Sandy Blvd.

From, Car Dogs (a Real Life Fiction)

The wind was a torrent of darkness
Among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon
Tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight....

-Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman

Sandy Boulevard cuts diagonally across the city, an impatient afterthought of city planners, eager to please campaign contributors by making access to Portland's downtown business distrct as quick and easy as possible from Portland's newish, "international" airport. Screw bothering with the tidy north-south, east-west grid that otherwise describes most of Portland's streets. Sandy is a great way to get from Northeast Portland to Northwest (and vise-versa) especially if you are drunk. It's a straight shot with no turns, few cops and lights that are timed to easily anticipate the next one.

It would be the route of choice if you've just scored some dope down by Skidmore Fountain and you want to land at a non-descript strip joint far away before your connection figures out that four of the six twenties you handed him in the shadows will look a lot like photocopies in the light.

Or, you would have chosen the hotel out on 82nd and Sandy as the location you mutter into the office phone for the escort service to send your "date" because, if you make the lights on Sandy, you'll have enough time for a good quicky after work, before you meet the wife and daughter downtown to celebrate your anniversary at Jake's.

Or, you'd be headed up Sandy around midnight this Monday if you are Kenny Lawson and you've been screwing your 20 year-old boyfriend in the Slaughterhouse District with plenty of Evan Williams (following the shots of Makers Mark you'd bought in public), and you are nearly incapacitated before you drive back to your office at 26th and Sandy. You'd be hoping beyond hope that the alcohol will somehow make twenty-hundred-thousand-and-something dollars look like the sixty-hundred-and-something the auditors need to see. The forty-hundred having vaguely dissappeared over the last six months of pretending to be a member of the Rat Pack in Oceans Eleven, and, too drunk to remember that all the money the Pack heists in Vegas gets cremated with their dead buddy in the end, it gets spent at Sammy The Russian's invite-only poker games. It would be hard for a narcissist like Kenny to believe that the movie he's starring in could end so badly.

Kenny. Kenny Lawson. General Manager of Sandy Motors, son-in-law of the owner, Big Al, President of the Metropolitan Automobile Association, contributing ($) member of the Forsquare First Christian Church, father of two, husband of one, and lover of as many as possible. Kenny doesn't yet realize that his current financial fiasco will be his biggest yet, ending in mayhem and death for hundreds he won't care, or even know about.

Welcome to Sandy Motors! If I can't make you a deal, I'll eat my hat!