Dispatch from Portland 2022: Chutes and Ladders

Everyone knows how the Portland dance goes: take an event you don’t like and immediately hit the streets, break some windows, set things on fire. Notice that there are few to no consequences. And while it might get a little boring, repeating the same sequence every night, there are upsides, in that people – including people outside of Portland – are paying attention to you; are trying to decipher what your moves mean, trying to impose order on what is mostly a bunch of spasmodic gestures.

Or maybe they’re more than that? Maybe you’re creating a movement, which would mean you’re legit, and if that’s the case (and who’s to say it’s not?), then what of the people not joining in, the ones who appear to have a problem with the dance? People who, when you ask them to do one little thing, to maybe hang a sign in their window advertising your movement, get balky or cranky or try to hide. What kind of person would have a problem with a “WE WELCOME ALL … WE WELCOME YOU, YOU ARE SAFE HERE” sign? Maybe someone with monstrous intentions. In which case it is the movement’s responsibility to both shun this person – the “ALL” in that welcome sign has limits obviously – and to expose them for who they seem to you to be. Maybe you start a little social media campaign to embargo their shop, maybe you break their windows, maybe you show up with your camera-phone and accuse them of being racists or Zionists. It’s kind of scary to do at first but then, it’s kind of fun; you have actual shots of people running from your camera. And soon, you are feeling very good, feeling strong, gliding through the community like a hot knife through butter, your efforts are making the world, you feel pretty sure, better in the end for everyone.

Which is why it doesn’t make sense, not really, when people don’t hire you. You show up for an interview for a position at a café and the manager is unbolting the outdoor furniture from the ground, bringing it inside, and when you ask why, he says he doesn’t want to have it thrown through the café windows. He tells you to look up and down the street, at all the broken windows at the other shops, a fate his cafe has thus far avoided. You see the WELCOME sign in his window and think to mention the protection it offers, but do not. Instead, you say, “It's just property.” He thinks to tell you he has twelve people he’s trying to keep employed during a pandemic but does not. He thanks you for coming by.

When you do not get the job, you look him up online, maybe he’s on the 86’d List, the IG account where people in Portland’s service industry can anonymously post about their homophobic misogynistic tip-stealing ass-grabbing bosses with zero fear of retribution. Reading the posts can be sort of delicious and confirms what you believe; that the world is full of secretly terrible people, people who need to be rooted out by you and your crew. Still, it makes you a little sad to read the accusations against someone you worked for, someone you really liked; she had bought you a plane ticket home when your mother died. But maybe you were wrong; maybe if you met her now, you’d know better and would see through her.

Thinking about this nevertheless gives you a mixed-up feeling, one you are not sure you risk indulging. You’ve been present when people made excuses for peeling away, saying they needed to go back to school or to work and their new schedule would interfere. You know at least one person who deliberately took a night shift to stop coming out. And you had not been very keen on what went down between guys who had been allies the week before. One had just gone back to work at a bar; he’d been hauling a picnic table to the curb when you and your crew marched past. You were about to say hello when the guy’s friend called him a traitor and kicked over the table. Everybody kept walking, and you did, too, looking back once to see if the guy was watching his former crew walk on, and whether he looked wounded.

It has occurred to you that you are playing a zero-sum game. You cannot say the window-smashing and fire-setting are making the city more beautiful, though then again, so what? There are more important things than beauty. Still, so many places in Portland have closed, and the ones that stayed open say the pandemic forced them to cut back on staff and hours. You think this is likely bullshit; that owners can pay employees if they want to, but they don’t want to and now they can use the pandemic as an excuse. Still, it sometimes feels like you’re running in place. What was that children’s story, where the tigers ran in a circle and melted into butter? At least there was butter.

It's hard also to know who to get a pep talk from about this. There is, sure, still a lot of creativity in the movement, people make flyers and create funny or cutting memes. And, you guess, there is no shortage of enemies; the cops are still bastards, the mayor still has no balls, the people you liked on the city council got voted out, though you didn’t really know much about them, not more than that they were better than the other people. You don’t really pay attention to national politics but if you did, you’d say Biden has dementia, you didn’t vote for him, you didn’t vote at all.

You did vote that one time, the first time you were eligible. Your mother had taken you with her to the polls in Montana when you were little; she would press the “I Voted” sticker onto your parka. You and she drove together to the polls in 2016. It was the big Hillary year and then it had all fallen apart, and could she understand, you’d cried to her on the phone in summer 2020, after another night of attacking the federal courthouse in Portland, that you had to do this? Know what you hope to gain, she’d said. None of this was about personal gain, you told her. It was about sacrifice, about being willing to spend every night in the streets fighting for people who didn’t have what other people had. It was about fairness.

“Is it?” she’d said.

One night, instead of marching, you stay home and watch your housemate’s boyfriend’s kid. She’s five and wants to play a boardgame called Chutes and Ladders. “An exciting up and down game for little children,” the box says. You remember this game, how you need to go all the way around the board to reach the winner’s circle. But there are shortcuts in the form of ladders, you explain to the girl, and there are chutes, which make you slide backwards. The girl looks at the board, at the many intersecting paths and colors, at the chutes and ladders crossing one another, and asks, “How do you tell the difference?”