2007 – A Rough Start

March 2007: I’m at Dave Kappelt’s house, across the street from my apartment above the Empty Keg in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. I’m 23 years old. Dave takes off his shirt and yells at me to punch him, and I put Dave in a headlock. Seth kicks me in the ribs. A week earlier I had received a bonus check – I felt invincible finally having a financial cushion (having slept in a graveyard and been a bum just a few years prior) and was ready to do something drastic with it. I head home that night and buy a plane ticket back to Portland. I find an apartment on craigslist.

One month later I have lunch with my grandma and mom and break the news. In May, I’m flying to Portland.

Addresses: 222 W Erie Streeet, Edinboro, PA; NE 31^st and Ankeny; 37^th and Wasco; SE 15^th and Ash

I Indian Magic

I was the youngest General Manager for a Taco Bell working for the R3 Food Service franchise. At 22, I stepped in to take over the role for Heather, who left for reasons that would soon become apparent. The owner, Maurice, was irresponsible for a franchisee, didn’t invest the money he made back into his store, was absent and careless and let his restaurants fall into disrepair. I worked 50 to 60 hours a week for many months at my cashier’s wage of $9 hourly. And then, after saving my restaurant from being shut down by the health department, and improving our secret shopper scores, Maurice gave me a big fat bonus check. I not only got a raise to $12 hourly, but he retroactively paid me for all the hours I had worked so far. This included time-and-a-half for the overtime. Essentially, a $3000 bonus check.

I hated working for the owner, and wanted to go back to Portland, where I’d spent four months in 2004. I bought my plane ticket and scheduled my last day. I prepared my store to transition leadership. May 15^th was my last day scheduled. My shift ended at 6pm. At 5pm, I received a phone call. It was Maurice. He requested that myself and all the managers who worked under me would be on a phone call that evening, at 10pm. I suspected he had heard something of my departure, and out of a sense of duty I decided to join the call.

The topic of the call was not my departure. Rather, it was about Maurice’s franchise. Turns out, he had violated his franchise agreement. He wasn’t paying his managers appropriately. He was letting his stores fall into disrepair. He wasn’t investing his profits back into his restaurants. So Taco Bell was taking five of his restaurants away from him. The next day, our Taco Bell was going to close.

He was talking to the other Shift Managers about how he would help them get jobs at his other locations. When it came to me, it was a special case, as I was the only manager who didn’t have a car. He asked me if I would be able to get to any other location, and I told him there was no reason to, as I was done as of this day.

“That’s not a very professional way to quit, Shawn,” Maurice said.

“I don’t think you’re in any position to tell me how to be professional, seeing as how your restaurant just got taken away from you,” I replied. I tossed my keys on the table and walked out.

II Evan Jackson

Before moving, I found a place on craigslist, and asked Aurora, an old friend in Portland, to vet it for me before I arrived. She met my new roommate, Evan, and said “he seems like a really nice guy. Young, but very nice.” She was right about the fact that Evan was young. I landed on May 18^th and met my new roommate.

He was 18, living on his own for the first time. He was very handsome, and fit. He had a fake ID, which facilitated his ability to drink an incredible amount of alcohol. We lived at 3100 NE Ankeny St, Apartment 1, and paid $370 each for the two bedroom. His is a life very typical of an 18 year old’s – his friends come over, one of them is old enough to buy booze, they get booze, they maybe bring some girls over, they get drunk and sleep with people.

During the day, I like to sit on my front stoop and carve a walking stick. A quarter-width branch atop the stick extends forward, carved to be a muscular arm, with a hand and fingers pointing straight ahead.

My belongings arrived via FedEx one day after I arrived. It looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to my computer tower, and the monitor was unusably damaged. I had of course not taken out insurance, and as it turned out the shipment had also overdrawn my bank account. They had given me an estimate of $250 to ship the two large, heavy boxes. The actual cost was more than $600. I lived on ramen noodles and my grandmother bailed me out to get me back into the black. I got a Best Buy credit card and bought my first laptop computer for $700. I found a monitor on the street, bought a DVD burner, quickly backed up all the music I’d made and downloaded to DVDs, and after burning the last DVD the tower never turned back on.

I took an entry level position at Taco Bell (NE 7^th and Weidler), and because of the difference in minimum wage between Portland and Edinboro, was making approximately the same amount each paycheck, with far less responsibility. Move complete.

