Going Over To The Dockside

The Dockside Restaurant is a modest pile of old timber surrounded by shine and money, and there are cheeseburgers in it, really good ones, the kind that isn't presented on a ciabatta roll with large food groups you can't wrap your teeth around--no. A nice squishy bun and a modest squishy burger, served with a side of potato chips and an RC. And lord only knows why the owners haven't sold out their precious footage in prime territory yet, but a lot of people are glad they haven't. You see an outfit like this, squatting like a turd in a field of gazelles, and you just find yourself rooting for it.

So it was fitting to discover that the Dockside's main claim to fame is its association with Oregon's own Tonya Harding. Or, more specifically, Tonya Harding's trash, not to be redundant. We loved Tonya Harding around here. She was a scrappy, hard-working figure skater with thighs that could snap a logger in two, and then pull an Applebee's off its foundation. She could leap into the air, spin three times, and part out a Trans-Am before hitting the ice again. She had rigid yellow hair and high bangs with enough engineering and product to fend off a tornado. She learned to skate in the Lloyd Center shopping mall, between the Cinnabon and Forever 21. And she was ours, all ours.

Also, she was not Nancy Kerrigan, a lanky, toothy beauty, and Tonya's chief rival on the ice. Nancy Kerrigan's dad was a welder and her circumstances growing up probably weren't much different than Tonya's, but we figured we knew a princess when we saw one, and that made us root for Tonya that much more. Tonya was more sturdy than beautiful. She was our Dockside.

So what's the Dockside connection? When Nancy Kerrigan was whacked in the knee by a large unintelligent fellow, the whole world immediately suspected Tonya was behind it. Our Tonya! But we knew her. We didn't suspect--we knew for a fact she was behind it. All the perps rounded up were related to Tonya in some way but she herself was held legally blameless, for lack of evidence. No matter: we were her fans and we knew what she was capable of, and we had faith in her too, knowing someone in this crew was going to do something massively stupid at some point, and then they did. She and her friends were heading to the transfer station with bags of trash and got within a mile of it and spied the Dumpster behind the Dockside, and they pulled over and hurled their trash in there, saving themselves the dump fee.

When the owner of the Dockside took trash out the next day, she saw the freeloaders' offending bags, and did what anyone would do: checked inside for clues to the miscreants. And there was an envelope with handwritten instructions for where to find Nancy Kerrigan and when and where she trained and an "X" where the treasure was and maybe a little "Kilroy was here" drawing. In Tonya's handwriting.

That's our girl.

We didn't like her in spite of it. We liked her because of it.

Tonya was banned from figure skating and carried on in a state of disgrace we find comfortable and familiar, and her legend lives on, as well as her place in our hearts. It might seem odd to cheer on a dim criminal with no principle beyond expediency, but resentment of the beautiful Nancy Kerrigans of the world can take you a long way. We're not looking for perfection. We're offended by it. The elites make us feel bad.

So don't say we haven't seen this kind of thing before. Donald Trump is just Tonya Harding with a nice 14-million-dollar bump from Daddy. He's always going to have his fans.

Don't Play It, Sam

The press has pinned out another bit of laundry on the public line, and it's tawdry enough, by some people's standards. When Mayor Sam Adams came out and admitted he'd had sex with a boy of eighteen--and he quaintly claims to have waited until the boy had been eighteen for several hours--the town went nuts. Oh, it wasn't the sex, goodness no, it was the lying about it. That is problematic, for sure. If he'd lied about the sex, what else is there that he might be lying to us about?

Hard to say, but I think it's entirely plausible that if there is something else he's lying about, it's probably more sex. I consider it entirely possible that our new mayor has lived his very public life on the up-and-up and has nothing to apologize for or lie about except for sex. People lie about sex. They lie because they don't consider it anyone else's business, but they know there'll be hell to pay if it gets out, and it might not get out. That's substituting expediency for principle, which I don't generally approve of (on principle), but I find it difficult to get real worked up about it in these sorts of cases, because I tend to agree that it's nobody else's business, myself.

In this case, even if the mayor did have consensual sex with a grown man of eighteen, which is entirely legal, he still might want to lie about it. He may not want someone in his life to know. Or he may not want to bolster the public perception that gay men prey on children, and this was cutting it a little close. Or maybe the boy was really seventeen and eleven months. Do we really want to investigate this? Bring in DNA samples and carbon-date some underwear? Does first base count, or do we draw the line just outside the batter's box? Most public figures who are not Janet Reno have a little something going on they'd rather not talk about, and even Janet said she wishes she did.

Now if you really want to see me get exercised about a political scandal, it's going to have to be about money. Somebody is taking kickbacks or somebody is getting free house additions or somebody is steering contracts to his rich buddies--that I want to know about. That's because it's my money. This particular town seems to suffer a whole lot less from those sorts of shenanigans than many others do.

I don't know whether my mayor is going to be a good mayor or not, but I tend to trust him. One of the other quaint things about him is that he is a professional government guy. He has always been interested in how cities work and he's gotten in on the ground floor and devoted his entire adult life to civics, immersing himself in all the minutiae of policy and budget and planning so that--I assume--he actually does have a better idea than most of us do how to run a city. I admire that. People frequently claim a CEO is in a better position to operate things than a good-government guy, but I'll go with the die-hard wonk with a heart every time. So I don't particularly want to see this episode bring him down.

I just think that if we're going to be realistic, we should grow up and assume that most people have some things they'd just as soon not tell anyone, let alone tell everyone in a banner headline, and that 90% of those have to do with sex. And I think we should allow them to not tell anyone, and go about the business of steering the ship of state, or even rowing the dinghy of city. I tend to distrust the politicians who brandish their spouses and children at us, especially the ones who make a big point out of going after sexual minorities or talk a really pious morality game. Because they're the ones who are going to be playing winkie in the bathroom stall and stalking pages and banging the maid. I take that on faith, as it were.

Sam's got tremendous political instincts, I'll say that; if he really did hold off until this boy's eighteenth birthday, he was being pretty careful, and a little sweet and old-fashioned to boot. And when he finally came out with his apology, he did it on Inauguration Day, when, you know, there might have been something else to write about.

So it probably isn't fair of me to suggest it, but I still suspect that at least some of the uproar this time isn't really about the lying; it's about visualizing our openly gay mayor being openly gay. He was supposed to be it, not actually do it. I don't go in much for visualizing other people having sex, myself. Not even our handsome blue-eyed mayor. But I did see that photograph of the boy in question, and now I'm thinking of giving visualization a whirl. You all can do what you want.