true stories

The windshield wipers pushed sheets of water side to side as the buss tentatively accelerated into the downtown traffic. Danny peered through the water looking for his stop. A damp newspaper beside him had a headline warning of rising rivers due to melting mountain snow and thirty straight days of percipitation. There was a picture of a man canoeing through a Wal-mart parking lot.
The bus let Danny out next to a puddle. Danny hopped through the water and onto the curb. He scurried the short distance to the Highschool, ducking under eaves to avoid the rain when he could. His friend Nate was waiting by one of the entrances to the school. Warm air escaped everytime a student entered the building next to them.
“What should we do today?” Nate asked.
“We should do something,” Danny said.
Nathen nodded and agreement. Some time passed. Wind blew a dramatic sheet of rain across the lawn of the school. Students screamed and ran faster towards the school.
“We could go to class,” Danny sugested.
“Yeah, not so much,” Nathen said.
“Can I have an Adderoll?” Danny said, trying to decide.
Nathen put down his apocolypic backpack. He found an orange pill bottle and presented two pills to Dany. “You have to help me find some vodka,” Nathen said.
Danny swallowed the pills, they zipped up their jackets and stepped back out into the rain.

They walked briskly across the freeway overpass towards downtown. Rain poured down Dannys face, matting his hair. After about six blocks he began to feel the excitement of the attention deficate medication. Though they had no where to go, Danny was enjoying every drop. Nathen not so much.
They stood in the middle of Pioneer Square. Occasionly someone ran past. Nathen battled a cigarette and the rain, occasionly looking longingly at the buss shelters.
“We could go to my house,” Nathen said.
“Lets see what happens,” Danny said. His shoulders were now drenched.
“I think the liqour stores are open,” Nathen said.
Now the excitement was in Danny’s ears.
“Let’s eat,” Nathen sugested.

Over hot coffee, and sausage McMuffins Nathen went through the possibilies for Vodka aquisition, “We can get a bumb to buy it. we could shoulder tap. Where do you want to try?”
Danny was staring at the line of people ordering. The humidity in the air carried their perfumes to him. Mixed with the coffee, food and filth, it smelled like a morning commute. “What?” Danny asked focusing on the conversation.
“Where do you want to find some vodka?” Nathen asked.
“Oh, I don’t care,” Danny said.
“Let’s keep moving,” Nathen said.
The shops were begining to open in Old Town. They made their way along the street, peering into them.
“Hey gentleman. Can I borrow a dollar to get a buss ticket?” The voice came from a woman in a door way. She was wrapped in a wool blanket. Nathen turned to face her.
“Sure. Hey. You wouldn’t consider going to the liqour store for us? It’s my friends birthday.”
“I could do that. Give me five extra dollars,” the woman said.
“Ok,” Nathen said. Between the two of them, Danny and Nathen produced fifteen dollars. Danny handed it to the woman. She had cold hard hands covered in cheep jewlery. Her eyes were deep in her face, but she still had beauty. She tried to stand, but wobbled. Danny put his hand on her arm and helped her up. The smell of urine rose from the blanket. She took a few moments to compose herself, then said “Wait here.” She turned a corner.
Nathen and Danny stood in the doorday waiting for her return. What seemed like too long passed and Nathen began to fidget.
“Fuck,” Nathen said. “What are we going to do?”
“She’ll be back,” Danny said, slidding down to the ground.
“Jesus, don’t sit near that,” Nathen said.
“Fuck it,” Danny said.
“Maybe we should keep moving,” Nathen said.
Danny watched the ripples in the puddles and the drops snake down the windshields of a Volkswagon parked infront of them on the street. A shiver rattled him as a chill entered his body through the dampness on his shoulders. “Nah, it’s nice here.”
“It’s nice here?” Nathen asked incredulously. “This is nice? You are sitting in a doorway like a bum on a Tuesday morning and you think it’s nice? Shit. So young and you’ve already achieved your potential,” Nathen said.
“Maybe,” Danny said.
The woman returned, shaking her head. “I’m pissed,” she said.
“What happened?” asked Nathen.
“They said they don’t sell alcohol for public consumption. They were calling me a fucking bumb. I got pissed. I think I may have told them I was buying it for someone else. I’m pissed, I yelled something,” she said, wiping her matted wet hair from her face. The last remnants of makeup bled down her eyes.
“Fuck,” Nathen said.
“I know,” she said.
“We have to go to the Liqour store up by the library,” Nathen said turning to go.
“What? I’m not walking all the fucking way over there in the rain,” the woman said.
