A Jim Beam Laundromat Homeless Man Christmas Memory

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 son-of-a-bitch. 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.

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.

Why not laundry? A 24-hour laundromat was a block away.

I walked to the laundromat in a light snow with my basket. I brought along a novel and pint of Jim Beam. It was my custom to drizzle a little whiskey into the 25-cent coffee purchased from the ancient machine whenever I did my laundry because that's what writers did and I thought of myself as a writer even though I hadn't written anything for publication.

Typically no one was ever around in the laundromat, so it was to my great surprise upon entering, when I beheld a bearded older man wearing a dirty coat, sitting slumped in a chair, and looking out the window to the falling snow. He had several bundles of possessions around him and was not doing any laundry.

We sort of nodded to each other when I entered.

In Portland of 1989 on the east side of the Willamette River, seeing such a homeless man never happened. I don't think they were even called homeless back then: transients, bums, vagrants, winos, drifters, etc.

But the homeless crisis was in motion then and starting to receive national attention. (Thank you President Ronald Reagan for starting it all.) Who would have ever thought it would come to dominate Portland life and political discussion and my writing life three decades later?

I got my laundry going. I purchased a coffee and spiked it. It occurred to me that the old man could use a cup to ward off the chill and the Christmas Eve blues so I asked if he wanted one. He perked up and said yes. He excused himself to go to the restroom. When the coffee cup filled up, I took it out of the machine, dumped three quarters of the contents into a sink, and topped it off with Jim Beam.

The old man emerged from the restroom. He returned to his seat. His cup of coffee rested on a table near him. He acknowledged the gift and sipped it.

I will never forget as long as I live the expression in his eyes when he took that first taste. Marty Feldman comes to mind. Or Betty Davis.

He glanced at me and nodded. We never exchanged another word. I did my laundry, read, drank my coffee and whiskey, and walked home in the snow. I no longer recall what I did the rest of the evening.

I thought it a charming little Christmas story. A few days later I told Angela about it, thinking she would love the sentiment. She burst into anger and harangued me for providing alcohol to such a man. He was probably an alcoholic and you gave him booze? On Christmas!

Her blunt reaction shocked me. I didn't argue the point. It was Christmas Eve in the laundromat, snowing outside, and those were all the reasons I needed.