Oral essay: Miyoko Izutsu

[NOTE: This is a sample of a column I'd like to do for a Portland publication. It's still for sale.]You remember when she asked you for change three months ago because she made eye contact and seemed extraordinarily lucid. Now she lives in the Stewart Hotel on Southwest Broadway, caring for a sick man there. Before that, she slept on Portland’s streets for nine years. You sit with her on a warm afternoon in the North Park blocks. She was born an orphan in Japan. Now she is 57 years old and reminds you of a friend’s mother.

My husband went to visit his people in Alabama and he never made it back. His sister called me and told me that he had been run over by his brother’s car and he died before the ambulance came. So I moved in with my daughter in law, who lived behind a man who ran a drug house. But I didn’t know that. I went to church all the time, and I was a very responsible member of the PTA and all that.

I moved and this man—we’ll say Money, Mississippi, because that’s where he’s from—he’d say, “Hey girl!” He’s a black guy. “What’s going on? You like to play dominoes? You like to play cards?” He wanted sex.

Anyway, he invites me to his house and I say, “Well, what the heck.” This is an old man. I mean he was in really good shape, but white hair, white everything, and it just so happened he ran a crack house. And eventually he says to me, “Hey you tried drugs?” Because I told him I’d try anything, you know I was feeling pretty terrible. And he was a nice guy, but he gave me this pipe and I passed out right away. And it led to, oh, about nine years of homelessness.

It’s not easy though, getting off the street. It is not, especially for a woman. You know who gets help? It’s recovering drug addicts, alcoholics, ex-cons, the mentally ill, prostitutes, battered women and women with children. I don’t fit into those categories. My children are grown. I am a recovering drug addict, but I refuse to get on medication. I don’t need to be neutralized or super cooled. I need to have my mind functioning all the way. Already I’ve done enough damage to myself.

I think I was meant to go through this for a purpose so that maybe I can do something for other people. My youngest daughter’s 23. She’s in Las Vegas and she’s like, “Yeah right, mom, mm hm.” But I’m not really trying to prove myself to anybody. I’m just trying to get it together. I want to have a house and have my kids come to see me, but I gotta slow down, just take it step by step. I pan handle sometimes to get from here to there, but what means the most to me now is your attention, and if you speak to me, that means so much to me. To hear more about Money Mississippi and Portland’s lack of women’s shelters, check out the Friendly, Friendly Follow Through online.

Follow through: Miyoko Izutsu

[NOTE: This would be the web-only component of afore mentioned column.]After 45 years as a church-going mother Miyoko Izutsu fell in love with a crack dealer she calls Money Mississippi. She’s just now pulling herself together after a decade on the street. But whatever happened to that guy?

In the middle of this audio file, a really fat jogger runs by and Miyoko cheers him on.


In the 1984 tradition of ironically named governmental agencies, Miyoko thinks that the downtown law enforcement arm known as Clean and Safe is anything but.

"I’ve been beaten up three times out here on the street. Once by police…"

Despite several programs for men, Miyoko says that there are few resources for homeless women in Portland.

"...you don’t have use of a bathroom, no water, no shower, you can’t store your things there, and you’ve got to get your behind up at about 5:30 in the morning and you go out the door, and you can come back again about 7:30 in the evening. Which is kind of messed up because women can be taken advantage of a lot more easily than men."

Here’s Miyoko’s best shot at making some sense of her time on the street.

"I call 'em people that have their ass on their back. They’re so stuck up--and I used to be like that. I would dare not. I was a wonderful mom and nice to people who were nice. You know, respectable citizens. But homeless people, oh God…"

Photo: The Stewart Hotel on SW Broadway, Miyoko’s place of residence for the moment. By Jason Simms.

Oral essay: Howard Willett

[NOTE: This is a sample of a column I'd like to do for a Portland publication. It's still for sale.]He owns 90 properties in North and Northeast Portland. He showed you one treeless property on North Shaver last February in which the stained, carpeted floors slanted toward the center. Interstate 5 was 12 feet away. He wanted $1100.

You ask him to pick a place to get coffee in Northeast. He chooses the Denny’s near Broadway and MLK. He takes cream and sugar. It’s 9 in the morning.

I used to work in the lumber mill and I took my savings and bought some houses in Vancouver, Washington. Then I came over to Portland and I bought one house to live in and I noticed there were entire streets that were boarded up in Northeast Portland. I just started buying and fixing up as cheap as I could. I was buying houses for five, ten thousand, fifteen thousand dollars apiece. The banks were selling houses as well as the realtors. Nobody wanted the houses.

I waited for a long time, and I kept asking my realtor, “When’s it gonna turn around? Things are supposed to be getting better.” Over the years it’s panned out. Nothing’s the same anymore. I used to rent mostly all government program, you know, Section 8. But now I don’t do that anymore hardly ever because the rents are more than what Section 8’s willing to pay. People are moving in from everywhere. California. It’s become a popular place for music, art, that kind of life style.

I’ve been told I’m one of the last landlords in the area that’s still renting houses. Most of the houses around us are all homeowner houses. The thing is, if I sell, I don’t know what I’d do with the money. I have everything in the world, if you knew how I live and stuff. I don’t know what else I would do if I sold all the houses. So we’ve made a lot of improvements and changes to try to bring them up to the standards of the other houses. Giving notices to some people so that we can remodel and increase the rent. It improves the neighborhood. It gives me a better tenant. Now it’s all trendy and people are opening up restaurants. It’s great. We’re all happy.

But doesn’t that price out the black people who grew up in the area and the artists and musicians?

I don’t really feel sorry for ‘em to tell you the truth. It’s just kind of the way it goes. They could always move somewhere else. They can move out in the country, I guess, where the rents are cheaper, wherever that might be, you know. I think a lot of people get hurt that way, but what can you do? You can’t sit there and take a loss. You gotta get what you can. It’s the American Way. For about the history of Northeast Portland and to learn about the Howard Willet crust punk band, check out the Friendly, Friendly Follow Through online.

Follow through: Howard Willett

[NOTE: This would be the web-only component of afore mentioned column.]He had the right idea at the right place at the right time. Howard Willett bought 90 homes in North and Northeast Portland in the ‘80s for around ten grand a pop. He put them together on a shoe string one by one and he still looks after them himself.

"…I would buy paint for as little as a dollar a gallon from some of the places that were closing out. I would get carpeting sometimes that was free from the carpet stores…"

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Like most property owners in the area, Willett is continually working on home improvement.

"…so we’re weeding out all the bad ones, trying to get rid of the you know…There’s a lot of things that I use as reasoning to get rid of people. Cluttered yards, not paying their rent, people that are living there that shouldn’t be, filthy, you know…"

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Howard tells of a time when Portland was an untamed, uncivilized land. Picture this on the walk home from Last Thursday.

"…everything was boarded up. You wouldn’t even open a store down there--even a grocery store--because you’d be robbed every day."

Say, Howard, what's your favorite band?

"…the members of that house all used to rent somewhere else form me and they came together to rent one house together and they were a band and they named their band the Howard Willett Band. I said, "Naw, you’re kidding me." And then one of the employees who used to work for me, he saw them play. It really was a band and I couldn’t believe it!"

YouTube yields this footage of Howard Willett on tour in Fresno, CA.:


Photo: The back of the slanting Willett property mentioned in the intro to this week's FFW. Here's the front of the house (both photos by Jason Simms):