On my friend Scot in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

Well, I finished another assignment.

Last night I scared the life out of myself when I was transferring the document back to the client. I had to get it to him through Dropbox because the large file size made it impossible to just email it - he had embedded images in the file - and I’m not used to Dropbox, and through a peculiar process I thought I had managed to simultaneously and automatically delete the file out of the Dropbox website, off my computer, and off my backup drive. A hundred and ten work hours, over the course of a month and a half! And I’d have wasted that much of the writer’s time, too, after telling him I was almost done . . .

Thunderstruck both figuratively and literally! (Well, two different levels of figurativity.)

I rassled around and found the file in Dropbox, though. But not before letting the client know there was a problem. The client has his marked-up manuscript back. And this morning I think the problem might have been partially an illusion, the result of a combination of my rustiness in using Dropbox and having been awake for too many hours. Embarrassing. But better.

I’m up early again. The strange habits of the final push persist. It’s three-thirty in the morning. I woke up. Coffee. Why not.

There’s something serious that I am overdue writing about, but first - though the contrast will be incongruous (better beforehand than afterward!) - because it should be noted and I won’t otherwise do it: A fantastic thing about Portland just lately, sampled last year and fully exploited this year, is Burger Week.

For one week, fifty restaurants of all sorts in Portland all serve a burger for $5 (which is significantly less than the going rate for anything above the McDonald’s level). Many of the participating restaurants aren’t even places that serve burgers at all normally. And all the burgers are mad-scientist masterpieces. I’ll say it again: Masterpieces. The restaurants can’t use the same recipe the next year, either.

Cheap meals, and it’s a great way to explore new restaurants. I had one burger at Migration Brewing last year. This year I mentioned Burger Week and my mother got interested.

So, so far:

At Ya Hala, a Lebanese restaurant that we are going to return to (great menu, and right next to a second-run cinema we like), we had the Beef Falafel Burger: “Fresh-ground beef with cheese, garbanzo and fava beans, coriander, cumin, garlic, parsley, and cilantro on a brioche bun, with lettuce and topped with refreshing tzatziki.”

At the Fifth Quadrant, a Lompoc Brewing pub we’ve been to before, we had the Beirut Burger: “A quarter-pound patty of our custom ground beef with spicy red pepper hummus, organic arugula, and tangy goat cheese on a toasted sesame seed bun.”

At New Seasons Market, unique among the entrants in that you can take it home (because it’s just a supermarket; there’s little place to eat there), we had the Block Party: “Carmen Ranch grass-fed patty, creamy Tillamook cheddar, sweet Walla Walla onions, Felton & Mary’s BBQ sauce, bacon, pickles, lettuce, and tomatoes stacked on a pFriem [spelled right] Wit Ale bun.”

At Las Primas, a Peruvian place with great prices that we are definitely going to return to, we had the ¡Papa a la Huancaína Burger!: “Peruvian-seasoned quarter-pound beef patty, lettuce, fried potato, and pepperjack cheese, slathered in huancaína (a creamy chili pepper and cheese sauce) and finished off with a botija spread.”

All knockouts.

I am tempted to go on to our targets for today and tomorrow, but you get the idea.

The lesson: Explore. Dream big. Make it new.

And stamp-collecting with meals . . . it’s just generally a great idea.

A old friend of mine died a few weeks ago. I found out on July 20th. (You never realize how fast you read until you glance at a website and the death of someone you know hits you with absolutely no processing delay.)

His name was Scot. I miss his phone calls. It is hard to understand that he won’t be calling again. He called a couple of weeks before he died. I remember that it was a good talk, but I was tired from work and I don’t clearly remember the conversation.

It shows how bound up in this edit I’ve been that I haven’t written about him before.

A friend as old as my return to the United States. I guess my oldest. When I got to Las Cruces, New Mexico, I was thirteen. He lived three houses away. He was ten. Good grief, I thought he was so much younger than I was.

Scot died of an overdose. In the last seven years of his life, alcohol and prescription opioid addiction had grabbed him. As a result he lost a marriage, he tumbled a bit and spent a spell in jail, and after that he said that often the only thing that kept him going was his daughter. He’d been completely sober for a couple of years - he had almost died, he had brought his liver to the point where drinking again, ever, would kill him, so that was a good guard as far as his beloved whiskey. He sounded better on the phone than he had at his lowest, but more chastened than the exuberant Scot I’d known. I guess he lapsed as far as the opioids. Anyway, he got some. And it might have been simply a lapse for a low day for all I know - his more powerful demon by far was the alcohol. Perhaps only a three-hour tour. But I gather that what he bought was actually fentanyl, so much stronger than anything he would have expected, and his tolerance had to have grown low. He left a cat.

(I do not understand how the fentanyl thing even happens. It getting mixed in with the regular black market opioids, I mean. The news says there’s a lot of that, and now Scot is dead, but it’s like a drug-scare cartoon. It makes no sense. Greed, yes, but you want repeat business. If you randomly mix your supply of narcotics with something many times as strong, you will lose returning customers.)

