Going Down: The First Battle of Portland
The Plaza Resort Club, Reno, Nevada
The tension in the packed elevator was as thick as shag carpet soup. One false move and there would be shrieking chaos: desperate and violent, people trying to rip up the floorboards, dogs and cats living together.
Darkly bizarre.
Is THIS what we have come to as a species? Are we THIS close to torches and pitchforks?
How did we even GET HERE?
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Aug. 4th, 2018, Tom McCall Park, Portland, Oregon. Antifa vs. The Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.
“We must be that front line. We may not be muscle bound gym rats, we certainly aren't the sort of sadistic bullies we are facing, but never the less we have to go out there and be the ones willing to physically protect people already under attack in our communities. We are regular people called to do extraordinary things. That is the historic moment we live in.” -Antifa
“At the end of the day you can’t punch an ideology out of someone…” -Joey Gibson, Patriot Prayer
Two days before, on the 2nd, I celebrated my birthday by being kidnapped by my brother and taken on a desperate, frequently hilarious, and occasionally violent substance fueled trip on a ‘special mission’ to cover the Patriot Prayer protests in Portland. The tale of that trip would be a story deserving of being well told one day, but not today because Sparky, the Editor of WTF? has told me that if I submit one more multi-post story for publication she will stop paying for the constant stream of Warner Brothers Classic Cartoons that plays on a little monitor on the desk I have here in the basement.
Suffice to say that we arrived in Portland stoned…ripped…fabulous!
Portland Oregon smells like a big city bus station restroom during The Great Bowel Evacuation of 2018. People literally shit in the streets here. You can just smell the plague in the air. The streets around the cheap hotel we rented were littered with fresh piss, shit, and used syringes. It was like being in Oz if Oz was Hell.
We left my electric wheelchair behind and took the regular, ‘Manual Mode’ wheelchair because, as my brother reminded me: “Your electric wheelchair weighs 500 pounds. I can’t push you in that if things get weird. Better to take the one I can push.” We took the chair, along with a cooler filled with booze, weed, and a few things I can’t mention until I check on the statute of limitations. Mike also had his Glock holstered and I had a Saturday Night Special in my boot. Mike drove us non-stop across half the United States in a beat up 1979 Chevy Van. I never asked where he GOT the van, and he never told me.
We checked into the hotel just minutes before the beginning of the protest but, because things were already happening, we didn’t move into the room. We had to get to where the action was, and shortly thereafter, we did.
The mood in the area around the park’s entrance was edgy, dark, eerie like the few minutes before a bad storm. There was a lot of people gathered in the park and spilling out through the Naito Parkway entrance, and already there was a lot of shouting and police standing around…watching…
They were searching the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, taking away anything that could be construed as a weapon. They were not similarly disposed with those obviously from Antifa. I think they were going to search us until I produced a press pass from my old High School Newspaper.
“We’re with the press, officer,” I explained to the tall, hulking policeman decked out in his riot gear: helmet, bullet proof vest…shin pads??? “I’m a reporter for the Greenwood Bulldog. This is Elvis, my ‘handler’, bodyguard, and valet.”
“Elvis?” asked the cop.
“Yes. He’s not from this country. He is half Nordic Wombat. He was found in the Dark Forest by Gypsies who saved him from certain death at the hands of rabid newts. I’m training him at the moment, right Elvis?”
“Helmen minapenfuhrer,” said Mike nervously, surreptitiously pinching back of my neck, concerned he would be discovered with an unregistered Glock G-48 Silver Slide in the holster hidden in his jacket.
“Are you sure that someone in…your condition should be going in there?” asked the policeman. “Could get pretty ugly…”
“You know what they say about the Working Press, Officer: “Neither Rain, Nor Snow, Nor Sleet, Nor the Dead of Night…”
“That’s the Postman’s Oath, Dumbass!” hissed Mike into my ear.
“The News continues on, Officer!” I continued. “It waits for no man, no revolution, no exigency! Constitutional provisions for the Freedom of the Press…”
That got us into the park with no trouble. The cop was GLAD to get rid of us.
“What the hell was that about me being your fucking valet?” said Mike with mock outrage, letting go of my wheelchair and walking over to the edge of the park, away from prying eyes.
I rolled over to Mike, difficult as it was due to the uneven ground and my not inconsiderable size. He was leaning against a cement pillar. He had fired up a joint, pulled a beer from his jacket and popped it open. I lit a joint and took a swig off the flask of whiskey I was carrying.
I have no idea where the flask of whiskey came from.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. I felt like I had to describe the situation. For what it’s worth, I definitely like you better than I like our sister…”
Mike pushed himself from the pillar, shaking his head, “No you don’t.”
