Thanks for visiting and happy reading!

XX Briena

An ambulance was parked next to the Honey Buckets when I arrived, lights flashing. A handful of homeless people were gathered around. I parked and walked over to see what was going on just in time to see several men wrestling to lift a stretcher. On the stretcher lay a gigantically fat man, shirtless, with an oxygen mask.  A paramedic was pumping his heart as the men struggled to carry him to the ambulance. His arms dangled limply off the stretcher. He was dead.

I’ve only seen a dead man once before in my life. It was in Guatemala. I was sitting on a chicken bus traveling from Xela to Antigua when the bus slowed and followed a traffic jam around something blocking the road. As I looked out the bus window I briefly saw a small man. He was wearing a hat. His body was crumpled in the middle of the road face down and splattered in blood.

This time a gigantic man was carried past me like a beached whale on a stretcher. He was blue-faced and looked incapable of moving out of water. He O.D.’d on heroin, so it was told. I don’t know much about heroin or meth other than what Sarge told me. Heroin gives you a sort of euphoric relaxation, while meth gives you an adrenaline rush. Both drugs are disgusting and highly addictive. I read recently that Portland has had a record amount of deaths to meth O.D.’s over the past year.

I looked at the people standing around. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. No one at the scene was crying or looking even slightly more than remotely concerned. No one I talked to knew who he was. They didn’t know anything about him other than he’d come in with a new group of people who were now staying under the bridge.

The new group under the bridge was comprised of probably 100% druggies. This was an educated guess based on the state of the women of the group who boasted these characteristics: up to 100% toothless, giant open sores on face, jerky bodily movements. One woman had short hair died red. Her face was puckered as she was missing 100% of her teeth and obviously void of dentures. She smacked her mouth together and wandered aimlessly like a hen pecking at grass. I watched a man approach her. He was rubbing up against her and whispering in her ear in a deal-making sort of way.  She put her ham sandwich down, made her way to the porta-potty, gathering long streams of toilet paper, wandered back to her sandwich and ate a few bites, and followed the man away. I watched her walk with him through the parking lot and disappear. I knew she was on her way to sell sexual favors for drug money.

It was a disgusting scene.

The week before I had made Dan a birthday cake. In reality I made him brownies with frosting and sprinkled with chocolate chips, but he didn’t know the difference. He loved it. He confessed it was the best birthday cake ever.

Dan's Birthday Cake

Dan the Can Man was born August 28th. He was so excited to know about his birthday cake that he told his friend Tim, who came along. It was enough for Dan to remember I would  make him a cake since I had told him of it nearly a month before the date. A month is a long time for someone like Dan to remember anything. He was most likely drunk when I told him.

When Dan isn’t drunk, he usually exclaims, “I’m not drunk!” with utmost surprise. And then wonders why he isn’t.

I gave Dan two gigantic pieces of his cake, Tim one, and shared the rest with others sitting around. It was quickly demolished.

A week later I arrived under the bridge alone. Dan was there. He was more drunk than ever before with red booze dripping down his beard and his hand gripping a container under the breast of his jacket. After the BB-Q a cop would ride after him on a bike and give him a citation for carrying an open container in public and kick him out from under the bridge.

But before all that, Dan sat on the wall hollering drunken exclamations and told me that Tim, who had been inside for a month after graduating from the AA program, was in jail after ‘messing up’. He’d started drinking again and played his Metallica music too loud and now would be kicked out of his apartment and end up back on the streets again.

“You don’t want to know about Tim,” he said. “He’s in jail. He says hi. He loves you,” he told me.

Tim and Dan eat cake

Dan then proceeded to announce, in a very loud voice, news-worthy warnings to anyone who’d listen.

“The ‘canes are sweeping in toward the gulf, heading for the oil spills!” he exclaimed like a blaring news radio announcer.

“But we live in Oregon,” I assured him. “We don’t live anywhere near that area so we’re safe, right Dan?” I said.

“The hurricanes are sweeping in toward the coast!” he repeated.

