When I read that Portland poet Walt Curtis had died at 82, it reminded me of a different Portland. For all my precarious existence back then, I loved it. I arrived in Portland in 1982, at the worst possible time. The timber economy had just collapsed. Unemployment was about 12%. I didn’t find work for almost a year. It was me, an epileptic black lab, and a red Toyota pickup. Living in a cheap, furnished apartment in the inner southeast, every weekday, I drove to the employment office. It was a lonely time, so at night I found cheap things to get out of the apartment. One of my favorites was open mic poetry readings, a habit I picked up while briefly living in the California wine country. For a 50-cent bottle of beer, I could be around people doing something they loved. Those readings, in dives all around downtown, were how I learned my new, gritty city.

I had been writing some stories and bad poetry for years and wanted to connect with other people who had the same word problem. There was a hippy coffee house on NW 23^rd that had open mics every week. For the life of me, I can’t recall the name of the joint. It might be a bookstore now. I remember that the counterculture bus service called Green Turtle used the place as its Portland depot. I may have had my first ever espresso there. 50 cents, of course, but harder to milk the time at a table over that tiny cup. I quickly saw there were stars in the local scene who showed up almost every time and who seemed to know everyone in the room. Walt Curtis looked to be at the top of that pyramid. From his work, and listening to strangers talk, I found out he was the night clerk at a truly scary little grocery store in Old Town.

Portland then was a tough place. More decaying blue collar, than an outpost on the edge of a renascence. There was no place called The Pearl, just endless warehouses that felt on their last legs. They were places where people made things and fixed things. I savored the aroma of boiling wort at the Blitz Brewery. Malt and hops molecules steamed up from a stack atop of their brewery on Burnside. And, in the first bloom of gentrification, little theater companies repurposed empty spaces and built stages for surrounded by a hodgepodge of chairs and benches. You had to have what I call “street radar” to move around Old Town and inner northwest. I learned to avoid the shadows under the Lovejoy viaduct, and which abandoned loading docks were homes for street people. With time, I began to recognize the same panhandlers, druggies and drunks nodding off against walls.

There was Elvis, a guy in a dirty tux who carried around a wood cutout of a guitar that he strummed while singing Love Me Tender. He moved in and out of the doorways of rock clubs and poetry readings. One of my favorites was an open mic regular Bad George, a drunken black Irish street poet, who some nights was too wasted to string words together. Other nights, he took requests for his amazing opus called “Bad George Needs an Apartment,” a sonnet that detailed where he did and didn’t sleep. More than once, amidst the applause he genuinely asked if anyone had a place he could sleep that night.

Many people know about the famous west coast punk rock club Satyricon. (Kurt and Cortney met there.) The venue was a dingy long hall of a bar with a stage in the back. You could smell the stale beer, cigarettes and urine up the block as you approached the doorway. What many people don’t know is that the punk scene started as an open mic poetry reading at a bar on Burnside called The Mediterranean. The Med was another narrow space of booths that wrapped around a counter just inside the front door. Almost always at that counter was George Touhouliotis the owner and impresario. Under the counter was a small refrigerator where he kept quarts of dirt cheap Bohemian beer. When street people came in the door, he would reach under the counter, put a quart in a brown paper bag for them and point at the front door. It was George who bought the Satyricon space and moved the Med poetry scene there. Punk rock came soon after. I had accidentally plugged myself into the genesis.

One night, at a reading at a slightly more upscale venue in Old Town, Walt Curtis sat next to me and struck up a conversation. I was a little excited. I chatted with this celebrity of a strange little world. He asked about where I came from and why I was there. I told him I wrote poetry but was too shy to walk up to a mic. Mostly, I was happy that someone, anyone, was willing to have a conversation with me, let alone Walt. Only later, wiser, and much deeper into the scene, did I understand that, for Walt, I was a type. Tall, slim, young, a little lost, Walt was hitting on me. When I understood the truth of that moment, I realized that the conversation had ended abruptly when he figured out I was straight. Still, the encounter meant that on other nights I too was one of his nods as he walked through rooms. That was fine by me.

A full circle, of sorts, happened a couple of decades later when I was working to get Nick Fish elected to city council. Nick had been an aide in the first campaign of Congressman Barney Frank. Barney flew cross-country to do a fundraiser in the living room of now notorious democrat powerbroker, Terry Bean. Leaning against the fireplace, flanked by two beautiful young men, was Gus Van Sant, whose first film was based on Walt Curtis’s novella Mala Noche. Bean’s beautiful home was in the West Hills. It looked out over the much-changed city. From the back of the room, I thought about the unflinching street poet still down there somewhere.

And now, one of the last breathing ventages of that special time is gone.