Tristan and Andrew go to where Andrew remembers the Vita Cafe being in NE Portland to use their courts on the way from Salem to Seattle and are thwarted. Instead, they play in Ian Crozier's front yard in North Portland with Ian and Joe and Matt as a team with the fourth set of balls.
* * *
Tristan was internet researching our trip and sitting with Paula at the kitchen table when I woke up. I took my first domestic shower. I read the paper, when I got out of the shower, that the University of Oregon Ducks had played their first game in Matthew Knight Arena, named for Phil's son who died in a scuba diving accident. The image on the cover of the Oregonian was the duck mascot descending from the arena's ceiling amidst an extravagant light show and a cheering photo-taking packed house. The ducks won the game. At the dining room table Kimberly's mom told us about an allergic reaction she had at the Christmas party at her work, which happens to be at the hospital, and her emergency recovery, transferring from the floor hosting her party to the ER level. Tristan happened to still be paying this very hospital from the Thanksgiving he spent with Kimberly's family when the dog bit his uninsured hand. It was a top-notch hospital they both agreed.
Kimberly invited us the night before to meet her for lunch at a diner next to the used bookstore she was working in. We made our preparations, expressed our gratitude, and made our way downtown, across the river and to Kimberly's literary warehouse. The diner was a long block away and I was wearing my boots so I wanted to walk a little while, in the interests of time, they ordered me a coffee and were spared from excavating a third seat in the cab. "Tuesday's Gone," by Lynard Skynard came on the radio. We had talked about it at karaoke the night before as a worthwhile song independent of any personal objections any of us might have toward the band. Tristan sang "Running Down a Dream" By Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and ran around the bar with the cordless microphone at the guitar solo. Kimberly sang "The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia." I sang "Without You" by Harry Nilsson.
I showed Kimberly the photo of the new arena's inauguration, gifted by her mother. Kimberly told us tales of her adventures across the country with Will, her dog and her truck. We talked with the cook about our various diets: she was on the Atkin's diet and was sitting down after the lunch rush to a plate of meat and gravy; Kimberly had qualified her vegetarianism to include bacon; I had recently started eating candy bars again; Tristan was at a liberal moment in his dietary elections.
Permitted to fill our mugs and thermos with the day's end's pot of coffee, and bottles and jugs with ice water, they drove and I walked back to the bookstore where Kimberly gave us a spirited tour of the establishment. It had moved from downtown and was presently the entrance to, and third of, a huge warehouse, segregated by a wall created by dozens of bookshelves. Many volumes jumped out at us, but Ghost Towns of the Old West and the Muppets Take Manhattan struck us as most important to the journey.
We left with nuggets of anecdotal wisdom from Kimberly's travels, a guide to the neglected past that lay around us, and a manifesto regarding the owning of one's destiny.
After the brief approach to Portland we were in my old stomping grounds; and I felt the regret that dances with nostalgia to a sad waltz that replays daily in my heart. We would only be there for the time it would take us to do a load of laundry while playing a game of bocce ball next door at the Vita Cafe on northeast Alberta Street. My brother once took and blew up a photo of that laundromat during one of the Last Thursday art events on Alberta; silhouetted crowds of people passed in front of the illuminated window while a couple people inside folded and waited. I always thought of that window when I thought of the block with with the cafe and its extensive street front courtyard and its raised bocce court.
In moments like these pride taps regret on the shoulder and dips and spins and swoons nostalgia to the tune of Teddy Pendergrass and the rhythm of my heart's smooth bass line. We drove up Martin Luther King after getting off the bumper-to-bumper freeway and as I was looking out the window I expected to see someone I knew. Regret tapped his toe in contradictory 3/4 as I thought I might have known these people if I hadn't left two years before. We both also realized we had bladders bursting with coffee and ice water. My friend Emily had a job interview, she said, and wouldn't be able to meet us at our brief stop. As we went east on Alberta I kept a keen eye to make sure the laundry place wasn't further west than I had remembered. When we got to the 20s (MLK is 4th) I got ready to spot it; by 25th I started to worry that things were not as I remembered them; by 28th I was sure we were at the right block. And there was the Vita Cafe, on the other side of the block. And there was no laundromat. The old location of the cafe was now a Vietnamese place. There were picnic tables on the bocce ball court, big sturdy tables a foot above the rest of the courtyard. We parked and considered. We brought the camera and took a picture of the court.
Then we went to ask what happened. They told us dinner didn't start for another hour and we left it at that. Playing on the obstacled court did not appeal to me and it didn't seem feasible to move the furniture. We then went to the Vita Cafe for answers. They were busy and said they'd be right with us. A woman with a beard held a baby at a table by the window. We were told they moved a year ago. We asked if they knew of a close laundromat. They said the one across the street went out of business. We explained we came for bocce and laundry. "Nothing's really working out for you today is it?" we were asked, rhetorically.
