I want to take a break for a minute from writing about my father’s last dying days. It’s starting to feel a little draining. Mostly the writing helps, but I want to switch gears for a minute. I don’t know why I decided to write about my eight months living in Portland, Oregon from late September, 2010 to June, 2011, when I was 27/28 years old, just getting sober, but it’s what floated to the surface. So here goes.
September 23rd, 2010—age 27—I went to a dive bar off Columbus Avenue in North Beach in San Francisco called The Saloon. It turned out to be my last drunk. Read about this final night of drinking HERE. The next day I woke up ruined and done with alcohol for good. Haven’t had a drink since; almost 13 years now.
At the time I was living in a small dilapidated two-room second-story apartment in a rough part of North Oakland with a fellow alcoholic. Within days of quitting the bottle I decided I had to leave. I knew only one human being who was sober; a good friend from high school who’d become like a sister and who’d gotten sober in AA two years prior, and who’d moved from our hometown of Ventura, California to Portland in 2008. I called her.
Within a week of my final drink I was on an Amtrak train northbound. I’d snatched everything I needed—mostly books and some clothes—and had chucked the rest or given it to my alcoholic buddy. A 20-hour ride got me to Portland. My friend—Jenna—let me crash at her low-income high-rise apartment studio. There we spent our nights writing, reciting poetry to each other, reading, talking recovery and life and high school, the past and the glorious [sober] future. And she took me to my first AA meetings.
Those meetings were Young People’s meetings, catering to a crowd primarily in their teens and twenties, though anyone could attend. At almost 28, I felt old beyond my years, even then, which was partially true and partially bullshit. I was a strange mix of Old Soul mixed with highly self-aware mixed with experienced in life mixed with no clue how to do basic conventional adult things mixed with childishly immature mixed with confused and angry and depressed. I had a questionable violent side when I drank. I felt caught between my parents’ middleclass values and my younger rebellious punk rock identity. Read my in-depth essay about identity HERE.
In short: I didn’t know who I was or what the fuck I was doing. I was lost. Clueless. Scared.
I remember those early meetings, down the rickety wooden stairs into an old dank church basement where 50 of us would face the wall and talk about the 12 steps and our worst selves. We talked of spirituality and God and recovery, hatred and fear and nights where we crossed taboo lines most had never even imagined. We’d all done things we regretted. We’d all hurt ourselves and others. We’d all at one point wanted to die. We’d all once hated ourselves. Somehow, this common bond allowed us to laugh. For the first time I felt like I was a part of something bigger than myself. A community. (Though I intrinsically still don’t trust that word in all its implications.)
Besides going to meetings—and not taking a drink one day at a time—I remember spending much of my time alone. I found an apartment after a month-ish in North Portland off Killingsworth Street, not too far from N.E. Alberta, where the hipsters were. It was early November. The Giants had just won the World Series. The weather was cold and gray and rainy, typical Pacific Northwest. I went to a lot of coffee shops back then; I’d write in my little black moleskin journal. I finished the first draft of my high school YA punk rock literary autobiographical novel. I had a crazy amount of literary and creative energy. Jenna and I’d spent nearly all our time together the first month when we lived together, but once I moved things shifted.
I remember the rest of November in that apartment on Killingsworth, and then December and January. I rented an upstairs room from a young couple only a few years older than me. The guy was thin and tall and effeminate, some kind of tech engineer. The woman was a little older and six months pregnant. They were excited about starting a family. I wasn’t working. Before getting sober I’d had a fulltime job selling tourist clothes at an Italian clothing store in Hayes Valley in San Francisco; somehow, despite the drinking, I’d managed to save up some dough. This was 2010/11 and it was Portland and I was only renting a room: Life was cheap. All I did was write and read and go to meetings. My expenses were low.
Down the street was a dive bar called The Florida Room. I used to go there and sit at a table, ordering half a dozen large Diet Cokes with ice and writing, my laptop with connected large black keyboard, typing away for hours and hours. Once a bartender asked me what I wrote and I said I was working on a novel. She didn’t ask any further questions. This made me glad. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to write. I must have been the only patron in there not imbibing alcohol. Sometimes I ordered a side of greasy fries, drying my fingers before typing.
