TO the first responders,
We think we have a plan and I’m sorry that you’ve become a part of it.
I’m trying not to think about you too much when I write this. I’ve watched enough crime dramas in my day to know that some calls stay with the first responders, but I am telling you now that we should not be one of them.
But someone needs to understand why, this I know. There will be curiosity, for sure, and there will be plenty of speculation. I just realized the Amtrak runs on the bottom deck of the bridge, so I’m betting we’re going to put a damper on some passengers’ commute up to Seattle today. If they’re lucky, they can get their digital cameras out in time and permanently capture our macabre demise for their social networking pages. I’m sure the news stations with their instant live satellite link-ups are lining up on the adjacent bridges now, maybe the esplanade, ready to package our deaths into quick 30 second teasers so Mr. Smith in the West Hills will continue to tune in long after that commercial for a Lexus has faded off his screen. They can hem and haw, and mumble comments about us being selfish and pathetic wastes of life while yelling into the kitchen at their wives, asking them why the roasts are not on the table yet. After all, it is six o’clock.
I’m sorry that kids may see us; that I am actually sorry for. I’m even sorrier that those who might see will see us sandwiched between their favorite TV shows tonight or on the front pages of their emails when they go to load those.
Our deaths are what they are, but this note is not only an explanation of why, but a statement.
The best thing that ever happened to me was meeting Dana three years ago. Funny thing is, meeting me is definitely the worst thing that happened to her. She didn’t so much as take an Aspirin before she met me. And I know you will see my file eventually. I’ll spoil the surprise now: drugs have been a problem for me for a long time. Blame it on whatever. You can feel free to blame all the usual sources, because I’m all blamed out. I stopped long ago.
Go ahead and judge what Dana and I had. She was 18 when we met in a college sculpture class, and I was 26. Dana was an art history and visual arts double major and I was an English Lit major, specializing in Renaissance literature. She studied the intricacies of modern art, neoclassicism, baroque and realism. I just sat around reading the filthier of the Earl of Rochester’s poems out loud near the Pizzicato pizza place at Portland State University. Dana wanted to be a curator at the art museum. I just wanted to tick off an elective and make something practical in the class, like a pipe to smoke out of. Those dreams are so large and far away now.
I knew from the moment I met her we’d be entangled, enmeshed forever. She was so strong, but so preciously consumed with me. I was full blown into some pretty bad shit by then, but she didn’t care. She stood by me and eventually got sucked down with me. That’s the greatest mistake I’ve made—letting her get involved in all of this. She wants me to let you know, though, that this is ultimately her choice, that she’s doing this to escape the hell we’ve gone to together, but also because she’d do anything for me. She says she loves me.
And, you know, I believe her. I’ve had a lot of people tell me they love me before, but she’s the first that really made me believe it. She stuck around. I didn’t really notice the fact that I didn’t understand love until I met her. Love is holding your shaking lover tight during the worst of the withdrawals. Love is feeding your best friend the last bit of food you have and going to bed hungry instead of letting her. Love is hitting rock bottom, scraping the bottom of the barrel to get your hands on your drug, but not letting your soul mate sell her body to make an easy score. We all have our own definitions of love. That is love in our sick and twisted little world and I know it’s more pure than any other version of it.
We moved into an apartment at the Yards down across from Union Station after we dated for a year. Dana was still going to school full-time, and I was going to school and working as a line cook at Jake’s Grill. That’s about the time we got really messed up. We both started hanging around with a rough group there. Some were musicians in the scene, others were writers, and some were artists like Dana. Everyone fed each other drugs and we all sat in each other’s company, pretending we were there for reasons besides the drugs. We tried to pretend we were a community of artists feeding off each other’s chaotic energy. We had to be fucked up for our art. But when we got evicted from the apartment for the drugs the landlord saw through the window when they were painting the exterior, I was not surprised when none of those friends came looking for us or returned our calls.
