Choppy’s ‘party’ is juggling for money by I-205
Experts who work with people addicted to drugs sometimes talk about the functioning of an addiction as a “veil” of sorts. The idea is that doing drugs ends up pulling a kind of hazy film down upon one’s vision.
Life’s bumps and bruises, in this view, its twisted traumas and the myriad problems life brings, leads people to pick up a bottle, pipe or needle. Which pulls the veil down.
Sooner or later, in most cases, people sober up. At which point, they pull down the veil, dissipating the smoke with a breath of fresh air. It’s at this point they may often notice that all the problems that triggered their using in the first place are still there. Hopefully, at that point they have a support system in place to lean on: family, friends, NA or AA groups, addiction recovery specialists, mental health professionals.
Which brings us to Charles ‘Choppy’ Gillihan, 34, who says he has a Bachelor’s in Engineering from Washington State University, class of 2005. If you’ve recently driven up the off-ramp from northbound I-205 to the NE Glisan Street overpass, you may have seen him doing his thing.
Gillihan is originally from Seattle, which I learned when I asked if he was from Portland, and he responded “sort of.”
Sort of?
“I’m from Seattle.”
Uh, Seattle is not Portland.
“Portland’s not even a city, it’s a little town,” he said. “I’m used to bigger cities.”
Gillihan says that he was making medical grade implants but transitioned to custom guitars. He fell on hard times, he says, when his wife left him and “took everything I had.”
His drug of choice? “Heroin, dude.”
Gillihan says he does “pretty well” soliciting donations from passing motorists. “I don’t go hungry,” he allows. Like “Working” Kirk Reeves, the longtime fixture on the west bridgehead of the Hawthorne Bridge until he died in 2012, or any other street performer, Gillihan isn’t panhandling; he’s offering something to passersby — his juggling —in return for the occasional tips. It’s a bit different than roadside “flyers,” as they’re sometimes called, people with signs asking for help who rely on people’s generosity, compassion or shame seeing a fellow human being who is broke.
But his trade does come with a down side: the balls not infrequently roll into traffic.
“All the time,” he says, shortly after chasing one down. “They get run over all the time.” They’re just cheap, foam rubber, he says, so no harm done.
As long as Gillihan himself doesn’t get caught in front of a zooming car trying to get his ball back.
While his points of comparison include Seattle and Los Angeles, other West Coast cities with large homeless populations, Gillihan says he’s impressed by the sheer numbers of homeless in Portland.
“The market’s flooded here, if you know what I mean. Portland is covered by homeless people. A lot of them are territorial.”
‘They want to be homeless’
Many will insist that homeless individuals actually “want to” be homeless. That it’s a choice they make, as opposed to a function of multiple traumas, addictions, mental illness, or the larger market forces that have made jobs scarce and renting prohibitively expensive for many in Portland.
There will not be an easy answer to this eternal debate, which mirrors the debate over addiction— choice, or disease?
‘Choppy,’ for his part, views his current homeless situation as no biggie.
“In the wintertime, this is easy,” he says. “In the summertime, this is a party. I think everybody who is out here wants to be out here, don’t you think?”
Perhaps that is the veil heroin has pulled down over Gillihan’s life. Or, perhaps there’s truth to the thought that —particularly in the height of summer, when the fair city of Portland can seem a veritable cornucopia of life, flowers and easy living — homelessness is a choice, the exercising of one’s American right to freedom.
As he reflects, Gillihan’s anger and bitterness, which may be part of the drug-related and assault felonies he mentions, occasionally surface.
Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s immediately after he mentions his wife.
“All these people driving by in Mercedes are literally two paychecks away from being right here,” he says, his voice taking on a different tone. “They look at me like I’m some kind of disease or something.”
Gillihan’s “I ❤️ Bacteria” T-shirt could be part of that dynamic. But in the end, Gillihan’s words, hard to hear above the traffic noise coming from underneath and next to us, recall the axiom “there but for the grace of God, go I,” attributed to Englishman John Bradford. All things and people are interrelated, Buddhist dharma teaches. And if the Will Smith movie is to be believed, all people are connected via six degrees of separation.
As I prepared to leave for a meeting, disinclined to interfere for more than a few minutes with Gillihan’s livelihood, “Choppy” paused, and the veil cracked, just a bit.
“All this being on the street has turned me into a cynical asshole,” Gillihan said, with a wry grin.
Flannery O’Connor, then, with the last word: “To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility, and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character.”
