Today might have been one of the best of my long, eccentric, start and stop teaching career. Writing from the heart with first period. Saving the world with second period. Posting reviews on Rollingstone.com with third. Pizza and reporting with fourth. Then the Friday Lunch Jam opne mic: rock, folk, poetry, rawk, Japanese ballads, emo, thrash metal, indie angst, GLORIA, and....a....rave.

Check out it out.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NHSFridayLunchJam#p/u/9/Iqp8EVLWlnw

And I get paid to do this?

A 91-year old woman disappeared from my neighborhood in January. The never found her body. She told her caregivers that if anyone tried to remove her from her beachfront home (where she had lived for 40 years), she would walk into the ocean.

I think she walked into the ocean. I've talked to her friends and the cop who supervised the search. I've retraced her possible path. I've taken photographs and checked on the weather and the tides and the moon on the morning she vanished. I need to talk with the nephew who lived with her when she disappeared.

He passed a polygraph.

No note. No body. I feel like I am on to the greatest beach story of all time.

....................

I've been thinking a lot about Oregon City these days, and my youth. Here's a piece that follows up the Halloween deflowering story.

The Coin Toss

.. ..

We always went to the bowling alley on our dates although we never bowled a single frame.

.. ..

Tricia always drove us in her brown Pinto and we kept the sound of the AM radio low because we loved to talk.

.. ..

I always flipped a quarter and she always called it in the air.

.. ..

If I lost, I had to sneak into the bowling alley, sneak into its fetid men’s restroom, fit the quarter into a condom machine, and turn a silver knob until a little wrapped package plopped out in a tray below. If Tricia lost, she had to sneak into the women’s restroom and do something similar although she never gave me a description of its décor.

.. ..

I can’t remember the brand, color, state of lubrication or texture of the condoms we each purchased, but we never went without one.

.. ..

In 1981, the Oregon City Bowling Alley was the only business in town an underage and responsible couple could buy condoms after hours. This was also the same year the NY Times first reported on a “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”

.. ..

After the purchase, Tricia would fire up the Pinto and we would drive Molalla Avenue toward Singer Hill and explore Oregon City’s historic area east of the bluff overlooking the Willamette River and the paper mills. We always searched for a vacant and unlit place to hide the car and have sex in the back seat. The Pinto probably deserved its reputation as a terrible, even murderous American compact car, but the Hatchback model Tricia owned was incredibly spacious with a huge curved rear window that allowed for scenic views and plenty of maneuvering.

.. ..

The parking lot of a huge stone church near the John McLoughlin House was our most frequent and preferred spot.

.. ..

We never drank alcohol during these Pinto moments. We never smoked cigarettes, let alone pot.  Neither one of us had a curfew to obey.

.. ..

The police never rousted us.

....................

I won a prestigious literary award the other night but something happened in the parking lot of Newport High School 18 hours later that topped that honor by eight miles high.

.. ..

A couple of weeks before receiving the award, I noticed a student in my first period English class drawing on her binder. Her illustrations were superb and I asked her if she would consider drawing some editorial cartoons for the school magazine. She said “yes” but didn’t seem to sure about what an editorial cartoon actually was. I gave a 30-second lesson and suggested an idea for a drawing that would accompany a column.

.. ..

She brought in the cartoon the next day. It blew me away. I asked her—no, I demanded—that she join the staff. Basically I dragooned her. She had to juggle her entire schedule and school was already five weeks along. But she changed everything in a matter of hours and I introduced her to the staff the next day. Within ten minutes, she was assigned three cartoons and turned them all in the next day! Then we asked her to draw a color comic strip, something I’d always wanted for a high school publication but never pulled off. She turned it in the next day—first period.

.. ..

So in the parking lot, the student and I carried a rusted Oregonian box to her mother’s car. I’d “collected” four boxes in decrepit condition over the summer and Harbor Light staffers had decorated three of them brilliantly to promote and distribute the magazine in funky style. But one remained and I had dragooned the student into cleaning off the rust, sand down the metal, coating it with primer, then illustrating the entire box as she saw fit.

