Empire Christmas

Danny Deacon was conceived in the back seat of a Ford Country Squire station wagon at the Mo-Vu drive in theater in 1961 in what was then the city of Empire, located on the western edge of Coos Bay. The theater screened an Audie Murphy triple feature that particular summer evening: Posse from Hell, Hell Bent for Leather and To Hell and Back.

Four years later, Empire merged with Coos Bay and assumed a different identity as a prosperous working-class district of the city whose residents exhibited an extraordinary amount of consumerism. Four decades later it would become a living museum to the decline of that prosperity and the uselessness of such consumerism. And it was no accident of recent American history that four decades removed from Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Empire’s seemingly number one industry was addiction recovery services. The two are directly related.

Danny was born in a Coos Bay hospital and barely graduated from Marshfield High School in 1979. He had never set foot outside of Oregon and was now 65 years old and living in a driftwood fort on a stretch of Coos Bay beach adjacent to the Empire Boat Ramp.

That technically made him a resident of Empire, now transformed into a strange, semi derelict, infrequently surreal, sneakily picturesque, residential and commercial area with sly potential if some new ideas trickled in to begin a renaissance.

Contemporary Empire is worthy of a sprawling Keseyesque Oregon novel and certainly rates an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the greatest number per square mile of moldering barbecues, boats, appliances, cement mixers, RVs, buses, tractors, trailers and other vehicles (including a fire truck, ambulance, Greyhound bus, ice cream van) abandoned in front, back and side yards. The one novelist (or possibly a journalist or sociologist) who discovers and reveals exactly why that world record exists in Empire will have become a literary and social science master by doing so. And the place to start the research is by reading on microfiche in the Coos Bay Library, copies of The Empire Builder, a weekly newspaper covering all things Empire from 1953-79. A husband and wife ran the publication all by themselves for 26 years and that longevity is probably worthy of a novel, too.

Danny moved into the fort the first week of December as Christmas loomed. Not long after, a drunken vigilante who lived nearby in a dilapidated apartment rousted Danny at midnight and told him to move along. Danny moved along, but always returned, and this routine continued until a week later when Danny punched the man in the chest with ferocious force and told him to leave him alone. The man did. Getting knocked into a bay at high tide by a homeless man twice your age can do that to someone.

This was the first time in Danny’s life that he had ever been homeless, although he’d been close a few times in the immediate aftermath of 2008’s Great Recession.

The fort Danny called home was known by connoisseurs of driftwood forts on the Oregon Coast as a dugout. That meant the builder dug out a bunker under a large driftlog or root wad and then added driftwood walls on either side. Typically dugouts were roomy enough for two and a small campfire at the bottom end. They tended to last much longer than other driftwood forts because they were anchored by a massive piece of wood that sometimes wouldn’t move for years if it washed ashore on a king tide corresponding with a flood event. A dugout wasn’t waterproof in rain, but damn near if the builder had double-sided the walls.

Danny had not built his fort. When he assumed occupancy he improved it significantly by weaving dune grass through the walls, a kind of thatching if you will. He also mounted a stuffed dragon on top of the fort. He’d found it in a garbage can and felt no stuffed animal should be tossed away. So atop the fort it went. He dubbed the dragon his protector but gave the beast no name.

As previously mentioned, Danny graduated from high school in 1979, a particularly tactile and practical era in the annals of American public secondary education. His senior year consisted of Auto Shop, Wood Shop, Metal Shop, Home Construction, Beginning Ceramics and Current Events.

Two decades later, in one of the more disastrous education polices in American history, school districts across the nation ripped out their vocational shops (not to mention art and home economics classrooms) and replaced them with computers, computers, computers. Soon thereafter came the Great Satan, the Internet (then later the poison and addiction of social media) and the beginning of the end of American decency, democratic government and common sense.

Curiously enough, today’s high school drop rate is precisely the same as it was in Danny’s era. Homelessness has tripled since Danny graduated from high school. There were no homeless in Empire then.

After graduation, Danny partied all summer then began the life of a manual laborer in Coos Bay as a deckhand, logger, concrete man, landscaper, painter, drywaller, roofer, gravedigger, bud tender, you name it. In almost 40 years of work, Danny was always paid in cash under the table, never opened a bank account, never filed state or federal income taxes, never had health insurance, never saved any money. He would never collect Social Security because he had no documented work history.