III Lauren Anderson

Lauren was the girl with whom every boy in Edinboro fell in love, and she wanted to live in Portland, too. I may have inspired or encouraged her to move to Portland with my somewhat brash decision to leave, and told her she could crash on my couch. She moved out, and in, and within a few weeks had traded my couch for Evan’s bed. I sighed heavily the first time I caught them making out, as it seemed like an inevitable consequence of putting two attractive people younger than me in the same small apartment.

As quickly as Lauren entered, she found a room with another old Pennsylvania friend, and she exited. Evan was somewhat shocked. Lauren had pulled me aside at one point and given me (and not “Evan and I”) a couple hundred dollars for the time she’d lived with us. It was amicable from my perspective, but Evan was pissed and said any number of disparaging things about her exit, and her as a woman and a person.

IV Kate the Painter

Across the street from my Taco Bell sat a FedEx store. Every few days, a tall and beautiful woman in a FedEx polo shirt and wild haircut would come in for lunch and order vegan burritos. I was convinced she was trying to come visit me, and so after a few visits, I took my lunch break when she showed up, and asked her if I could sit with her while we ate.

She was a little shy at first, but she had a sense of humor that came through very quickly. I hit on her, and she blushed. I went back to work. She started to visit more, and I asked her for her number a few visits later. We’d text each other while I took drive through orders and she helped people make copies. We’d meet after work and have a drink.

She had a boyfriend, it wasn’t working. I helped it not work.

She was a painter named Kate, one of the most talented artists I’d ever met in my life. She was a little bit crazy, like most artists, but had a genuine childlike joy that I found endearing. Her energy would carry me through some of the darkest days of my first year in Portland.

V Labor Day

Taco Bell is a shit job, let’s not forget. A part of how shit the job was in Portland, versus Edinboro, was how sleazy some of the employees of the Portland location were. Yes, I was a 22 year old RGM who was sleeping with an 18 year old employee. But even I wasn’t as sleazy as the Portland shift manager, Scott, who offered me pills to keep me working.

Scott fell asleep in his car one shift, when it was busy and we needed him. He came back in a few hours later, smiling and looking stoned, and said he’d got a pill from one of the other employees that really floored him. The next day was Labor day, and Scott asked me if he could trade me one of those pills so I would cover his shift. I told him no.

The next day, Labor Day, another manager called me. She said I was supposed to be covering Scott’s shift. I told her that no, I don’t work on Labor Day, and Scott had offered me pills to take the shift, which I had refused. I was told in no uncertain terms that I was to work this shift or I would lose my job. And so I lost my job at Taco Bell.

I spent the whole day at home having sex with Kate the Painter.

VI Crystal Jigsaw

I took a job at Holman’s, blocks from my apartment. I’d been working in food for some years and they had a sign advertising the need for a line cook.

The place was a dive. Smokey, greasy, poorly kept but extremely popular. The kitchen staff were treated like second-class citizens by an uncaring, conservative owner who is notorious for firing people so he doesn’t have to give anyone raises. Years later, I read a review of Holman’s in one of the local newspapers that said something like, “When you look back through the kitchen window, and see the cook sweating and running around like wild, you can’t help but feel like you’re looking at a scene from a Saw movie.” That’s how it felt. Wait-staff didn’t have it much better.

The Kitchen Manager, a tall man with a pockmarked face, Mike, looked at my resume. “Can you flip eggs?”

“Yeah,” I lied. “Sure.”

He called my bluff, and took me back to the kitchen. He put an egg pan on the stove and turned it on, and handed me a raw egg and some oil.

I fucked up immediately. He laughed. “Okay, kid. Be back at 1am.” He gave me a teflon pan to practice with at home, flipping a piece of bread to train the muscles in my wrist in the delicate flick required for eggs over easy.

I worked the 1am to 4am shift, which was Holmans’ late night debaucherous breakfast hour. I was the side cook to a great man named Christian, a recovered-ish addict who had great taste in rock and roll and who taught me the bulk of what I now know about basic greasy spoon cooking, plus a fair amount about what I now know about how bars and restaurants work. He’d lost all his teeth to being on junk, but his dentures looked good and he had a really friendly demeanor for an older guy. I learned later he wasn’t that much older than me, just weathered from hard living. 