.. ..

As we shoved the hulking son-of-a-bitch into the car, the student introduced me to her mother, “as the only teacher who ever believed in me.”

.. ..

She’s returning the box to school on Monday. I can’t wait to see it.

.. ..

Is there such thing as a benevolent dragooner?

Friends:

I returned from Portland this morning after accepting the Stewart Holbrook Literary Legacy Award from Oregon Literary Arts last night.

Watch the video if interested.

It's good to home.

First issue of the Harbor Light comes out tomorrow. It's the best issue of my career.

....................

....I arrived home at 2:30 a.m. after attending the screening of Fast Break in Portland. Tomorrow I head back into town to accept the literary award. The drive about kicked my ass last night, the dark curves on Highway 20, and the deer here and there grazing off the roadway. I thought about pulling over and taking a nap, but I wanted to see the dogs a lot worse.

.. ..

Approximately 40 people attended the screening and I sold 10 books. But resurrecting this film was never about selling books; it was about seeing Oregon the way it was in 1977 when the Portland Trail Blazers seemed to matter to the culture. I can barely watch pro sports anymore. I guess not having cable TV for nearly a decade now has something to do with it.

.. ..

One highlight of the evening was running into my old high school tennis partner and catching up on old Oregon City times.

.. ..

On the way home, cruising down Killingsworth toward I-5, I saw approximately 30 naked women with jack o lanterns on their heads jogging, jiggling, screaming down the sidewalk. At one point, their painted bodies formed a loose sexy wedge and crossed the street right in front of the truck. I reached for the camera and tried snapping a few shots, but the camera wouldn’t focus and I lost the moment.

.. ..

I wonder what would happen if a group of women pulled this off in Newport on Halloween.

.. ..

I’m in a café in Newport as I write this and a guy near me is talking complete shit to some stranger. He just stood up and pulled off his belt, held it up, and said to the stranger, “This could save my life one day.”

.. ..

Now he’s talking about Jesus.

.. ..

I see from the billboards that Eddie Money and Loverboy are playing Chinook Winds on Halloween. Shit. I would love to see who shows up for that concert.

.. ..

The paper went to press on Friday after school and it looks like it might end up the best one of my career. What a staff I have! We were a journalism machine last week and I bet we could put out a weekly if we had the money.

.. ..

The paper hits the campus on Wednesday. It should prove a sensation.

........................................

The Legend of Fast Break and a Special Screening of Far Out Oregon History....

.. ..

Fast Break, a film documentary about Bill Walton and the Portland Trail Blazers winning the 1976-77 NBA title and the aftermath of their accomplishment, is the greatest movie I have ever seen on the subject of professional team sports, basketball as a metaphor for life and the perfect practice of Zen Buddhism in American society.

.. ..

It also might be the best movie ever made in Oregon and about Oregon. It certainly is the best stoner movie in Oregon history.

.. ..

If you call yourself a real Oregonian you simply must see Fast Break, even if you don’t care the least for pro sports or give a damn about the current version of the Trail Blazers, meaning you’re just like me.

.. ..

On October 24-26 at the Clinton Street Theater in SE Portland, true Oregonians will have a chance to see this incredible documentary and relive one the greatest cultural moments in the state’s history. If you were living in Oregon during the championship season and were half-way sentient, then you know exactly what I mean. The feeling was called Blazermania and it was a good kind of social disease.

.. ..

Fast Break is prima facie a documentary, but really it’s more of a stoned contemplation of a subject than anything else. That its subject was a professional basketball team led by its counterculture star center unselfishly winning an NBA Title in 1977 just makes the film’s treatment of the content all the more incredible and quintessentially Oregon.

.. ..

