice beckoned me and there was a finger in my chest.
"MELVINS! See, now THERE's a good jump-off point. MELVINS."
My uniform for going out usually (and almost always) consists of that two-headed dog Melvins shirt. This was what I was wearing yesterday night. People fucking LOVE that shirt. I just don't even understand it, to be honest with you. Doesn't matter if I am in Belltown Seattle, or Outer Sunset San Francisco. It's always an enthusiastic guy (and occasional woman) who just bellows "MELVINS HELL YAH" and then the conversation starts from there.
THIS particular guy, though, had other ideas.
"Yeah, look I get why people like the Melvins, but you'd have to suck my dick and give me a free ticket to go see them again."
This man instantly had my attention. Nobody has ever talked smack about them before, especially not in a tacked-on lead-in manner to a conversation that was already ongoing. The other end of the battery was a Hapa Japanese guy and what I thought was his girlfriend, and they greeted me.
"Becca! Hi!"
"Kentaro! Nice to meet you!"
"MARSHALL. HOW YOU DOIN, MAN! Hey, cool shirt though, but yeah, Melvins aint my bag of tea."
He had a glint in his eye and a swagger to his step. His beer cap barely covered his enormous dome; he was dressed in all black and looked like if Isaac Hayes had skateboarded across town to his Black Flag audition. Soon we were all awkwardly standing around as Marshall continued to ramble, dropping some knowledge about music. So i decided to walk into the pub and order a beer.
I figured that was the end of that interaction at that point. I sat down and ordered randomly off a tap, and grimaced when it turned out to be a sour beer.
"Fuck. Goddamn millenials and your sour be---"
Suddenly, that same finger that had been pressed into My Melvins logo was suddenly a paw on my shoulder.
"Hey dude! I am so sorry if I offended you. I dig your swag man, I don't really like the Melvins but I think its cool that you're into that shit I was just talkin out of my ass."
"No worries man!"
"You wanna come play pool with us [Kentaro and Becca]? It's free."
"Yes. Yes I do."
Marshall reintroduced me and we all reintroduced ourselves. Suddenly, The Spirit had hit me square in the jaw and I fucking loved it. Suddenly I was in Drawing Flies (1996), Clerks (1994), Reality Bites (1994) and Singles (1992).
After a couple of rounds, The Spirit was alive and well, and Marshall was leading the charge. He smacked my phone away in between cue shots as I was trying to text my mom, telling her I'd be home late. He dictated all the pooltable rules out of thin air, with some hilarious arguments occuring with Becca. He would dole out cigarettes to whoever wanted one on the street, and talked trash at an Uber driver for parking in front of the bar and then wandering in.
Through this "altercation", we come to discover that he works for the local cab company, and astonishingly, was a born-raised Portland native. In the course of an hour I had come to know exactly who Marshall is. He made it very plain and obvious that the facets of his personality were vehemently rooted in his origins, his vocation and his cultural palette. He was proud of his rare breed status. Quite honestly, I would have been too.
Marshall was a crazy cat and he owned it. We smoked a tiny bowl around the corner, and he just had this edge that I hadn't seen or felt in a long, long time.
"SNAPPERS. Fuck yeah."
"Wut?"
"SNAPPER. C'mon, you know what a fuckin snapper is. You're from the Bay Area don't TELL me you don't know what a fuckin' snapper is."
"I..."
He points at the tiny bowl he had packed into his one-hitter.
"Snapper! Takes the edge right off! Snaps ya BACK! Shit, man, I thought you were HIP, what with your fucking SOCKS."
It all felt familiar to me, though. He would go around being super nice to people one minute, and then walking away talking a bunch of trash. He would say something sarcastically, but then say that he meant it seriously. And then double back and say he was just talking out of his ass and that he's a dirty old man with nothing left in his life to do except drive a cab and get fucked up and masturbate. He was 60% Chill, 35% Dick, and about 5% "Miscellaneous". He just carried himself in a way that was a proverbial neon arrow pointed straight at him that said "FOLLOW ME TO FUN AND ADVENTURE AND MAYBE SOMETHING FUCKED UP"..... I couldn't have asked for a better Spirit embodiment.
We drank a round of shit beers in shiny cans and ran the pool table into the damn ground. And THEN, he wrangled up me, Kentaro and Becca and convinced us to head to his favorite dive bar around the corner, where there was apparently a pool table that was superior in positioning (he was wrong). And again, The Spirit did not disappoint. Suddenly I am walking three blocks down with 3 complete strangers, tagging along on some lost expedition to find the next moment of entertainment. The whole time Marshall is just being Marshall. One minute he'll be telling us we're the greatest, the next minute he'll be mocking us incessantly for being too serious or wound up, or too deliberate and stuffy.