After a month or two on the late shift, I got extra hours manning less busy, earlier shifts that would end at 2am. Some of my shifts on weekends would end at 10.

One evening, I was done at 10 and decided to hang around and drink and be merry with some regulars. From 10 to 1, Christian would be on, and then at 1am Mike would join Christian for the 1-4 late rush. Except by 1:30, Mike was nowhere to be found.

I’d been drinking since 10, when Christian came to get me at my table. “I need you man. Mike is upstairs doing meth, and I’m getting killed.”

This was how I learned to identify methamphetamine users. Mike and the Dishwasher (Lisa) were upstairs, locked in her apartment, using crystal meth instead of coming to work. The dishwasher wasn’t supposed to be working but Mike, the kitchen manager, was.

During a couple slow spots, Christian ran upstairs and banged on the door. Nobody would answer, but music was blaring inside. Finally, at 3:30, things slowed down. I was now hungover from sweating all my drinks out in front of a hot grill. I was sitting on a countertop next to a meat slicer when I heard Mike’s voice. “Hey man, get your butt off of there.” He’d finally showed up.

He and the dishwasher both had overdone outfits on, and looked like they’d been awake for days. They moved erratically for no apparent purpose. The two of them side by side, hollow sunken eyes, bugged out of their heads, looking like they’d aged overnight. Christian was pissed at Mike, and let him know to his face that this wasn’t okay. I didn’t move from the counter. Mike said, “Do you think I’m kidding? We can’t have your butt on there.”

I left without saying a word.

A few weeks later, Mike just disappeared. We received a phone call on the bar line. The woman on the other end of the line said something like: “Hi, is Mike there? Mike, the kitchen manager.” He wasn’t anywhere that we knew of. “A few weeks ago my husband and Mike met at a bar, and he’s been hanging out with Mike ever since. And well… I think they left town. I heard a friend of his say he mentioned something about going to Denver. He took our car. And… I’m just worried. Is Mike gay? Did my husband leave me for a man?”

The bartender had to be the one to break the news that her husband didn’t love Mike, but Crystal.

VII Hungry Tiger Too

A new bartender at Holman’s, Shane Torres, told me one day that he wanted me to come out. He’d just started doing stand-up comedy, and there was a bar not too far away called Hungry Tiger Too, SE 12^th and Ash. I hadn’t had many people invite me out and  I was a fan of comedy (David Cross and Bill Hicks, mostly). So I took him up on it.

This was the first open mic comedy show I ever attended. It was in the dining room of the bar, a nicer place than Holman’s but not by much. Several booths of patrons ignored the show while a few tables of onlookers would stare and sometimes chuckle.

Having been a performer long before coming to Portland, I was enamored by this and would end up making a hobby out of it. I went to two open mics as a spectator before deciding that at the third, I would try and tell some jokes.

Shane Torres and Jesse Allison convinced me to keep coming out to comedy. It was after my third set, when a political funny guy namedKyle Harbert shook my hand, that I realized I was okay at this

VIII Gregory Scott Wakefield

This is where things start to get bad.

A neighbor of mine and Evan’s started becoming a fast friend. He would come visit Evan and I, smoke weed with us, watch us play Mortal Kombat, and tell jokes. He was late 30s, early 40s, with a shaved head, eyeglasses, and a deeply wrinkled face. His name was Greg, an independent contractor who did finish carpentry, and he was one of the guys. Within a month of meeting him, he would let himself into our apartment without knocking. He was offended once when we had our screen door locked.

Greg offered me work as “his assistant” when I quit / was fired from Taco Bell. He was keen on my interest in cooking, and helped me to get a job apprenticing in a five star restaurant called Wine Down, on NE 28^th and Couch (where City State Diner is now located, and where on my first night on the line I saw my chef take off a large piece of his finger with a $300 Japanese folded steel chef’s knife.) At one point, Greg paid me $100 to transfer a long list of contacts from his old phone to his new phone.

One day, Greg asked Evan and I to sit down and have a talk. He got us stoned, and told us some bad news. Apparently, all the years of doing drywall had led him to having a persistent tickle in his throat. He’d been bothered by it, so he went to a doctor. And the doctor informed him that he had contracted a form of throat cancer known commonly to people in his industry. They needed to operate, if he was going to survive.