It took several times of assuring him that we were safe in Oregon before he changed his announcement to, “The ‘canes are heading in toward the Gulf, headed straight for the oil spill, but we’re safe. We live in God’s country, he’s on our side. We’re safe.”

“Hey, I still got some of that cake you made me, pretty lady,” he told me. “I told my friends the prettiest lady in Sellwood made me a birthday cake and they said, ‘well that’s just perfect then’. And that’s perfect then ’cause the prettiest lady in Sellwood made me a cake. So that’s perfect, right?”

Two men were under the bridge dressed in slacks and button-up collared shirts. They were videotaping, documenting the people living under the bridge who the police announced were about to be kicked out. Postings hung around the area informing the world that they were about to kick out anyone ‘living’ in the area.

Everyone had eaten and dispersed. I loaded the barbecue and supplies in my car and was closing the boot when I looked up and into the eyes of Angel (On-hel), the little sixty-something Mexican man who I see so often. We instantly communicated without words. I sadly announced the end of the BB-Q, he expressed an disappointed understanding, knowing he’d arrived to late, and shrugged his shoulders.

Angel is very quiet. He only speaks Spanish and is very shy to speak at all. He usually sits alone, far removed from everyone else.

One day I was riding my bike and passed Angel on the riverside bike path. I had a bag of cookies and was happy to find someone to give them to. He’s always so grateful. I’ve never seen him smile.

I felt horrible. He looked so sad. I riffled through my bag and found four-dollars. Enough to buy a meal at the popular homeless hangout up the road, Burger King.

I closed the door and walked over to him. Handed him the money. He tried to refuse it, unsuccessfully, and then looked down and started to cry.

It was only four-dollars.

“I’m an Eagle Scout, Scout Master and have a Mountain badge and all sorts of other badges,” he said, “I know how to take care of myself.” He let out another wheezy grunt of a laugh. He certainly seemed proud about that.

Wayne was crippled, I learned, and half blind and so received a bit of social security money each month. Several years ago he was hit by a car and shattered his pelvis and hip bone. On a different occasion, he fell from a wheel ramp and sliced open his arm, accounting for 24 staples. He pulled back his coat sleeve and showed me a long scar leading from his wrist all the way up his arm. I could see scars left from the staples. He lost a pint of blood.

We had been sitting at the plastic picnic table for probably twenty minutes now and he hadn’t taken a single bite out of his chicken sandwich. It sat there in front of him, a chunk of grilled chicken, green sprigs of lettuce, and a bun sprinkled with poppy seeds displayed like an artful sculpture atop an open platter of tissue paper.

I had seen Wayne hunched over a shopping cart full of bloated black garbage bags, scooting around Sellwood many times before. For as many homeless friends as I have, I had never met any of the people living on the streets of my own neighborhood. Not until I sat down at that plastic Garden State picnic table to enjoy three delicious risotto balls stuffed with cheese and herbs. It was then that Wayne pushed up his shopping cart, ordered a sandwich, and sat down next to me. I was fixed to leave about then, having finished my snack, but this was a character I wanted to meet.

Rowan, the Garden State cook was sitting with us. “Hey Wayne,” he said, “You gonna come pick up my cans again?”

“Yeah, you got some?” he asked, “Same place?”

“I’ve seen you around, but have never met you before,” I introduced myself, “I’m Briena.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. He removed the tattered fingerless army green glove from his right hand, and offered it to me. “I’m Wayne.”

Wayne had big bags under his eyes which weren’t as much dark circles as they were sacks of loose skin. He had a weathered face and, although he didn’t talk in a way that I could see, I knew he was missing at least most of his front teeth. I wondered how he would eat his sandwich.

“This guy used to live in my backyard,” Rowan laughed, “Him and a bunch of other guys… until I had to kick them out.”

“That house was abandoned for seven years,” Wayne confirmed, “A bunch of us used to camp out in the backyard. Some guys even built a fire in the garage. But not me,” he insisted, “I never did that.”

