Good morning from the compound in Chinatown, where it seems I rarely am these days, it’s been a year of travel for work and for pleasure, work and pleasure that this morning at 1am appeared at my door, in the forms of Oksana Hutnyk and her two daughters, Diana, 13 and Viktoria, 7, who after a bowl of ice cream showed me the moves I’d shown her in her kitchen last March in Lviv, Ukraine, by doing a headstand and a handstand.
I know, pics or it didn’t happen, but they’d been traveling for who knows how many hours (first time in the States!) and I myself had gotten in 24 hours earlier, from Portland, where I am reporting on the murder of Rachel Abraham, whose tragedy, as it did two weeks ago, opens the latest episode of Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em, which overall is a really good episode, and so I am sharing it here.
I scooted up to Portland after a very quick trip to LA, for a taping of Real Time with Bill Maher, on which Matt Welch was appearing for the 12th (!) time. The episode, with Wynton Marsalis and Scott Galloway, was great. Here’s a clip!
This trip to Portland was interesting and remunerative and heartbreaking. I posted a few videos to Twitter (@nancyromm), initially to report on what people keep telling me: that downtown had been overtaken by the homeless and the drug-addicted. I didn’t exactly find that to be the case, parts 1 and 2:
What I did see is what I’ve been seeing in NYC for the past year+, some sort of drug that lays people flat on their backs, rain or brutal sunshine. “Are you sure they’re not dead?” I’ve been asked. No, I am not sure, but they don’t look dead, they look out cold, in a posture very different from the heroin lean or nod. Maybe it’s fentanyl, maybe it’s a methamphetamine called P2P, which Sam Quinones, author of Dreamland (which I reviewed for WSJ) and The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, wrote about last year for The Atlantic. Whatever it is, we are seeing people under its effects more and more. I am so conflicted about hard drugs, a confliction at its core concerned with the human inside the addiction. I saw so many people collapsed on the sidewalks in Portland, their feet and legs a rictus of scabs, and then the two young men I refer to in video #2; maybe in their early twenties and with some animation about them, or the one did, an anticipation as he prepped his left arm.
Okay, it’s 10am, I have three lovely ladies still in their PJs and within earshot, eating breakfast. I hope you like the episode included here, and if you do, please subscribe! I leave you with a picture of Oksana and me in our fighting Ukrainians shirts…
… and an outro song, the very very beautiful “Los Alamos” by Jason Pontius xx
When Do-Gooders Do Bad Things