THEATER OF THE UNDETERRED

We’re pleased to post playwright Helen Hill’s magnificent short story “THEATER OF THE UNDETERRED” which reads like a play within a play. The story’s set in Dignity Village and namechecks the original Out of the Doorways campaign that led to the birth of the Village.

THEATER OF THE UNDETERRED

On my way out of town, I veer off at the Hope Chest Thrift Store; suddenly what I’m wearing feels hopelessly wrong. I grab the first $2 dress that seems to say: “sincere and humble playwright” Perfect, except for the shiny faux gold buttons. Too upscale resale. I buy it anyway, and realize I’m in way over my head even as I hand over the two bucks, realize I’m rushing headlong into a void in a polyester dress that smells like a stranger’s perfume.

God I’m nervous. A bundle of copies of the new play are on the seat beside me, fresh and throbbing like a raw, chapped newborn, tentative and untried. Going public with new work always feels like stretching my neck across a chopping block, but to top it off, the destination of this new work is an infamous village full of strangers whose lives I can’t begin to imagine.

Almost there, I think. But where is this place? I’m lost in the outback. Lonely industrial warehouses scattered among peeling farmhouses, weed-choked idle acres and the whine of converging freeways in the distance; I’m out where God lost his shoes, it seems. Where else would the city of Portland put an acre full of homeless people?

I spy a low patchwork of tar-paper shacks and tents like a jumble of hodge-podge hives, hard to see from the road, but I recognize the yellow plastic “Dignity Village” flag atop a tower of angled sticks, snapping in a chilly wind funnelling down the Columbia Gorge.

I’ve seen pictures on the web, on television and in the newspapers, but this is not what I expected. I imagined the Village would be showcased like the paradigm busting oddity that it is: an autonomous homeless encampment run entirely by the 65 plus or minus residents and granted tenuous status to exist independently (from day to day) by their uneasy landlords; the City of Portland. It’s three years old, and has been written about in the NY Times, the Italian press, and provided a model for homeless camps in Montreal, Japan, Seattle, LA, London and Denver. With all that, it’s easy to miss.

Several years ago, when a new law banning camping within city limits was passed, Portland’s growing homeless population found themselves prodded, poked, tasered, booked, fined and jailed for the crime of having nowhere to sleep. Pockets of poor were swept daily from encampments under bridges, bushes, inside doorways and off dead end streets in the dead of night and told to move along, move along. But there was nowhere to move along to. The shelters were bursting, the social workers exhausted. Long lines began forming at 9 every morning for a chance at a bed 12 hours later and a few hours sleep in a room often full of contagious, coughing people. Couples were split, possessions unsecured, no pets allowed.

The cold winter of 2001 found a core group of homeless fighting back in an effective and original way. With planning and staging, the “Out of the Doorways Campaign” was born; a series of agit-prop actions designed to call attention to the lack of affordable housing and the plight of the homeless. The activists conducted stately parades through downtown Portland with loaded shopping carts, carrying signs and chanting. They camped in strategic places such as open greenways beside upscale housing developments. Wealthy condo owners opened their floor to ceiling curtains to enjoy an espresso in the morning sun and found themselves face to face with tent cities that had bloomed overnight. Newspapers were full of articles about a moveable band of humans, undeterred, with a simple message: “We are a river of people with nowhere to go, and the river is growing wider every day”

Along the way, they acquired a name for their vision of a place to rest and arrest the downward spiral. Dignity Village; a Zion in the heart and mind where fruit trees grow, birds sing, and it’s safe to sleep at night. It took a year, but a red-faced city finally caved to pressure and allowed them to occupy a near-acre in a thinly populated area out by the airport. The vision was realized, though no one ever guessed Zion would look like a wind-swept, asphalt-covered leaf composting yard surrounded by a heavy chain link fence.

I park across from the Village’s neighbor to the south, a sprawling county corrections unit with a twenty foot high razor wire fence, grab the stack of plays and duck as a pair of F15 fighter jets screams into the sky from the nearby National Guard runway. Perfect placement on the part of a city still intent on pressing these independent undeterred into a mold. On either side of them and in the sky above are constant reminders of the power and authority of the military industrial complex, of the system they’ve been displaced out of, are bucking.