He grabbed a hold of the handles of my wheelchair and we plunged into the fat and soy on the Antifa side of the line; my brother cautiously wheeling me down the front of the Antifa line, me shouting stuff like “YOU KIDS AND YOUR HULA HOOPS AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL AND YOUR BOMBS!”, “DOWN WITH WHALES, UP WITH BIRDS”, and “HILLARY NEVER ATE BABIES WITH KETCHUP!”
We were making our way towards the other side of the park, dodging bottles, sticks, and rocks, drinking and smoking our joints and continuing to blend in with the Antifa side so well as to stand out like sore thumbs.
“GO HOME YOU NAZI FUCKS!” screamed a grossly overweight masked…man?..woman?..thing?
“YOU SAID IT, MAN!” I shouted.
“YYEEAAAHHHH!” exclaimed the masked and…diapered mound of flesh.
“FUCK THOSE PEOPLE! THEY’RE JUST ANGRY THAT EVERYTHING THEY NEW TO BE TRUE AND VALUED HAS BEEN DEGRADED AND DESTROYED!”
“YEAH! FUCK ‘EM!” screamed the huge, masked, diapered, and otherwise nude stack of soy globules. “WE CAN HAVE A NEW WORLD! A BETTER WORLD!”
“BECAUSE WE ARE OUT OF OUR FUCKING MINDS!” I shouted, raising my fist in the air.
“YYYYYYEEAAAAAHHHHHH!” said the jiggling Lard Monster, jumping up and down with abandon. I was thankful that Mike had pushed me past IT before it jumped out of its diaper.
We made it to the other side of the confrontation. I took a slug out of my flask.
“So, what do you think?”
Mike looked over. There was a wave of fists, sticks and bottles heading towards our way. This was about to become a riot; a moving riot.
“I think we need to get out of here!” he answered.
We started pushing our way through the mass of human waste. Mike was doing a good job of protecting me from as much of the jostling as he could, but we were still getting battered with bottles and rocks and people were screaming and slamming into us. We were about 100 yards from the street when my brother looked over and saw three Antifa jerkimos trying to set fire to an American Flag.
He rolled me over to the fence line and positioned me so that I was facing the preposterous vehemence that had broken out.
“Protect yourself until I get back,” he said before turning around and pushing his way through the crowd towards the flag burners.
“DON’T COME BACK WITHOUT THE COLORS!” I called out after him as I moved my little pistol from my boot to my waistband and grabbed my cane; a cane I had hand made for me that had long, thin cylindrical bars of lead encased in a fine, single piece of hickory.
In front of me, the Proud Boys were already ripping huge pieces out of Antifa. They were taking Antifa’s implements of destruction away from them and using them, which, of course, got the police to move in. I saw a few one punch knockouts, I saw one guy sitting on another, ripping off the young commie’s mask and beating his face into hamburger. People were being beaten with pieces of wood and throwing bricks. I know I saw the flash of at least one gun.
And it was all coming at me in a huge, raging, stupid wave.
I looked over and saw Mike cold-cock the guy holding the flag and grab the flag from him, turning and walking away. One of the other goons reached for Mike’s shoulder, but Mike smacked him in the face with his elbow. Even from here, I could see flying teeth…
I had to keep this mob from getting within arm’s length of me. If they do, my last resort, the gun, won’t be effective. Worse yet, I could be crushed. I used the cane to pull up the foot pads, in case I needed to stand, and prepared to beat the living shit out of the next person that wandered into my reach.
Suddenly, Mike appeared. My brother had the flag under his arm. He grabbed the back of the wheelchair and started pushing me towards the park entrance as fast as he could which, due to the fact that my brother is 6’4” and is made of solid muscle and sarcasm, meant that we were literally crashing through bodies on the way out of the park.
I was doing my best spazzing in the chair and yelling that I was sick and about ready to throw up. Mike was shouting: “MEDIC! MEDIC! WE HAVE A MEDICAL SITUATION HERE!” All I could see was the vast backs of people who REALLY should wear more clothes to a riot.
Then, we were out of the soy, and back onto the Naito Parkway.
We were in the middle of a full-blown riot. Across the Parkway and a big patch of grass, we could see and hear people running and yelling down the downtown streets. We could hear the breaking glass of the windows in the businesses that are unfortunate enough to have rented such prime real estate to ply their wares.
“WE NEED TO GET BACK TO THE VAN!’ I bellowed.
“I KNOW!” he replied. “WE CAN’T GO BACK DOWN THE MAIN STREETS, THOUGH. WE’LL HAVE TO GO DOWN THE SIDE STREETS.
