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Updated 04/15/10
Excerpt from Hostile City or Bust
I woke up on the floor feeling like hell. My head hurt..my eyes burned. My radio alarm was buzzing so loudly that for a moment I thought it was a smoke alarm. I turned on my side and looked for the switch on the alarm clock. I fumbled around for awhile. Finally, I just yanked the goddamned cord out of the fucking wall. I sat up and looked around my bedroom. OUR bedroom that is...me and my wife Marla. The room was empty except for a half dozen boxes and a few blankets that we had slept the night on.
After scratching my nuts for a minute I began to check out different body orifices and parts for damage assessment. From the head up I felt very foggy. I wasn’t too foggy though to realize the meaning that this special morning held though. This was a day that I had planned over a year for. MOVING DAY. The day that I would escape my longtime hometown..Portland Oregon..FOREVER!
The thought of leaving “Snoreland Boregon” brought a tiny smile to my chapped, dry lips..in spite of the aches and pains that had greeted me with the alarm. In an instant I mentally tuned out the general hangover symptoms that I was suffering from. Brother, I couldn’t fucking WAIT to hit the road.
The one morning discomfort that I can never afford to ignore no matter how elated I am in the morning (which is a rare phenomena) is a vague swelling and churning in my bowels. I have drank almost every day of my life since I was 15 years old; as a result, I need to take an explosive beer crap within 15 minutes of rising almost every morning.
I strolled into our bathroom and had a seat.
BRAPP!! In one blast I filled the bowl with countless tiny shards of poop.
The thought ran through my head...could be the last shit I take in Portland. Feeling much better, I sat on the stool for a while and tried to reprogram my brain to be aware of all the chores and obligations that I faced before blowing town. My wife Marla I realized, was already off running last minute errands. We had spent a couple days loading and reloading and reloading and reloading our UHAUL trailer..ad infinitum..over and over..world without end. Amen.
We hadn’t fit NEARLY all of the possessions that we wanted to take with us to our new home. We had wound up leaving a lot of small furniture and appliances, cleaning supplies, etc. on the porch of the house for the SALVATION ARMY to pickup. The favorite chairs that we thought would easily fit into our trailer of course didn’t fit. Our moving vehicle plan SUCKED in fact; unfortunately we didn’t realize it until the largest trailer available was jammed full. We had bought a brand new fucking Ford mini-van specially to haul the trailer. We thought we were being smart. We thought it would be a tremendous waste to rent an entire truck that I probably could barely drive to haul our thrift store furniture 3,000 miles. There just wasn’t enough room for hardly ANYTHING in the goddamned trailer besides my fucking valuable record collection. Our clothing and numerous musical instruments couldn’t be left behind..our son Elvis was 9 years old..too young to leave his gigantic pile of toys behind.
So, our porch...or rather the porch belonging to the couple that had purchased the house..was covered with stuff we would have preferred to have taken along.
After a great deal of brainstorming the night before, Marla and I had concocted a plan whereby we would ship 30 or so boxes that also wouldn’t fit into the trailer to the UPS “will call” terminal in our new home.
We had to haul the 30 boxes to UPS before leaving town..unfortunately, we had liquidated our junker autos...and our brand new van was already hitched to the trailer. It was USELESS for hauling anything.
We had to RENT A FUCKING CAR at the last minute from my buddy Mike who just happens to work in the rental car biz. We planned to haul the boxes to the UPS terminal..then return the rental car..and take a taxi back home.
I dressed and rolled up our blankets. I hoped there would be room in the van for them..not to mention my fucking alarm clock. I wandered around the mostly empty house looking for last minute things to pack. The longer I looked, the more I felt like breaking down and bawling. Everywhere I looked I saw little things that needed to be packed..a coffee maker..a pile of shoes...some bric-a-brac that was missed on a high kitchen shelf. The telephone and answering machine. On and on and on. It’s all tedious little crap..but put it all together and you’ve got a considerable pile of stuff to cram into an already full vehicle.
I stopped at the open door of Elvis’s room. It always does my heart good to see him sprawled out sleeping peacefully. Unfortunately, it DIDN”T DO ME A BIT of fucking good to see the state of affairs in HIS room. I thought that Marla had dealt with the situation the night before. From where I stood, even though all the big items and boxes had been hauled out of his room, there was still a literal second carpet of tiny toy parts. Marbles.. forgotten action figure swords...McDonalds happy meal trinkets..candy wrappers..HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of fucking candy wrappers. My son had lived for 5 years in this room..and it had never really been thoroughly cleaned. We had always wanted the boy to clean his room; but a “DEAR ABBY” column Marla had read suggested that kids will clean their bedrooms “when they are emotionally ready”...and that it’s best not to harass them...better to let the little angels learn for themselves.
Well, having fallen for that progressive hogwash..I stood in the middle of a dire fucking mess and screamed obscenities. Elvis woke up and asked what was wrong. I immediately put his 9 yearold butt to work plucking tiny fragments of trash and debris out of his carpet.
