Mood v.9: Daylight / I wake up feeling like you won't play right

All the feels.

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Mood v.8: The days after

The day after, I talked on the phone for 12 hours. I apologized for the hangover. I stopped my car on the Interstate while protesters clogged the routes. I waited to crash.

The radio played Tupac. I tried to return to the Miles Davis I'd been stuck on before. Then the voice from beyond came barrelling back. Phife and Tip, right on time.

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You got the light. Count it all, joy.

October is mild and golden here, fast-shifting, too. I'm in writing and walking mode, listening to these songs all month. 

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It ain't no plan set out for you

My home state is the incarceration capital of the world. I am loving this podcast from New Orleans Public Radio documenting the Louisiana lives affected by prison. An episode about rapper Jahi Salaam really moved me.

“You grow up – you living in a shitty house, like your house broke down, you go to school, your school broke down, you feel me, like there’s people getting shot, there’s people getting locked up. That’s what I mean by struggling,” Jahi Salaam said. “You know, it’s hard to grow up. Like it ain’t just – it ain’t no plan set out for you or nothing. It ain’t no road you can just walk down, like, ‘Oh, I know I’m going to be straight.’”

A fond farewell to a friend

My grandma Louise wanted to die four years ago. My pappaw had already gone, and she spent her days without him watching Fox News and smoking in the carport. She stopped eating for a while, slimmed from 135 to 80 pounds, and told me she was ready.

“I wouldn’t care if it was tomorrow,” she told me when I flew from Portland, Ore. to Monroe, La. to visit her that year.

Much of her belongings were already spoken for, she said. The cast iron pot would go to her sister. Half a dozen others had laid claim to an old paint palette she used back in her crafting days. She gave me odds and ends that nobody wanted. An old bra, my grandfather’s tie. She sent me home with months-old HGTV magazines and a roll of pennies from 1983.

When she found out Portland had banned plastic bags, she began saving hers for me. One night that spring, she spent two hours carefully analyzing 100 bags for holes. Then she folded and smoothed them into a pile small enough to go unnoticed in my suitcase.

She was anti-liberal, she said, but had a country way of conservation. She composted by feeding raccoons her table scraps. She recycled by sending those bags home with me. It had been years since she stayed in a hotel, but she stockpiled cabinets full of travel soaps.

“Here,” she said, pressing one against my nose. “They still smell.”

She gave back jewelry she had been keeping for me, a pair of diamond earrings I wore as a baby and a brooch she said I had been given for Christmas.

“You could have your grandpa’s ring,” she said.

“Why don’t we wait?” I asked.

“Honey,” she said. “You wait too long and there’ll be nothing left.”

***

Few people get to know their grandparents as adults. My childhood memories of her are spare. I remember the night she woke me up from a dead sleep, hunched over and hissing, “Casey, you’re restless. Get up and go pee.” Everything else is a fragment -- four letter words she said in four syllables, a red-and-turquoise outfit she once forced me to wear.

I kept my distance from her and everyone else in the family. At holidays, I read a book or wrote in my diary while relatives talked meatballs or medicines, unplanned pregnancies and prison stints.

I always planned to move far away some day. I just felt different than the rest of North Louisiana. I thought back then it had something to do with books or music, but as soon as I left for college in Mississippi, I realized it’s because I’m gay. I told my mother that Easter Sunday, inspired by the intensifying chords of praise songs to confess.

The preacher prayed I would repent and die immediately: “Save her and take her.” My mom sobbed and wrote all my professors an email, told them college was a cesspool that had ruined her daughter.

That summer, I went home. At the Fourth of July barbecue, an uncle peered at me over the meat.

“You know about Sodom and Gomorrah, right?” he asked. “God destroyed a whole nation to wipe out homosexuality. He’ll destroy you, too.”

My mom jumped up and ran to the bathroom, a tiny half-bath barely big enough for one. I followed her in, squeezed against a wall and tried to promise I wouldn’t be gay anymore. My grandma knocked then jigsawed in without waiting for an answer.