I remember the thin layer of snow in December and January and 18-20-degree weather. Cold as God. I remember going to a handful of live rock shows around town with Jenna. One was Joe Pug, whose music I fell in love with and still listen to. I remember riding my road-bike—which I later had shipped up to me—in the cold gray rain, surprising myself at how fun it was to do in the wet. I remember riding to a “secret spot” (it seems I always have such a spot no matter what city) down a small trail to an open valley where I’d sit and stare out at the Willamette River which flowed 20 yards off. Starry nights, or full bright moon nights, I loved riding my bike fiercely the 15 minutes from my apartment to said secret spot. I’d watch the sky and the river and ingest the natural organic smells and think deeply about life and sobriety, etc. Good memories.
Sometime in early February, I think, I moved to another apartment, still in the same area but a little further north, five or six blocks north of Killingsworth. The young couple I rented a room from had had the baby and no longer had the desire for a stranger living in their house. (I’d known this arrangement going in.) I rented this new room from an older lady in her 60s who had a blind cat. I was closer to the secret spot so I didn’t mind. It was a quiet house on a quiet residential block. I felt cut off from the rest of the city but I didn’t mind. I saw Jenna less and less. I’d decided to move back to California in the summer, to live in the Bay Area again, alone, and to go back to college, S.F. State. I wanted to study English Literature. I was going to be a writer. I mean I’d always been a writer, really, but now I was going to make it official; I was going to “codify” it into the law that was Me.
But in the four months I lived in that house—from February to June, 2011—one thing of note occurred. Jenna introduced me, at a random live rock show one night, to her older male cousin’s former best friend, a man I’ll call Blake. Blake and I became instant best friends. We’d both gone to private Christian high schools. We’d both been transfixed with Jack Kerouac in our lurid twenties. We’d both traveled like Kerouac had in his magnum opus, On the Road. We’d both read the classics voraciously. We both loved hiking and backpacking. We both had been drummers in bands once upon a time. We were both intelligent, sensitive and highly independent. He’d had his heart broken a couple years prior after a long relationship and he was just finally, slowly starting to come back into civilization. I was six months sober when we met. It was a perfect match for friendship.
Blake and I spent a lot of time together during those final couple months. We went out to dinner. We met at dive bars. But mostly we took long, meandering walks and talked about literature, travel, drinking, women, existentialism and life. We healed each other in many ways. Prepared one another for the Next Thing. It was a brotherly, holy comradeship. In mid-June, he took off a week of work and rented a car and drove the two of us south down to the Bay Area. We took our time, taking two days to get there, staying in Arcata along the way. In the city, we stayed with my two close friends in their Haight area apartment in San Francisco. Five days later Blake drove back. We stayed in touch. He got married in 2015 and I was there. Now he has a kid.
What I recall the most about those eight months in Bridge City was the consistent coffee shop hangouts, the constant reading of books, the late nights until 3, 4am of writing, as if trying to get down every experience I’d ever had. (Not unlike Kerouac writing down On the Road on that one scroll in a fever of speed.) The AA meetings around town in dark, dank church basements along with the smell of freshly brewed black coffee and the perpetual stink of cigarettes being smoked outside before and after. The cold gray unceasing drizzle and rain. Northeast Alberta Street, with the cafes and restaurants and food carts and cool-kid hipster spots and outdoor places to eat communally. I remember spending far too much time in Powell’s Books, of course, one of the best bookstores in America, if not on Earth. I remember crossing the Willamette River back and forth over and over all the time. Live music and the smell of body odor and beer. The ripe feeling of nostalgia.
Getting sober at 27 was a gargantuan feat. I’d just come out of a decadent decade of demoralized self-demolition. From 17 to 27 I’d walked my own inner Trail of Tears. I was ready for change. Hot for it, actually. I’d hit an emotional and spiritual “bottom,” as they say in recovery circles. I’d been estranged from my family, wild, violent, confused, a daily blackout drinker for ten whole years. A hardcore punk-rocker who lived “the lifestyle,” and then a Kerouac-wannabe writer who went out there and thumbed across America and hopped trains trying to get that holy elusive “life experience.” By the time September, 2010 arrived I was spiritually whipped. I was done. I was ready. The anger, the fear, the travel: I didn’t have any gas left in the car.
To Portland I came. And to Portland I owe my thanks.