Wayne had lived in Sellwood for fifteen years. His zone stretched from Bybee to Linn Creek, 17th to 7th, and not beyond. He knew all sorts of stuff about the neighborhood, including where to get cans and locations of abandoned buildings, but also about other homeless people. He knew my friends, Dan the Can Man and the Bionic Tramp. He chuckled when I mentioned them. He also knew all sorts of unfortunate stories about people dying on the streets.

At one point he told me of a man in his thirties who lost a good computer tech job to alcohol. One day, he told me, the man took a handful of vicodin and a handful of other medicine and washed it down with beer. In the morning he was found sitting upright and dead. A six pack of beer was sitting next to him. Wayne was an alcoholic, but he still acted amazed that someone so young and capable of a good job could lose himself to alcohol.

“Can I have an orange pop?” he shouted at the new guy who looked an awful lot like Sideshow Bob, thin and lanky with a frolicking mop of spiral curls, black jeans cutoffs, and tall black lace-up boots.

“Orange pop? Of course!” he said and scurried to grab an orange soda.

“Have you ever seen some gold tokens…” I began to ask.

“Yep,” I hadn’t even finished explaining what I was talking about, but Wayne knew immediately what I meant. I was trying to describe the Sanctity of Hope tokens. “Some guy came up and gave me nine!” he said enthusiastically and somewhat aghast, as if he wondered what in the world that guy was thinking to give him so many, sucker. “Nine!”

“Yep, I was standing right there,” Wayne said, pointing to the order window of the Garden State food cart, “ordering my sandwich and he just walked up and handed ‘em over.”

I wondered, then, what he did with the tokens. There wasn’t much to offer within his Sellwood boundaries in terms of redeeming them. I imagined Sellwood Cycle Repair, the neighborhood’s only participating vendor, didn’t have much to offer for someone sporting a shopping cart instead of a bicycle.

“I gave them to a friend,” he said. “He’s kind of passed on now.”

One day, Wayne told me, he and a friend, Allen Summer, were put in Hooper. “For detox,” he told me, “We were drinking and, yeah, we were a little drunk,” he admitted. His friend was let out of the tank an hour earlier. “He had all my money. Twenty-five dollars and three tokens.” Allen was crossing the street at MLK. He was looking for a beer. And was hit by a semi truck. “He wasn’t watching where he was going,” Wayne shook his head, looking down. “He was… I don’t wanna say it,” Wayne continued shaking his head, “He was scattered all over the road,” he said.

Wayne was full of stories. He was polite. He was friendly. He talked about anything I wanted to know about. And even talked about what I really didn’t want to know about. I have a lot more talking to do with this man. But mostly a lot more listening.

Or at least that’s what he told Linda, our waitress at My Father’s Place diner and bar on Grand Avenue.

It was Brian’s birthday. It was also Mother’s Day. It was beautiful and sunny with the bluest sky the world had ever seen, and we went out for a happy birthday breakfast at Brian’s place of choice…

My Father’s Place.

Walking in off the sidewalk was like walking into a seventies-style cave. It was hard to believe the lights were on at all, but the Sheri’s-style booth lamps glowed just enough to vaguely make out brown vinyl bench seats that looked like they’d been pulled straight out of an old school bus. Old faded pictures, scattered about, hung crookedly in an eclectic collection of decorative wooden frames. Camping lanterns, tea pots and a red Radio Flyer hung from the ceiling. (Brian especially liked that part.)

Toward the back of the restaurant a vending machine, stocked with Kit-Kat bars, Snickers, and Camel cigarettes, stood amongst a small collection of video poker machines with their blinking lights. An old-fashioned photo booth sat quietly in the corner. All windows were draped with rickety blinds, tightly closed and covered in a sticky layer of dust.

We chose the big round table in a windowed corner next to the Christmas tree. That’s right, it was May 9th and a plastic Christmas tree was happily erect and decorated with dusty ornaments and Valentine heart tinsel in the front window of My Father’s Place.

Linda poured us all coffee. She had a low pony of thinning, slicked-back gray hair. “How are you this morning?” she asked us.

