The sky lit up, the people replied, “Aaaahhh!!!”. Sally and I hurried beneath, past all of it frantically in search of a toilet! The Portland waterfront was just a huge, harried bustle Independence Day. What, with the vendor markets, and the pressure-valves called cops, or “security” milling around and about, and the distant reverberations coming from the 38th Annual Waterfront Blues Festival, the whole bolt of the surrounding opulent tapestry coalesced into this milling, undulating miracle of passive pageantry. The line of the river undulated too, in long, slow shivering celebration; and up in another Cassiopeia of gunpowder and bravado, over 100,000, over the late dusk’s Independence Day, the rattling bursts and rockets blessing were imprinted upon the sky. The greatest miracle that just may have occurred that evening was the absence of a violent physical confrontation each and every moment (Thank God!). There was of course the tension present in large crowds, but overwhelmingly, people were enjoying themselves immensely! It was a grand civic demonstration!
I, of course, was a cheapskate I must admit. I say this because if I had only and simply purchased an admittance ticket or two to the Blues Festival, the short, unfortunate misadventure I am about to relate would not have occurred. Put another way, my poor young daughter may not have suffered the “torments of the damned” if I’d only indulged a bit more in community-guided consumption. Of course, the 38th Annual Waterfront Blues Festival is the Oregon Food Banks number one most successful annual fund raiser, so there was already the incubus upon me for not giving for that reason alone. In my defense, I boycotted it for the exorbitant and exclusive price it imposed on the public for admission. I support the festival, not the professional organizers managing it and pricing working families out. I support the festival, not ticket prices that have jumped from $3 to $20 in 2 years, with no noticeable difference in anything. Without going more into this very petty dispute I have with the 38th Annual Waterfront Blues Festival, for me to have purchased admission tickets that doleful eve was not our fate.
There we were, wending savagely through the swarming, seething fun-seeking mob, scouring the mass with a squinted eye for a free loo! Legend had it that these magical, treasured oases of bladder evacuating relief existed. They were plopped arbitrarily in secret locations scattered throughout the westside waterfront; Tom McCall rolled in his grave. This wasn’t the humble 4th of July weekend galas I remembered in Woodland Waters campground dreams, or small town Almont Michigan fairground fireworks displays, no, even at those intimate events there were many San-O-Lets to be found. I see in my mind rows of gleaming inviting sanitation-green & white sentries of intestinal security, blessed bladders of sweet justice.
Our eyes swept across the concrete apron surrounding the Salmon Street Fountain, behind us Hawthorne Street’s bridge overpass flapped and echoed, its’ girders and beams the stuff of shadows, always moving, groaning, stretching. We turned desperately, hurrying back in the direction we’d come, and around again…
“Dad! I think I see it!”
Further south, beyond Salmon Street, at the southern end of long sprawling Tom McCall Park, stood the legendary loo! It stood like a silver sphinx, twinkling with day-glo stars and moons scrawled with chalk. All the twinkling in the universe was concentrated upon this living aluminum glimmer, and the people worshipped, and it was savage, I turned away. My eyes followed the people leading into a long 1/4 mile line south toward the Sellwood Bridge and the South Park Blocks, lost into the vapor of the night, all of its supplicants nodded and waved.
“Dad, there’s so many people!”
I turned my head sharply west, scowling up some street, I didn’t know which, Alder?! No! That was north, bah!! Let’s just say Market, westward ho we tramped up against it, the hill and Sally’s intestines both. Against gravity, against grace and dignity, all due to my refusal to pay $20 extra bucks!
In the light-dappled air of the night, senors and senoras sold tacos, churros, elotes, chapulines, chicharrones, all out of small bike carts with backyard grills and Coleman coolers. Other vendors rose up through the smoke and clatter, rose up to tempt the passers-by with every kind of candied sweet treat, every kind of sausages in rolls, Chinese noodles, deep fried wads of granulated tissue, reconstituted, regurgitated, SOLD! Racks of pork ribs slathered in vinegar gravy, and great pluming banners of smoke above, as if the roasted mutton, lamb and beef existed as an apparition just upon the air over us.