Marla returned home with our rental car. I was beginning to really panic about how in the hell we would be able to leave town on schedule at 10:00 AM. It was 7:30 already and besides the trip to UPS it seemed like it would take a long time to completely clear the last scraps of crap out of our old home. Marla doesn’t panic as often or as quickly as I do which is admirable. I admit that I get worked up over silly potential eventualities that never even come close to becoming reality. Unfortunately, the flip side of the coin is that Marla very often can’t be convinced of many potential shitstorms and travesties that actually DO come about.
I led her to our little Cherub Elvis’s bedroom and showed her the thick tangled carpet that Elvis was trying to pluck. I started yelling again..
“GODAMNIT GODAMNIT GODAMNIT!! I thought you were going to have his goddamned fucking room cleaned last night?? How in the FUCK are we ever going to leave by 10:00???? HUH??
HUH??
Marla didn’t appear too concerned.
“SHUT UP already. We’ll take care of it. Keep working on it Elvis”.
She left the room shaking her head at what an asshole I was being.
Her laid back attitude drove me fucking crazy. I knew I sounded like a jackass standing there yelling, but what the fuck..I KNEW I was right. Why SHOULDN’T I fucking panic??
“Hey Pa”..Elvis said with a poorly concealed smirk..”are we still gonna keep track of how many times you cuss on this move?”
Elvis looked forward to keeping track of how many times I blew my top and swore over the ten day period we would be traveling 3,000 miles. It had seemed like a cute idea when we had thought of it during a calmer, happier time. Now, I was just getting more and more pissed the longer I stood in his goddamned pigsty bedroom.
“GODDAMNIT!.. I bellowed back..”we’ll talk about it later. Just get to work on that fucking rug. We’ll be back as soon as we can from UPS”.
The UPS terminal was about a 15 minute drive. No matter how we tried to load it all in it still wound up taking us 3 trips to the terminal to get our 30 boxes shipped off. Of course, every frigging trip we had to wait in line behind idiots who had barely bothered to even tape shut their crappy boxes. For every paying customer UPS attracts at least 5 total clueless nitwits. Senior citizens who can’t understand why they can’t ship to a post office box. Clueless foreigners who can barely speak a word of English blankly staring at each other while the clerk tries to explain to them the basic rudiments of parcel delivery. It never fucking fails. Whenever I’m in a hurry to get somewhere it seems like it’s senior day everywhere.
It took almost two fucking hours before we pulled up in front of the rental car dealership to return our car. I shook hands with my pal Mike McNally and told him I’d stay in touch. We walked several blocks to Union Avenue where we could flag a taxi..a rare vehicle indeed in Portland.
When we arrived at home we agreed upon the following priority list:
1) keep me calm...
2) Vacuum a huge puddle of water out of our basement with a shop-vac. Pack our cooler full of water, soda and beer for our trip. Try to stuff the phone, bedding, etc. into any tiny crevice available in the moving van. Vaccum the carpets (we had agreed to shampoo them for the new buyers..oh well...fuck ‘em). Deal with crap sitting in heaps about the house...a huge bag of charcoal briquets...help Elvis finish plucking bingo tokens, petrified raisins and other surprises out of his carpet.
3)The last thing to do was to attract the cat that we were moving with us into a special cage. Keeping the goddamn cat had been a compromise solution. We actually had TWO cat’s; I fucking put my foot down..there was NO WAY I was going to deal with 2 cats for 10 days in a vehicle. One was bad enough to have me pissed off. We managed to give away the least favorite older cat..and Elvis and Marla SWORE that I wouldn’t be inconvenienced by the younger, smaller kitten.
After working our asses off for a couple hours, Marla and I wound up in Elvis’s room finishing up THAT fucking nightmare while Elvis chased his fucking kitty around trying to get the stupid fucking thing into the cage.
When it was all over, the carpets all over the house looked like absolute fucking hell. We simply ran out of time. We had stuffed anything we needed to take with us into a heavy trashbag..and everything we weren’t taking into another. The bag of briquets, half used cleanser containers, etc. was left heaped on the porch for hopeful pickup. From the sidewalk it looked like hell...it looked worse than Fred Sanford’s yard. The walls of the house were covered with nail holes, nails, chipped plaster, etc. The backyard was filled with dogshit..and the refrigerator reeked.
We had to move though...THAT FUCKING DAY. The new proud owners were ready to take over our house..and we had to lam out of their before they saw what a fucking mess we were leaving. There was no fucking tomorrow. We had an elaborate battle plan complete with carefully plotted motel room reservations. We had said goodbye to what few friends that we had left. The phone was disconnected...the change of address forms had been delivered to the post office.
I strolled down the steps to the curb where our brand new blue van (we had already affectionately dubbed it “the war wagon”) waited to haul us and our valuables to our new way of life. I checked my pockets....I had a wallet STUFFED with cash and travelers checks. My key chain was lighter than usual minus home, work, junker auto and P.O. box keys.