The coffee tasted like burnt dirt. I had a thought for a moment, that it probably wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t work at a coffeehouse serving Portland’s infamous Stumptown coffee. My coffee taste buds had turned to snobs. I stirred four creamers into the 8oz mug to drown out the flavor. Sipped it. Reevaluated my thoughts. Stirred in another creamer.

“Good,” we all replied in unison.

Brian was the only one who chimed in to ask how Linda was that morning. He drank his coffee black.

I handed Brian the plastic bag full of cookies I’d baked for him the night before. They were sugar cookies from a package mix. He smiled grandly.

“Somebody loves me,” he announced, “Thanks sweet heart.”

There isn’t really much better in life than to make people like Brian happy, people who are as genuine as him and have so little.

Brian had told me he called his mom that morning. He calls her three times a year, he told me. Christmas, Mother’s Day, and her birthday. Their conversations are always tense, he said, as he would expect from a mother who worries about her son. He will probably never see her again.

Brian had been to My Father’s Place probably a dozen times before, he told us. He probably had his order planned in advance. He ordered the hobo omelet. It was gigantic and full of all sorts of meat with hash browns and a biscuit. He ate the entire thing. Every bite. He scraped his plate clean. It’s not everyday a homeless guy is treated to a special birthday breakfast. It can be assumed the occasion was not taken lightly.

“I can afford to take the whole day off,” Brian told me. “A lady I talk to sometimes gave me a birthday card”, he said, “with one-hundred dollars.”

Brian used to sell Street Roots newspapers at New Seasons market. He’d make an average of thirty to forty dollars a day. But these days he’s been pan handling for work, which earns him on average seventeen dollars a day. There would be no working today, however. No selling papers, no pan-handling, no cardboard sign. It was Brian’s birthday. He was twenty-two again. And he had the whole day free.

“Well, they finally did it,” Dan told me. “But I figure, after a couple years of not being bothered that’s pretty good, right?”

Dan the Can Man had been raided by the police. While he was away, canning I assume, the police raided his camp and took everything he had. Including his sleeping bag. Now all he had were the clothes on his back and whatever treasures were held in a sad-looking plastic bag.

Thank goodness he managed to find another sleeping bag. Those are highly desired and hard to come by in the world of homelessness.

“That’s pretty good though, right? Two years without being bothered. I guess I’m pretty lucky, right?”

I searched through my things. I didn’t have an extra blanket, but I did have my high school North Face backpack. backpacks are also prized possessions among the homeless and this was a good one. It was blue with no holes and had patches sewn all over it from places I’d traveled like Czech Republic, Holland, Austria and Singapore. I cut off most of the patches so it wouldn’t look too conspicuous, put a toothbrush and travel-sized Colgate tube in the front pocket along with some chewy granola bars and two dollars. And brought it with me to the Wednesday barbecue.

“So,” I asked Dan, “do you ever carry a backpack?” I was sure I’d seen him with a backpack once before, but mostly saw him carrying a ratty plastic bag.

“Oh yeah,” he said,”But I have a hard time holding on to those, you know what I mean? They’re real nice to have, but I can’t seem to hold on to ‘em. But they’re real nice,” he said, “they’re certainly very nice.”

He was sopping wet. The weather in Portland had been moody for the past couple of weeks. Storming with bouts of pouring rain and sometimes hail. His coat was made of nylon and completely drenched. But he was chipper and chatty that day.

“Dan?” I asked.

“Yes, pretty lady,” He replied.

“If someone had a back pack to give you, would you take it?” Dan has been known to turn down offers and I wasn’t sure if he’d take the pack.

But he did. Happily.

When I pulled the backpack out of the motor home, it must have been glowing with a bright blue aura because faces all around honed in on it instantly, like a giant sparkling diamond. Several people, scattered about, froze in their steps, eyes locking instantly on the bag. Eyebrows raised and locked eyes widened. They watched as I handed the pack to Dan.

“Wow, that’s a nice one,” Dan told me.