Scot was there back in the early 1980s when I got Dungeons & Dragons, the first one that would become the “basic” or beginners’ game, the blue box, the one where the rules kind of didn’t really work yet (the combined mathematics of the die rolls to determine hits, the amount of hit points characters had when they started out as rank novices, and the amount of hit points taken away by successful attacks meant that player characters died like flies without progressing beyond level 1 or anything). Anyway, there we were at the picnic table on my parents’ front patio completely failing to figure out how to play through the module The Village of Hommlet. I was trying to be a Dungeon Master (the gamemaster, the master of ceremonies, the contriver of the stories), and he had written up his character, and somehow the plotline barely even moved on to the village proper. I don’t know what our problem was. It was like we were just milling around in the muddy road outside the village.

He remembered that to me for all the years afterward. Now only I remember. We also made ourselves fencing sabers out of old ski poles. Having ground the ends down to razor-sharp points first, obviously. Take things seriously.

Scot was the DJ at an alternative radio station, he was a chef, he was a job recruitment advisor, he was a salesman for law enforcement tactical equipment. Whenever a job ended he had another one instantly - of course anyone who interviewed him would hire him. He always had an energy that made me look torporous. He laughed a lot, infectiously. He had a sparkle. He was the most distinctly alive person I’ve known.

He was bright enough, but he was always much more emotional than intellectual. He was like a big bounding dog. When I argued with him I had to remember that he was going to run with the ball he was excited about, and then maybe later something I’d said might seep in. He thought the world of me, in a way that I think was largely an artifact of the differences in the way our minds worked. He would say I had a moral compass that never wavered. Far from it. I just worried about the question of what the moral compass should say. To me, that’s only ruminative fallible bafflement while I screw up periodically like everyone. To him, being led around much more openly by a gigantic heart, it read as something close to sainthood. (Considering that very often when this came up I’d been trying to dissuade him from something, I was never in a good position to counter this as much as I should have. And it didn’t feel terrible that there was someone who saw me that way.)

We never met as adults, not after we both worked in Albuquerque in 1992-1993. (We were going to, once, when I was out in Ohio staying at a friend’s house. He was driving up from Kentucky to see me . . . and his car’s serpentine belt broke on the road.) At one point, when things were good with him, and things being usually more precarious with me, he said that if my mother died I could come out and live with him and his wife on their horse farm. I shriveled at the possibility - I do not think I’m the best house guest, and I don’t like pissing off friends . . . but that was nice. Best laid plans, huh, Scot?

There was a story he told me on the phone that I wrote up in Open Diary on July 18, 2002. When I found out he was dead I showed it to his sister. I’ll show it again here. This story is Scot all over. In my original I sanitized him slightly as “Scooter”. Here I’ve put his name back.

A word on my friend Scot, once an alternative radio DJ, now a chef with certificate, doing very well indeed - and this story is all very much him. Ebullient would describe him well.

He told me this story a couple of weeks ago on the phone.

It seems that he and I think three friends got the idea of skateboarding down the parking garage of a research center.

If I’d seen the name of the place written down, I’d remember it, but Scot said that he found out that the place had been very much under scrutiny as one possibility in the anthrax-mailing investigation. A very high-security place. Which might account for the attitude of the security guard.

Anyway, it was a problem at first to get into the parking garage, but he and his three friends got into the locked door by waiting for someone to come out through it and then going in past them. They go up to the top. They start down.

Scot says he is the novice of the group. Typically for him, he’s started out first down the slope and is in the lead.

As he’s looping down he catches sight of a security guard, then loses sight of him, but knows he’s going to go by him on the next loop. I’m taking Scot’s word on lines of sight here, so I’m assuming it all makes sense, in grungy concrete. Anyway, Scot makes the next loop and suddenly the security guard grabs him by the throat, sticks a GUN in his ear, and is screaming, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING???”

Scot says something to the effect of, come on, man, what does it look like, I was skateboarding.

The guard lets go but keeps the gun. “GIVE ME THAT SKATEBOARD! GIVE IT TO ME!!!”

Now, you’d have to know Scot to understand this, but Scot instead turns and pitches the skateboard over the concrete wall behind him (blue sky, etc., it’s the safety wall at the edge).

He turns back to find the guard’s eyes bugging. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING??” the guard yells. “I could have SHOT you. Get down on the ground! GET DOWN ON THE GROUND!!!”

. . . Remember the other guys?

Voom! Voom! Voom! They fire past behind the security guard, who spins round, yelling even louder.

So Scot - this is Scot - with the guard’s back turned, he goes and dives head first over the little wall with the blue sky over it. The guard missed it all.

Now, Scot has somewhat misinterpreted how far down the structure he has circled. He told me he had in mind a ten foot drop.

So he falls FOUR STORIES.

He goes through two trees and a big bush. He ends up deep in landscaping brush, and right in front of him is his skateboard, in the branches at eye level, and one of the wheels is still spinning. He grabs it, fights out of the bushes and takes off.

He has a big bruise along the outside of one thigh and that’s it.

One of his compatriots on this venture is having problems believing Scot is human. This fellow, in his youth, slipped off a bench and landed wrong - wrong enough to break his lower back and sever nerves. This fellow needs a catheter to pee, and if he wants to go number two he has to push with his hands at his lower abdomen. And here’s Scot, from four stories up . . .

Last updated August 16, 2018