Bend News

Drunken Loser Or New-Age Prophet?

Being Joe: Is Bend Editor Qualified?

By Peter Rice, 8-01-08

MISSOULA—After a hard day of hitchhiking (with a touring bicycle no less) from Glacier National Park to this fine city on the banks of the Clarkfork River, I would have liked nothing better than a calm evening, a cold glass of buttermilk, and perhaps a little acoustic music. But my friend and your provider of news and “insight” to all things Bend, Mr. Joseph Friedrichs, had other ideas.

“Your assignment is to document the evening,” he said. Apparently, some big shindig to knock the collective socks off Missoulians was in the pipeline, and my job was, as the squarest friend Joe has, to be an astute and impartial observer of his drunken meanderings, and those of his closest friends in one of Montana’s largest cities.

I should back up here. First, this statement from Joe comes only occasionally, and usually at the start of something frightfully interesting. The last time he wanted everything documented, we were about to embark on a three day tour of Arcata, Calif., which was without power and in danger of being flooded into nothingness by a torrential New Year’s Eve storm. By the end of the weekend, we had dodged flying branches in the streets while navigating a car through unregulated intersections, been nearly hauled off by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department for a crime we were eventually able to prove we didn’t commit, and I had fallen in love with a noxious weeds expert.

The second thing to say here is that that this attitude is nothing new. Joe belongs to an incredibly strange generation of journalists. Today’s crop, rather than looking to Woodward and Bernstein for inspiration, turns instead to the likes of Hunter S. Thompson. The hard work and fact checking and money following that brought down the Nixon Administration has been replaced by a philosophy that holds that the ingredients to good journalism can be found at the bar and at the pharmacy. Thompson got blitzed out of his mind and produced genius, so why can’t I, goes the idea.

It’s one of those philosophies that everyone adopts because it fits in naturally with the sad collection of drunkards, misfits and weirdoes that wallow around schools of journalism. I would compare journalism students to the folk who drop out of high school in order to work in a saw mill, except that would be a gross insult to the people in saw mills. The fact is journalism students are generally good at nothing, but desire a decent health insurance policy anyway, so they choose professional scribbling as a somewhat white collar gig that has a tradition of tolerating excessive consumption of alcohol and general sixth-grade-level idiocy.

To make that long story short, I was reluctant to do this “assignment.” I never went to one of those dens of inequity called a journalism school. I just read the New Yorker and books about American politics a great deal. In college, while people like Joe were out partying, I was the R.A. who got people like Joe in trouble and tried to take hard classes and then get really good grades in them. He took swimming and billiards. I read Supreme Court opinions and wrote 25-page papers about presidential war powers.

Still, Joe was willing to back up this assignment with actual U.S. currency. So after verifying that the twenty dollar bill was indeed real, I busted out my notebook and got to work, hell bent on exposing Joe and by extension, this generation of journalists, for the thoughtless factory workers they are. Besides, I figured this would be a good opportunity to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the carefree hooligan who has been living the high life writing news stories (read: ripping off the Oregonian, the Bulletin, and making stuff up about duck sex) for the last year or two while the rest of us toil away at real jobs.

The scene I was supposed to document is nestled in the backyard of a white corner house in a tree-covered neighborhood near the University of Montana. This is the sort of house that screams out “hippie college students live here.” It was a mess, with makeshift or broken furniture and beds. A three-legged Labrador hobbled around, past an issue of the National Lampoon from December of 1988. A few guys strummed out tunes from the unkempt lawn next to an impromptu stage. One man, a former heroin addict turned fountain maker, worked away at some shop project.

The bulk of the people were in some way connected to the university. Either they had decided that the college life was too good to stop living after the required time, or they had not yet been formally released from that soft prison.

There was also the matter of Burns, a 30-year-old stocky guy with blonde dreadlocks, broken glasses and a mind that followed him around but rarely caught up with him. We found him tending to a cabbage patch, and he soon proceeded to cook up a huge stew with moose meat.