“That’s a nice pack,” chimed in a tall, thin lady with short brown hair and missing front teeth, “Got any more of those?” she asked. I told her I didn’t, it was my bag from high school and I only had one. I knew that lady. She always refused bread with her hot dog. “Just the meat,” she’d say, “No bread.” I always thought it had something to do with her missing teeth, but one day she told me, spitting in disgust, “When you’re in prison for so long and that’s all you get to eat, bread every day, you never want to eat it again. I’ll never eat it again,” she said.  “Tortillas are OK, though.”

It was Cinco de Mayo and we were serving bean burritos with tortillas toasted on the grill. She took one for herself and two for her partner who, according to her, was very hungry.

Dan liked his new backpack. After an unfortunate affair, he was the winner. Somewhat, anyway. Most importantly, he was happy. There’s not much of a better feeling than to see Dan the Can Man taken care of and happy. For that matter, I suppose in the end I was the real winner.

“I’m Smoke Box.”

“What?” I asked in response. I pretty much heard him, but wasn’t sure if I’d heard correctly. But with meeting people who introduce themselves as ‘Gumball’ and ‘Moon Wolf’, it shouldn’t have taken me by surprise.

“S-M-O-K-E-B-O-X,” he replied.

He didn’t look much like a ‘Smoke Box’, but I could imagine ‘Smoke’ or ‘Smokey’, I guess. The first thing I noticed about him was his hat. A big black leather cowboy hat, molded under around the brim. It shaded his eyes in a mysterious, pleasant sort of way. He had a long thin face with a mature goatee, and wore a long dark pony, an over-sized black Harley Davidson vest, camo pants and black leather fingerless riding gloves with knuckle holes.

I had never seen him before.

“Take a look at that article when he’s done with it,” were the first words he spoke to me. He had a soft voice to contradict his dark attire. I looked over and saw Travis reading an article cutout. Travis looked up, smiled curiously, cocked his head, handed the article to me.

‘11-yr old Girl Saved After Four Days in Alligator Infested Swamp‘, read the title. I read it.  A fifth grader, for unknown reasons, rode her bicycle into the woods and was found four days later in a swamp among thick brush. She lived. It was uplifting.

Smoke Box talked in a kind, gentle, patient sort of way. Judging by this and the fact that he wore a pair of sunglasses all evening which he never removed, I figured he might have smoked a bit of pot before the barbecue.  He talked mainly about three things:

1. Playing the piano. (He spoke of playing in different locations including Astoria, Anchorage, and a shelter across the river).

2. A video of himself on YouTube singing karaoke to ‘Wasted Time’ by Don Henley as an intended spiritual message to viewers.

3. ‘Dad’. I assume this is his term for God.  Mostly, he incorporated ‘Dad’ in all which he was talking about and implied that ‘Dad’ talked to him or sent him messages.

Smoke Box sat down, carefully pulled a square of paper towel from the roll, folded it in half, and began to write on in with a metallic silver marker. ‘YOUTUBE IN GOD SERVES’ he wrote. He neatly outlined this in green pen, and then continued writing ‘ME SiNGiNG WASTED TIME FROM THE EAGLES DON HENLY’. He drew a box around ‘WASTED TIME’ with an arrow pointing to ‘IN GOD SERVES’. He then wrote down his email address and handed the napkin to me.

When he stepped away, I pointed at Smoke Box and asked Brian, “Do you know that guy?”

Brian spoke in a quiet, secretive voice. “Yeah,” He said “I’ve known him since 2004 when I moved here, but he’s always in and out. He told me that he just came back from Denver. He’s a real nice guy. I like the way he talks. Really down to earth. He told me a few years ago that used to have a Harley and got in a real bad motorcycle accident so now he has his bicycle instead with real tall handlebars,” Brian gestured toward a bike leaning against a concrete pillar with, as he said, ‘real tall handlebars’. It was all souped up with fat tires and lights of all shapes, sizes and colors zip-tied on here and there, and a pair of hand-cuffs locked to the frame. I assumed he used them as a fancy sort of  bike lock. “When you get him talking about that stuff is when you can really hear how nice he sounds when he talks,” Brian continued in a whisper. “He’s just a really nice guy.”