“Why not?” Nathen asked.
“I don’t feel good. How about we buy some fourties and some soup?” she asked.
“Soup?” Nathen repeated. “Soup? That’s... ok. That sounds good,” he said amazed that it did actualy sound good.
They found a convinience store with narrow isles. Through the windown, Nathen and Danny watched as the woman went to the coolers and took three fourties of Old English beer. She then got a can of ‘heat and serve’ soup. The rain intensified on the backs of their necks, so Danny turned away and found a dry spot under a mostly dead tree. It’s trunk protected him from the sideways rain. Nathen continued to watch her like a dog waiting for it’s owner.
The woman emerged from the store, steam wipping wildly off the top of the soup cup as a wave of weather hit her. The three of them walked quickly towards the Burnside bridge. Weekends under the bridge there was a market. Weekdays it was a parking lot littered with people sleeping in sleeping bags. They sat on some cool pavement against a concrete wall. Danny sat first, the woman sat next to him, in contact with him. Nathen sat on the other side of Danny from her. Nathen cracked open his beer and drank. He imideatly shivered. The woman sipped her soup. She then opened a pack of American Spirits CIgarettes. Nathen stared at her. She noticed, then offered Nathen a cigarette. It was obvious she was spending the fifteen dollars they had given her. Danny didn’t mind. Nathen obviously did.
“You still got that fifteen bucks,” Nathen asked the woman.
The woman looked at Danny for an answer.
“I’m talking to you,” nathen said.
“Me? No. I bought all this shit with it,” she said matter of factly.
“Is there change?” Nathen asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
“If you are a good boy, you can have it,” Danny said.
“Yeah,” the woman agreed.
Danny drank from his bottle. The liquid was thick sweet and bubbly. Once past his tounge it seemed to push a button in his brain to turn down his perception of the cold. Nathen seemed to be drinking with a purpose. The woman put her soup down and with shaking hands cracked the top of her fourty. She drank some while making a dry heaving noise. She then put the bottle down, leaned over and allowed drool to pour on the pavement infront of her. Nathen and Danny watched this with amazement.
“Yup, it’s the good stuff,” she finaly said, then half burped, half puked.
“Are you alright?” danny asked accepting more of her weight as she leaned on him.
“How old are you guys?” She asked, then cackled.
“Seventeen...”
“Ish,” Nathen interupted Danny.
The woman cackled again, then reached for her soup but couldn’t reach it as she had leaned more on Danny. Danny handed it to her.
“Stay in school,” she said with a ridiculous grin and slurped more soup. “Jesus, so you were born like in 1980? Jesus.”
“We can take the Max train to the other liqour store,” Nathen said.
“Oh honey,” the woman protested. “lets go with this for a minute.” She then offered the soup to Danny. He couldn’t tell how old she was. Now that she seemed happy and smiley, she seemed much younger. Danny took the soup and sipped at it. He could smel lher beer on the rim of the cup. He handed it back. She seemed to be decending into a state of intoxication, the light in her eyes extinguished by the rain, beer and dry heaves.
“Oh, honey,” she said again for no reason.
Nathen seemed displeased. He drank nervously. Distantly they heard the rumbling of what sounded like a masive truck. Uncertain, Nathen and Danny looked around. The woman closed her eyes and smiled. Soon a dumptruck came rumbling down the cobled old town street. It drove into the parking lot they were sitting in and stopped. It dumped a load of sand into the middle of the lot then drove off. Another truck rumbled around a corner and dropped off a masive load of sand next to the first load. It too drove off.
“What the fuck was that,” Nathen asked.
“I don’t really know,” Danny said.
Nathen stood and walked over to the two mountains of sand. He stood and considered them for a moment, smoking his cigarette. He noticed a two traffic cones. He climbed each pile and deposited a cone on top of each.
“Thems is the biggest titties I ever saw,” he said, kicking the sand off his shoes.
The woman laughed and grabbed at Dannys arm.
“Hey guys, I have an idea,” She said. “lets go to Good Will.”
“Why?” Nathen asked.
“It’s on the way to the Liour store by the library,” she said.

Danny helped the woman to her feet. A long green school bus drove up and stopped next to thepiles of sand and men in orange jumper suits filed out. A sherif lined them up against the buss. The sight of the guns and the police hurried Danny, Nathen and the woman along their way. Out from under the bridge, the rain fell on their exposed heads again.
“What the fuck do you think was happening there?” Danny asked.
“Probably public service for inmates. They let them out to do work for the city or county. Cleaning up roads and shit. You know,” the woman said. Her walk was almost a forward fall.
