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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (July 20, 2012)
street roots July 20, 2012 Rod Beal BY JAY THIEMEYER C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T nd of April, Oregon coast. Route 101: for vodka. But everywhere wasn’t as Setting out from Gold Beach heading accommodating as Hood River. for Brookings and beyond. Night “You smell like ‘Blue Label’,” I told him. spent in colorless, chaste Motel 6 situated He jumped on that. If I knew Blue Label, I in the woods overlooking where the Rogue was all right by him. And he opened up. enters the Pacific. Wake to a sort of Zen Told me his whole life story. A rootless dreariness. Rain all night, wind, loud American story. Out of a time warp; he drumming on the windows. looked like something from the beginning of In the morning I survey the downed the last century. Before that, even! Like branches strewn across the parking lot, the Huck Finn refracted through the American debris on the roof of my car. I’m one of last Century (such as it was). I’ve had time to to leave. No rush. I drop my key off and go. think about what he shared with me, and I Leave the lookout point and ease back down believe it was about as good a onto 101. No traffic. representation of an American loner, an Sky beginning to clear, with a low ceiling American floater, in these times of the of gray, spindle clouds. Gazing at the sky is failing, flailing American Dream, where the claustrophobic, like finding myself in a small same suckers fight The Man’s wars and pup tent sagging in a night rain. Glimpses of cling to the myth and delusion of American the ocean beyond the estuary wake me and exceptionalism, and won’t know from get my motor going. nothing about being on the road. I felt, in Coming up a rise, in the bike lane ahead, short, that I was in the presence of I see a heap of wet laundry slowly grinding greatness (after a fashion). toward the top, one foot in front of the But really, Rod Beal was merely a other. I slow down and ease over. Open the messenger of things to come. View of the passenger-side door. He shuffles up and future from the very bottom. grunts. Maneuvers his knapsack off his He said the edge of Brookings would do, back. I can smell him — moldiness mixed wherever he could do some canning. I could with vodka. drop him off there. I look at what I imagine to be his face I said I’d done some major canning back beneath the watch cap and the black hoodie not that long ago. Paid my way with this covering. Can see nothing but his dun- fella back in the '80s who drove me from colored brow and brown whiskers and curls Atlanta to Jacksonville. I paid my way by from the cap and the reflection of clouds in bumming change wherever we stopped. the thick lenses of his taped glasses. It was Truck stops and shopping malls off the like looking in a mirror. interstate. Since I wasn’t one of the “Have a seat,” I say. He does just that, no familiars, people tended to be generous. difficulty, letting out a groan after setting his That change paid for the gas and food, and knapsack in the well of the front seat. we drove non-stop. Quite a trip. He was an “I’ll leave the window cracked,” he says. old Marine, this one, and he was going to No need, I tell him; not to worry. find his old lady to start up another thrift E people their space. Simple as that. These days, apparently, he found that solitude, if you want to call it that, in forever traipsing around the country, unaccountable to anything, riding his bike 'til it got stolen, and staying ahead of the game juiced on 100- proof ‘Blue Label’ Smirnoff. After the jail time, he was let out on probation and ordered into treatment at the Salvation Army. His taste of sobriety was a little over three months at the Salvation Army’s ARC program. Got his two-month coin, his three-month coin, was sponsoring guys, the whole shtick, then one warm day toward the end of summer, he’d just had enough. Probation or no, he was out of there. With what little money he had, he did what he’d always done. Got a bike for long distance travelling, and a 12-pack of beer, and zoot, he was gone! At 53, he was still in his teens. Before joining the Navy, he had a bullshit job that allowed him to buy a white Mustang convertible. But when he enlisted, his adversarial dad took the car and wouldn’t give it back. It broke his heart. The story behind that, Rod Beal didn’t share. There was, in fact, a lot he didn’t share. He had a well-honed roughly hour long spiel and he stuck to it. Any questions were left hanging. His story served the s Rod Beal rehearsed his story, one he’d purpose of keeping people at bay. But I told many times I’m sure, it became could dig where he was coming from. It’s obvious that his whole life was about moving not easy being a loner, even if you’ve got on. No roots, no predictability, just constant your health and the means to buy a bike and moving. When he was ten it was a step up a 12-pack. for him to get into foster care. Up to that When we passed Pistol River, he was point, he went with his mother, whom he quiet for a moment. He’d been telling me loved and who still lived down in Santa about breaking probation before. They Monica. Her life was always there in Santa caught him on the other side of the country Depends, or some goo for hemorrhoids. Can’t remember.’ He said he’d missed that. He was still seeing her on that bridge. Said riding his bike up and down the coasts, that trip across that bridge in the Keys was scary but a rush. He said, however, there was nothing scarier than crossing that bridge from Astoria over the Columbia River right here in Oregon. Blue Label or no Blue Label. I said I could imagine. “Yep. I spent the winter in Hood River. Lost my bike. My glasses. Everything I needed, gone. Stayed there till a week ago. One day it was warm out and the clouds had disappeared. I left.” He wanted to go to the Olympics again, then down to Seattle and Tacoma. Get a ride one way or another. He didn’t have a bike this time out, but the hitching had always been easy 'til he got close to L.A. He hadn’t counted on the rain and cold though. Who’s gonna pick up the Green Man straight out the forest, with the leaves and needles still stuck in his hair? He was indeed a heap; his wet clothes looked like foliage, a leaf pile. A In exchange for the ride, he produced his story. It was taken for granted. It was all he had to give. He deposited It as