“Rhonda Jean,” she said to my mother. “Life is a buffet. Some people eat hot dogs. And some people eat fish. She likes women, and you need to get over it.”

Somehow my being gay made my grandma and I grow closer. That summer, she handed over the only thing I ever needed to inherit. She gave me a story.

We were sitting that day at a little wooden table, her fiddling with a pack of Virginia Slims, me with the hair I had just cut short.

“I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man,” she told me.

I begged her to say more.

Roy was born in the 1920s, she said. His parents, or at least the parents my grandma knew, had kidnapped him from an abusive family. They changed his name from Delois, she said, cut his hair, then ran. My grandma met him in 1950, the day she moved to town. Roy played “the most beautiful music,” she said, by which she meant he played the first banjo she ever heard. She didn’t know much else. Roy had died before she had a chance to ask.  

After college, I moved to Oregon and became a journalist. Working at a newspaper taught me how to talk to strangers in ways that always evaded me with my family.

Distance has a way of burnishing the memories of home. The longer I lived in Oregon, the more I missed Louisiana. Finally, a few years after I left, I returned to visit my grandmother. I told her Oregon had taught me how to investigate. She said she had one mystery for me to solve. What had really happened in Roy’s life? Had anyone loved him? Did he ever feel like he belonged?

“It’s eaten at me all these years,” she said. “Am I gonna die without finding out?”

We decided a film documentary would be best. I assembled a little crew then flew down to meet my grandma on Hell Street, the road where her shotgun house once looked out on Roy’s.

Trailer homes had replaced all the houses, but I knocked on every door. Only a few remembered Roy. She was ornery and mowed yards, one neighbor said. She wore men’s clothes and kept her hair short. Kind of, a former neighbor told me, like yours.

I went to Roy’s nursing home and church then tracked down former Hell Street neighbors. I read Census records and microfiche. Mostly, though, I talked to my grandmother. We went over everything she remembered about Roy. When those stories ran out, we talked about her.

She told me about picking cotton and about the first time she saw running water. In her day, she received newspapers only a few times a month. They were always outdated.

She told me, three times, the story of the day she moved from a delta community she called Frog Island. Her parents could no longer earn enough sharecropping, so the family hitched a ride on a stranger’s truck.

“And I rode on top of a bale of cotton,” she said.

Later, my cousin and I drove round and round North Louisiana trying to find Frog Island. Google Maps, for all its flashback features, doesn’t go that far deep into the delta or the past. We stopped and asked a cottonfield owner for directions. He led us to a stranger’s driveway, one small frog statue left as a reminder.

My grandma told me about the delta quicksand that scared her and the UFO she swore she saw. I know the first time she ate a Chiquita banana was June 1952. The first perfume she wore was Evening in Paris. She used strips of tobacco cans to roll her sister's hair and fashioned Christmas tree ornaments out of candy wrappers she rescued from the trash. As a teenager, she saved all her money to buy herself a pair of red jeans but waited to buy them until she had enough for a pair of green ones for her sister.  

My grandfather wasn’t the first boy she dated, but once Troyce Carter drove down Hell Street, no other man mattered. They dated three months, she told me.

“Then we zeroed in on this,” she said and pulled out the little wedding book that had cemented their lives together.

“They put my name as Louise Huffman,” she said, squinting to read the fading ink. “And right here it started Louise Carter.”

She shared family secrets I wasn’t supposed to know, reveals she told me to forget until my deathbed or the afterlife.

I went down a few times a year to ask her questions and dig up whatever I could on Roy. I found Roy’s Bible and a poem he wrote, even a few pictures that showed a curvy boy with a guitar strapped across his chest.

“Did he ever date anybody?” my grandma asked me. No one knew, I told her.

“Can you imagine?” she said. And I could. She talked all the time about my brother’s girlfriends, but my grandma never asked about mine. Finally, three years into the film project, I told her I was getting married. She changed the subject, and I started crying.

“You never ask about me,” I said.

We avoided each other the rest of the day, but she insisted I share a bed with her that night. At 3 a.m., she shook me awake.

