Gargoyle Park and Portland Pork

My homebwon Steve was in town many weeks back, coming up for his first visit to our fair City of Roses. Along with him came a cast of crazy motherfuckers, comprised of Maniac Lee, Nate the Coke Lord, DANDAVE, and Slumbering Brian (who, of course, napped the entire trip...next time you want to come up, you're uninvited...just kidding, I'll have plenty of pillows, blankets and chamomile tea waiting for you). Though it was a short visit, and I worked one of the days they were here, we still got deep into the lifeblood of the Stump.

We were faded the entire time, so details are fuzzy. Suffice to say, they greeted Jeff and I with cans of Pabst (what good Portlanders) upon our entrance into their room at the Jupiter Hotel...where they proceeded to display the most impressive drug collection witnessed by man since Hunter S. Thompson's infamous trip to Las Vegas. The room was soon destroyed with 707 area-coded and thizzzz-related chalk tags (thanks Jupiter, brilliant amenity!). Over the next few days we went on a whirlwind of fried dough, strip clubs, and assorted smoky dens of alcoholism. We attended the Blazers v. Mavericks game (Sergio hexed Dallas back to the Stone Age, and we loved it), smoked danky in the heat at Waterfront Park, checked out the view from Big Pink, and visited Yam Yam's, featured prominently in a Mac Dre (these guys are his disciples) verse on Cool Nutz's second album Speakin Upon A Million..."I met this bad bitch/she was comin' out of Yam Yam's". We walked around the city at 2am with four cases of shitty beer, drinking with any and all street denizens we happened upon, including a bike cabby, Tookie Williams' fellow death row inmate (not sure how he escaped a similar fate), and some guy named Glen, who was cool until he started trying to get Lee to molest him and throw him out a sixth story hotel window. We also brought forth our inner Gaaaarrrrgoyles and visited the Mecca of Gargoyles aka Mill Ends Park (henceforth known as Gargoyle Park by our fellow acolytes)...there we paid homage to His Gargoyleness by sacrificing Glen's still-beating heart.

Oh, and did I mention the cops? No trip to Portland is complete without a firsthand experience with the unchecked brutality of our local boys in blue. Stumbling past the clubbing crowds near the Skidmore Fountain MAX stop on our way to the Steel Bridge, out of nowhere, as if magically initiated by a finger snap from the God of the Police State, at least a dozen bacon-wrapped cops appeared, dressed in black armor and equipped with riot shotguns, and homed in on a single unidentified black man, hitting him with mace and Tazers, without warning and seemingly without any provocation or reason whatsoever. They then proceeded to rough him up...all the while a massive crowd is forming, we're filming video and taking pictures, the pork patrol is telling us it's illegal to videotape police operations, we're telling them it's actually not, Maniac Lee is trying his damnedest to get any cop within view to shoot him in the stomach with a plastic shotgun pellet, I'm shouting out the name of James Chasse (a relatively recent victim of unprovoked police murder) and Kendra James...thankfully, cooler heads amongst us prevailed and we slowly walked off before arrests began to occur. Steve recently posted video of the attack, taken from his cell phone, on YouTube (search Crooked Portland Cops, or click here for videos 1 and 2)...the quality's pretty, well, cell phone-ish, but you can certainly feel the chaos erupting.

Thanks for coming up, homeloccs.