I learned of its existence in 2006 from Larry Colton’s book Idol Time, tracked it to an Oregon Historical Society warehouse in Gresham where it had lain entombed since 2001, miraculously acquired a copy, viewed it, had my mind blown, and became obsessed to resurrect Fast Break no matter what price it exacted on my bank account.

.. ..

Let me tell you, it was a high price but worth every penny. In 2007, I published Red Hot and Rollin: A Retrospection of the Portland Trail Blazers 1976-77 NBA Championship Season and included a DVD of Fast Break. The book was an Oregon hit and Powell’s bestseller. After readers watched the film, they often wrote or called me in utter astonishment. What is the story of this film and its filmmaker?

.. ..

A Portland filmmaker named Don Zavin conceived and directed Fast Break as an independent production. He shot the film in the spring and summer of 1977 and it debuted at the Fox Theater in downtown ..Portland.. in September of 1978, showed there in an exclusive engagement for one week, played one more time at the ....Northwest.. ..Film.. ..Study.. ..Center.... in October, and then was never shown in public again.

.. ..

Don Zavin was born in Portland in 1932, graduated from Grant High School and University of Oregon. He eschewed the family furniture business and eventually found his way into documentary filmmaking. In 1963 KATU Television in ..Portland.. hired Zavin to write and produce a documentary about the history of ....Oregon..... Later, Zavin moved to ....San Francisco.... and produced a series of documentaries including a highly acclaimed and unnarrated 1971 film about teenage drug addiction called Last Minute to Choose that aired as a CBS Special. He returned to ....Oregon.... in 1976 and landed a job producing a thirteen-part instructional series for the North American Soccer League called Soccer for Everyone.

.. ..

In the spring of 1977 as the Blazers launched their improbable playoff run, Zavin began shooting Fast Break. He followed the team through their victory over the 76ers, the summer, and next fall’s training camp and preseason. How he convinced the Blazer front office, coaching staff, Walton and the other players to cooperate so fully in this intimate and unorthodox project, quite possibly unprecedented in the annals of professional sports, is unknown to me or anyone still alive connected to the film’s production. But Zavin finagled the cooperation and the cinematic results are out of this world, at least the world we recognize today of American popular culture.

 

Fast Break opens with a psychedelic animated dedication to a member of the film crew, (Patrick Stuckey) who drowned in the ..Warm.. ..Springs.. ..River.. while on location in ..Central Oregon.. making the movie. From there, Fast Break embarks on one hour and fifty-seven- minute trip, and I mean trip, that cuts back and forth between the playoffs, Walton’s summer vacation, and the beginning of next season. No such thing as chronology exists in Fast Break, and virtually no narration save for that of Larry Colton who accompanies Walton on a bicycle trip down Highway 100 on the North Oregon Coast and to a basketball clinic on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.

.. ..

Space constraints here limit a full review of the sheer far out scenes that comprise Fast Break. I also don’t want to spoil all the mind-expanding surprises. Let me tease out a few scenes: Fast Break captures in almost operatic fashion Walton’s legendary jam over Kareem Abdul-Jabber in the playoffs, Walton dousing the Championship Trophy with beer, Maurice Lucas visiting inmates at the Oregon State Penitentiary, and an apparently intoxicated Walton receiving ceremonial chieftain honors from an Indian…around a bonfire! There is more, so much more, and after watching Fast Break, a hungry viewer will wonder: What happened to the spirit of so many things Zavin captured in his film? And why are contemporary professional athletes so apparently uninteresting compared to their predecessors?

.. ..

Fast Break suffered the cruel marketing misfortune to debut in ..Portland.. at the precise moment when ....Oregon.... had come to loathe Bill Walton because of his accusations of medical malpractice against the team and demand for a trade. It also didn’t help that ..Portland..’s two leading film critics, the Oregonian’s Ted Mahar and the ....Oregon.... Journal’s Bob Hicks panned the movie. Mahar: “It has little to say…no clear concept…sequences go on at ridiculous lengths.” Hicks: “Idolatry…don’t look here for the answers to today’s perplexities…somehow the invented athletes of Semi-Tough (Burt Reynolds and
Kris Kristofferson!) seem more human than the real people who star as themselves in Fast Break.” Zavin failed to find a national distributor for Fast Break in 1978. Apparently he kept trying, and then in 1979, another film titled Fast Break, a big-budget studio comedy about a misfit college basketball team starring Gabe Kaplan of Welcome Back Kotter fame, was released. This bizarre coincidence precluded any chance that Zavin’s Fast Break would gain national distribution.