“Casey,” she said. “I do want to know you. Bring her down, and I’ll meet her.”

A married woman, she said the next morning, should know how to make biscuits, so she tried, in vain, to teach me. I filmed her three different trips working Crisco into flour then watched them all in Portland before attempting to make the biscuits myself.

“They’re delicious,” my wife told me.

“They’re not hers,” I said. Something was missing, the sour, soft crunch created by Bulgarian buttermilk, humidity and a hundred-year-old cast iron.

My grandma never called me on my birthday, never called me period unless I was in town visiting and she needed me to pick up something. But she knew me, the real me, in a way that made me feel like I could go back to Louisiana and slowly, over time, come to know myself.

The last time we talked, she told me she had a stash of plastic bags and maybe, no promises, a few memories left to drag up. I told her I would finish the documentary, but I had realized, finally, that the film was never the point.

“Just leave me your stories when you go,” I told her. And she did.

Mood v.6: Wish I was there. Wish we'd grown up on the same advice.

September was a rough one. I spent the days listening to jazz for calm, to Frank Ocean for validation. In Louisiana, I listened to dark rap. In Miami, Latin pop.

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America's whitest big city? Portland has a thriving black community, too.

My "diversity beat" at The Oregonian most often is a gentrification beat. For the past few years, I've written narratives about the displaced, about the communities lost. A reader and community leader has often pushed back on some of those stories. Rightly, he asked why I only wrote sad stories about African Americans. He sent me numbers showing the population was growing. Both narratives are true -- African Americans have been pushed out in big cities across the country. But there are others who are thriving, making a home in a place the rest of the country knows for quirky whiteness.

Here's the latest piece I did, the first in a little series that will continue through the fall. Photos by Beth Nakamura, my favorite journalist and best tag team partner.

After gentrification: America's whitest big city? Sure, but a thriving black community, too.

Every few months, a national news outlet travels to Oregon to trek through a familiar narrative. Portland is America's whitest big city, they report. Black people have been shoved out, shut down.

Yes, at 76 percent white, Portland is less diverse than Omaha or Salt Lake City. And gentrification did displace and disperse what was once a dense black community in North and Northeast Portland. Others left willingly, realtors said, for bigger lots and better schools.

But those are not the only stories black Portlanders have to tell. Frustrated by the steady dirge, some of Portland's black leaders have begun sharing another narrative. African-Americans aren't disappearing, they say. Some are thriving.

The number of black Portlanders increased 4 percent between 2000 and 2010, they note. And new Census data, released this year, shows the metro area had nearly 5,000 black-owned businesses in 2012, a 42 percent increase over five years.

"We just don't all live in Northeast Portland anymore," said economist Stephen Green, a 39-year-old African American who grew up in Aloha but lives in Woodlawn, among a few Northeast neighborhoods that have added black residents in recent years.

Green understands why the other narrative proliferates. Older black people miss knowing their neighbors. Young white liberals feel guilty for driving up rental prices.

But that story has outlived its use, he thinks.

If people think Portland has no black residents, they won't support its black businesses. Smart, ambitious young African Americans won't stay or move here.

The whitest city in America will become only whiter.

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Mood v.5: Feel like bustin' loose

Back yard heat nearly touching 100, I dance around til the sun slips low. Here are the songs that ease my summer afternoon transitions.

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White Portland Police captain, black actor salve wounds with words

They were a microcosm, just one white police officer and one black man, talking. But the conversation Friday between a Portland Police Bureau captain and a local actor shifted something.

It was the antidote, they both said, to a week of shootings that left officers and black men across the country dead.

Portland Police Capt. Michael Crebs and Alonzo Chadwick first met last Wednesday at a performance of "Hands Up," a series of seven monologues, each written by a black playwright after Ferguson. Each piece explores race or police violence.

Some of the monologues were "real negative" toward police, Crebs said. It "took some effort," but he pushed himself to sit there, to listen.

"For me to be my best, I need to hear those experiences," Crebs said. "As a police officer, it's so important for me to understand the people that I serve. We are all just humans trying to get by on this earth."

