"My name's Rich, and Jon turned me into an alcoholic."
In unison: "WE LOVE YOU RICH!"
This morning, it's reveille at 0630-- up and out we go. I might be on vacation, but Big Murph has to go back to work today. I'm up early anyway, thanks to the 3-hour lag in my body, so I'm going to work with him. As we're getting ready to go, I notice that the Today show (featuring OU alum Matt Lauer) is shown on tape delay out here. It's kind of weird how they tape it, then show it 3 hours later and pass it off as live from NYC. I tag along to the Rose Garden, home of the Portland Trail Blazers, bad boys of the NBA. For a time, the natives were referring to them as the Portland Jail Blazers, since many of their players seemed to end up on the wrong side of the iron bars. Murph sells season tickets for these thugs. Thanks to the lockout (basically, the greediest bastards in the world want a bigger share of the pie from the second-greediest bastards in the world), there isn't much action in the Blazer sales office lately. Nobody wants to buy tickets because they're not even sure there's gonna be a season. Plus, it's hard to convince rich people that they should spend a ton of money for the chance to see millionaire crybaby basketball punks try to dunk on and mouth off to each other 41 times a year.
As I'm sitting in Murph's cubicle, reading The Oregonian, I start to wonder about Rich, who's supposed to be meeting me here today. Just as that thought passes through my tiny brain, as though it were scripted in some movie, the secretary pages Murph to tell him he has a visitor. That's good karma. Rich was in town to visit his brother at U of O and his flight doesn't head back to L.A. until later tonight, so we've got the whole day to spend together. We embark on an unguided walking tour of P-town. As we head out through the Rose Quarter complex, I remember that last year when I was here, KISS was in town and there were gigantic, inflatable KISS band members on this very lawn. If you thought Gene Simmons was ugly at normal size, you should see him at 80 ft. tall.
There's a giant grain elevator that sits right on the Willamette River, blocking the Rose Garden's view of downtown. Apparently, Paul Allen (multi-billionaire Microsoft co-founder, Blazers owner, and world's leading consumer of concession-stand nachos) has offered the owner a whopping sum of money for the place so he could tear it down, but the owner refused. As we walk across the Steel Bridge, Rich offers a solution: hire a painter to paint a mural of downtown on the grain elevators. That way, a painter gets some work, the guy keeps his business from being sold and destroyed, and the greedy Blazers owner can get his precious little view. I think the grain elevator guy should paint a giant Mickey Mouse flipping the bird toward the Rose Garden, much like the "Hey Iran!" t-shirts from the late 70's.
Walking through downtown, I tell Rich my thoughts about how similar Portland is to Cincinnati. He agrees. We head to the Justice Center, because apparently, they have some really cool fountain that Rich's brother (an architecture student at U of O) told him to see. As we step through the metal detectors, I see water running down the huge marble wall inside the Justice Center. Big deal, it looks like the roof leaks. But as we get closer, it looks like the water is running over a louvered surface like an old washboard or something. Standing directly in front of it, we saunter around like 2 high school kids plotting to steal condoms from the pharmacy. When we're sure nobody's looking (except the security cameras which almost assuredly caught us on tape), we both touch it. It's not a louvered surface at all. The water is let out in such a way that it just looks like a textured surface. It's just water running down a marble wall. Pretty cool. We leave to continue our adventure. Above the street rests a huge billboard, touting the goodness of Tandem bars, an ice cream bar that's half ice cream sandwich, half Klondike bar. Since we've both been seeing these ubiquitous billboards all over town, we decide we'll give in to their huge advertising budget and we set out to find us a coupla them ice cream samiches. Easier said than done... After about 1½ hours of walking around and checking every convenience store we could find, we still haven't tasted the delectable delights of the Tandem bar. By this time, it's turned into a full-fledged manhunt worthy of Tommy Lee Jones and we decide that these Tandem bars better be the best friggin' ice cream bars in the world, or we're gonna strangle an innocent stranger. At this point, we're like the Washington Generals of ice cream bars.
We finally score the booty at a local 7-11. The Tandem bar-- few things in life have been more hyped, more highly anticipated, then failed to deliver as promised. It was even a bigger letdown than the final episode of Seinfeld. Rich takes one bite and says, "This sucks. It tastes like every other ice cream bar I've ever had." Jon mutters, "I feel violated."
The Tandem bar incident took the wind out of our sails. We had high hopes for the day, many things we would like to have accomplished. Somehow, all those plans got scrapped in favor of heading to NW 23rd St. and drinking at microbreweries. We end up at some place where Rich orders a shot of Campari. Have you ever tried this rhinocerous urine? It looks like watered down cherry Kool-Aid and tastes like a liquid fart. It's bitter and acrid and I had to have another pint of Ruby just to get rid of the taste. Worse yet, I carried on like a toddler who was just told to finish his lima beans while Rich drank it stone-faced, with a twist of lime. Some weird guy at a neighboring outdoor table strikes up a conversation (if you can call it that) with Rich when he overhears Rich telling me about the movie High Art. It went something like:
Rich (being interrupted by weird guy in middle of story): "... and then they-- huh?"
Weird Guy: "I said, are you talking about that movie High Art?"
Rich: "Yeah."
Weird Guy: "Yeah, I want to see that movie."
Rich: "Oh. It's good."
Weird Guy goes back to eating his pizza and doesn't say another word the whole time.
You thought Starbucks was on every corner in every city of the United States? Try walking around the Pacific Northwest. Here, they're virtually stacked on top of each other. At one intersection, we come to a Starbucks (evil corporate empire that it is) which is literally adjacent to a Seattle's Best Coffee. Rich said on his tour of Seattle they had certain things they were supposed to do. One of them was to walk into a Starbucks and ask, "Is this Seattle's Best Coffee?" forcing them to say no. I'd say between Microsoft, Nike, and Starbucks, they've pretty much got this little corner of the U.S. boxed up.