Dana’s mom, Deidre, let us move in with her for a while, but that’s because she clearly didn’t know what was going on. It took a year for her to finally kick us both to the curb. It took me losing my job for getting caught doing drugs and not getting a new one. It took Dana failing out of Portland State. It took her mom constantly walking in on us doing drugs, huddled in the corner of her daughter’s bedroom, on the floor. It took Deidre reaching into her jewelry box for a family heirloom that we had pawned long ago. The final nail came when the police showed up because someone recognized Dana stealing clothes on a surveillance video at some random teeny-bopper mall clothing store. Maybe it was someone Dana knew from high school that was working there. Deidre lied, said we weren’t living there, and that we were living on the streets. When we returned from scoring that night, all our shit was in the streets.
When we first came out here, we came to the Steel Bridge. There are many other bridges here that people rather famously sleep under: Burnside, Broadway, Hawthorne, plus the countless overpasses on the east side by I-84. We chose the Steel because just a couple months before some runaway girl was stabbed and set on fire under that bridge. We had heard about it on the local news. We knew very few of us would be sleeping under it anytime soon. When you are in this position, sometimes the safest option is the most dangerous.
The first fall we were out there we had no idea what the hell we were doing. If it weren’t for the fact that we slept huddled together, we would have frozen long ago. It took us too long to figure out where the warm spots in the city are (air vents in general or ducts outside of public swimming pools). It took us way too long to figure out how to stay dry during the constant rainstorms at night. It took us way too long to figure out the intricacies of homelessness. It’s not really something you’re taught in any book. No one tells you how lonely these streets really are and how isolating it is to be out here. You sit in the middle of Pioneer Courthouse Square with a coffee cup, trying to collect change, trying to get the attention of every single businessman stopping at a burrito cart for lunch. You try signs like “I’ll bet you $1 you will read this sign” or “family kidnapped by ninjas—need change for karate lessons” to get any and all attention you can. You not only become invisible, a ghost, nonexistent, you become a nuisance and an inconvenience. After spending eight or more hours being ignored by thousands of people, you start to relish the moments the cops come by to tell you to move along. At least they recognize that you breathe. I can’t imagine how lonely it would be out here without Dana. We can at least validate each other’s existence.
On Thanksgiving we were in a cattle line at dinner at the mission when Dana about dropped her tray. One of the volunteers behind the counter dishing up the cranberry sauce was her mother’s neighbor, Mrs. Perry. A week later Mrs. Perry was back serving food and this time she brought a friend, Deidre. I sat alone, at a back table, watching the two of them stage an intervention with her near the plate return. I knew Deidre was proposing to take her back in and spend all the money in the world to get her clean, under one condition: she never speak to me again. I knew she’d have to leave me eventually. I told her good luck and goodbye, half hoping she wouldn’t remember my name when she closed her mother’s car door behind her.
A week or so later, she was back under the bridge with me. This time she greeted me with open arms that were stitched together and bandaged. I asked her what had happened. She told me it had been too hard, but refused to tell me what “it” was, so she stole a carving knife and barricaded herself in her mother’s bathroom. When the police finally got her out, the grout in the tub was already soaked in blood. I told her to never do that again unless she gave me the choice to come with her. Once she was discharged she told her mother she was coming back to me. She told me her mother warned her that sometimes if you close a door behind you, it stays shut.
The two of us tried to get into a new experimental maintenance program shortly after Dana came back out here. First we were told we were denied because we hadn’t been “addicted long enough”. When we re-filed six months later we were told we “weren’t addicted enough”. We re-filed again once our habit doubled, and we were told they wouldn’t take couples because it could be “disruptive” to our treatment. When the program went tits up due to some city budget cuts, we weren’t surprised but it still hurt that our one chance was finally gone. The night we found out the program had been cut, I got a bad batch and nodded out. Thankfully, Dana got me some help from the mission in time. When I came to, I was in Providence’s E.R., puking up charcoal into a pan, and being stabbed with adrenaline, which gave me the worst fucking series of feelings in the world. Within six hours we were back under the Steel.
Dana and I are up to about a $200 a day habit each now. Neither of us ever saw that coming, but I have to give addiction some credit. I can talk anyone out of some change now, a skill I would have never even thought I could have five years ago. I may not have gotten my degree, but drugs have given me a better education and skill set than that major ever could have. Dana can steal anything from anywhere and resell it now, something she would have never picked up in the halls of PSU. We are the epitome of street smarts. Well, we were for a while. We can’t keep this up anymore. Too much is stacked against us now.