We were shocked, and sympathetic. He told us he really valued our friendship, and that he had good news. He came from a wealthy family, he said. His family was going to be helping him with his recovery. He didn’t want to be in recovery in the apartment building where we all lived. He wanted a house, and his family was going to provide him one – a rental house in Laurelhurst, around 37^th and Wasco.

He offered us a deal. “You guys are my friends, and I want you with me during my recovery,” I recall him saying. He propositioned us with being his companions. If we would move into the house he was going to rent, he would charge each of us just $300 apiece. A less expensive place, far nicer, far more private, to help a man with cancer recover. It was obvious we would say yes, and we did.

We moved in November. When we signed the lease, the person who showed us the home referred to Greg as “Scott.” I perked up.

“What was that? Scott?,” I asked.

Greg shot back. “Nevermind that. We’re in! We got the place!” He high-fived Evan and I.

One day, we sat on the front porch of our new home, and Greg asked us to do him a favor.

“My family is worried I’m not resting enough. The doctors told me I could stay in the hospital last night after treatment, or leave, and I left. My family thinks I should stay in the hospital, though. I’m going to call them. Do me a favor, and if they ask to talk to you, don’t tell them we’re home. Tell them we’re at the hospital.”

We did as he asked. Simple enough, don’t let the parents worry.

Around late November, Greg’s family came for Thanksgiving. I was to make them all a nice big meal, putting to use some of the apprenticing and cooking I’d been doing.

Greg was in the shower. His daughter pulled me aside. She was hurried, and quite serious in her tone.

“You know my dad’s name is Scott, right?,” she asked.

“Yeah, but he goes by Greg. I found that out when we moved in.”

“You know my dad isn’t allowed to be a contractor in Washington state anymore, right?,” she asked presumptively.

“No,” I answered. “No I did not.”

“Well, he was in jail in Washington and had his contractor’s license taken away for conning people,” she told me. Without missing a beat, she wrecked me. “Nobody in the family thinks he has cancer, Shawn. We all think he’s faking it so we’ll pay for this house.”

Minutes later, Greg emerged from the bathroom, head freshly shaved.

I was shocked. The story gets hazy here, as it was surreal and traumatic. Evan and I, and both our girlfriends (mine being Kate the Painter), coming to mutual agreement sitting in the car in the parking lot of a 7/11 that his daughter was right and he’s been lying to us. Me making Thanksgiving dinner with the full knowledge I was doing it for a con man. Greg’s father slipping $200 into my pocket for dinner, which had cost me more than $250 just in ingredients, plus an entire day to prepare. Me confronting Greg, as “Scott,” as a liar and him complaining that the Thanksgiving turkey wasn’t very good. Him attacking me. He microwaved dozens of my CDs. He called me at work. I wrote a Myspace blog about Greg, and he sent me text messages threatening to sue me for libel. I told people who knew him what happened, and he sent me text messages threatening to beat me up. I talked to his dad on the phone, and his dad, a lawyer who was gunning for a political appointment, said, “my client maintains his innocence.” They’d rather protect the family name, and assets, than admit that young Scott Gregory Wakefield – or was it Gregory Scott Wakefield? – had done anything wrong.

We moved in with Greg in November, and moved out in December. Evan and I stuck together through that, thank god, though it was damaging to our relationship and ultimately divided us against each other. I took the con a lot more seriously than Evan did. He and I moved into a new place at SE 15^th and Ash. Moving twice in such a short time frame was financially devastating.

His face sticks with me; I still think I see him everywhere. I would learn later about a disease called “Munchausen syndrome,” a disease where people lie about medical conditions for personal gain, or attention. Apparently people who have this disease each have the same, very distinct set of facial features. They tend to look alike. I really am seeing him everywhere.

I cancel my MySpace account so he can’t track me any longer. I Google anyone who I meet for the next three years, and ask many people to see ID when they tell me their name. I grow paranoid, and distrustful of strangers, for some time.

At Holman’s Christmas Party, the owner of the bar gives himself the first (and last) pick in the White Elephant gift exchange, so he gets the best prize for himself. The party wasn’t fun. Kate came and I didn’t pay her much attention because I realized how little I liked working at this place, how little I felt like I fit in with the culture of the owners, and how weird it was that I lived in Portland during Christmastime.

I remember calling my family, and crying to them, that I missed them and I wished I was able to be home with them. But I was safe.

I don’t remember New Year’s but I’m positive I didn’t enjoy it.