05 September 2003 ~ Methamphetamine and a fifty cent rubber ball, or, Jake and Helena's adventure in Shelton...

On my very first night in Olympia, I was made aware of a small town, somewhere in Washington, by the name of Shelton. As I stood waiting for my taxi to pick me up from the Greyhound station, a young man approached me -- he was probably about sixteen -- and asked if I "needed" anything.

I said: "No, I'm just waiting for my taxi."

That wasn't what he meant.

The boy was a meth dealer, seeking a ride back to his hometown of Shelton, Washington. His brother or somebody was supposed to pick him up. My taxi was late, busy picking up, as I would learn, one of the only black people in Olympia. This particular old gentleman was on his way to a gig; he was a jazz singer. Whatever the meth-boy had told me about Shelton and junkies, was overshadowed when the jazz man began belting out his new tunes from the backseat.

But while I waited, the boy told me all about life as a dealer. He told me what meth WAS, bceause I didn't exactly know. "Shelton's the easiest place to get it," he said. "I don't like doing this anymore. I see what people will do for it, you know? And it's pretty fucken sick. These people like, sell their own kids' furniture, their own kids' Christmas presents... I had one ladt try to trade me her son's birth certificate..."

"A birth certificate?" I asked. "What the hell good would a birth certificate do anybody?"

"Yeah, that's what I said. I didn't take it. I don't take money that people get from their kids, you know? That's just fucked up."

"So where is this Shelton place?"

"It's like, out that way a little ways..." The kid pointed sort of west. Or south. He didn't really know which way. "It's just this shitty little hick town. I fucken hate it, but it's home, you know? It's got nothing there. Just burned out old factories and shit. Nobody's got a job, nobody's got any money. The economy of the whole place is drugs."

And then my taxi arrived, complete with awesome black man in the backseat. (Little did I know that I wouldn't be seeing another black person in almost-all-white Olympia for another six months or so... Race is rarely worth mentioning, I've found, unless you're talking about a black person in Washington outside of a few certain sections of Seattle and Tacoma. One can realistically expect to hear things like: "Do you know Mike? The black guy on the west side?" One can realistically expect to be able to answer in the affirmative.)

So, that was my first introduction to Shelton.

I didn't actually SEE Shelton for another year and a half.

Well, I'll be damned, this hick town, this veritable drug den, this god-forsaken hellhole with it's burned-out factories... It was actually sort of NICE. As a matter of fact, I immediately loved Shelton. I didn't actually ADMIT that, because everybody sort of knows it's a rural hellhole... But it's a QUAINT rural hellhole...

On Wednesday, I was fiending for an adventure. Anything. This part of the world is just teeming with adventures; all it takes is a full gas tank and a companion, and you'll be able to find an adventure. But it was past one in the afternoon, so going anyplace TOO far wouldn't afford Jake and I a very good adventure. Well, at least not a very long one...

Jake's version of an adventure was driving to Toys R Us and playing with all the stupid action figures. I was about to make fun of him for being so childish, when I saw a huge stuffed orca, and ran over to it, named it, and spent the next ten minutes talking to it.

We left the store an hour later, give or take, having made one purchase: a rubber ball, of the variety that those stupid red-and-clear vending machines sell.

We went back home. Jake bounced the ball off the stairwell until his mother yelled for him to knock it off. Then he bounced it one more time, for effect. It knocked me in the chest. This precipitated a mock-tantrum, during which I repeatedly yelled that I now had a "bruised peach," and insisted that the only cure for my wound would be an adventure.

"Like WHAT?" asked Jake, for the four-hundredth time.

"Let's go to Shelton!" I grinned.

"Okay...... What's in Shelton?"

"Meth. Old factories. Hicks maybe. I don't know, but I sense an impending adventure. In Shelton!"

So, we went to Shelton. It's thirty or forty minutes outside of Olympia, but you know when you're almost there, because the Olympia Mountain Range bears its silhouetted teeth at you. For the first time, they look sort of menacing.

"I have to PEEEEEEEEE!" said Jake. "Where am I going to PEEEEEE???"

We didn't see anything that looked remotely promising. It was past five o'clock now, and almost everything looked closed. A few lights were on in quaint little houses. Well, houses that were probably quaint a few decades ago. Now they looked shitty. But you could still sort of see the quaintness. You couldn't see anybody in the act of selling, purchasing, or using meth, at least.

"You could just get out and pee in somebody's yard. Or if you want to be polite, maybe we could ask somebody if we could use their shitter."

(It was at this point in my life that I realized I'd never used the word "shitter" until I'd met Jake.)

We looked around. Nothing.

"The hospital!" cried Jake, seeing a sign for it.

"Yeah, they might be open," I mused.

So we went to the hospital. Jake did whatever he had to do, and emerged with a huge, beautiful smile on his face. "I'm going to step ouside and have a cigarette," he said.

In the courtyard outside, Jake smoked and bounced the fifty-cent rubber ball.

This led to a rousing game of, Throw The Ball Against The Courtyard Steps And Then Catch It.

"You have to be SMARTER than the ball," Jake taunted me, as I chased it back and forth.

"I AM smarter," I yelled. "Just not as coordinated."

"Riiiiiiiiight..."

So I tackled him. We fought over the ball. We bounced it. It flew every which way. It thunked up against a hospital window, probably distressing a patient who (this being Shelton) was recovering from an overdose. The ball flew into a rhododendron. It smashed through some ferns. It rolled under a picnic table. I crawled through the foliage to retrieve it, and Jake patted my butt. I chased him. We played with the stupid fifty-cent rubber ball, at the Shelton General Hospital, until the sun had gone down.

"It's nice here," said Jake, after it had grown too dark to play. He sat in the hospital waiting area, watching an episode of "The Simpsons."

"Yeah. Only... it's a HOSPITAL."

"Yeah, but we're not here for ANY reason. We've just got noplace better to be. I love it."

So we watched TV. In a hospital. Forty miles, give or take, from home. For no reason in the world.

Then we had burgers at an A&W stand. Jake decided that he wished he were the Greek God of Chance. I decided that if I was a Greek goddess, I would be the Goddess of Clumsiness. "I could break people's legs!" I cried. "Only, I wouldn't do it to be MEAN... I would only break the legs of bad guys. Like, scary people who were about to shoot little, small, helpless people. I'd make them trip, and break their legs. Or, if, say, two people were destined to meet, and one was in the hospital getting, say, hair implants, I could have the other one fall down a flight of stairs, so that they could meet in the hospital, and fall madly in love."

Jake looked at me as if he thought this were simultaneously the stupidest thing he'd ever heard, and also the most brilliant thing he'd ever heard. We ate our cheeseburgers.

"I love you," I said.

"I love you too," said Jake.

"I don't know anybody else who would go to Shelton with me to play with a fifty-cent rubber Toys R Us ball at a hospital."

"Me either."

"That was a hell of a good adventure."

"Yeah it was. Did you have fun?"

"Of course! Did you?"

"Yeah!"

Then we drove home, exhausted from our adventure.

~Helena*