.. ..

Don Zavin died from pancreatic cancer in 1998. Several years later, his widow, Ellen Thomas, donated his entire film archive to the Oregon Historical Society and ended up in Gresham and except for an underpublicized and liquor-free screening at last year’s Portland International Film Festival, has not been shown in public since 1978!

.. ..

So come on out and enjoy the Red Hot and Rollin’ and Rip City fun at 7:00 p.m on October 24-26 at the Clinton Street Theater. On Saturday night I’ll introduce Fast Break and hand out free copies of the movie and my book. You’ll have to answer some trivia questions and here they are:

.. ..

Red Hot and Rollin’ Trivia

.. ..

1. Who wore number 20?
2. Who was the Blazers’ assistant head coach?
3. What was Wally Walker’s nickname?
4. What was Robin Jones nickname?
5. What was Larry Steele’s nickname?
6. What Blazer had the nickname “Bottom?”
7. Who is the only player in all of professional sports to have a poster of himself issued by the Grateful Dead?
8. What Blazer shot his jump shots left handed?
9. What now defunct financial institution was the Blazers chief advertising sponsor?
10. What nickname did CBS sportscaster Brent Musburger bestow upon Bill Walton?
11. What was the official seating capacity of Memorial Coliseum?
12. What team did Portland defeat in the second round of the playoffs?
13. Who was the Blazers owner?
14. What Blazer shot 67 percent from the field in the championship series?
15. What planet did Daryl Dawkins claim he came from?
16. Who was the only Blazer to wear Converse Chuck Taylor hightops during games?
17. According to the Neilson ratings, (what percentage of Oregon households with televisions in use during Game Six against the 76ers were tuned into the game
18.  Who was Bill Schonely’s color commentator?
19. What television game show did Bill Walton appear on in 1979 after he left the Blazers?

.. ..

....................

....A woman sitting near me in a café is reading Isaiah from a very old school-looking Bible and surfing the net at the same time.

.. ..

I went to the beach at 3:00 p.m. to see if the same man I’ve seen wading weirdly in the ocean the last two days at 3:00 p.m. was wading again. He wasn’t.

.. ..

A year ago, a 90-year old woman living in my neighborhood and suffering from dementia disappeared from her home at 5:00 a.m. Her body was never found. I’d thought about her in recent weeks and then received a totally random tip from one of my student’s about something the woman told a relative before she disappeared. I finally got around to calling the police officer in charge of the search and told him I was considering writing about the woman. I’d always hoped that she defeated dementia for a lucid moment and simply walked into the ocean to end her life. At first the detective seemed hesitant to talk to me, but I’ve become pretty good inducing people to talk to me. We started with some pleasantries and within a minute I had him telling me everything. I could not believe the extent of his disclosures. This has to be one of the best Oregon Coast stories I’ve ever encountered and I will chase it.

.. ..

I went to Toledo for breakfast on Saturday morning to interview someone for the Notion book. I’d heard he was short with people but we had a very pleasant conversation and he promised to track down a 90-year old woman who once worked as a bartender in a lounge where Paul Newman may or may not have come in drunk and chainsawed the legs off a pool table.

.. ..

I head into Portland three times in the next eight days and that will test my endurance. More gigs. I keep telling myself to stop.

.. ..

School is going incredibly well and I can’t wait to see the first issue of the magazine hit the campus. We just keep getting better and my editor and lead designer are teaching me a thing or two about patience.

.. ..