I believed him.

I get excited to see Dan. Dan the Can Man comes and goes, is usually on some sort of mission, and is dumbfounded when he discovers himself to be sober.

He’s one of my favorite people… he and Tramp. They were in Vietnam together and are the sweetest, most innocent drunken duo I’ve ever met. I hadn’t seen Tramp since the beginning of last summer. Shortly after he’d been hit by a car. He was sitting on a park bench on the Esplanade with a broken leg when I last saw him.

Dan told me Tramp split and headed south to Eugene last summer. He hasn’t seen or heard from him since.

‘I miss him,’ Dan had told me, ‘he’s my partner.’

It was windy, Wednesday night. A cold wind.

Now, over six months after I’d last seen Tramp, Dan was at the barbecue. He was dirty. He wore a bushy, wiry beard dripping with cheap beer suds. His right hand was tucked beneath the left breast of his open jacket. ‘Hey pretty lady,’ he said to me when he walked up, and gave me a big hug. I was elated, to say the least.

This man… this wonderful man… went to war for our country, served as a platoon leader, and came out an alcoholic. He now roams the streets of Portland looking for cans to serve his disease.

‘Look at this city, this pretty city,’ he said to me. It was dark. Lights from towers across the river were reflecting in the Willamette. ‘Such a pretty city we have here in the Pacific Northwest,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

He turned his back to me, took his hidden beer can from beneath his coat, took a long swig.

He was hardly dressed for the cold night.

He turned back toward me.

‘Your hot dog’s getting cold,’ I said. It was sitting on the bench.

‘Oh yeah, I’ll eat it,’ he said,’ gotta eat, it’s what keeps us alive, right? I pray everyday to keep everyone safe. I’m so glad you’re safe, pretty lady. I’m so happy to see you.’

I told him I missed him and Tramp. That I hadn’t seen Tramp for such a long time. He nodded his head somewhat drunkenly.

‘How are you, how was your Christmas, pretty lady? I had a great Christmas. I woke up alive. I prayed to live through the cold night and I got my wish. It’s the only thing I asked for and I got it. It was pretty good. God’s pretty good, right?’

‘This is Tim, by the way,’ he gestured toward a tall, thin man, gangly looking with long, stringy hair. Tim gave me a shy wave. ‘Tim’s my canning partner,’ Dan said.

‘Nice to meet you,’ I told Tim. It was strange to see Dan with a different partner than the Bionic Tramp.

‘Have you been getting a lot of cans lately?’ I asked Dan.

‘Yeah, I like to go to Sellwood,’ he told me. ‘I’ve had thirty-five different canning partners, you know that. I’ve been doing this a long time. Since ’87. You start to figure out where the good spots are.’

‘Is Sellwood a good spot?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I just like it over there, but across the river, up Macadam, that’s a good spot. And up the hill by the cemetery, that’s real good. And Raleigh Hills, out past the Vietnam Memorial… you know where the Vietnam Memorial is?… Out past the Vietnam memorial, that’s a real good spot, you find cans laying around everywhere. But, what’s tomorrow? Friday! In Burlingham they put out these nice yellow bins. Friday mornings. Yep, tomorrow I gotta get to Burlingham.”

He turned around. Took another drink from his beer.

“How do you carry around so many cans, Dan?’”I asked.

“Well, we just carry bags. One day Tim had fifteen dollars worth and I had ten and we were walking across a parking lot and the bags broke open, see, and we were trying to pick ‘em all up and the security guard came running after us and said,’You get this stuff out of here fast. Move it fast!’ And we said, ‘We’re pickin’ it up fast as we can, don’t call your congressmen!’ right? Don’t call your congress men, right? Yeah, and I ran and found some bags and we picked ‘em up and got on out of there! Yeah, there was like twenty-seven dollars there. That was pretty good.”