They walked up the steps to the bridge. A man was leaning against the rail, nonchelaunt despitte the downpour. The river water was swollen and dark brown. Danny paused and watched it churn. The woman lightly tugged on his arm to get him moving again.
In the doorway of the X-ray people were slumbering out of the rain. At a stop light, Danny and Nathen drank from their fourties, then put all three bottles in Danny’s backpack.
“Aren’t we missing home economics?” the woman asked. Nathen ignored the comment.
Soon they came to a Good Will. Danny lingered by the display case. Nathen seemed facinated with a sofa for some reason. Out of th ecorner of his eye, Danny noticed the woman go into the bathroom. Danny asked to get a closer look at a battered guitar behind the counter. He played the few chords he knew. It seemed like a hardy instrument and Danny imagined himself playing it for money on the street. Danny noticed he was being watched by a security guard, which sort of pissed him off. He walked over to the men’s clothes and looked at a few army unifroms. His own jacket was soaked through and the thick green pollyester of the uniforms seemed like a better shield from the rain. He drapped it over his arm to buy it. The security guardapproached him.
“Sir, could you leave your backpack at the counter?”
“Why?”
“Sir, it’s store policy.”
“I didn’t steal anything,” Danny said, worried the man would take his beer.
“Sir, if you cant abide by the policy, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
While blushing, Danny took his backpack off and handed it to the clerk. Without looking at Danny, the clerk took his bag. The whole interacting made Danny feel stupid and young.
The woman appeared behind Danny and presented a large purse, “You might as well take my purse too.” The clerk took her bag and stowed it behind the counter. Danny blushed a little more when he realized the woman had no purse. The woman feigned interest in the jewelry in the case. Danny peered at the security guard with aprehension.
“You guys ready?” Nathen said, obviously thinking of his bottle of Vodka.
“Sure, lets get the hell out of here,” The woman said at the direction of the clerk who presented a purse and Dannys bag.
They walked away from the store in the rain for a while before Danny felt comfortable enough to ask, “you stole that purse?”
“Yeah, I stole a purse,” the woman said. Then she opened the purse and Danny saw it was full of books. Danny also noticed she was wearing different pants. A wave of admiration passed over Danny. The woman walked with new purpose.
They hobbled through the rain and puddles up Burnside. Nathen became ajgtated when they passed the street that led to the liquor store, but Danny trusted the woman’s new sence of purpose.
The entrance to Powell’s bocks had it’s regular assortment of political petitioneers, panhandlers and a few extra people hiding from the rain. It was a mess. They made their way through.
“Take these to that counter and sell them, they know me too well,” the woman said. With that she walked over to the magazines. Danny shrugged at took the purse full of books to the book buyer’s counter. The book buyer peered into each book and put them in a stack. A few of the books he looked long and hard at and checked something in a large well worn volume. After checking all of the books, he wrote a few things on a clip board, signed a check and handed it to Danny. Danny thanked him and walked towards the woman who apeared to be looking at a somewhat erotic comic book. As Danny handed her the check he noticed the amount, ‘172.75.’
“Jesus, you can pick ‘em,” Danny said.
“Oh, honey,” she said and turned towards the front door. “I was an English major.”
“Can we go to the liqour store?” Nathen asked.
Outside the weather somehow had gotten worse. The rain fell straight down in large drops. Traffic was stopped on Burnside.
“Where do you have a bank account?” the woman asked.
“US Bank,” Danny said. The woman took Dannys arm and they turnned back downtown towards the bank.

A man standing under the marque at Mary’s Club caught the woman’s eye. She politely shoved Danny back and went to speak to him. He seemed dubious to what the woman had to say. She offered him a cigarette, which Nathen noticed. Danny knew he’d have to get liqour in Nathen to get him back to his easy going ways.
“Let’s go,” the woman said. “We have an appointment.”
“Hey, I was wondering if we could get Nathen here a half pint before we go any further. He’s getting bitchey. His parents have him strung out on a lot of personality pills and it the liqour that really mellows him out,” Danny said. Nathen made his best puppy dog face.
“Come here,” the woman said, reaching out and grabbing Nathen’s arm. She led him into Mary’s club.
This was a big deal. Nathen was being led into Portland’s most notorious strip club for his first drink at a bar and he was only seventeen. Danny felt betrayed as he waited just down the street. He didn’t want to share the shelter of the marque with the man their lady friend had spoken to earlier. Pactiently, Danny endured the the driving rain for what seemed like an eternity. Traffic slowly backed up on the street in front of him. Danny peered into the rain to see where Broadway was meeting the back up of Burnside. Something had happened somewhere sending the city into grid lock.