There’s a sluggish green slough channeled beside the entrance, (full of jet de-icer run-off and two headed ducks deformed by chemicals, I later learn), leading to what appears to be a small plywood security shack. I see an American flag in the window and a little Scotty guard dog yapping, tail wagging furiously, pulling tight on his chain to greet me. His loopy fur sprouts over button eyes, and I reach down to clear his view of the world. I have to laugh, he looks like he’s about to come apart, he’s so happy, and for a moment I forget how scared I am to cross this unknown threshold, and in that moment, a beaming man in a fluoro-orange vest emerges from the shack with a clipboard and I think this security post seems more like a fragile rib cage protecting a heart.

“Hi! Welcome to Dignity Village!”
“I’m here about a play. I called last week.”
“Oh right, we talked about that at the meeting last night. I’m Ben.”

He extends a warm hand. How silly of me to worry about gold buttons on a dress, he is looking into my eyes. I look into his and understand there won’t be any awkward questions asked of me, no quick judgments of the sort I’m used to. He wants to know only what I want to tell him. I feel exposed and accepted at the same time. Forgiven. No need to invent or expand, every reason not to. Let’s just get on with the business of being human.

Ben leads me past dozens of plants in black plastic pots reaching for a weak late winter sun. There are raised boxes, compost piles, container gardens everywhere. They’ve turned Joni Mitchell’s paved over paradise back into a green Garden of Eden in an upside down reclamation project: they’ve buried the thick pavement with worms and dirt, tomatoes and dill.

We enter the Common Room, a large, circular structure tagged together with old windows, plastic sheeting, warped formica and plywood panels. Inside are couches that look like they’ve been thrown off a cliff. Seats torn from cars. Cats dozing. A can of chilli with a spoon stuck in it heats up on a blazing wood stove leaking cherry light at the seams. Old, young and middle-aged, any race. Laughter, dogs, ghetto blankets. There’s a line of faucets to one side with an open drain for brushing teeth and washing pots. Ben disappears and someone says “have a seat.”

A squall outside builds, hits, a drumming rain deafens on a roof built around a center pole, built with anything that tends to shed water: wood, plastic, tin, cardboard. Raindrops leak and sizzle on the wood stove. I just sit with the din, it’s impossible to talk, sit mute with copies of the play in my lap and try not to feel like an idiot. I can feel people looking at me. Oh God, have I made a terrible mistake? I distract myself from this thought and read the hand painted signs on the “walls” One has the five rules of the Village. #1: No violence to others #2: No violence to yourself. #3: No stealing. #4: No drugs or alcohol within 220 yards #5: No loud or obnoxious behavior.

Someone passes me rice in a saucepan with a fork in it. I take a bite and I am two things; I am a hopeful, irrelevant playwright from a fantasy world where people can indulge in the luxury of theatre and I am a grateful guest in this large living room that has a deep sense of common ground, of friendship, failure, recovery.

The squall subsides and a woman across the room flashes me a smile.
“Hi, my name’s Chocolate.” Her boyfriend takes a long drag on his cigarette and exhales smoke through a metal hole in his throat. I try not to stare at it. It seems rude not to explain myself, so I say; “I’m here about a play, are any of you interested in being in a play?”
“Oh, Honey”, says Chocolate, “We just don’t do that kind of thing.”

The stack of plays in my lap suddenly feels very heavy. Maybe I can say the rain made the ink run and the plays are ruined. Maybe that way I can leave Dignity Village with some Dignity Intact. A man in green army fatigues sitting beside me senses the kamikaze dive of my self-confidence and says, “Don’t worry, Jack will be here soon.” He says Jack like a nurse would say The Doctor.
“First time here?”
“Yeah.”
“Want a tour?”
“Sure.”

My guide’s name is Dave, he walks with a limp. Tells me he’s been at the Village a few weeks. Got his leg mashed on a job and couldn’t get disability, couldn’t work for over a year. Lost everything. Things are looking up though, he tells me. Lucky he found this place. Now he’s working steady hours driving truck, saving up for a place of his own. He proudly lifts a blue plastic tarp doorway to show me his cot in the windowless Quonset hut tacked on to one side. It’s too dark in there to see much, but I say “cool” anyway.

Dave shows me the Council Chambers, just off the Common Room, explaining that this is where the business of the Village is conducted. The room is full of light from windows screwed together in a rough circle, just big enough for a large round plywood table painted with a many-pointed star. Dave tells me each point reaches out and includes those sitting around the table, keeping everyone a part of the discussion. A ghostly visage of Jesus is pencilled on one section of wall, and stacked up ten feet high
against another are dozens of loaves of Wonderbread, making a solid circus of yellow, red and blue balloons with the word “Wonder” over and over again.