Twenty-seven dollars is a whole lot at five cents a can.

” Tramp died.”

“What?” I asked.

“Tramp died. They say he died down in Salem. Some people told me.”

Dan’s hot dog sat on the bench. It was once plump and warm. Straight off the grill. Now it was limp and cold and a little charred on the edges.

Dan took a drink from his beer. And another. He didn’t turn around this time.

Bud

About three weeks ago, Travis and I arrived under the bridge ready to barbecue. People were scattered about, but, unlike other Wednesdays, were not waiting with eager, drooling anticipation for hot dogs. I noticed Bud sitting alone on the concrete wall where I normally set out the juice and condiments. I smiled when I saw him and walked up to greet him. He smiled back at me. A giant plastic tub of ice cream sat beside him, almost empty. On his other side, a milk crate with waffle cones and a tupperware container full of water and a soaking ice cream scooper.

“Want some ice cream?” Bud asked me with a big, toothless smile. Bud was wearing a new baseball cap. It was blue and had a cartoon picture of a doctor with big, googly eyes and giant blood-squirting syringes and said ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’. 

Bud had had extra money left on his Oregon Trail card for the month. With the extra money, he bought two giant tubs of ice cream, arrived a half-hour early at the barbecue, and served ice cream to the others who came to eat hot dogs that Wednesday.

Bud has an apartment provided by the city. If it wasn’t for that assistance, he would be on the streets along with the people he brought icecream to that evening.

By the time we arrived, what was left of the ice cream had melted into a gloppy, frothy soup. I scooped some out of the tub, into a waffle cone and delivered it to Travis who was busy setting up the barbecue.

It’s not often that we arrive under the bridge and have homeless people serving us.

“I salvaged these cones from a place that serves food downtown,” Bud told me. “They were throwing them all in the dumpster,” he said. “They’re perfectly good waffle cones.”

I recently heard about an organization that serves the homeless downtown. A good amount of the food donated to them… perfectly good food… goes straight into the dumpster. “Why?” I asked, “People are hungry.” Because, I was told, they only serve the food that they deem to be healthy. Any pastries or sweets go straight into the dumpster. I was disappointed. If people are hungry, why should someone else determine for them what is OK for them to eat. Why can homeless people not enjoy a bit of junk food?

Travis enjoyed his icecream, as did everyone else under the bridge that evening.

Bud was a star.

Sarge (a.k.a. Jim the Cowboy)

“What type of horse did you used to ride?” I asked Jim. He’s a cowboy, you know.

He raised his chest.

“A Nevada Mus-tang,” he replied like taffy. “She was a chestnut, called her Sheba. Wanna know why I called her Sheba?” he asked me. “Because she rode like a qu-een.”

Jim grew up in Idaho. “I was fifteen. Best hundred-and-fifty bucks I ever spent,” he said. He used Sheba for cattle hearding. When he was seventeen he joined the marines. His mother signed a waver to allow him to join under-aged. I noticed a small butterfly tatoo on his left hand, in the crook between his thumb and forefinger. It almost looked like a moth. He got it in Thailand while he was in the military.

“You know,” he said, “I went to that corral and had my eye set on a big gelding. A bay. But Louis told me ‘You don’t want that big-headed thing! He’s got too much attitude! He’s gonna give you nothin’ but trouble!’,” Jim said, “and he pointed at this little yearling and said ‘Look at her, she’s what you want. She’s perfect!’.”

“I didn’t want her!” Jim said. “She was punee! I wanted a big horse. But I listened to Louis. He knew what he was talking about. And, you know what? That pony ran like the wind!”

“Louis knew what he was doing,” Jim said, “He told me ‘You know, you could throw a saddle on her and break her in. You could do that. But you want her to love you. You want her to live for you. You don’t let anyone else touch her. You want to be her da-ddy.’ “

“And so that’s what I did.”

Jim the cowboy is now homeless and can be found in Portland, Oregon. Read more about Jim in my previous blog ‘Origami Birthday Surprise: An Intro to Melvin and Jim the Pirate’.