We stopped by my friend Eve's house a few blocks away. She was not home; she was in California; we left a present, chatted with the nice fellow looking after things, and used the bathroom. We had met before a few months in Monterey, and he seemed to find it strange that in so short a time my life passion had become bocce.
Our spirits were lifted, however, when we stopped by Ian's house further north, and were treated to a spirited, unparalleled match on a course improvised around his house, with certain frames even utilizing the sidewalk. The game was catered by a nice man with a cooler of homemade tamales, the proceeds of which went to benefit his church.
* * *
5:10 PM Ian's house, Portland, OR
Andrew
4
Ian Crozier
7
Tristan
5
Joe/Matt
6
Tristan: “OK. Today we are recording here, later in the evening, roughly—“
Andrew: “Round Kelso.”
Tristan: “Kelso, Washington.”
Andrew: “Heading north on the I 5.”
Tristan: “Heading north on the I 5, yes. It’s approximately twenty to eight o’clock. That’s 19:40. And—”
Andrew: “But what we’re talking about happened around five o’clock during our sojourn in Portland. We had planned on playing on a bocce ball court in the Vita Café on Northeast Alberta. However, the Vita Café moved across the street at some point in the last two years, unbeknownst to me and a—”
Tristan: “Thai. Thai food restaurant.”
Andrew: “A Thai food restaurant took its place. And the bocce ball court they had in their side area—the seating doubled in the side area so that there were chairs and picnic benches in the court. And—we could have played, and kind of had obstacles, but the whole was just too disturbing for me. Additionally, we were going to do laundry in a laundromat on the strip, which, also it seems, apparently has closed in the past two years. So it was just—it was shocking to me. So we ended up playing at Ian’s house—”
Tristan: “And we learned at the Vita Café that the laundromat had closed from their general consensus. But it was about the only piece of information we could really get out of them—“
Andrew: “Other than we could seat ourselves if we wanted to eat.”
Tristan: “We could if we really wanted to, which we obviously didn’t because we felt zero warmth and recognition from the proprietors of this establishment.”
Andrew: “There was a slight bit of sympathy in the phrase, ‘well, nothing’s really going for you, is it?’ Something like that.”
Tristan: “Something like that. I think it was more indicative of our, of our unfortunate status as men, for the place was filled with purely X chromosomes.”
Andrew: “There were two men working in the kitchen, it should be noted, one woman with a beard and a baby.”
Tristan: “A woman undergoing testosterone therapy. A very interesting sight, and mind-bending and for us all. Now: on to Ian, Joe, Isaac and Tracy’s house.”
Andrew: “And Matt visiting from Minnesota. Tracy and Isaac retired to, what seemed to be to, smoke grass in their upper loft.”
Tristan: “Were they smoking grass?”
Andrew: “Seemed like it.”
Tristan: “Oh, OK. Smoking grass, doing this or that or whatever.”
Andrew: “And we, Ian, rather, sorry, Joe and Matt, his good friend from Minnesota, seemed to be eating something, but they expressed an interest through Ian to play bocce, but we started without them.”
Tristan: “I kinda scoffed at Joe trying to come in and play after, you know, he kind of—it was again, the rule about bocce where if you’re late you’re docked a couple points, docked five points, I said.”
Andrew: “For a scheduled match.”
Tristan: “Scheduled match. I guess this wasn’t quite scheduled. But I still scoffed at the etiquette, I was like newcomers—“
Andrew: “What looks friendly? McDonalds?”
Tristan: “Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. McDonalds for a bathroom break, purely, mind you.”
Andrew: “I’m gonna get a coffee.”
Tristan: “A coffee. So I mean again—the trend of newcomers not knowing the etiquette, I mean do your research people. This is the 21st century, where it’s 2011 now, we only got one more year before the Armageddon, you know, the fascists rule the country and everybody else, under the façade of democracy, come on, we gotta learn about bocce ball here. This is important, I mean, etiquette. Preserve the foundation of our cultural, social infrastructure. Anyways, they were late, but they played a great game.”
Andrew: “They did play a great game, but it turned out Matt had played the game, but didn’t know it was called bocce ball.”
Tristan: “So he was a ringer.”
Andrew: “So he was nailing shots.”
Tristan: “So we’re rolling up here on another silver-themed McDonalds. Eh, half silver. It’s kind of a silver and gold.”
Andrew: “I think it’s just faded.”
Tristan: “It’s maybe just faded. It is Kelso, Washington. Should we take a break here?”
Andrew: “Part one done.”
Tristan: “Part one done. Intermission.”
Andrew: “The set up.”