I wanted foolishly to believe that our pain could be something useful, something we could use to channel ourselves and to inspire ourselves. Maybe strengthen ourselves as artists. But as we sit here in our final hours I know that our pain was nothing more than what it really was. We placed our hope in our pain and that’s where we went wrong.
Luckily, on Wednesday Dana and I managed to win the lottery for beds at the mission and I’m so glad we did. We showered for the first time in eight days and got a good four hours of sleep. In the morning, as they prepared to kick us out, I told Dana to change into some of the clothes we had stolen the day before and to pick me out an outfit as well. I told her to ditch the rest. I had a surprise for her. We weren’t going to be reselling or panhandling today.
Yesterday, after we changed, I took her to the steps of the art museum. She stared blankly, right through the building, until I produced the admission and told her that we were going to spend the whole day at the museum. When we first walked in and paid, it felt strange. No one shot us sideways glances or tried to throw us out. It felt so bizarre to almost feel normal. We were fooling them all. If only they knew that we were the same people they refused to give the pennies they’d never use to. Seeing the smile on her face the whole day was worth all the hoops I had to jump through to get and not blow that money on more drugs. Later that afternoon we stole gourmet bread and cheese from a market in Northwest and climbed a fire escape onto the top of an old building in the Pearl District. We watched all the lights in the city come on and then watched many of them turn off. We did drugs for the last time, ate like kings and hoped the sun would never come up. As the sky went from black to lavender, Dana turned to me and said that things would never be this good again. She told me it was time.
I think we’ve decided on an old-fashioned public hanging. Yeah, I think that’s what we’ll do. Sure, this isn’t medieval England, or even the early days of Oregon’s history of small town frontier justice. But that’s the problem with this city—it’s not a new frontier. It’s old, stale, grey, painful, wet and dismal. It’s a mess all right, and these streets and small spaces under these bridges are the new Wild West. The Steel Bridge shall be our gallows. Dana and I will go together on the Steel Bridge.
Everyone in Portland that walks out to these bridges and never comes home jumps to the icy cold reality of the Willamette River below. These bridges are meant to connect the city, connect us to each other. East to West. But so many of us can only see them for their other functions. They separate two types of people—those that are free to cross on the top deck and those that sleep below the bottom one. They are also a fantastic way to encapsulate a failing life, to create a metaphor through one single action. Start out on top and fall so quick and fast, until you sink so far below, never to be found again. Well, that’s too easy. If Dana and I did that, with no friends or family left to care or check up on us, we’d sink to the bottom of the river for months, and when we’d resurface we’d be just our shells, our skeletons. Like I said, I’ve seen all these crime shows before. You’d treat us like bones, testing us, molding us, and scraping us for clues. And when you got sick of us you’d call us John and Jane Doe, and bury us in a numbered lot in a county cemetery. Well, we have names and they are Pat and Dana.
Yes, we are making a statement, albeit a dramatic one. Yes, I want you to see me as I twist in the wind with my fiancée from this homemade double noose from this guard rail. When we jump today we won’t hit the water and be swept away. Take a real good look, Portland. I want you all to look. Remember the backpack I was wearing with this note in it. Remember the holes in our shoes and the dirt on our hands. Remember my face, the sick way my head was contorted, and rope burns along our necks. Look hard and commit us to your memory. I hope we sear a spot deep in your brain. I want you to look, just not you, you poor bastard that gets stuck with the task of cutting us down. You’ve suffered enough.
- Pat and Dana
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Walker was born in England, and lived on the island of Crete, Greece, before settling in Portland, Oregon. She spent almost eight years in Vancouver, BC pretending to be Canadian, before recently returning to Portland. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in print or on the web at Gawker.com, The Los Angeles Review, The Tyee, This Magazine, Big Truths, and The Vancouver Observer. In 2012 her nonfiction was shortlisted for the Event Magazine nonfiction contest.
LF #018 © Emily Walker. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, June 2012.