Finaly Nathen and Danny apeared. Nathen was smiling like an idtiot. “I will someday be a bartender at strip club,” Nathen said. the woman handed him a cigarette. Aparently all was forgotten.
“What... what happened in there?” Danny asked with an idiotic grin.
“Oh, you know.” Nathen said.
“Actualy Nathen, I don’t know. Infact I probably wont know until 2001 when I turn 21, at which point the world will have ended and I will never know,” Danny said.
“I had me a Long Island. No one was dancing, but there was a naked chick sitting at the bar next tome,” Nathen said.
“Next to you?”
“Well, next to her,” Nathen said. “She knew the lady.”
The woman pulled Danny’s arm towards the bank. They kept walking.
“What’s a Long Island Taste like?”
“Like ice tea with gasoline in it. It was good. Cost me five bucks and three dollar tip,” Nathen said.
“Wow.”
“Best eight bucks I ever spent,” Nathen said, smiling behind his cigarette.
The idea of a naked woman just behind a door on a shitty cold wet day aroused Danny. Looking down on the woman on his arm, he felt like a man of the city.

An forced sence of nonchelaunce came over Danny as they waited in line at the Bank. He spoke too loud and tried to wipe some water off the womans face with his soaked sleve. “Where did you study English?”
She looked at him like he was an idiot. “Where did I study English? My GI father taught me in Vietnam. I went to Reed College here in town.”
“How did you end up on the street,” Danny asked.
“What?” the woman asked with a note of danger in her voice.
“I mean... how did you end up how you are living...” Danny stamered.
“Hanging out with you? Are you implying I’ve hit rock bottom or something? I guess I may have if I’m hanging out with you. What the fuck?” She was becomming agitated.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” Danny said.
“I think shes pretty cool,” Nathen said.
Danny quickly deflated.
“Just because I don’t have some beautiful middle class life in the West hills,” she began.
“We don’t live in the West hills,” Danny argued.
“Bull shit, you go to Lincoln High School. That’s allways been the rich bitch school,” she said.
“Not us. We’re from the East side, both of us,” Nathen added.
The woman pouted as Danny cashed the check. As they walked away from the teller window, the woman snatched the cash from Danny and stuffed it in her pocket. back outside in the rain they made their way back to Mary’s Club. Nathen looked hopefully at the door, but the woman had a brief interaction with the man waiting there. Danny also was watching the front door of the club.
The woman pulled them down an alley towards one of the smaller park blocks behind Marys. There was a closed sign on the women’s bathroom, but by reaching into the hole where the door handle had been, she managed to open the door. Little light made it through the cracked and dirty windows. There was trash and old blankets on the floor. The woman lit a candle sat on a toilet and unrolled from a piece of cloth a hypodermic needle, a vial and a spoon.
The sight of this made Nathen spook, “I’ll wait outside,” he siad, taking a fourty from Danny’s back pack and leaving.
“Did you just buy that from the dude at Mary’s?” Danny asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I saw those first editions at the thrift store yesterday but I couldn’t get them alone. That Ferlingehtti was cool. I would have liked to keep it. It’s unethical to live well and long as a poet. When will those fuckers die...” She tapped about two tic tacs worth of powder into the spoon. She then squirted a fluid into the spoon and boiled it over the candle. She tore a tiny piece of cloth off the rag the needle had been rolled in and put it in the spoon. She filled the needle and tapped a few bubbled out of it. She then put the needle in her breast pocket and took off her pants. She put her leg up on what had been a toilet paper dispencer to expose the back of her knee cap. A tracked an purple vein appeared in the dacing candle light. She poked it with the needle and pushed the plunger in. Relaxing back on the toilet, she let her leg fall heavily to the floor. Danny watched all of this with amazement.
“Honey, you should snort it,” she said. Danny figured he knew why.
Danny had done cocaine before and rekoned the dosage was lower with Heroin. He took a key from his pocket and dug out a tiny mound form the bag and snorted it. He waited in silence as the rain rolled over the roof of the old bathroom.
For a while nothing happened though it was nice to be indoors. The candle made the bathroom homey. The woman melted more and more down onto the toilet. The sound of her occasional sniffle showed Danny she was stil lalive. Danny slid to the floor next to her. She loomed over him like the Queen of Portland, her gray legs wide open to soggy city. Maybe she had just given birth to it. Danny was concious not to stare, though he knew she couldn’t care. Dannys nose started to run profusely. A gentle euphoria displaced the iritated euphoria of the adderol he had taken earlier. His shoulders relaxed and despite the weight of hours worth of rain on his body. He felt warm.