Joe is not a hippie - not even a vegetarian. But he loves hanging out with these people, in these sorts of settings, because random things and ideas can and often do happen, often thanks to whatever stimulants or depressants happen to be around. He had, for example, spent the better part of the day raking up apples with Burns. Why? Who knows? To Joe, there is no greater project than what he is doing right now. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow, in the Friedrichs book. (It’s a small book with large type and lots of pictures, if you’re curious.) Events in this group don’t happen as much as they evolve, usually without any concern for clocks.

Take the case of the Rhino in Downtown Missoula. The bar is a favorite haunt of Joe’s, and we found ourselves there later with Burns.

“You got six hours to live, and for those remaining six hours you can listen to Dylan or Neil Young,” Joe said to Burns. “What’s it going to be?”

Burns couldn’t process such things.

“Music is everywhere, man. Air is music,” he said, between drags of, improbably enough given the public place, a joint.

The interrogation was interrupted by a waitress who had screwed up an order.

“Does anyone want an Irish car bomb? I got one to give away.” Joe quickly accepted, and drank it down after a toast with three law students from a neighboring table.

Back with Burns, the increasingly alcohol-influenced questioning continued.

“You’ve got a choice between starving to death or eating to death,” Joe said.

This was greeted with a long silence from the big dreaded man, who suddenly remembered, somewhere in the drunk and stoned haze, that he was late for his work as some sort of functionary for a downtown club.

This is normality for Joe. Things are just happening as usual, but paradoxically in a very random way.

“Bill,” Joe said to me, using my nickname, “if I were to kill a man it’d be with a pool cue.” The splintered end, he reasoned, would come in handy.

“Wish I had my harmonica,” Burns said.

Joe then noticed that the law students had a much larger than average pack of matches resting on their table. He grabbed it and announced that he intended to keep it.

Jamie, one of the law students, was not impressed.

“There’s a difference between being funny and being an asshole,” she said, rebuking Joe with a few more choice sentences.

“You know, the last time someone said that to me I ended up with an engagement ring on my finger,” Joe told me.

The tension faded as Burns remarked that “You’re a pretty nice guy and I love you but you are kind of an asshole sometimes.” Then he set about coughing fiercely.

The pattern for the evening was set. Utterly random witticisms, rants about the TV show Full House, games of rock-paper-scissors with the winner buying drinks, more hypothetical questions, including one about Goldfish. Burns eventually went to work, but then came back, apparently to get cups, but also to smoke a little more dope.

Who knows why New West’s Bend editor thrives in such chaos, but he does. Eventually, rather than attempt to crash at the house, we retired to the Rattlesnake Wilderness, where Joe reminded me, as we were about to fall asleep next to a spent bag of Taco Bell bean burritos, that bears frequent the forest in these parts and wouldn’t it be great to be known as the guy who died fighting one.

And here we have, dear readers, come to one of those clichéd journalistic paradoxes at the heart of this bizarre assignment. Or maybe it’s just an either or question. Is Joe, Bend’s messenger boy and general man about town, merely a drunk and an asshole? Is he just another lame Thompson groupie failing to realize that a keen intellect and buckets of sweat - not just amphetamines - went into the late great one’s writings?

Or has he, probably without knowing it, come up with his own philosophy, his own way of life. For the fact is that if he is just a drunk, he is no ordinary drunk. For Joe, today is always the best day of a beautiful life. He gives the impression all the time that the coffee he is drinking is the best he’s ever had, the camping spot he is sleeping in is the best he’s ever encountered, the woman currently on his mind is the most beautiful he has ever seen, and the bowel movement he just had, downright revolutionary.

He is incredibly focused on whatever makes him happy at the moment, a trait that he shares with his old man. (Joe’s parents are pillars of their community in Mason City, Iowa, and should both be knighted or nominated for sainthood or something, given that they have tolerated Joe for so long.)

His personality was on full display during the drive back to Oregon yesterday. We swam six rivers in four states (Rattlesnake Creek, MT; Lochsa River, Clearwater River, Salmon River, ID; Grande Rhonde River, WA; Minam River, OR). Each was better than the next.

“Liberating,” he declared, after jumping into the Lochsa.

The excitement he showed when seeing the Wallowas for the first time could be felt in the air.

“Billy! The Wallowas!” he said. “I’ve now been to every part of Oregon!”