Danny was homeless because his 93-year-old uncle Vern kicked him out of his ramshackle Empire home (two decrepit boats and two rusting VW buses in the back yard). Vern suffered from infrequent bouts of dementia but had moments of clarity that were typically accompanied by extreme anger. Drinking a bottle of Canadian Club a day didn’t help either. Danny had been living (and drinking) with him for several years after he could no longer afford an apartment. Vern had no other family; neither did Danny. Before he went totally around the bend, Vern asked Danny to help him out—rent free. Danny said yes and continued various handyman jobs but mostly drank, ripped bong hits (from the same bong he made in Beginning Ceramics!) and waited for Vern to croak. He just assumed he’d inherit the house, or what was left after 35 years of deferred maintenance.

Vern still had control of his finances and conducted his business by mail and landline. They all knew him at the bank and tolerated his eccentricities and need for old school service.

What exactly precipitated the blowout that led to Danny’s homelessness has vanished to history. It was probably something banal like what crap cable TV show Vern wanted to watch and Danny did not.

In any event, Danny gathered some clothes, $23.37, a roll of toilet paper, pocket knife, sleeping bag and toiletries, stuffed them in a backpack, and hit the road.

To where? Where does someone who becomes homeless for the first time go? To what you know. Where you grew up. Where you already are.

The Empire Boat Ramp was Danny’s first destination. He could walk there and that’s what he did because he didn’t own a car or bicycle and wasn’t going to steal Vern’s 1989 red Chrysler Lebaron convertible that had turned green after almost four decades of Coos Bay rain. The sedan even had tiny ferns growing in the tire treads that somehow never managed to die when Vern drove five blocks to the barber shop, bank or liquor store.

Danny figured Vern would regain his senses in a few days and he would resume living with Vern and they would celebrate another dismal Christmas together with TV dinners, booze and watching Elf and Bad Santa over and over again.

It was cold and overcast the first morning of Danny’s homelessness. He found the fort straight away and rigged it up. He lit a fire that evening, heated a can of chili in the coals, and dipped hot dogs in the bubbling entree. He washed down his meal with two cans of malt liquor.

A few days later, Danny knocked on Vern’s front door. He tried his key. No good. The son-of-a bitch had changed the locks! Vern saw his nephew through a window and screamed get the fuck off my property or he was calling the cops. Danny left, unsure if he would ever return. He was on his own and had to improvise in order to survive living outdoors in a locale where the average annual rainfall is 64 inches a year and December is by far the wettest month.

Hey, Danny thought, I’ve camped all over the county a million times. I know how to do it.

But recreational camping and homeless camping are existentially antithetical to one another. For one reason, the former doesn’t make you a loser and pariah in the eyes of many Americans. Another reason: recreational camping ends; homeless camping may not.

Danny was vaguely aware Christmas was coming. A few Empire businesses strung up lights and some of the residents erected outdoor displays, several that unintentionally bordered on Gothic.

The Empire Boat Ramp kept on being the Empire Boat Ramp during the holiday season and hosted its regular lineup of crabbers, clammers, fishermen, tourists, homeless people on the move, garden variety meth miscreants, and several old men who drove their rigs clear across town every morning to see the bay at first light. There was also a man new to Coos Bay who walked his husky down the bay beach at dawn no matter what the weather served up.

At first Danny didn’t know what to do with himself all day. He had no phone to play with; he didn’t read books; he was too broke to hit the sauce regularly; he didn’t know how to play solitaire. If it was raining hard, he left the fort and took shelter in the nearby nameless donut shop, nursing a coffee for hours while watching action movies the proprietor played at ear splitting levels.

When the weather cleared, Danny gathered firewood but also began picking up trash littering the bay beach and hauling it to the dumpster at the boat ramp.

Why the civic service? He didn’t even think about it; it was merely something constructive to do, and yes, homeless people get bored, too.

What often occurs when the homeless perform some rudimentary civic service, such as picking up litter or weeding public flower beds, is that they attract the attention of others. This attention often leads to interactions and sometimes those interactions work magic for the homeless and housed alike.

Danny often shook his head in disgust at the shit housed people threw away at the beach and the shit homeless people left behind after a night or two camping in the area. Some of it Danny put to use, like a large jar of coconut cooking oil and a backpack.