Soon Nathen ducked his head back in the bathroom. “Guys, I think something is happening. Cops were driving over the sidewalks to get by the traffic. Maybe we should get a bottle of vodka and go check it out,” he said, then noticed the position Danny and woman were in. He ducked back out.
“Yeah, lets go see,” Danny said. The woman looked at him from what seemed like a thousand miles away.
“Ok, but you’re driving,” she said.

Danny had to nearly drag the Woman along now. Nathen walked nervously ahead. They walked along the stopped traffic on Burnside back towards the river. When they were within a few blocks they could see the span of the bridge was open. Walking up the ramp to the span they saw the river had risen even more in the few hours they had spent away. It was nearly to the top of the sea walls. They walked down the steps to where the trucks had deposited the sand earlier. The once empty parking lot was a buzz with activity. The prisoners were shoveling sandbags full and people were taking them away as fast as they were set down. Front avenue was baren of cars and filling with brown watter.
Danny looked at Nathen and shrugged. He took off his coat and put it over the woman, led her to a corner to sit, and walked over to the sand pile and began to fill bags. His help was quickly appreciated. Aparently the people taking the bags away were local buisness owners. Danny worked for what didn’t seem like lonng at all. the only way he could gauge the passing of time was the growing blisters on his hands.
It was noticed that he wasn’t a prisoner by a dumptruck opperator. “Hey kid, get in,” he said. Danny hopped up into the cab of the truck. The truck drove through the water on Front avenue to the water front park. The big wheels on the truck tore the grass beneith the truck as it drove right up to the sea wall. They came to an open concrete space which was a music venue in the summer and stopped. There a more prisoners were filling sandbags at a frantic pace and other prisoners were stacking them right next to the sea wall. From the height of the truck Danny saw the river was higher than the ground they were standing on and the sand bags were holding it back.
Filling sand bags was harder here as there was no proteciton from the rain. The wood on the shovel dug mor easily into his hands. A prisoner turned to him and said, “Man the other day I said I wish I could feel the rain on my face. Be careful what you wish for, huh?” Danny smiled.
Danny stretched the sleves of his shirt down over his hands wchich were bleeding to keep shoveling. As he handed a sand bag to a man throwing them onto the back of an empty dump truck, the man noticed his hands were bleeding and switched spots with him. Now Danny was catching sand bags being thrown onto the truck. Without warning the driver would drive away to a weak spot on the sea wall and Danny would throw the bags out to people stacking them on the wall. Huge pumps collected water as it seeped through the imperfect wall and shot it back into the river.
Danny imagined the water breaching the wall and washing them all down stream with the tree trunks, desbris and occasioanl car that floated past them. A roar went over the workers when the news passed that the river had crested up stream in Oregon City. The sandbags they filled now were being trucked back to under the bridge where the buisness owners grabbed them up. Danny felt a weird power above them all on the back of the dump truck, rain water pouring over his face and filling his shoes.
Noticing a line forming infront of a bar-b-que, Danny wandered over to it. A Red Cross worker put a dry wool blanket over him and told him, “good work.” Danny accepted a burger on a paper plate and walked over to where the woman was sitting against the side of a building. He wrapped his blanket aorund the two of them and through a powerful neasia, forced down some food. It was night now, but the light set up by the city and red cross iluminated the whole area. Someone comondeered a bull horn and walked up and down saying, “we saved the city.”
Danny recouperated sitting next to the woman for quite some time. He then explored the area. There were some celbraitions in the near by bars, red cups of dark beer were being passed out. Danny sipped his and watched a man get interviewed by a local news station. He said the worst might be over but the walls needed to be watched all night. Danny nodded in solem agreement. He found a damp blanket that another person had discarded and returned to the woman. They curled up tight against the humidity.
In the morning under the tent of blankets,the woman fixed again. Danny snorted a tiny bit of heroin. He bought a newspaper from a box exposed to the rain. THe drops hit his damp shoulders and chilled him. The neadline read, “The Great Flood of 96.”
“What’s your name, honey?” Danny asked the woman, ushing her phrase.
“Oh honey, to you? It’s Honey.”
While buying the two of them soup at a coffee shop at the Skidmore building, Danny filled out an application to work. The owner read it and told him he started the next day. Danny was done with school.

the end