“Sometimes we get a whole truckload donated”, Dave tells me. “It’s months old, but it never molds. What do you think they zap it with?” He tells me they use it for kindling to start fires.
“Would you eat that shit?”

The squall lets up, and Dave offers to show me the “neighborhood”. We walk a narrow path on raised pallets above standing water; between cluttered dens, tents, box structures built on skids. “Here’s where Hippie lives”, he says, “and that’s Jack’s Chilli Pad. Jesus lives over there”, he’s pointing now to a formless mound, like an animal den made of whatever. Jesus emerges carrying a dead duck by the feet. He tells us he killed it with a slingshot.
“Really?” I say. Jesus laughs, pins me with his eyes.
‘You white people don’t know nothing’, Jesus says, swinging the duck at me. ‘Here, you take it. Cook it.’
‘Um. No thanks, I don’t eat duck, but thanks.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Jesus says and Dave steps in and rescues me again, tells me not to pay any attention to him. Tells me Jesus lives to tease, loves to talk about how we owe his people 200 years of back rent.
‘Two hundred and FIFTY!’ sneers Jesus.

We go on our way. There are shopping carts full of odds and ends, rusted bicycle parts, dogs on long leashes, dog shit, doorways made of shredded blankets, upended tables, tarps. Piles of anything discarded that might be useful; lumber stuck with nails, broken windows, torn sections of ancient countertops. A woman named Sunshine invites me into her structure. There’s barely room to turn around, but she’s proud to show me her dry bed, a clean rug on the floor, and a tiny corner kitchen with cups neatly on a shelf, a window hung with lace and colored glass beads.

‘We call this Lakefront Property’, Dave says, pointing to a wide, stagnant puddle of water in the middle of the Village. ‘We have sailboat races here sometimes’. Some tents on pallets perch on the edge, part in, part out of the scummy water. A fat rat scurries by. ‘Yeah, there’s tons of ’em. The dogs and cats are afraid of ’em.’

We circle back to the Common Area, where I sit again and wait for this man Jack, who I learn is the acting Chair of the Village Council. He arrives finally and I remember thinking: he looks dangerous. He moves slowly towards me, rolling a cigarette with thick fingers. Beaded dreads down to his waist. Tattoos. Looks at me with one cruel eye, one kind eye, and quietly, so quietly, says; ‘I used to be a porn star in Amsterdam.’ Oh. He lies down full length and slow on the cracked naugahyde couch and takes a deep drag off the cigarette, exhales, assessing me through a haze of smoke. ‘So, you’ve got a play for us?’ he says.

Keith, who’s just come from Bible study class, must be the appointed Village Crier. With a nod from Jack, he steps outside and shouts at the top of his lungs that a play is being read, and people should get their ass over. Ross shows up, a wiry man made of rubber with pigtails that end in corkscrews. His girlfriend, Chrysler Chelle smiles a shy, pirate smile and keeps saying no way, no way, but she stays, listening around the edges. Ginger-Julie arrives with her giant wolf dog named Crystal-Ann. There’s Patricia, a white-haired woman who likes to sweep, and Al-Amin, a strapping young man who carefully spells his name for me, making sure I understand there’s a dash in-between the Al and the Min, and while we wait, he sings a verse of the Koran in a strong, clear voice, looking straight into my eyes the whole time. And Kat, a beautiful young woman in an oversized man’s coat who asks Jack for a ‘monkey fuck’, which I watch and learn is when you light one cigarette off another.

We settle around the star points of the Council Room table, pass out the play, but before we can start we’re drowned out by another squall. I discreetly shift my chair away from a thin stream of coffee-colored water pooling in my lap as another pair of fighter jets screams into the sky, obliterating even the squall. But mouths around the table keep moving; they must know how to lip read. As the planes begin to fade to dull thunder, I take my hands from my ears and Ross shouts that they send up one jet for surveillance, two for reconnaissance, three’s a scramble, and four means Armageddon. ‘We’ll be the first to know when the world’s gonna end!’ He laughs, eyes wide.

‘We’re losing light,’ someone says. ‘Let’s get started.’ Okay. I introduce myself, explain how I was asked to write a play about community for an upcoming conference in Portland called the Village Building Convergence, and that once I’d written the play, which is based on a true story, I realized I’d be a hypocrite if I asked anyone else but the residents of Dignity Village to perform it. ‘So what’s it about?’

