This is the story of my escape from the depths of Portland/Astoria, Oregon to the heights of Manhattan, New York.
I started to make the move around early May. I had just quit THC for good on May 4, my dad's birthday and my cat Penelope's birthday. I had lemon pound cake and some top-shelf and some diamonds to celebrate the final day, you know, just in case they wanted to polygraph the story later in a federal clearance interview.
My 30 days for the apartment I was staying at (1543 Exchange St, #601) was up on June 9. I tried to sell all of my shit at an "Estate Sale" (which I called "One Man's Trash") but almost no one came by to purchase anything. I had to have my friend Alles cart all of the boxes over to a hotel in Chinatown, Portland. We got maybe 2/3rds of them. The following day I called a Lyft XL to Astoria from Portland and back to retrieve the remaining third.
I stayed in the hotel one more night than planned (I initially had only one night on the books). They denied me late checkout after the second night. I was not done packing everything properly into boxes (this was my first cross country move ever), and so I barricaded the door and let hotel management raise hell to get me out of the room. They eventually escalated to calling the Portland City Police Dept., with whom I complied. They basically got my stuff from the Chinatown hotel to the UPS Store near Portland State University (by the bus stop).
However, even this was not enough time to pack all of the boxes properly. After my conduct and general eyesore of boxes irritated the front desk person at UPS to the point where she ejected me from her store, I was sitting at the curb by the bus stop with all of my boxes, some of them partially unpacked, some of them secure. It was my first time being genuinely unhoused, and it was humbling to some degree. Nonetheless, I kept my dignity and called my driver Zheiko from All Star Town Car. While I waited, I serenaded the entire PSU community with Sinatra's greatest hits, including "That's Life."
With the grace and kindness of my driver Zheiko, I managed to transport the boxes, all 20-ish of them, from the curb by the Portland State University UPS Store to the curb of the airport. Some considerate strangers helped me transport the boxes from the curb to the Delta counter. However, when I got to the Delta counter, the person working the counter laughed in my face with a combination of sheer incredulity and contempt for the privileged, telling me that "there was no avenue of recourse through which I could get these boxes transported from Portland to New York tonight." The airport, because this was in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, had no postal counter through which I could ship everything to my mom's place in White Plains; further, the plane itself had a hard limit of seven checked items per passengers, no exceptions for extenuating circumstance whatsoever.
I asked the Delta counter guy what my best next move was, and he simply shrugged and with one of two cheeks suggested that I call some local friends to help out. I spent the next twenty minutes trying to keep my cat Penelope calm as every Portlander and tourist that walked by pointed and laughed at the eyesore I was generating, attempting to call my local friends -- Alles, Ethan, Seth. Of those three, Alles had already helped me immensely in the move, and was apparently too busy with a friend to come by. Ethan and Seth were in Astoria and offered me, essentially, their thoughts and prayers. So I was on my own. I called up U-Haul and was informed that they did not offer drivers. "Do you know someone that might at this hour?" "I don't know." At this point the Delta counter guy was getting impatient and had called the airport staff over to inform me that the boxes and my cat could not stay by the counter, but instead had to be transported over to an out of the way corner of the airport lounge.
So I'm there at the lounge with my boxes and my cat, and at this point my flight is getting closer and closer to departure. I resolved to ditch all of the boxes, literally my entire apartment and life's worth of material possessions, and only bring things that could fit into my two carry on luggage pieces. I figured I could at least make my flight if I hustled, so there I was, frantically unboxing and sorting and packing and making a mess in general, when the "Port of Portland Police" (henceforth "pigs") found me.
"Hey buddy,"
said one pig (Officer Justin Beiss),
"What's going on here? Are you doing okay?"
They eventually got to business after about two minutes of phony fake concern for my situation. They told me that they were about to arrest me on the grounds of illegal dumping, unless I decided to go to the hospital in order to treat what they had diagnosed, in their ultimate medical expertise and authority, as a serious mental crisis. I told them calmly over and over again that I was okay and that I just needed to sort out the things I needed in order to fly and get the fuck out of the Pacific Northwest, but at this point the pigs only heard the stressed ramblings of someone clinically insane. Basically, I was an easy mark, and the pigs ate that shit up.
They coerced me into "getting some assistance from EMT" which entailed me surrendering my cat Penelope to the pigs, who then confiscated and detained her at a local shelter in Troutdale, Oregon. The EMTs were kind enough to transport me to Oregon Health and Science University (henceforth "OHSU")'s emergency wing. Therein, I was treated for insomnia by an attending doctor named, I shit you not, Charles Brown MD. The nurses and clinical staff were extra kind to me, and basically made sure that I got a wink of sleep before attempting to flee the PNW again.
I spent the rest of the day after leaving OHSU Emergency attending to some basic errands. I went to Best Buy and picked up some basic gear, having lost my laptop (not to mention my birth certificate and social security card, which were deemed by the pigs "nonessential"). I got myself a Thule backpack to hold everything, a cheapo Lenovo IdeaPad laptop computer, and a Google Pixel 10a smartphone. I spent about an hour in Best Buy trying to un-fuck the config on the new Pixel (basically untethering it from the advertisement industrial complex). It was around then that I was able to reach my friend Alles. He told me cheerfully that my little brother Miles had inquired about my whereabouts and that he told Miles with zero hesitation that I was still in Portland.