Murph pulls up to the curb where we're standing and we hop into the Explorer. That's gotta look like a drug deal (or something of the like) to bystanders. Now we're off to Portland's famous Rose Garden. As we wind our way up into the hills, I can see why Portland is called the Rose City. Beautiful roses line the streets all around us. The gardens are well-maintained and striking in their beauty and simplicity. We park the car and get out to walk around the Rose Gardens. There are breathtaking views of downtown in all directions. I'm reminded a bit of the feeling I had at the Getty Center (see L.A. trip report), although this doesn't really compare with the Getty. Walking around up here though, you feel as though somebody's gonna crown you King at any moment and say something like, "You are master of all you survey, my lord." I half expected a choir of angels to start singing. It's like some fantasyland, like Alice in Wonderland.
On the level below us, some people are doing a photo shoot for a catalog's Fall wardrobe. Four anorexic models (2 male, 2 female) are changing into and out of sweaters and having their pictures taken by an obnoxious photographer ("That's it. Work it! Work it! Who loves ya, babe? Hate the lens! Hate the camera!") As we're viewing the silliness, a renegade dog rockets past us in a blur of fur and saliva. It seems there's another dog present at the photo shoot, to be included in some catalog pictures and though the photographer doesn't see it coming, there's about to be a turf war in the Rose Garden. Right on cue, the blazing dog erupts into a fit of barking and hysterics. Take a picture of that, Sven.
Rich is floating around the rose beds on a cloud of Campari, not paying attention to what's going on around him, and shoving his nostrils into every unsuspecting rose petal nearby. Each color brings a new favorite scent. "This is the best one! No-- THIS is the best one! No wait-- THIS is the best one!" So here we are, two mildly innebriated fools and a human rose stem, traipsing around the city's pride and joy, declaring our love for the roses. We finally all agree that Salmon edges out Lavender for the best scent.
Next it's on to the Vietnam Memorial. As we walk down the walkway toward the circular monument, we notice a couple half-naked sunbathers with a boombox that seem totally out of place near this serene memorial. This solemn place brings a somber tone to our conversation as we reflect on the little factoids that are compared and contrasted on the wall's inscriptions. Murph tells us a story about Lt. General George Casey, who was a friend of his dad's from the war. General Casey had asked Mr. Murphy to be his aide on a 2nd tour of duty in 'Nam. Murph's older brother had just been born, and Mr. Murphy wanted to spend some time with his new son and his wife, so he declined the offer. General Casey and his aide were killed a few weeks later in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. And that's how Murph got his middle name: Casey. Another one of his dad's friends from Vietnam was watching the movie Forrest Gump when all of a sudden, he realized the footage of Forrest's awards ceremony was the actual footage from his own ceremony in which he was awarded a Silver Star. The trail winds around and ends up in the Solace Garden, which at this moment, on a sunny summer evening in Portland, seems like just that-- truly a peaceful place. The most striking thing about this circular monument is the histogram of names that's shaped like a bell curve, of all the people from Oregon who died during each year of the Vietnam War.
On the ride home, we're sitting at a stoplight when a pseudo-alternative-punk-looking teenage boy crosses the street in front of us. Replete with all the tools of rebellion: dyed green mohawk, shredded baggy jeans, studded leather jacket on top of requisite black concert T-shirt, and many tattoos and piercings, this kid has a look on his face that says, "I'm pissed off at the world, but I'm not sure why." Campari Rich, who's sitting in the back seat, notices the kid and says aloud, "Articulate your dissension." Whether he's debating the thermal efficiency of Gore-Tex (see L.A. trip report) or providing a voice for angst-ridden teens everywhere, few things in life are more fun than being in Rich's presence when he's been drinking.
We arrive back at Casa de Slivs with dinner on our mind. Murph and I decide to hold out for later, but Rich wants something now because his plane leaves in a couple hours. So he heads around the corner to an Italian place to pick up some dinner and bring it back to Kev's place. An hour or so later, our collective thought is, "Where's Rich?" He made it sound like he was gonna grab some takeout and come back to eat it, then he took off like Magellan. Finally he shows up with dinner in hand. After dinner, it's time for Rich to get to the airport and return to being a freak magnet in Southern California.
Tonight Murph, Trish, and I go to some bar to see a singer/songwriter named Mark Alan. He's a local favorite and a regular performer at this place. Trish actually knows the guy because she's done some work with him through United Way for local charities. He's very unassuming when we meet him, and he's running a bit late getting set up, so we don't talk to him very long. We're surrounded by a bunch of faux-angst-ridden, clove-smoking, Green Day bassist wannabes who are wallowing in their coolness. Their attitude screams, "Nobody understands me and I like it that way!" I'm pretty sure these are the people Ben Folds was talking about when he wrote the song "Underground." Trrrrrrrsh's roommate Katherine (newly in love and quite peppy about it) shows up and joins us. The conversation centers around soulmates, relationships, and true love, spurred by Katherine, queen of the romance novel readers. You think I'm kidding, but she tears through those things like Marge Schott tears through a carton of Pall Malls. I decide to give the Pear Cider a try, since I've never had one and it's on tap here. Trish loves it. It tastes like a Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler that's gone flat. Hardly worth the $3.50. Mark Alan takes the stage and transforms into the consummate professional entertainer, in complete command of his skills and the crowd. He's got a James Taylorish voice and sound, and very good original songs. I didn't expect him to belt out songs the way he did, after speaking with him before the show. Quality entertainment, to say the least. I regret not buying his CD while I had the chance.