It wasn’t long after Danny began living in the fort that Coos Bay began delivering up gifts: a crab ring, a crab cooker, colored floats, a Gruden hoodie, rope, unopened cans of beer, a half empty pint of Fireball, rubber boots (they fit Danny to a tee!), a clam gun, a fishing pole, a Tanya Tucker album from 1978, and a large purple dildo still wrapped in its package. Danny laughed heartily when he found the dildo and took it back to his home. Hey, you never know when a dildo might come in handy in a driftwood fort!

Danny also started collecting hairy tritons, hundreds of them, Oregon’s official state sea shell, for absolutely no reason except they intrigued him. He didn’t even know of their symbolic designation.

It wasn’t long after gifts started showing up, that Danny began using some of them to feed himself and earn a few bucks. He’d stopped all his outdoor recreation after moving in with Vern. Too hungover. Too stoned. He could clam, crab and fish hungover and stoned in his youth, but he was now closing in on septuagenarian status and his body couldn’t possibly hack it anymore.

And then it could.

Once Danny had been a man of the tides who never needed to consult a tide table chart. Now he was again. The circumstances were obviously different, but the outcome was the same: the best tasting seafood in the world—all free! Permits? What stinkin’ permits!

Danny’s first thrust of the clam gun into the mud led to instantaneous muscle memory. Same when he tossed a crab ring. Same when he cast a line. He was surprised each time when that happened and it made him smile.

He quickly harvested more than he could eat so he sold the rest to locals and tourists at the boat ramp. He also gave away a lot of his cooked bounty to homeless people, many of them living in battered mobile domiciles, cruising up and down the Oregon Coast. There was just something in the old sound and smell of the ocean they couldn’t leave behind. And well, boat ramps with fish cleaning stations (quasi showers), restrooms and dumpsters are damn good de facto, brief-stay, service centers for the homeless. Portland, Salem and Eugene should have deployed this model a decade ago.

One morning, outside his fort, Danny met the man who walked the husky and struck up a conversation with him, naturally about the bay, but he also shared some of his personal story when the man asked about his homelessness. The man noticed Danny’s shell collection and informed him of the hairy triton’s official status. Danny was thrilled. Maybe he could sell them to the hippie shop in Empire. The man thought it a grand idea. They would make great necklaces for the ladies.

Danny also told the man he had become friends with an otter who lived in a creek a hundred yards away. He liked watching the otter at dawn and dusk race out to the beach and dig for clams. It made him clap every time.

In the few days remaining before Christmas, the man met Danny every morning, one time in a squall, and brought him bottles of Dunkin’ Donuts French vanilla iced coffee and bear claws. The man asked Danny if he was going to try and see Vern again. No. The man asked if he could bring him something special for a Christmas Eve meal. Danny didn’t hesitate: how about a box of KFC? Sure. If you’re not in the fort, I’ll leave it inside. Thanks.

The afternoon of Christmas Eve, the man and the husky drove to KFC and he bought the 16-piece bucket and a half dozen sides. He also made a quick stop at a thrift store because they were always a zoo right before Christmas and he liked the crazy holiday energy of people trying to make Christmas just a little better at the last second. You never knew. Maybe one cheesy Christmas Carol snow globe or a wobbly Rudolf figure might spark a special sentiment and make all the difference in the world to someone. Castoff holiday decorations have been known to do that. New ones? Perhaps not as much.

The man spotted a little battery powered set of twinkle white lights. Instantly he thought: these would look great on Danny’s fort!

He purchased the lights and batteries and drove to the boat ramp. It was the best he’d felt about Christmas in years.

Light rain had fallen most of the day but had stopped when the man pulled into the parking lot of the boat ramp. He was surprised how many vehicles were there. He spotted a lone crabber on the dock. The man and the husky descended to the beach and the husky went berserk off leash. A stiff wind blew from the north and whipped up spindrifts. It was getting dark. Fog was rolling in. The tide ripped ashore and threw up a crunchy bass sound.

Danny wasn’t at the fort. The man set the bucket and a sack of sides inside. He realized he hadn’t brought him anything to drink. He stuck a sawbuck inside the bucket. Danny would know why.

He also placed the box of lights and batteries inside the fort. He and the husky started walking away and the man stopped. What the hell am I doing?

Ten minutes later the man and husky walked away from the fort. It was all lit up.