“When was the last time you heard the following sentence uttered in City Hall: “The first time I shot heroin…”?” Lindstrom asks. “Bobby Tsow sharing his story of addiction and recovery with Mayor Potter and Commissioner Leonard shows how far we’ve come. Commissioner Leonard’s willingness to share his family’s struggle with addiction made the seventy-five people in the council chambers feel that their elected officials understand the life and death urgency of this issue.”
Like Leonard’s and Tsow’s, Lindstrom’s connection to addiction is a personal one. His own father was a high-functioning alcoholic, but his brother, Lindstrom’s uncle, died “a wino’s death.”
“My family is riddled with alcoholics and addicts,” he says. “When I was growing up, there wasn’t the language of recovery there is now. It was just silence or ‘why is your dad drunk all the time?’. I often wondered why my father didn’t reach out to his brother but I think it would have meant confronting his own alcoholism, and that was something he chose not to face.”
“Growing up, I was surrounded by adults that I loved and looked up to, but I knew there was an obstacle they were facing that prevented them from finding a better, truer self. I wondered what it would take for them to break through.” he says. “And then, of course, I came across this process called recovery.”
Which is where his last two documentaries, and indeed, much of his life’s work, has been focused.
Lindstrom’s uncle died in 1987, the same year he began a Masters Degree in Fine Arts, Directing and Screenwriting at Columbia University. While there he made a documentary about Earl “The Goat” Manigault, a Harlem basketball player in recovery from a heroin addiction. Lindstrom returned to Portland in 1992, and began teaching at the Northwest Film Center. His films have been broadcast on PBS, OPB and French Television and won numerous awards.
“I first heard about James Chasse in the newspapers,” he says. “But reading about Jim’s youth, he and I are roughly the same age, and it seems he had this profound impact on people. People were very moved by him.”
Lindstrom mentions Greg Sage’s song, Alien Boy, by way of an example.
Like Chasse, Lindstrom grew up in the suburbs of Portland, and remembers clearly “what an exciting prospect it was to go into Portland,” growing up. He transferred back to Portland from Rutgers University in 1981. “And at the time, Northwest Portland seemed like a place where you could live simply and cheaply and focus on your art.” he says.
Lindstrom also mentions Monica Drake, who has written an essay about life at The Lawn, an apartment building in Northwest Portland, and Chasse’s presence there.
“And Jim was part of that milieu,” he says. “That era in Portland was unique, there wasn’t the kind of marketing to creativity that there is today. It was much more underground and less self-conscious.”
“Contrast that to today’s gentrification, and it wasn’t like there was a Starbucks and a Gap on every corner,” he says. “Northwest Portland was full of these really divey taverns, all of them wild places, with a mix of all different types of people. It was distinctive, authentic.”
Perhaps gentrification played a role in Jim Chasse’s life and death?
“In the early ’80s, Portland was going through hard times. Reagan’s de-institutionalization put a lot of people with mental illness onto the streets, and they seemed to mainly end up in Northwest. Most people were fleeing the inner city and the ones who stayed here were either here because they had no place to go, or because they really wanted to be here,” he says.
“Nowadays, if you drive down to 162nd and Stark, it’s wild because there are all these people who 20 years ago might have lived in downtown and accessed social services there. Now they walk in these wastelands designed for the automobile, not for pedestrians. It’s alienating.
“In the early ’80s, there was a real vibrancy to inner Portland. It wasn’t fancy or particularly trendy. It had spirit and vibrancy. A certain rebel quality.” he says.
Which is what the young Jim Chasse appears to represent, in Lindstrom’s mind. There’s also a heroic quality to Chasse, too.
“In the research we’ve done into Jim’s life there is a rich,full existence of friendships, and sustained artistic endeavors that we can document up until his early 20’s or so, and then the alienation of schizophrenia takes over and his existence becomes more and more solitary and marginalized. As we slowly piece together the last twenty years of Jim’s life, what emerges is his heroism in creating daily routines that gave his life meaning.” Lindstrom says. “His rhythms, his rituals of taking long, long walks, going to the downtown library, or to church, or paying tribute to the statue of Joan of Arc — I think In his own way James Chasse had a very rich inner life defined by a beauty of the spirit.”
“But I think, as a society, we’re to be judged on the quality of life we provide for people like Jim,” he continues. “Can’t we do better than giving him a tiny room in a single room occupancy hotel, with feces on the wall, and then being beaten to death under mysterious and suspicious circumstances? There’s none of us that are okay with the way this is working. There is work to be done. We have to do better.”
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