The journey was both a white-knuckle trip through downtown Portland and a testament to the reserve of strength my brother can still muster, despite his advanced age and his “fixer-upper” condition…
Listen to me…I’M the one in the chair…
We took a long way around the area, trying to avoid Antifa, who were given free reign to do what they pleased, apparently, while Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys and their supporters were hand-to-hand fighting the commies in the streets. Stopping into a pub for a quick drink hoping that the rising wave of ‘democracy’ doesn’t crest over our heads, Mike and I sat for a minute to plan out our next moves.
“I’m over Portland,” mumbled Mike into his beer.
“Let’s just get outta here,” I said, nursing a couple shots of whiskey. “We still have all our stuff. Let’s just leave. Screw the hotel and screw this town. We get to the van; you can relax and I’LL drive us back!”
I had been up for about 36 hours; Mike had been up longer than that. We got to the van, which turned out to be miraculously untouched, and I managed to get us out of town. We were both anxious to get as much distance between us and that nightmare as possible.
We were heading East on Rt. 90 out of Portland. We had just finished a joint when Mike finally succumbed to sleep. That’s when I had the ‘come to Jesus moment’: We had just experienced the worst of this nation in the form of the Antifa commies. Let’s go somewhere, relax, and experience the best that capitalism has to offer.
I headed South, screaming down Rt.15 and switching to Rt. 80 near Salt Lake City, steaming Southeast to Reno.
Mike found out about this plan at a gas station just outside of Twin Falls Idaho. He was impressed with my initiative. He ended up driving us from Elko, through the delightful town of Winnemuca, and into downtown Reno.
“Where are we going to go?” asked Mike. “I really need to get the stink of Portland off me.”
“We deserve the finer things after that horror show,” I replied. “We need a place that has a bar, is close to the casinos…”
We were rolling past the Plaza Resort Club. “Here you go,” I said, pointing out the main building, “Let’s go there.”
“We would never get in there,” said Mike, lighting a joint and handing it to me.
“Come on, come on; we’ll get in,” I said, “I’m feeling lucky.”
We got up to the check-in counter just as one of the attendants was hanging up the phone, ending a conversation in which, someone apparently had to cancel the ‘Bridal Suite’ at the last minute.
Mike slapped his credit card on the counter. “Bridal Suite” he said, looming over the woman at the check in desk.
It was a lovely suite of rooms, truth be told. Mike got the cooler full of supplies up the elevator to the room at the top floor, and I rolled myself into the elevator, down the short hall and into the room.
First thing’s first: we ordered room service: a few ham sandwiches, some shrimp cocktail, a bottle of whiskey, two bottles of vodka, a case of beer…we each took a shower, changed clothes, and relaxed on the balcony, having drinks, smoking weed, and dropping acid, just two good Americans; filled with hope and cheer, come to Reno for some wholesome fun and harmless shenanigans.
We had come half way across the United States of America to witness the ‘Participation Trophy Generation’ stomp their little feet and whine, demanding from the Government that which they didn’t receive from their parents. They are a violent lot, determined to take what they want from a Society that, ironically, has catered to their every whim: gay marriage, three thousand genders, the ability to ‘identify’ as anything or anyone they want, the ability to force others to agree to their delusions by insisting that you use their preferred pronouns.
We came, we saw, we scarpered.
Now, we were in Reno, Nevada, in the elevator, descending from our fancy-shmancy top floor suite and down into the bowels of The Beast; the game rooms, the bar, the show clubs…the cheap hookers and expensive booze.
Suddenly, for no reason at all, Mike looked over to me and asked: “Do you think the chimp is going to be OK in the room by himself?”
“Oh, absolutely!” I said, playing along. “Stinky has plenty of food, water, and two and a half hours of ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom’ on the TV. He’ll be fine.”
We rode down another two floors, enjoying the rising panic in the small, enclosed space.
“What if the maid comes in,” asked my brother.
“I gave the taser to the hotel manager,” I replied. “If he didn’t give it to the maid, then I hope she knows Kung Fu or Krav Maga, because that little bastard is deadly if he is riled, and Stinky doesn’t like to be surprised…Besides, we have no choice,” I said, gravely, “We can’t let Tommy Two Legs get away with it. The idiot has ordered two broken knee-caps, and it’s up to us to be the delivery boys!”
We were getting down towards the ground floor of the hotel in this long ride. The feeling in the lift now was verging on the kind of deadly silence you hear in a rolling boxcar filled with hyenas that have been given Viagra and LSD-25 right before you throw the politician in. Every single person in this slowly descending closet looked at my brother and I with a curious mix of fear, confusion, outrage, and hatred.
“Are you SURE the chimp will be OK?” my brother inquired with a big grin on his face.
“Absolutely,” I reassured him just before the doors opened and the people in the elevator with us stormed off into the lobby like miffed shipwreck survivors racing for the lifeboats.
“Stinky knows how to take care of himself!”
We stepped off of the elevator and into the American Wet Dream.
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