Well, twenty years ago, there was an old ramshackle hotel perched on the cliff edge of the sea, not too far from Portland. It was a thriving community, plenty rough around the edges. There used to be lots of places like it, this one was typical; for several decades it had been a low-rent haven for retirees, WWII and Vietnam Vets, old fishermen, cannery workers, waitresses and single moms who paid only $50 a month’s rent. There were painters, not-quite-famous-yet-poets, sculptors, motel maids, retired nurses and runaways. They fought together, drank together, pooled food stamps, watched each other’s kids, covered for each other, and ate together in shifts on a grimy, oilcloth-covered table in the main room. The hallways smelled like piss and fish stew, the wind off the ocean rattled the rotten windows, but the view was worth a million dollars. It was a functioning community; a pauper’s paradise.

And then one day, a woman with money, connections, and dreams of a theme hotel saw the place, recognized its possibilities, and bought it for a song. She later described the hotel as ’empty’ or variously ‘full of transients’ in interviews she gave to newspapers and glossy travel magazines that featured stories of her new venture. Immediately after she bought the place, she issued 30-day eviction notices to the tenants. They fought the eviction in court, asked for an extension, but had no ammunition, no funds, no connections. Pretty themes and dreams drive moneylenders, and the poor and the gritty walk every time. They never had a chance. Their community broke apart and their lives came undone in just 30 days. They left shreds of black cloth hung on every doorway when they left.

There were plenty of rumors when the tenants scattered twenty years ago. Someone said the old fisherman from the 2nd floor died under a bridge that winter. Others lost children to the state, or went alone into institutions. Moved into cars. Disappeared. It was over. The old hotel had a new beginning. The new owner became a celebrity of sorts, her renovated hotel touted as a charming place for people who love literature, (especially literature of the oppressed), and a haven to experience raging storms in soft armchairs with books and mulled wine at the elbow. A haven for people with plenty of havens. For a few hundred dollars a night, one could book the ocean view ‘Alice Walker’ room, with ‘The Color Purple’, a novel about growing up black and poor, beside the bed. Or the austere Meridel LeSueur room, complete with a collection of her stories about labor unions, welfare recipients and the Great Depression.

No one seemed to notice the irony. Perhaps they were too charmed by chintz, too lulled by lace. At any rate, an invisible social curtain descended to hide the flagrant paradoxes; the hotel was even named for a woman who offered free sanctuary to homeless artists at the turn of the century. Poverty: lovely to read about with mulled wine at the elbow, unlovely to witness.

Jack speaks first. He wants to read the part of the crusty old fisherman who works hard to hide his soft heart, but he wants to change him to an old Rasta fisherman named Winston. Fine. Kat wants the part of the single mom trying to go straight. But she wants to be a prostitute on the side. Okay. Ross wants to play the new owner. He’s dying to mince around in a dress on stage, he can’t stop giggling about wearing a dress. Um I don’t know, Ross. Ross has so many ideas, I think he’ll explode. Ginger Julie wants the part of the retired nurse. Al-Amin the Vietnam Vet. We start reading, but the focus keeps getting derailed, there are endless jabs at each other, a random diatribe against Bush, the War, the Weather. Jack gets a phone call and disappears. Parts get mixed up, we start over. Jack reappears. Start over again. I begin to get a feel for the chaos of homelessness, begin to learn how focus is a luxury born of ease and security.

It gets hard to see the words. Can we turn on a light, I say? They laugh at me. Electricity? I just made a joke. A propane tank appears and is set in the middle of the table like a bulky centerpiece. The squalls have passed, but now there is the roar of a blue sputtering torch and more chaos as the giant wolf dog Crystal Ann lunges at a thin cat which claws its way up the wall of ancient Wonderbread, and I sink further into embarrassed depression. I’m dying here, my naïve presumptions are killing me. This play is not only bad, this whole idea has been a long distance call to nowhere. What was I thinking? How many more pages do we have to endure till I can slink out of here?

But as darkness falls, there’s a shift in the mood. Ross and Al-Amin quit bickering, Crystal Ann is put on a leash, and the characters begin coming to life. We read past the part where the tenants find out they have 30 days to vacate, past the part where they decide to fight for their right to keep their home. ‘She can get a bank loan, why can’t we?’ they ask. ‘She calls us transients in the newspapers, but what’s more transient than people who stay at a place one weekend a year?’ ‘It’s about class’, the ghost authors tell the new owner when they visit her in a dream one night. ‘You’ve squandered our intentions, my dear’, Meridel LeSueur tells her gently.

