Oregonian Nights

By Jim Riva

Having a magic carpet isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially if you’re overweight. Marty Janko, a bartender, is a fat slob, and he is a proud SNOB: Supporter of Native Oregon Beer.

To solve a concavity problem caused by his weight, Marty does a little woodworking on a sheet of plywood and dubs it the Fredboard, after Fred Eckhardt, the godfather of craft beer in Portland, a.k.a. Beervana. With the magic carpet tied to the Fredboard with a ratchet tie-down, Marty is able to lie down on the carpet and go out for “flyabouts” at night with a hydration pack (filled with beer) on his back.

Flying no faster than 35mph because he is afraid of crashing into geese, Marty stays below 1,500 feet to avoid being detected by satellite radar. While flying back home one night, Marty falls asleep ... and is awakened off the coast by F-15 Eagle fighter jets of the Oregon Air National Guard. Chased by the jets and a Coast Guard helicopter, he ends up making a crash-landing in a forest near Pacific City.

Unable to get to work, Marty gets fired, but things go from bad to worse the next day when he is violently stabbed after getting off the MAX train at Pioneer Courthouse Square. Thrown into the media spotlight, Marty is coaxed by his pregnant domestic partner, Barbara, to take advantage of his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame—and Marty comes up with some good, old-fashioned activism.

Oregonian Nights is a barrel of laughs in addition to a barrel of beer, and it has it all: action, adventure, fantasy, and romance (and activism).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Riva
• Release date: Sep 5, 2020

Jim Riva

Jim Riva was the class clown in his boyhood days. He became a serious student of philosophy at the undergraduate and graduate levels before coming to the philosophical conclusion that the best outlook on life is to take humor seriously.An off-the-beaten-track world traveler who spent the better part of fourteen years in Japan, Jim has written nine novels that fall into the Humor category and more than thirty-five audio sketches that are on The Champion of Reason Podcast.He lives and laughs (and continues to write) in Oregon with his Japanese wife and their daughter.

Book preview

Oregonian Nights

Book One of The Magic Carpet Trilogy

Published by Magic Carpet Publications at Smashwords

Copyright 2011, Jim Riva

Cover art by Sharyl Steinmark

Photoshop work on interior photos by Matt Joseph

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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CHAPTER 1: BACKYARD MAGIC

(June 6th, 2009)

It drizzled in the morning like it always seemed to do on the day of the Grand Floral Parade, not that I would have gone to the parade even if it had been a perfectly wonderful morning. I didn’t care how much my five-year-old daughter, Agnes, begged me to take her. It was my day off, man, and I wanted to chill at home and drink beer. So I told Agnes that she could watch the parade on Channel 8 (KGW) with color-commentary by Tracy Barry and Joe Donlon.

Agnes’s mother, Barbara Callahan, who was six and a half months pregnant with our second child, was at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, hawking her beadwork (Barbara’s Beads) at Portland Saturday Market with 250 other vendors of various arts and crafts. So I was stuck with Agnes and her ridiculous Disney Princess obsession that made me root for Maleficent, the evil Queen, the cruel Stepmother, and the wicked Sea Witch.

I told Agnes that she was free to do whatever she wanted to do as long as she didn’t bother me, and I stationed myself outside on our deck and drank Oregon craft beer in 22-ounce ‘bombers’ while re-reading Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. When Barbara arrived home, I was working on a bottle of Sesquicentennial Ale, which Rogue Brewery made in celebration of this year being the 150th year since Oregon became the thirty-third state of the union.

The amber-orange Sesquicentennial Ale was my fifth beer of the day, or maybe it was my sixth. I wasn’t counting; it didn’t matter. Thanks to my grandmother, Grandma Sue, I had the money. Five thousand dollars was considered my fair share of what we found stashed under Grandma Sue’s mattress in early March after she crashed her motorcycle on a country road near Roseburg and died from injuries.

After unloading her canopy tent and all of her vendor stuff from our old Chevy van, Barbara entered the living room and saw a picture of a flower and a rainbow that Agnes had drawn on the living-room wall. Dude, she was pissed. She chewed Agnes out and then marched out to the deck and chewed me out—as if I were the one who drew the picture with her vast assortment of lipstick.

I didn’t say a word and I made sure to keep my distance. When Barbara got POed, I didn’t add fuel to the fire. She was barely five foot tall, but I bet that she could have given Tonya Harding a good fight.

We met for the first time when she fell into my arms at the Oaks Park roller-skating rink. We met for the second time during a Storm Large performance at Dante’s, when I fell into her arms. (Well, I would have fallen into her arms if she had caught me.) At the time, she was staying with friends at the Alberta Clown House, not long after getting arrested for spending three weeks high up in a Douglas fir in Mount Hood National Forest to protest old-growth logging. Anyway, one thing led to another and we ended up getting non-legally married (the Intentional Commitment) at the Voodoo Doughnut Wedding Chapel.

I took a drink of the Sesquicentennial Ale and watched an airplane head to Portland International Airport. That’s where I worked. I was a bartender at the Rose City Pub, which was run by Global Concessions.

My hours had been cut, but I still had a job, and that was more than a quarter of a million Oregonians could say. The state unemployment rate was 12.2%, third highest in the nation. Foreclosures were up more than 100% during the same period in 2008, when the financial crisis began. One in twelve mortgages was delinquent.

We didn’t have to worry about the bank repossessing our home because we were renters, and we planned to keep on renting despite an $8,000 tax credit that the federal government was dangling like a carrot on a stick to first-time home-buyers. Shit, we didn’t have enough money to make a down-payment on a house anyway.

With so many houses facing foreclosure, we were able to get a great rental deal on a house that was a whole lot nicer than the house we moved out of on the east side of town—after it got burglarized for the second time by meth addicts. We didn’t want to have to pay the meth tax a third time, man.

Our house was on the west side of town, in Raleigh Hills. It was on the less-affluent side of Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway but within staggering distance from the Raccoon Lodge and Pub, which had been brewing some superb sour beers.

The best thing about our house was that it had a big, private back yard. It was so private that I could have mowed the lawn in the nude, not that I would have done that. Hey, I refused to mow the lawn.

I liked chilling out on our deck and drinking Oregon brew. There were seventy-three brewing companies in Oregon. Portland alone had thirty-three of them, making it the beer capital of the world, and I had moved to Portland to capitalize on it. Beer aficionados called this area Beervana, and there may have some people who called me, at one time or another, the ‘Inebriated One’.

The main reason we moved to the west side of town was to be closer to Barbara’s mother, Patti Wheeler. Ma Wheels, as I called her, had issues, but she was good with Agnes and would be a big help to Barbara after the baby, due on August 28th, was born.

The main drawback about living on the west side was that it took longer for me to get to the airport. I would have quit my job if I could have found a full-time job