Fruit and maple oatmeal
Fruit and maple oatmeal
Fruit and maple oatmeal
Fruit and maple oatmeal
Fruit and maple oatmeal
Fruit and maple oatmeal
Fruit and maple oatmeal
Fruit and maple oatmeal
McDonalds.
Andrew: “So, there were options, not the best options, for the game of bocce ball.”
Tristan: “Is this part two or part three?”
Andrew: “Was ‘Fruit and Maple Oatmeal’ part two? Alright, part three—”
Tristan: “Option.”
Andrew: “Options. There was one—there were two— two grassy spots on either side of the front walk going into the house, which made for a kind of, an interesting way of doing it, so you would, you would jump, you would throw your ball over the walk, the pavement, what do you call that? Sidewalk kind of—concrete. Concrete front walk. On this kind of elevated area between the sidewalk, and between the further elevated porch; and then you would just go back the other way. Also there was a back area with a grassy area that was about the same sort of total area as the front area but a little more overgrown. There were some corn stalks left over from the fall harvest. Some pumpkins. Some leaves. And we decided, well, we’ll just, you know, play it as it goes. As per usual, he who wins the point throws the pallino where he’d like in what was given, the boundaries really being do we want to play bocce ball in the neighbor’s area, or by cars, and potentially break something. But, you know, creativity being an ideal, yet wanting the game to be playable in a way that’s not gonna hurt somebody or invade somebody else’s space. So what ended up happening with these options was that we circled the house, and kind of just pushed the boundaries of the property and used this kind of middle, raised area in front of the house, and then, in the back, going from the porch, to the grass. In the front we went from the porch to the side of the house; the sidewalk was utilized. There was a lot of interesting stuff that ended up happening.”
Tristan: “There was a significant hill between the grassy front lawn, then down to the sidewalk, maybe a three foot drop; and then the grassy area between the sidewalk and the curb. All utilized.”
Andrew: “All utilized—sometimes by chance, sometimes by plan, somebody thought, ‘we’ll go over there.’ Sometimes, though, we’d be aiming for the grass, and then it would end up on the sidewalk, almost to the neighbor’s, behind the house. A lot of interesting stuff happened. Fast forward ten, what do you call it? Ten sides. Ten sides in. Nobody’s got a two pointer, it’s Matt and Joe, become Joe/Matt. They each have a ball—I think they were mostly doing it though that Joe would throw two in one round, and then Matt would throw two in the next. Ian, Tristan, Andrew playing as single units. I was yellow, Tristan was blue, Joe/Matt was red, Ian was green, which made sense, green for Ian, because Ian’s an outdoorsy guy; I think he got to choose first, and that’s what he chose: green. So, fast forward there: Tristan’s got like five points, I’ve got four, Joe/Matt are lingering with like two, Ian’s got one. It evens out—Joe/Matt get the first two-pointer in one round with some spectacular shenanigans by Matt in the sidewalk. They jump up to six, Tristan’s got five, we’re playing to seven. I’m lingering at four, Ian’s got one. Ian is still with one. But then, coming out of nowhere, Ian starts to pull back; it’s four, four, five, six. We go around back, Ian gets another point, it’s five. We’re still thinking, ‘alright, Joe/Matt’s gonna win this with one.’ Ian comes out of nowhere, gets the ball closest, waits out while everyone else puts theirs in. Tristan’s looking pretty damn close with his red—no Joe/Matt—Joe/Matt had the red, and Ian tosses the ball in there, knocks red right out, and, because all of the energy went into the red ball, his just plops in there. Red ball is gone. Ian wins the game, coming from one—Tristan doesn’t score a point since Ian has one.”
Tristan: “He scored like five points in three rounds.”
Andrew: “It was inspirational. We have been playing a lot of bocce ball—never has applause been warranted or occurred naturally. But we applauded Ian right then.”
Tristan: “A natural eruption.”
Andrew: “Monday. Friday. That’s the game of the day and, let me tell you, I was, I was not happy for a minute there.”
Tristan: “I was feeling good and then all of a sudden my game just fell apart.”
Andrew: “I meant earlier—despairing about the whole Vita Café thing.”
Tristan: “Oh yeah, you were pretty perturbed. I will quote, ‘I just wanna get out of here.’” I just wanted to note that Joe made an amazing plop shot, where he kind of dropped it on top of one of Ian’s balls, this was in one of the earlier rounds, he dropped it right on top of one Ian’s balls, which went hurling off of the play surface, and his ball remained precisely where it was going to be Ian’s point, and taken it as his own point. Maybe that was my ball”
Andrew: “Yeah, that was you ball. That was brilliant.”
Tristan: “I think that was the turning point; it started to slip…”
Andrew: “Those were two moments I wish we could have had documented. Maybe bring the tape recorder—but you never know when your gonna want the tape recorder on, that’s one thing. Maybe we should bring the tape recorder to one game. That would be interesting."
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