It was time to go...BUT, the goddamned kitten that I had been promised over and over wouldn’t delay our trip by a heartbeat wouldn’t even get into the fucking cage to leave our street!
For a half hour I sat in my comfortable drivers seat running thoughts over in my mind while Marla and Elvis chased a fucking cat around the neighborhood.
I was SURE we had made the right decision to uproot our lives and move 3,000 miles away to PHILADELPHIA. An eastern dinosaur city that has seen 500,000 citizens flee for greener pastures since the 1950’s. Marla and Elvis were taking a wait and see attitude. Almost all of our friends thought that we not only were making a huge mistake, but most expected us to return to Portland “humbled” with our tails between our legs. Our relatives of course felt betrayed and unloved.
Ironically, Oregonians pride themselves on their ancestors “pioneer spirit” that led them to load their possessions 150 years ago into wagons to make a similar journey..a similar new start. Maybe I was driving a more modern vehicle, but I was moving my family in response to similar motivations. I felt thoroughly stifled and trussed-up by so called “progressive” west coast ways...dreamed up by the same people that have covered so much of the west with drab stripmalls and generic condominiums. I saw the city I spent the majority of my life in being gutted of unique neighborhood taverns and cafes in favor of over-lit yuppie hangouts that all look alike. Yunno..”TGI Friday’s”..places like that. One by one the grand neon signs of Portland that I loved so much fell. As for the beautiful parks that I had enjoyed so many good times in...they were closed between dusk and dawn..alcohol was totally prohibited. Where can a man enjoy a beer outdoors in Portland?? Either in your own backyard..IF you’re lucky enough to have one..or an overpriced psudeo-fashionable sidewalk cafe. The wrestling promotion I had followed as a kid was legislated and regulated out of business. Blue collar families had been leaving in droves for years. For every white trash family that left, 3 irksome yuppie family’s relocated to Portland from California.
Just like the teeming hordes of immigrants that relocated to remote sections of the US over the years to escape religious oppression, I felt I was fleeing the oppression of the “Portland mindset”. The new wave of Portlanders do not tolerate cynics who criticize their heaven on earth. People who do not actively support the local sports franchise (the NBA’s “Trailblazers”) are subject to public scorn and ridicule. Indeed..I’ve witnessed many “friendly” “tolerant” Portlanders ready to fight over disrespectful words towards the home team. (An office I worked in declared occasional “Trailblazer T-shirt” days. Once a cynical fellow wore a Laker shirt as a joke; he was forced to cover it with a sweater!)
A few months before our big moving day, I had been in the home of what I had considered to be one of my very best friends. There was a small party going on..a roomful of 20 people or so. My friend announced to the guests that I was planning on moving to Philadelphia. Instead of wishing me well, these “progressive” “mellow” Portlanders began ridiculing me worse than I had been treated since junior high school. Even though few of them had ever set foot East of the Mississipppi they were all “experts” on what Philly would be like.
“Niggers” would beat up Elvis at school. We would undoubtedly live in a home infested with roaches ( I was especially warned against a strain of flying roaches). A haze of thick smoke would blanket the city. “Niggers” would steal our possessions. “Niggers” would mugg us. NIGGERS NIGGERS NIGGERS. And, of course we would be disappointed at how many Italians and Jews we found. On and on and on and on it went. Finally, my “friend” had the entire room laughing at me. He shook a finger at me and delivered the same “pro-Portland” mountain/river/ocean cliche ridden speech I’ve heard so many times before.
“Irwin...when you get back there and realize what a shithole it is..you’re gonna know that WE..HERE..have the PERFECT PLACE TO LIVE. We’ve got the MOUNTAINS..we’ve got the RIVERS...we’ve got the OCEAN...we’ve got the DESERT..we’ve got it ALL. You can travel all you want, but I don’t need to. This is the perfect place to live right here.”
Of course, if you look at any map of the US you can easily see that anybody who lives along either coast can make the same geological claims that Portlanders make when they deliver the mountain/river/ocean speech. Here in Philly we are actually an hour drive CLOSER to the ocean than Portlanders; the Poconos are less than an hour away. The Schuykill and Delaware rivers (to name two) run directly through central Philly. You know what else?? Even though the population is 3 times bigger than Portland there is less of a traffic problem. Parking is easier, because the city was built to hold a half million more than live here now.
You could NEVER convince the huge majority of Portlanders that they are not living in “the best place.” So be it. Once you begin to understand how pigheaded “progressive” Portlanders are about believing that they live in the center of the universe...you can begin to understand why I first began to ache to escape their bullshit.
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The Whiskey Rebel's writings have entertained thousands of readers around the world in the zines Carbon 14 and AMP where his columns appear on a regular basis. Plus he written/published his own zines "Traitor Baitor" and "Drink Around the Clock."
Phil Irwin
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updated 04/15/10
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