Mobile Junkie III: Oregon Postcards

Mount St. Helens
drawing by MJ

Georgia's boyfriend had been freaking out and alienating people for quite some time, but the total picture was lost to me. Hey, I was the tolerant one who accepted people for who they were, faults and all, just like Georgia. But the Day of the Rats changed all that.

I've got to admit, there were signs that should have tipped me off. When Theo visited Dolly (our mother) with Georgia, he picked on Dolly continually. Her coffee was undrinkable, her house needed to be cooler, her food wasn't good enough. "I know what I like!" he would proclaim, followed by a loud HA HA HA, as if he were kidding. Dolly had visited Georgia and Theo once and came back with stories of Theo's anxiety when the basement flooded. She told Theo that "he didn't have to take it out on her," which, if you knew Dolly, who took 40-some years of abuse from her husband and avoided conflict at all cost, was a brave thing to do.

The day I arrived in Portland Georgia and Theo took me out to dinner, and Theo became irate when our meals took too long to arrive. He stuck out his lower lip and pouted when he found that Georgia had eaten all of her fish and there was none left for him. I was surprised to hear him make fun of gay men. What became the most telling incident, though, was when we arrived home on that first night and were entering the front door. Their big dog greeted us at the door and we were all sort of jammed half way in when Theo tried to shut the obviously unshuttable door, scraping it against Georgia's back. When she said, "Ouch!" he barked, "Well, come in! MJ isn't that big!"

But all of these incidents paled for a time because the next day, the second day of my visit, The Day of the Rats began. That morning Georgia said in hushed tones that she hadn't told Theo, but she thought she had seen a rat in their back yard. Later that afternoon when she arrived home from work and I reported seeing not one but two rats in the yard, we conspired together to buy some traps and kill the rats ourselves. Weighing the pros and cons of poison, live traps and old-fashioned spring traps (let alone the ethical and spiritual implications of killing an animal), we settled on the spring kind, and went straight to Fred Meyer's and bought two of them. Filling them with cheese, we gingerly set them in strategic spots in the yard, quietly tip-toed back into the house and straightaway caught two rats! We refilled the traps triumphantly and when Theo got home Georgia casually mentioned that she had seen a rat in the yard and that we had caught two of them.

At that moment Theo snapped. "Where did they come from?" He repeated this for a while as he began his verbal whipping of Georgia: "Why didn't you tell me? We will never be able to sell the house." He paced out into the back yard, peered down at the traps, paced into the house, repeated his questions over and over. "Where did they come from?" Where did they come from?" My attempts at snapping him out of it , "Who cares where they came from?" "We are taking care of it! We are getting rid of the rats!" just egged him on. "Why didn't you tell me?" "We will never be able to sell the house." Luckily I had a bedroom with a door that closed for escape, but Theo was going to be home the next day, so I asked Georgia to drop me off at Powell's City of Books on her way to work.

Powell's was an oasis in the tumult of Theo. I spent five hours browsing current affairs, eastern religion, gay and lesbian writing, global writing, graphic novels, literature, metaphysics, travel writing, independently published books, art, islam, current events, politics...I got lost in the titles, in the pages, I let my mind brood over the events of the past couple of days. I bought coffee and sat by the window in the coffee shop, trying to process this journey, what this "vacation" had become, what I was supposed to learn from this experience, what I was supposed to "bring" to Portland. Theo had a weakness in that he couldn't deal with things that he couldn't "fix", according to Georgia. His upbringing in the Bronx, in a "hard" neighborhood, had become sort of a cloak of forgiveness for all of his idiosyncratic behaviors. Who was I to criticize him in his own home? Georgia loves him, and she knows him better than me. I felt a softening, an acceptance of Theo as part of the family, quirks and all.

I had an idea. A few weeks earlier I watched an author speak on TV about a book he had written called Rats. He had studied a group of rats in New York City and was taken by how similar their behavior was to ours, and he came away from his experience with great respect for them. I would buy the book as a gift for Theo, and it would raise our consciousness about rats and help dispel the negative vibes in the house. The rats would be a bonding experience between the three of us. I waited on the corner for Georgia to pick me up, happy with my purchase. What a cool book!

That evening Theo took the book from me, glanced at it and threw it down onto a pile of newspapers and books in anger. He then proceeded to ignore me for two days. I tentatively spoke to Georgia about it. "I guess people really don't want to change their perspective." "No, they don't," said Georgia. That night Georgia and Theo took the dog for a walk and I could hear Theo yelling at Georgia a block away. Later Georgia tells me that Theo says I was mean to him and how does she expect him to act? Their yelling continues into the house and into Theo's study and I come out of my bedroom hideaway, my heart beating out of my chest, ready to defend Georgia from her crazy man. Theo begins a new tact with Georgia. "Don't you hit me! Don't you look like you are going to hit me!

I meander, phone to my ear, around Georgia's neighborhood with its tiny houses with landscaped front yards, fenced-in back yards and dogs everywhere. People here love dogs. As I walk I talk to Moe about her boyfriend misery and she listens as I tell her the story of Portland so far. "It feels just like the midwest, except it has healthy alternative communities and people are nice." I talk with AJ, who loyally says, "Theo is an asshole. Georgia is too good for him, mom." Huck tells me about his new guitar and the girl in his life, and I tell him about Georgia's bawdy retired friend across the street who has no use for men! She called me over earlier as I roamed down the middle of the street talking on my phone and asked conspiratorially, "How's World War III? Theo's just a baby. Hell! There are rats everywhere around here! One was face-to-face with my dog this morning in the back yard and it was as big as the dog!"

Theo is leaving in the morning, we just need to get through a few hours of agony and tomorrow afternoon Georgia and I will head for the coast.