We get to the end of the play. The light sputters out. No one speaks. I ask the darkness; ‘So do you want to do the play?’ Not a word. I wonder again if I’ve crossed some line I had no right to cross. Ross breaks the silence from across the table, says that I don’t understand.
‘We’re not like other people’, he explains, ‘we can’t memorize all this. We can’t do things other people do, we’re rejects. We’ll fuck it up.’

I don’t argue, what do I really know? And you can hear a pin drop; and after the rain and the jets and the squabbling and chasing, the silence is deafening. Finally I whisper: ‘Is that true?’ More silence. Fidgeting. Then someone spits out one fierce word: ‘BullSHIT!’ And I know we’re on our way.

One week later, it’s clear no one was expecting me back, even though we’d set it up. I have to go through the hood, call out: ‘Play practice.’ They seem surprised I remember their names. Everyone’s lost the script except Jack. I get the impression that a lot of scheduled meetings are patched out, cancelled or forgotten. Their lives are like a field of dreams with seeds planted and dug up overnight, again and again.

For two months my friend Rachel and I come once a week, then twice. By early April I’m practically living there and I wonder why I was ever nervous that first day. With the warm days of spring, the nuts and bolts of life get easier for the Villagers, and we are making a sort of progress with the play, but if I ever imagined that I was in control of the project, I quickly come to my senses on this point. Our attempts at rehearsals are constantly challenged by true priorities such as runaway dogs, stolen teeth, (sold for a nickel of meth), cast members kicked out of the Village, cast members stuck downtown without bus fare, cast members picked up for prostitution at the truck stop down the road, a temporary skid back into the meth, a caved-in roof, the ever constant, imminent threat of closure by the city, job interviews, clear-cutting protests, a visiting free medical clinic, crowds of curious student groups visiting the Village for a social studies class. Worst of all is when the weekly Hostess truck dumps off a ‘charitable donation’ of stale Twinkies and bright pink Snowballs. The scramble for the mound of plastic wrapped poison permanently derails any hope of rehearsal; the sugar highs that follow disintegrate everyone’s sanity and my patience.

Emotions swing like crazy; violent, sworn enemies one week are rolling cigarettes for each other the next. It becomes obvious that the usual theater warm-up exercises designed to open us up to each other and to the work are ridiculous. Set-up improv situations disintegrate into brilliant, all-out hilarious brawls in which Ross usually takes on the role of a cop so he can throw everybody up against a wall.

Exercises designed to instil trust are also a joke. They tell me I’m full of shit. I think they have a point. Why set up trust games for people who routinely save and destroy each other? What use does Chrysler Chelle have for a bonding exercise when she’s been up all night, talking down her neighbor Larry who can’t stop screaming about giant purple rats coming for him in his windowless plywood box? My cast has been living together in some of the most fundamentally unabashed circumstances humans can possibly live in. They operate daily on a level of honesty that is non-existent outside of the Village. Not a pretty honesty, but an invasive, explosive, grinding honesty studded with grace and anger.

The challenge is clear, if not simple: ride the rollercoaster of drama, meth, displacement, raw deals and recovery and embrace the hollow failure of dreams mixed with the joy and chaos of a true, evolving community. Life and the play become indistinguishable. The play about community is becoming my education about community. And I find myself learning what has always eluded me; what is perhaps the most important and most difficult lesson for anyone involved in art and theater; I learn to be loyal to the journey, to throw the outcome out the window and to cherish first and foremost our time together and what we can learn from each other.

My education is non-stop. When Lydia moves into the common room, it isn’t such a nice place anymore. Her grey hair hangs in oily strings down her face, she has long stained fingernails that curve, a little dog with dirty whiskers. I’m afraid of her. She’s made a nest of grimy blankets on one of the couches and sits in wait with her tirades, lost down some maze. I wish she’d go away. But one day I witness JP, one of the original Dignity Soldiers, a tough, radical young revolutionary, calling out sweetly to her, carrying a plate full of roasted corn, ‘Lydia, O Lydia, I made you sweet corn on the cob!’