This, of course, landed me squarely in deep shit. See, my mom controlled the credit card that I was using to buy all the Best Buy gear, so they already had an inkling that I was at the Best Buy. When Alles confirmed my in-Portland status to Miles, he essentially narrowed my radius down to the 100 feet around the Best Buy. I got the fuck out of the store and zig-zagged over to a Buffalo Wild Wings.
At the BWW, I drank water and eventually ditched my smartphone, credit card, and debit card in a small plastic bag. I told the waitress "someone left this here, I don't know who, it was just there" and she immediately nodded and took the bag away. I then went all the way back to OHSU to get some help and transport back to the airport. Due to Alles' leaking my location to Miles, I killed too much time and had none left to rescue my cat Penelope from the Troutdale OR shelter at which she was being held. I had to fly without her.
I finally board DL2139. Departed 10:30pm from Portland International Airport (PDX) and arrived 5:30am in John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK). Arrived with $0 cash, no credit card, no debit card, and no SIM card. I had a Google Pixel 10a with no SIM and a cheap Lenovo IdeaPad that I had picked up from Best Buy in Portland, plus my daylight computer tablet that I had managed to save from the pigs. From JFK, I took the subway ("A" line) from Jamaica, Queens to Inwood, Manhattan. Managed to do it basically for free (the subway was the only bottleneck, and instead of having to find $3 for the fare, the station attendants just gave me a pass). When I arrived at the end of the "A" line, I saw an assortment of arrival stories inscribed in tiny black type in the subway tiles. They had stories from all over the world of people finding a home in Inwood. It made me feel like I could be among them, if I just played my cards right and didn't piss off too many locals.
My friend Acacia, bless her, got me two nights at a Midtown Manhattan hotel. The night after that was the Knicks championship game, wherein I experienced complete and utter chaos and abandon on the streets. Hell, I didn't even know the Knicks were playing that day (I'm more of a Nets fan, when I watch basketball at all. Whenever I think of the Knicks I just picture that funny scene from the Disney animated movie Soul). Anyway, there were zero cops on the NYPD (they aren't pigs, just to clarify) who could help me out with, say, charging my digital devices. I ended up sneaking into a construction zone and using one of those orange outlets to charge up my laptop. I also took a fat piss on the highway wall.
I called for an ambulance around 3AM, but after waiting for four hours, no one had showed up. I then, later in the afternoon, went up to Mount Sinai Icahn School (my dad's old workplace) to be seen by the Emergency Wing. I self-reported as suffering from chronic severe insomnia and narcolepsy to the degree of affecting my own proprioception. They fast tracked me and suggested that due to my condition it might be best for me to spend one night in the psychiatric ward under voluntary admission (I did not know of informal admission at the time).
Of course, one does not just spend a single night at the Psych Ward. At least, not when one has a misdiagnosis on the books -- years ago, I was misdiagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder after a bout of drug-induced psychosis from a bad dose of 2-CB (hey, I was a sophomoric Reed College student who didn't know any better). The cops and psychiatrists who held me decided to give me a more permanent diagnosis to make me more manageable and compliant, so Schizoaffective it was. Bipolar type.
By the way, I do not believe myself to have this disorder. I have chronic severe insomnia, possibly heavy ASD (autism spectrum disorder), and what I've been calling ADM: "autismo-dopaminergic maladapsy" (which is not a real thing. But hey, maybe they'll add it to the DSM-6 lol). Basically, my brain is capable of producing obscenely spiky dopamine peaks, due to a having a higher neurochemical dynamic range and a lower neurochemical noise floor than most people. This gets diagnosed as bipolar-I. To add to this, my brain is unusually high in synaptic plasticity and the connectomics are not at all normal (due to cutting my teeth on pure/theoretical math for a decade straight, i.e. staring at a wall for hours until it coughs up the solution I need), which is the present-day textbook definition of schizophrenia. (Hey, when I was a kid, I remember this just being called having an "overactive imagination.")
Hence the diagnosis. Having been rediscovered as a bipolar-I type schizoaffective, I was thus deemed legally incapable of advocating for myself, and hence legally incapable of demanding my own release from the ward system. It has been three full weeks since I first entered Mount Sinai Madison, and one week since being transferred to Mount Sinai West. I have detailed the problems of the wards in a separate document, "Do No Harm."
Honestly? I view the past few weeks as the entire island of Manhattan giving me one giant speeding ticket. And considering how fast one has to be going in order for the totality of Work Island itself to say
"Whoa, whoa, slow it down, buddy! Pump the brakes!!
Do you have any idea how fast you're going??"
that is its own sort of amusing accomplishment for someone with my torque and voltage.
There is more to be told (and juicy it is indeed), but I'm going to wait until I'm out of the ward.
-j