We couldn’t enjoy any of it, dammit! Another glimmering cascade emerged across the air over the river, but I sure as hell didn’t see it!! We were dashing like maniacs up Market Street, where we dashed right onto 3rd and upon an open convenience store. In we hurried, my hopes of convincing the convenience store clerk to allow my daughter to use the restroom were half-hearted. Nonetheless, I had to make the damned futile effort! Portland at night, in its’ tiny downtown, always feels like old Portland (or what I imagined of it) until you enter an establishment and have an interaction with someone.
“Hey man, look, my daughter really is having a helluva time, she has to really use the toilet, you know, please, can you help her out?”
“Nope”
“Really, it will….”
“There’s no restrooms for the public.”
“Thanks man, FER NUTHIN!!”
I spit this at him from the hazards of 3rd Avenue as we continued south on 3rd, dodging the perceptibly thinner throngs and hucksters.
“Daaaaad, my stomach!”, Sally lamented, holding her cramping gut, the digestive juice thick with carnival fare and a pageantry of pastry previously consumed. Not to mention, the whole smorgasbord was mixed vigorously on the lurching, lilting six mile # 17 bus ride to Tom McCall’s memorial park.
“I know honey, I’m sorry! Dammit Sally, why didn’t you go at home?!”
“I didn’t have to!!”
“Yea yea, I know….” I muttered, turning my head back and forth frantically, searching for some sign of human contact and hope!
“Damn! I’m such a fool, I should’ve been better prepared!!” I thought as we rapidly marched in silence, the new storefronts flashing in the security lights, the old storefronts twinkling forlorn in the gleam of the new. All of the narrow streets slouched beneath their weight of twenty years gloss, gladness and loss. Such a rapid and vapid economic loop-dee-loo, and in this splendid night, in these narrow, always 1/2 wet streets, it felt like the whole world of the city and my heart was collapsing; oh my poor daughter!! For I knew her pain, I’d had the same; oh, I’d wish that pain on no one, not even a worst enemy!
“People here are beasts! They never used to be like this!” I was cursing to myself.
“DAaaAD….!!”
“I know I know….”
The strange Caribbean guys selling stones and skulls and fruit couldn’t help her; dark-eyed Guatemalan Indians with serapes and small carts of all the earth’s secrets inside couldn’t either; or the middle-aged Mexicans smiling over cd’s, Coca-cola, trendy liver-stuffed toys, tamales. Only brick and mortar, or….
CARTS!!!
The food carts offered a glimmer of hope! And it was a favorite of mine coincidentally, Lebanese food on SW 6th & Main, hot damn!! And those guys, sweating and smiling over their geometrically impossible shawarmas and gyros, sweat flying over the sandwiches and fries, “Sure man, sure! In back man, back there!!”
Saved, and our saviors were not the prophets, or the powerful, or even the moralists or materialists, but the human greasy heart of another man sharing in suffering and joy next to us, in the crowd, on the street, through the food cart window! Saved!! Not an elected official, or an imposed dictator, or king, queen, prime minister…. just another guy like me, slinging his woebegone mind away in that slurry of time we call life. Earning bread, breaking it, making love, breaking that too, earning families and histories, suffering the despair of bliss. Love must eventually lose in order for life and love to inevitably renew.
Little Sally was overjoyed, as was I, her lackaday dad. The big night was alive with smoke in the air and conversations all around. Distant sirens wailed a wistful evocation, with the bursts from Thunderbombs and Flashcrackers punctuating the summer’s song. And like a wide span of amphitheater above it all was lofted the rumbling incantations of the Infinite 38th Annual Waterfront Blues Fest, so fine!! It towered even above the rockets and mortars launched from the banks of the Willamette; three tall stages blues performers swayed from, with international acclaim, and all for a good cause, how could it not reign supreme?!
And here I was, next to a Porta-Potty back behind a Lebanese food cart in southwest Portland, downtown, feeling so relieved I broke down and bought a big Coke for Sally and I to share as we trudged back to meet our family. At least it was downhill.