Chadwick performed "Superiority Fantasy," a 10-minute monologue that tells the story of a man routinely hassled by police.

Like that narrator, Chadwick's experiences with police have been negative. The 36-year-old first encountered an officer in a Northeast Portland park when he was 14.

"I was treated as if I didn't deserve to be there," Chadwick said.
 

Then, when he was 19 and driving his first car, a female officer pulled him over on Northeast Alberta Street. Three other cars quickly appeared, he said.

"My mom had given me the talk, taught me how you should comply so you can come home alive," Chadwick said. The first rule: Never reach for anything. An officer might think you are looking for a weapon.

"I was crying," he said. "I knew I was getting ready to die. She told me to roll the window down. I told her I couldn't. My window button is in the middle of the car, and if I reach over you're going to think I'm reaching for something and you'll kill me."

The stop ended without incident, Chadwick said, but before the officer drove off, she said she had stopped him because his tail light was out.

"I asked her, 'You did all that because I had a tail light out?'" he recalled. "And she said, 'You fit the description of somebody we're looking for.'"

Since then, Chadwick said he has had about 25 encounters with police, 80 percent of which have been negative.

So when Crebs stood up at the end of Chadwick's performance last week, the actor wasn't sure what to think.

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Mood v.4: Spread too thin

Strangely grey July here in Portland. I've been working and writing non-stop.  Here are the songs steering me through.

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This time I'm really going off, fireworks

We skipped the fireworks and the outside fun, stayed home to paint the sky sparkly.

Mood v.3: It's about us right now

May was unseasonably warm. I bounced through streets listening to all the new songs everyone else is. These, plus Beyonce, too.

How did Chance find such light in Chicago? I felt guilty, dumb-grinning on the bus the day his album came out. It transported me back to my childhood revivals, when we grabbed bliss however we could find it, stubbornly shutting out the dark that creeped in around the edges. His Kirk Franklin feature reminded me of this older tune, "Stomp," which makes me just as happy in my 30s as it did as a Christian teenager.

Last Days of the Joyce Hotel

Few things are as fun as collaborating with a brilliant photographer on a story. A few months ago, Beth Nakamura asked me to work on a story about The Joyce Hotel with her. The motel is an old single-room occupancy hostel that has, for decades, housed some of the city's poorest. The block around it has gentrified, though, and the owner was shutting the motel down.

Beth and I spent a few months there, getting to know the workers and tenants. The resulting project came out this weekend. Check out Oregonlive to see Beth's photos and hear two of the residents tell their stories:

The beds sagged. The windows rattled, and the walls stayed sticky. But for 90 people, the Joyce Hotel was home.

Most had spent years at the Southwest 11th Avenue motel, forking over $40 a night to claim their little slice of downtown.

Then, last weekend, the Internet and cable television both went dark. A clerk collected keys.

After decades of housing some of the city's poorest, the Old Joyce had closed down.

The building's owner, who turned down multiple offers to save one of downtown's last remaining single-room occupancy hotels, was coy about its uncertain fate. He evicted the tenants in the middle of a citywide housing emergency.

"I already miss it," said Arnold Drake World, a 54-year-old artist who lived at the Joyce for three years. "Just the thought of leaving is terrible."

Poor people have been staying at the Joyce since at least 1965, when the owners began advertising furnished rooms for $32 a month. (In 2016, that would be just $242.) The 104-year-old building was another cheap lodge, the Hotel Treves, before that.

Occasionally, travelers booked a night at the Joyce. Men newly released from prison stopped by on their way to freedom. But mostly the hotel attracted longtime transients too picky to stay in shelters or on the streets.

"Most of us that do have any pride left, we're not trying to go to a Mission Gospel or anything like that," World said. "Because let's talk about lice, ticks, fleas and everything else that comes with those free scenarios."

The other guests, most of them men, shared that sense of dignity. They liked their bathrooms clean, their hallways free of drama.

Sometimes a drunk upset the balance, tumbling down the stairs or picking a fight with a lifer. And several people died inside, either from overdrinking, overdosing or once, in 2010, strangulation. A man fell to his death in 1991 while trying to rappel from a hotel window using a standard-issue bedsheet. That same year, one guest stabbed another in the heart.

