On Friday, June 2, 2006, a group of us took our co-worker, Monroe, out after work to celebrate his impending nuptials. I stayed with the group for dinner and two bars before deciding to head home at around 9:30. I retrieved my bike from the office and rode off into the Portland night. The feeling of comraderie still rested warmly inside but a surreal air permeated outside. I discovered my headlight was dead, so my short eight block, downhill ride was a paranoid one for I feared both for my safety and the long arm of the law (lighting is required for night riders in Portland). The weird atmosphere did not end once I reached the MAX station, either, because the circus was in town and overflowing onto my MAX platform.
The “circus”, in this case, was the 2006 Rose Festival which started two days before. One of the main Rose Festival attractions is Waterfront Village, which mostly consists of carnival rides, junk food and thousands of people trampling the grass in Waterfront Park. On this Friday evening, the Village was teaming with life and had crept over Front Avenue, past the parking lot and into my MAX station. In addition to the numerous people that crowded the area, the authorities had divided the platform and the sidewalk with steel barriers. There were gaps between the barriers so it was easy to walk through them. Still, their presence put me in a police state frame of mind as I rolled up to the station, hopped off my bike and leaned it against the garbage can.
As I waited for the arrival of the next train, I hoped for a Blue one because the Blue line passes closer to our house. Unfortunately, a Red train pulled up a few minutes later and I resigned myself to a longer bike ride home. I entered the train at the front of the first car, hung my bike on the supplied hook and sat in the side-mounted seat that allows me an unimpeded view of my bike. I settled in to read my book, which was about basketball on the ghetto playgrounds of 1970′s New York City.
Some time later, I noticed a little white guy in a light blue coat was having an argument with a couple of angry black girls on the other side of the train. The girls were doing most, if not all, of the yelling and doing quite an impressive job of it. If the guy, who was leaning against the plexiglass barrier right by the door, was responding, I could not hear it. At some point, the level of intensity was raised to a point where I considered pushing the call button to let the driver know that there might be trouble brewing. For whatever reason, I decided to let it go. By the time we reached Lloyd Center (the last stop in “fareless square” and the site of a popular mall), the yelling and screaming had not abated.
I glanced over at them again just in time to see an average-sized, light-skinned black man set one foot inside the car as he threw a roundhouse right that laid out the little dude in the blue jacket. And I don’t mean just knocked him down – I mean that the guy laid on the floor for almost 30 seconds before even moving after he got punched. I have never in my life seen someone hit with such ferocity and violence outside of television and the movies. When he finally stirred, he immediately tried to get to his feet but fell to his knees. For the next few minutes, he stumbled around trying in vain to stand. Each time his knees would give out and he would fall back to the floor. The prodigious amount of blood coming from his mouth also made the scene seem movie-like in it’s violence and gore.
By this time everyone on the train had noticed what was going on and several people were telling the guy to stay down for a bit. Both the puncher and the girls had long since disappeared but I think everyone was worried for the poor dude’s well-being. After watching him try to get up for about the fifth time, I walked across the car to try to help. I told him to just sit down for a bit but he wasn’t having any of that. Each time he stood, he would stagger to the side like he was drunk but there was no hint of alcohol on his breath. Finally, he fell into me and I maneuvered him into a nearby seat and implored him to rest a few minutes. He cursed a few times but did stay there for several minutes, so I retreated back to my seat.
Sometime during the aftermath of the punch, the driver had been called but concluded that there was nothing he could do and returned to his cab. As a result, however, we were still sitting in the Lloyd Center station and several more people had boarded. One of those passengers was a tall, skinny, dark-skinned black kid in his late teens. He happened to sit a few seats away from the punch-drunk kid, who noticed after a few minutes and started yelling at him. After he started moving toward the kid while continuing his verbal barrage, another passenger stepped between them and tried to convince Mr. Bloody Mouth that this kid had not been the one who had punched him. He wouldn’t listen to reason, though, and continued his tirade against the tall kid. Eventually his remarks turned racial which was too much for the tall, black kid who began threatening the little guy. As I write about it now, it seems like a scene from Crash, but the mix of misunderstanding and racism leading to angry and violent reaction was as real as anything I’ve ever seen.
Soon the police arrived and the tension quickly subsided. The guy in the blue coat refused their assistance and just walked away while the doors to the train closed. As we left the station I tried to explain to the tall kid what had happened and why the white guy reacted the way he had, but it was futile. He didn’t want to hear any excuses for some guy who had called him a “nigger”. It didn’t matter what had happened before he got there. There was no excuse for it in his mind. And he was right. There is no excuse. I supposed I should have felt that I had a greater perspective on race as I settled back into my book in which race and economic class are big factors, but I didn’t. I felt shocked to have witnessed such raw physical and social brutality.
When the train arrived at Gateway Transit Center, I was not really in the mood to bike the rest of the way home. Besides, I knew that a Blue Line train couldn’t be far behind since we had been delayed for so long at Lloyd Center. As I looked to the west for that Blue train, fireworks lit up the sky over downtown Portland signaling the official start of Portland’s 2006 Rose Festival. A tiny bit of hope crept back inside me as I watched the fireworks and waited for that train.
