I consider myself a writer. An unpublished one, but even so. I think in terms of story and plot and character. I try to structure my conversations into beginning, middle, end. I’ve attempted several novels. I dissect movies and TV shows with an eye towards the story being told.
I’ve lived in Portland, OR all my life. OK, some of my earliest years were spent in various parts of Washington state, and I did have that 8 month term of duty in Austin, TX. But I was born here, and the bulk of my life has been spent here. Me and my group of friends, years ago, decided that the best answer to the question “what’s your hometown?” is the town from which you graduated high school, and for me that would be Milwaukie, a suburb of Portland.
I love this city. I love its quirks, and its beauty. I love the parks, and hills, and coffee shops and strip clubs. I love Portland’s public spaces, like Pioneer Square and the Rose Quarter. I am vastly entertained by the local underculture, an intoxicating mix of left-wing, Vegan, strippers and bouncers and musicians and improv and theater and writers. I celebrate the fact that President Bush I called us “Little Beirut”. I love how it’s basically a big small town.
And having worked for Multnomah County for the past 9 years, and having various friends and family members employed by local government, I’ve got a pretty good grasp of how corrupt local politics is. It’s all about protecting business interests from any kind of social responsibility and increasing their profits. Maybe that’s true of other towns, too, but I can see the mechanisms and lines of power very clearly here. Mayors, commissioners, District Attorneys, state representatives, Federal representatives, all seem to get elected with the help of developers and the business associations.
Likewise, as a writer, I have my influences. If I had to give an elevator pitch about my personal ambition, I would say the following: “I write about Portland in the same way Carl Hiaasen writes about South Florida”. I can see the interaction between the high culture, the business and politics, with the low culture, the strip club owners and dive bar staff and musicians, and it fascinates me. When Phil Stanford pens another column about some retired beat cop trying to nail a known criminal and being stymied by the higher-ups, that’s red meat to me.
When a friend and fellow county employee is fired in order to cover-up the mis-use of contract workers as a scheme to funnel money into un-elected county managers… that’s both real-life and red meat for my writer’s brain.
So I’ve been trying to come up with a fictional, but realistic, plotline that I could use to explain and expand on how corruption works in Portland. And in the last couple of years, I sketched out a bare skeleton of a plot.
Basically, I envisioned a couple of mid-level managers in the county tax assessor’s office conspiring against a local, long-time fixture of a strip club. They would fudge the facts, and “find” a bunch of violations of the tax code, and pretend that back taxes were owed, and then use that leverage to force the strip-club owner to go bankrupt or sell the business to a local developer (who is working in cahoots with the county manager) at a loss. Then they’ll build a condo tower with claims of it being for “low-income housing” but in reality, making massive profits from the sales of those apartments. They’d use the construction to funnel money back into their own pockets with the use of contractors and kickbacks.
In my version of the story, fictionalized, of course, the bad guys would over-reach and end up killing someone who found out about the scheme. Maybe one of the strippers at the club is also a law student who digs into the problems the club owner is having. Maybe a shop steward at the county finds out. In any case, in my fictionalized version of Portland, the scheme is uncovered and upended, and the city takes a few steps towards cleaning up the influence of business and the puppetry of its civic leaders. Y’know, until next time.
So imagine how chagrined I am to find out that something very much like that appears to be happening: Is Commissioner Randy Leonard abusing his power to drive out “undesirable” businesses?
Is my book idea too late? Or will it be even more timely? Decisions… decisions…