Back to Basics
Lyft drivers, lingerie models, bad tacos
“Don’t believe everything the media says. They make things sound worse for ratings.”
This is my Lyft driver, picking me up from the airport and in response to my asking whether things were hot last night in Portland; that there’d been some worry. Portland, he says, has “not been hot all year.” I tell him, well, sometimes it is; that I reported on the protests all last summer and sometimes things still happen.
He is not convinced. “I’ve spent my whole life here,” he says, which reminds me of something I learned when I first moved to Portland but had forgotten, the hegemony of provenance, as in the time I was told, by a restauranteur to whose establishment I’d given a bad review, that I did not have the authority to write about food in Portland because I was not from here and also, to take the money I’d earned from my trash writing “and go get your nails done.”
I feel like I should smooth things over with the driver, who is driving us south of NE 82nd, past Asian supermarkets and discount tire stores and houses that, some time before we moved here in 2004, had become lingerie clubs. I remembered Honey Suckles because it was the place twin sisters, my daughter told me, were working. She’d known them when she was sixteen; their father was a police officer and sometime when they were still in high school they started using heroin. The drive from the airport to our house went past Honey Suckles and my daughter mentioned that day how the girls, who’d been vibrant and athletic at Central Catholic, had tried to help each other kick dope in a motel room but it hadn’t worked, she didn’t know more than that, it had been ten years since she’d seen them.
“Who do you write your pieces for?” the driver asks. I tell him, aware I am trying to allay his suspicion, if not why. We talk about the weather, how well Portland does summer, how it’s doing so today, look at how blue the sky is…
“But we have to worry about drought,” he says, as he drives past the place where my husband and I ate the worst Mexican food of our lives, tacos whose filling was basically a can of Spaghettios. The goblets of margarita with maraschino cherries were definitely also terrible but we drank them because we found the whole thing so funny.
“Nancy loved Portland for a long time,” a friend told some people in a bar on the Bowery other night but I had to correct him. I never loved Portland, and the main reason was you could not get lost there, you could not wander the city and find yourself on a street you had never seen.
As we pass three or four tents perched on a strip of median, I ask the driver if he’s seen an increase in the homeless population; how this seems to be a story the media is telling about Portland now.
After a pause he says, “Not more homeless but more people living in tents.” Then he repeats it. Maybe he thinks I am going to challenge him but I am not, I am interested in understanding how he differentiates these communities and might mention the deeply humane article about homeless/tent-dwelling people in Portland I read this week, but we’re at my stop.
I flew to Portland today not knowing whether we will see a repeat of last year’s mayhem; whether, despite participants’ seemingly inexhaustible appetite for doing the same thing over and over and over, they have maybe been satisfied. I was ready on the plane to believe they had been and jotted in my pad, If this part of over, what is the next chapter and why should we care?
And then the text from the Oregonian reporter comes through: “Proud Boys/Antifa melee in Oregon City right now.”
No new streets today.