But most learned to co-exist. They took turns using two washing machines and one microwave. They showered in shifts and shared beers when life turned dark.

The rooms were spare, but residents often personalized the cinder block walls. One resident left behind a Fleetwood Mac poster. Others stashed hot plates on the radiators and turned chests of drawers into food prep stations.

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People in the city: 1.1

Debbie Wooten talks about discovering she is black.

The best part of being a journalist is going to interviews. You get paid to have great conversations. Then, the hard work begins in translating those great moments into articles. No matter how well I write, the words never seem to live up to hearing people tell their own stories.

Last year, I started to lose the ability to hold a pen. My right elbow, wrist and thumb won't stay in the joints anymore, so gripping -- especially chopsticks and writing utensils -- is painful. I bought huge pens, which helps, but ultimately, I decided to start recording my interviews. I just can't write as fast as people talk anymore. But there's a gift in this pain: I now have records of those original, beautiful conversations. I'll share some of the ones I've liked best here in the coming months.

First-up, Debbie Wooten. She had polio as a kid, and in her later years, the symptoms have come back. A few months ago, she couldn't walk. I'm following her as she tries to get back into the comedy scene. I loved this little part of our conversation where she told me about the time she first realized she is black.

Mood v.2: upper echelon for no reason

The rap stations in Louisiana and Mississippi play brooding beats. I drove around last week in my grandma's aging Crown Vic, windows down and Kevin Gates up loud enough to rattle the roads around me.

Lost in Transition

A little more than a year ago, Oregon became the fourth state to offer Medicaid coverage for gender transition. I thought I would follow someone through the process of using the new benefit. A few people agreed, but after a few weeks or months, they backed out. They kept running into roadblocks, bureaucratic red tape that sent them into depressed states.

I kept talking to one person as she tried over and over again to get help. Eventually, I realized that was the story. Over the last year, I spoke with about 75 patients, doctors and insurance representations. The result is a new series -- Lost in Transition -- that launches in the Oregonian this weekend. Michelle Storm's story, as well as a few sidebars, make up the first part. The series will continue in to the summer.

LIFE ON LAYAWAY

Michelle Storm has spent her life closing her eyes when she takes a shower.

She knew in grade school that she is female, not the boy her parents thought they were raising. As an adult, after a stint in the Army, she legally changed her name and started referring to herself as "she." And then she started taking estrogen.

That was nearly two decades ago. The 42-year-old still feels queasy when she removes her clothes. What she wants most is a surgery she says will finally finish correcting her gender.

"I hate the anatomy I currently have," she said, "with an utter passion."

Last year, for the first time, the Oregon Health Plan decided to cover medical services for low-income transgender people. Since then, doctors, insurance representatives and even a U.S. senator have tried to help Storm, an Army veteran who cannot afford the $30,000 surgery, to get what she needs.

More than a year later, she is still waiting.

Read the series on Oregonlive.

Mood v.1: Give Me My Month

Back in college, we traded and cataloged mixes, a new theme every week. Tapes were retro then, but now the discs themselves are obsolete. I still keep a spindle of blanks, still stack together 80 minutes for road trips or special occasions. But I miss the regularity of sharing a stream of songs with other people. I'll try to reclaim that. Here's my first offering, a dark loop through February, what Antonya Nelson calls "the slim month of misery."

What did you learn about these two old women?

I've been working on a documentary about a rural North Louisiana town for the past seven years. I've watched and logged 7 terabytes of footage, edited together teasers and even screened a few shorts. We're editing the full-length film now, and occasionally I find a tiny clip of my grandmother that I don't remember seeing before. Today I found this one, from a 2012 trip. I had been out all day trying to find out information about Roy, the main character. My grandma started me on this goose chase a decade ago. She wanted to know about Roy, she said. After three months of searching, she started to be ready for a new topic. What, she wanted to know, was I learning about her? I've watched it a few times this morning, and I feel a little lighter every time I do.