Tuesdays I pick Patricia up at Sisters of the Road Café and we ride to Dignity together for rehearsal. On the way, she usually falls into a rant, like falling down a flight of stairs. One minute we’re doing fine, talking about weather or lunch or cigarettes or how many wheels on her walker still work, next minute, we’ve slipped somehow and she’s yelling at me that they want to label her mentally ill or she won’t get any money to live on but then they’ll make her take scary drugs and her old landlord who kicked her out still won’t give back her things and he’s got a picture of her dead son and she really wants that picture back but her roof at the Village leaks and what if it rains on that picture of her dead son? She’s speaking of such intimate, fragile, confused and violent memories that I don’t feel I should try and understand, just listen.

She’s so terribly angry, but mostly, I think, she’s scared. Even though it’s months before winter, she’s scared because old people can’t handle the cold, and the wind rushes through the gaps in her structure, and the rats get in and she wants to fix that with some clay and straw. Will I help her? Of course I’ll help her, and the play comes into perspective finally, talking to Patricia. It’s fun, but it’s not going to really change much. A good roof, now that would change something. A plug for the rat holes, now that would be useful.

In my world the play’s the thing, in her world, the play’s ‘a’ thing, but living through the winter, that’s really the thing. Just when I’m overwhelmed by her despair, our inequities, we arrive and she stops talking and looks over at me with a wide, toothless smile, her blue eyes shining, her straight white hair combed back with a bright green plastic butterfly to keep her bangs out of her eyes and there’s suddenly a child beside me, so utterly charming, and I feel blessed just to be near her, I can’t say why.

Jack falls asleep a lot during rehearsals. Exhausted after what I think has been centuries of energy holding, eons of vibrational tuning, spliffing, whatever. I think he’s the weariest man I’ve ever seen, but there’s a force in him, a metal energy that could move mountains or build a village of homeless people on top of asphalt. It was Jack who directed the Out of the Doorways Campaign that led to Dignity Village, and now he lives for these people, this cause. If a thing is good for the Village, Jack will fight for it till there’s no breath left in him, if it’s bad for the Village, he will summon a strong danger always beneath his surface, and throw it like a lightening bolt. Jack holds the place together like a magnet and sleeps like a dead man, twitching. I look at his swollen hands, the emphysema is bad, if I ask him about it, all he says is: Rasta man live forever.

I worry how he’ll fare in the upcoming winter, and realize how crazy that is. For a man that’s been homeless for thirty years, fear of the weather must be like fear of honeybees. How he will hold an old woman on the street, if she needs that. How he will greet each homeless person as a brother or sister, how he refrains from talking badly of anyone. But one day when a pusher came to the Village to sell his wares, his ‘tweak’, I watched as Jack transformed into the gangsta of his youth, watched as he walked like a terrible lion towards the man. Who couldn’t feel it. The pusher stepped back, got in his car and left, whining. I’ve walked with Jack down the worst drug alley in downtown Portland without a fear in the world. Yea, though I walk through the alley of crack, I will fear no evil.

One evening Chrysler Chelle asks me to have dinner with her and Ross, and we sit on her veranda (only poor people have porches), surrounded by potted vegetables stuck with little found things; broken clocks and plastic dolls without arms and such, and we visit while she peels onions on a board on her lap, then zucchini and broccoli, and there’s good bread from the donation table and rice fluffing in a pan. Chelle feels like someone I’ve known for years, someone you want to respect you; someone who brings out the best in you. She shares with me how it wasn’t long ago she had a beautiful home, children, a good marriage. But one weekend her husband brought meth home for them to try; just to try. Just once. She was one of the unlucky ones who got hooked first time out.

The spiral down went fast. They divorced because her husband was destroyed by what he’d done to her, what he couldn’t fix. Couldn’t face. Only took a year till she was living under bridges. She tells me how she became the one who checked on everybody through the coldest winter nights, waking every hour to make the rounds and cover bodies back up if they’d rolled out of their blankets. That’s how so many meth addicts and alcoholics die outside in the winter; she tells me, they roll out of their blankets and freeze
to death.

Chelle and Ross and I eat dinner together as the sky full of fighter jets and two-headed ducks turns indigo and a steady wind off the Gorge sends tiny black flecks drifting into our food from the leaf-composting yard next door.
‘It’s like a Petrie dish’, Ross says, ‘they sweep everything off the streets and dump it in our back yard, turn it every few days. You don’t want to think about it too much.’