He relished being a broken shard, an old guard, a joker card. Underneath the attitude, though, was the blueprint of a really, really genuinely nice guy who just wanted to recapture that Spirit I keep talking about, even if it meant having to recruit a bunch of out of town douchebags like me and Becca and Kentaro (they had just bought a house around the corner, freshly moved in from Boise).
Marshall's dive did not disappoint. The Keno arcade machines were populated by some greasy looking neighorhood kids, the entire bar reeked of refried dough and stale beer (their kitchen was infamous for its fried chicken), and the bartenders had this old school attitude that was a cross between LunchLady Doris® and Tom Waits. The rafters, made of old lumber, were covered in chalk graffiti. Buncha swear words, thankfully no racial slurs.
Eventually Becca and Kentaro tapped out. Marshall, ever the Indiana Jones type, implores me to take a cab with him over to Belmont.
"You're a cool-ass dude, man. You up for some fun? I'll show you the best fuckin' parts of town man. C'mon man, I'll spot your cab. Let's GO let's GO!"
I saw two ways this night would play out. I could hop in this cab with this dude, go tear a hole in the space fucking time continuum across all of Portland and end up on some fucking stranger's couch clear across town, with a pocket full of coasters and phone numbers and maybe a bunch of dirt clods.... OR, I could go to Plaid Pantry across the street, buy a couple of hero sandwiches, soak up the 1.5 pints of beer I had, and go home.
"Thanks so much for showing us around, man. But I really should go home."
"....It's fucking 1145 dude. The fuck you gotta do tomorrow?"
"....Fly back to SF."
A look of anger, disappointment, resentment and then apathy flashed across Marshall's rugged face. I will never forget that fucking look. I will never forget that fucking look on his sad, angry face. Because that is the EXACT SAME LOOK I have made millions and millions of times in the last few years, when I come to discover that the Spirit had faded. The Spirit was gone, the Spirit was dead, and the whole world has let me down. THAT look. The way he acted after that, was one where I might as well have robbed him and then smacked him across the lips.
Suddenly that pang of guilt I had felt earlier in the week with all those Bay Area exiles made sense to me.
San Francisco was once FULL of guys like Marshall. It can be said, then, that there is a massive population of Marshalls right here in PDX as well. Seattle too, but I'll get to Seattle later. You are a Marshall if you are weathered, if you are bold. If you are crazy, subterranean, hospitable to a fault and ready to show everyone who came through a grand ol' time. Good, old fashioned, random hilarious fun. I will say it loud, and I will say it proud. I know this, because I was one of those guys. Just like Marshall, wanting the profane and random, seeker of urban safaris. Bar hopping across the universe on a $20 stipend written by The Devil, resentful of the life ahead and only wanting to turn the volume down by cranking it all the way up...
And deeply heartbroken whenever the people around you fail to live up to your expectations, to the great splendor and potential that was once the human spirit.
I saw the light of the Spirit fade from his eyes in that moment, because he had put himself out there, only to be let down by some outsider asshole in brand new shoes that his dad bought him, wearing the shirt of a band he fucking hates.
I walked away into the night, letting that guilt sink in. And I apologized to him as I went to sleep. I apologized because I am not him anymore, because I am not staying in the town I thought I would die in. I apologized to him because I am evolving, and as I watch the entire coast become consumed by the new boom, I no longer fear the change and I no longer hate it, as the Marshalls of the world still do. The Spirit is still alive, but it too, needs to evolve. It too, needs to wake up and adapt to the way that humans now socialize. Nonconformity and cultural preservation still have their place, but it is up to us to figure out how.
If guys like Marshall are the old souls, the ones who cannot evolve quickly enough, the ones who fade away into irrelevance, then there must be some equilibrium that is attainable, some sweet spot on the pendulum where I do not have to be just another cumstain with wireless headphones and a Snapchat account.
I walked away into the night, and on the sidewalk, walking in the opposite direction, I saw a flock of 20something women, happily strolling home, with smiles that shone in the dark, waiting for eye contact.
"Good evening! How was your night?" I asked them, as gently and as sweetly as I could.
As they crossed over, their eyes twinkled in the midnight blue, over their shoulders and they responded in kind.
"We had a great time! Thank you! Have a good night!"
