A Jim Beam Laundromat Christmas Memory (Part 1)

It was Christmas Break. The year was 1989, my first year of teaching, and I’d barely made it to the vacation. I was totally overwhelmed and exhausted by the amount of energy expended teaching full time, over 150 students a day. (It would take another 20 years to learn how to manage my pace and become a better teacher, but that’s another story I’ve already written.)

I lived alone in a cavernous two-bedroom apartment on SE Belmont in Portland. It featured a balcony, huge windows, hardwood floors and a monster claw foot tub (no shower). Rent: $350 a month. It was way more room than I needed, but after my live-in girlfriend and I had broken up the previous year, there was little enthusiasm to leave.

It was a great place and had the advantage of towering over a Thai restaurant that many considered the hottest food joint in town. Johnny, a young Thai kid, owned and operated the restaurant and justifiably earned the nickname of Crazy Johnny because virtually every night he was screaming at a customer in the parking lot for one perceived affront or another. “You fucking cocksucker, son-of-a-bitch, motherfucker. You never come back here asshole shithead!”

The restaurant had no telephone so Johnny conducted business at the payphone below the balcony and was consonantly screaming in Thai, pounding the receiver everywhere, and kicking the hell out of the glass. It was all wonderful fun to hear and observe. He must have gone through three phone booths in my three years living there.

As I said, I barely made it to break. My first Monday off I read Neil Sheehan’s Vietnam War classic A Bright Shining Lie in one setting. That book was over 600 pages long.

Slowly I emerged from hibernation and started seeing the woman I was loosely dating, Angela, then a stunning 21-year-old junior at Seattle Pacific who was majoring in literature if memory serves me right, which it often doesn’t writing memoirs of this kind.

Angela and I had a tempestuous on/off relationship but there was something unique in our attraction and sexual chemistry that I haven’t experienced too many times in my life, if ever. She is also the only woman I’ve ever known with a terrible temper and the only woman who has ever slapped me across the face. (It hurt! It was right out of the noir films!) I will never forget the time she erupted in anger when we met at a campground near Mt. Rainier. She was pissed because she thought we were meeting halfway, and, as it turned out, she had to drive two thirds of the distance. It was during that outing that she also castigated me when I told her I suffered more emotional pain when my childhood dog died over the passing of my grandfather. I tried explaining but she wouldn’t have any of it.

Despite all our tensions, I was crazy for her and her then terrible taste in music! (Breathe—”Hands to Heaven,” our song!) I mean, she read William Faulkner and sashayed in faded Levi’s like nothing I have ever seen when she walked. She smoked cloves like a movie star and the Clackamas River still remembers her sunbathing there in a Polo one-piece swimsuit.

On Christmas Eve, after a low-key celebration with my father and sister, I returned to the apartment with nothing to do but grade papers that I had stupidly brought home over the break. I started grading then stopped. No! Not on Christmas Eve! That’s absurd!

I was feeling antsy. I needed something to do.