The stars come out and for now the Villagers own an infinity of diamonds. We listen to the sounds of the night: laughter, doors closing, pots and pans clanging, tarps rattling. There’s smoke from scattered cooking fires, layered.

How isolated and colorless the rest of the world begins to feel when I leave the Village. I am lost and lonely in a new way. Who of the grey suit and tweed skirt hurrying by might break into a spontaneous rendition of T. S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in Rasta verse? What shopper, arms full of purchases, might stop to expound on redemption and the circles of hell? Is there a bank loan officer who would offer the shirt off his back, without hesitation, still gratefully awestruck that he isn’t dead under a bridge with a needle in his arm? The Villagers haven’t lived a subdued life in any recent memory. I’m exhausted by them even as I’m awakened.

Friends from home, my sons and daughter, arrive to buoy the effort in many ways; they help run lines and construct the giant puppets that will be the ghost authors. Time flies as we hurtle towards our one win-or-lose-all, debut performance like a runaway train with a three-ring circus inside. I don’t see how we will be ready; some have their lines down, some simply don’t seem able to memorize, meth can burn out a mind like acid, and a play, like most things, hinges on teamwork. Ross’s comment that first visit haunts me.

The night of the big performance finally arrives. The Pine Street Theatre is packed, standing room only, with hundreds of people. We run lines one last time in a back room, circle up and join hands. I’m the only one who is a nervous wreck, the cast is calm and completely unruffled, and then I remember how their lives are constructed of situations exponentially more terrifying than this. Everything’s relative. I leave them to find a seat as the lights come up on a set designed by an original evicted resident of the old hotel, an artist we located living in his van in the Arizona desert, and the play begins.

And I am mesmerized. I have never been so proud in all my life. I can’t take my eyes off them. I honestly can’t tell you if they were good or bad. I honestly don’t care. I just know they were completely at home in their own play. I know they broke it wide open. I know they got a full standing ovation as the lights of the last scene faded, and the audience stomped and cheered them. I know that afterwards, they danced all night to a marimba band. I go home alone and creep into bed and unexpectedly find myself crying. Their lives are so hard, and I don’t know why. And I miss them.

I’m back in the other world again. Among people who wonder what to order off a menu. It’s a duller world, but the wear and tear is so much less. Questions without answers aren’t hiding behind every interaction, there are no challenges to comfortable assumptions. But I miss the full-throttle honesty. I miss my friends.

I go back and visit for an evening around the wood stove now and then. It’s so good to see them all, catch up on changes. A few have found housing, jobs, and have moved on, but most are still around. Chrysler Chelle is in charge of the building committee and she’s a superhero now, a strong-armed framer and roofer turning hodge podge hovels into solid structures with windows and doors.

Later Jack and I go out for a beer. He puts reggae on the jukebox and draws a picture on a napkin of some cards he’d like to make to sell for the Village. We talk about doing a tour of the play, maybe starting a Village press. The infighting is getting him down and he’s thinking of resigning as Chair, but he’ll die working for the homeless he tells me.

I don’t know if a theme hotel that offers visitors peace and inspiration is worth the unexamined destruction of a community, and I don’t know if an explosion of expensive homes is worth the destruction of a forested hillside and the peace and inspiration of the settled residents. These are baffling equations to pose. I only know we’ll need more and more Dignity Villages in the wake of development. That part of the math seems a certainty.

To Jack the Lion and Tim with his Merlin’s beard, to Gaye who is still in shock at the turn of events that made her homeless fifteen years ago, to my big beautiful friend Kadafy and his tremendous bear hugs, to Lydia; her dog and her blankets, to Chrysler Chelle and all the other Villagers ashamed to tell their children where they are; I have more money than I need and I am afraid of so much, but I wish you a clear, quiet sky full of clean, warm air. I wish you sweet roasted corn, respect, and a different world altogether.

Perhaps I was assigned a role, and you yours, and in the end it isn’t about how others will rate the success of our performance. In the end perhaps the important thing is the journey we are taking towards one another, and that we try and understand what it is we can do for each other; to string together minutes, hours, lifetimes, made only of that.

Helen Hill hellonwheels2_813 [at] hotmail [dot] com 503 842 7013 PO Box 353 Oceanside Oregon 97134. Pictures of Dignity Village and of the play can be found at www.dignityvillage.org. Follow links to The Filmore Hotel first performed in May 2004. Also at this site is a review of the play from Portland Indy Media. We took “The Filmore Hotel” on the road in the fall of 2004.