Two small dogs, both unleashed, rushed toward me, snarling, and one of them bit me on my left leg, just below the knee. It all happened within a second.
By David Sedaris
Illustration by Jack Smyth
There’s a place in Portland, Oregon, that sells these doughnuts I like, and I was walking to it early one afternoon when a dark-haired man twenty or so feet ahead of me turned to shout, “Why are you following me?”
“I’m not,” I said, and I pointed past him, farther down the block. “I’m following that guy in the blue sweatshirt.”
I’ve been coming to Portland since the late seventies, and there are days when everyone I encounter on the street there seems either drug-dependent or mentally ill. Since the mid-nineties, all my visits have been work-related. I go at least once a year and stay downtown, within walking distance of the theatre I perform in. The city always had more than its share of panhandlers, strident ones who’d yell, “You could at least say hello, asshole!,” as you passed them by, but the place took a definite turn for the worse in 2020, when voters approved a measure to decriminalize the possession of illicit drugs, at least in small amounts. After that, you saw people dealing openly on the street. You saw addicts shooting up outside restaurants and grocery stores and came upon them bent over in what’s commonly called “the fentanyl fold,” seemingly unconscious yet somehow still on their feet. How is it that they don’t topple over? I’ve always wondered.
I have done a mountain of drugs in my lifetime, and not just recreational ones. At twenty-one, I was seriously addicted to meth. Yet I managed to quit—not through the strength of my character but because my dealer moved to Florida and there was no one in Raleigh, North Carolina, to take her place. After withdrawing, I prudently stuck to pot, acid, mushrooms, Quaaludes, and Ecstasy. I tried heroin only once, and, to no real effect, would snort cocaine, though not often because it was too expensive. And I drank and was an alcoholic. In 1999, I quit everything—woke up one day and realized that, in the jargon of A.A., I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
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