niechanically as feeding the fare to the open m outh of a TriMet bus. “Where you heading?” “Santa Monica. Or anywhere south you’re heading.” “I can get you to Brookings.” “That’ll do. I know my way around Brookings.” “Well, when we get there, just let me know where you want off.” The ride was roughly an hour, with very little traffic or distraction. He said his name was Rod Beal. Been a reader for years. He was 53. Just lived for getting a bike that was sturdy enough and a 12-pack of malt liquor — Olde English the preference — and hitting the road. Had been all over the country. Covered all of it, he said, in decades since he was small. “Top to bottom and side to side.” Came up from Santa Monica last Fall heading to the very tip of the Olympic Peninsula and eastward to Maine and up that coastal highway which he’d done a few times but not enough, then down South as the weather got colder. But someone ripped off his bike and gear in Hood River. Then he lost his glasses. “I’m blind without my glasses.” Then, a friendly cop told him about an interfaith coalition that provided overnight shelter. The churches switched off week to week. So, Rod decided to spend the winter on the Columbia. Canning for “redeemables,” snagging for pocket change, diving for whatever and staying warm and dry. The winter days had a similarity, he says. Good to have a shelter to get out of that stuff when night fell. A week ago, he left Hood River and headed for Santa Monica. But his trip had been roughly a week long by now and the rain had done a number on him. He was OK as long as he could find cans and get money store. They had had success going around buying from the drunks who took donations at the Goodwill sites. Five or 10 bucks would get a lot of clothes. They then had rented a cheap storefront and filled it with these clothes, selling them on the cheap. Made out good. It had been several years now since they got busted and he left town. He knew the cop who got him and he knew he was close to retirement, so it seemed likely that cop would be long gone when he got back to start up the enterprise again. He was willing to take the chance, if he could find his old lady. She’d been the brains of the operation. “I’ve been in JAX,” Rod Beal said. “Spent a month in their jail.” I spent a week there in '83 when that guy drove me down and dumped me after I’d paid for the whole trip. He promised me there were fishing boats looking for workers. But all I found was a lot of locals looking for work and resenting the Hell out of outsiders taking that work. I have a ridge on the side of my skull from where this fella blindsided me and kicked me in the head. Monica; never once left the place. She attached herself to a series of questionable gents, ‘fathers’ as Rod Beal saw it. Men who abused his mother and him, till out of the blue, one of them treated Rod and his mother OK. The last one, the one that stuck. That is, until he was sent to a foster family. Then for some reason he didn’t explain, they became adversaries. Maybe being distant from his mother, she expressed more fondness for little Rod. Maybe, at a distance, physically away from her, he brought out the love in her. The motherly love every mother has. Or maybe it was just a way to taunt her new husband. She missed Rod Beal “so much.” He was always such a “righteous” kid. That kind of thing. Needling her new partner in chaos. They passed many a night getting drunk and passing out. Telling each other how much they missed little Rod. Or so Rod Beal explained it. The new man on the scene didn’t anticipate competition for the woman’s affection. Rod became an abstract and stayed with the foster family till at sixteen he stepped into his Navy blues. In a pattern he didn’t deny, he signed up for four years and stayed for three. Then, one warm, ’ve been out of homelessness for more bright day, he just split. Managed somehow than a decade now but I was totally to get a general discharge. Which meant plugged into Rod Beal’s story. He had these days, getting rehab for his alcoholism indeed been around. Most of it by bike and and a temporary straightening out. During most of it on the coasts or the Canadian the recent fall sojourn in Southern border. California, two years ago actually, he was He’d been from Maine to the Keys on the jailed for beating his wife. He demurred, Eastside. “You know that movie with Tom said she was just being a bitch. But there Selleck and Jamie Lee Curtis? Where she had been so many calls. He was hauled escapes on that seven-mile bridge down before the judge and sentenced to a year there? I road my bike on that bridge!” and a day. Said he never hit her, that he Damn, I said. I missed that one. Jamie Lee wasn t like that. Just the sort of guy who Curtis? Saw her in an ad for something- wanted to be left alone and give other I and hauled him all the way back to Santa Monica by plane. Shackled the whole way. I never pursued the fact that he spent a lot of time as a fugitive from justice for a guy who never bothered anybody, who had “never become a career criminal” — something he was obviously proud of, even if a lie. He just wanted to stick to his side of the road. But in fact, his life was a chain of inconsistencies. His wife was waiting for him back in Santa Monica. As was his long-time stepdad toward whom Rod Beal by now directed some notes of being loved and missed. Rod Beal seemed forever to be leaving home and longing to return. But what home did he have in mind? So he was quiet now. But only for a moment. He went on but never seemed to mention anyone besides his family, such as it was. He didn’t know his birth father and had nothing to say about his m other’s previous husbands before “the one that took.” He didn’t talk much about his wife after the incident he “didn’t do” that wound him up in jail. His life story was honed and something of an idyll but at the same time it didn’t add up. Except in the sense that such a chaotic, removed existence must have produced in him a sort of fantasy state, an alcoholic bubble where everything connected. Everything in the Blue Label sunlight sublime made sense. And was beguiling to whoever gave him a ride. In exchange for the ride, he produced his story. It was taken for granted. It was all he had to give. He deposited it as mechanically as feeding the fare to the open mouth of a TriMet bus. It seemed as though Rod Beal didn’t trust eing at rest, or stability, or pursuing and See ROD BEAL page 13