Speaking of school, I’m sitting on a good vampire story there. Yes, this is not a joke. If the Notion book stiffs, I know what to do—go vampire. I’ll make a million bucks, meet the fanged groupies, buy that 100-acre farm and take care of abandoned dogs for the rest of my life….that is, until I walk into the sea and never return…in human form that is.

....................

....A man can’t always walk on the beach. I like to think walking the beach can take me anywhere I want to go, and while that’s true of my mind, it’s not true of other destinations.

.. ..

I stood before the south approach to the Yaquina Bay Bridge, Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works Project No. 932, and most of it wasn’t there. Fog nearly swallowed all the soaring green steel.

.. ..

What an imperfect morning to try and conquer one of my greatest fears! I’ve always had a fear of heights. It’s why I fell off the roof and broke my arm in third grade; I couldn’t walk 50 feet on the Golden Gate Bridge; I never went to the top of the Eiffel Tower or Empire State Building.

.. ..

I began to walk the plank and noticed a smashed gull in the road. A cormorant flew over me; a cormorant flew under me. A man holding a Dutch Bros coffee in his right hand and a maple bar in his left strolled south on the opposite sidewalk. I think he was whistling.

.. ..

RVs blew by and shook the deck. Please Mother Earth! Don’t let a log truck come along! One did.

.. ..

How many people have jumped off the bridge? Fallen off? Blown off? How many survived?

.. ..

Damn you Conde McCullough! I curse you for designing something so beautiful, so alluring, so bewitching, with such gorgeous curves…sort of like my last girlfriend. She dumped me.

.. ..

I began to run. I stopped after 20 yards, ducked inside one of the ornate turrets to compose myself, read some ungrammatical graffiti, and heard sea lions bark and grunt in the direction of the Bayfront.

.. ..

Then I examined the girders, rivets, nuts and bolts the Depression-era boys put into exquisite place in 1936. Socialism it was called and it built this beautiful bridge and it built it well. That was about the most comforting thought I could muster from the middle of the bridge, 133 feet above the bay.

.. ..

The walk resumed, faster now, and I saw a man driving an 18-wheeler texting. A moment later, an obese state worker inspecting something with a hand-held meter approached me and we exchanged “hellos.” I rushed through the other turret and didn’t stop to read, although I did notice a peace sign drawn in chalk.

.. ..

I never once looked down, which would have been fine since there was nothing to see.

.. ..

Fifteen minutes later I crossed the Yaquina Bay Bridge on foot for the first time. I turned around: son of a b—I had to walk back in two hours.

....................

It doesn’t seem to happen as much as it used to, but every now and then I discover a book by sheer accident and reading it blows me away. Subsequently, I have to entirely rethink my approach to writing and definition of what constitutes good prose.

.. ..

One such discovery happened last week—In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin—perhaps the best non fiction book I’ve read in a decade. Simple. No digressions or pretentious displays of erudition. Very little about the writer but just enough to glimpse his obsession with the region.

.. ..

I’d read about Chatwin for years in magazines. He apparently lived a short life and traveled incessantly around the world, but I’d never read him or seen one of his books at thrift stores or the second hand book shops. I now understand why; they were obviously so good that readers couldn’t part with them.

.. ..

In Patagonia is the story of Chatwin’s walking and hitchhiking through Patagonia in the mid 1970s as he investigated a long lost connection to a relative who once lived there and discovered an ancient fossil of a giant sloth.

.. ..

The writing is remarkable because it’s so unremarkable. Short sentences. A lot of flat passive voice description. Virtually no commentary by the author as he encounters a series of bizarre characters who seem utterly lost in time. I finished the book in one sitting the other day and I could feel myself becoming infected by the wanderlust travel bug that I cured myself of when I moved to the coast in 1997. It has been a very, very long time since I took one of my epic world sojourns and I feel myself getting ready to take one again once the dogs pass away. I don’t wish for them to die anytime soon, but I will be ready for the road once they leave me.