Here is a man who loves life, who has achieved a zen-like peace with it, and yet, is arguably insane, as I learned not long after the oil light in Joe’s Honda Accord (lovingly dubbed “The Shark) started blinking. The road was the utterly desolate and hot stretch between Clarkston, Wash. and Enterprise, Ore. We were descending into a several thousand foot canyon when the idiot light started making its clicking noise, thirty miles from a town of any appreciable size.

All this travel log stuff may come as a surprise to readers who think the Bend editor would spend a good deal of time in, well, Bend, but Joe has actually been on an eight-week road trip. Seven thousand miles, an untold number of mostly Western states, and precious little TLC for The Shark.

Joe’s first reaction to the predicament was wide-eyed fear. He slowed down the car, as if this might solve the oil problem, and kept repeating the sentence, in a low and scared voice, “This is bad.”

I told him we would stop, not on this winding road with no shoulder and a steep cliff on one side, but at the base of the canyon and the Grande Rhonde River. A few tense minutes later, we crossed the bridge, and there found a little diner and ice cream shop. The two women who worked there watched as we popped the hood and tried to figure out how to work that complicated contraption known as a dipstick.

“Looks like you guys aren’t very mechanical,” one of the women said.

“No, my family has never owned a car,” I said, truthfully.

“And my dad is an idiot,” Joe said.

It turns out that Joe hadn’t changed his oil for eight thousand miles. But luckily, the engine hadn’t blown up, and the café happened to have three spare bottles of oil. We poured them in, took a dip in the river, and moved on to Enterprise.

This episode is key to our central choice here between basically worthless hack and some strange creature who appears to be blessed by a higher power in his quest for a new way of more fully living life. For the fact is that Joe leads an utterly reckless existence, much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of his saintly parents. All the time, he does things that are basically stupid, like not changing his oil for eight thousand miles (neglecting it to the point, I might add, where it barely even registered on the dipstick).

But then, there appears a little shop and a couple of helpful women who know something about cars. Why was that store there, in the middle of the most forgotten corner of Washington? Why would a café and ice cream joint even sell engine oil? Why was it not on any of our maps? Why did the oil light even bother to go off, since they apparently often fail to do so, according to the woman at the store? Does this place on the banks of the Grande Rhonde really exist, or did it just appear briefly to conduct Joe through yet another day?

Some would have been humbled by such an experience, which could have easily involved getting stranded in a desert canyon out of cell phone range in July on a road that boasts two or three cars per hour. But after a few miles, Joe was right back on top, obsessing on the beauty of the Wallowas, which were coming into view to the south. Just another day cheating death, fatherhood, a good thrashing, the government or whatever. Danger again deflected as if he were wearing a suit of Teflon.

The answer to this great riddle, my fellow Americans, is, alas, still beyond our grasp. We will need another few years, I figure, before we know for sure whether Joe is just a lucky guy who will eventually run out of luck or someone who will forever be that guy who fate never manages to catch, left to continue blundering off into the sunset.

Or, more than likely, we will never know, because he may just stop playing the game entirely. For the fact is that this current adventure road trip, itinerary now revised to include Hood River, Florence, and Brookings, is something of a farewell tour. After two years of working for some fly-by-night Web site and basically doing as little work as humanly possible, our hero has accepted an offer for an actual job in the great state of Minnesota. His plan is two years of this before he takes the show on the road, to some foreign country, he claims.

But a lot can happen in two years, and it’s just possible that what is billed as a temporary compromise with respectability and the Real World will in fact last a good deal longer. People get settled in their jobs, they meet girls who don’t want to move, they find a particularly good fishing spot. They suddenly don’t want to leave. Certainly I imagine his parents are hoping that this is less of a quick dip into the legitimate working world and more of an extended swim.

Whatever the case, it’s just possible that some mysteries were meant to remain so, and we must instead content ourselves with some passing word of incomprehensible wisdom about the meaning of life.

So here it goes.

“The meaning of life, first of all,” Joe told me, before issuing a huge burp, “starts with a box of Wheaties cereal. And you proceed from there. You move up to avocados eventually. After that comes rice, beans, tortillas, cheeeeeeeeeese. That’s the meaning of life.”

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