"Jon led with
his chin everywhere he went. He was an amazing performance
artist in how he lived. "
Every
so often the world forges a character who is larger than
life yet cannot negotiate reality.Jon Beckel was one of
those.
To the power of 10.
Sad-eyed and long-haired, the 39-year-old co-owner of
Le Bistro Montage spent much of the last decade as the
clown prince of Portland's hipsters. It's a role that
required a blue-collar outlook, the uncanny ability to
hit the right cultural high notes, an antic disposition
and a bucketful of obnoxiousness.
Two weeks ago, reality caught up with Jon Beckel.
In the early hours of July 1, after watching his girlfriend's
band at Berbati's, Beckel gashed his forehead somewhere
in downtown Portland. Arrested later on outstanding misdemeanor
warrants, Beckel was taken to the Justice Center, where
he was forcibly restrained. At some point, he suffered
a fatal brain injury.
No one knows precisely what happened. Did he fall and
bump his forehead? If so, was it before he was in custody,
or after? Was he injured by a corrections deputy?
Either way, Beckel's brain stem was destroyed. On July
6, he was removed from mechanical ventilation and died
at Oregon Health Sciences University Hospital. His death
was attributed to "head injuries with a left subdural
hematoma," according to Larry Lewman, a deputy state medical
examiner.
Multnomah County Sheriff Dan Noelle is looking for answers
to the riddle of Beckel's death. Last Wednesday, his office
turned its investigation over to the East County Major
Crimes Task Force--an acknowledgement of just how complex
the last day of Beckel's life was, as well as an admission
that the sheriff needs a political fig leaf. The task
force only comes out to investigate murders, rapes and
kidnappings. Its detectives will most likely take at least
two weeks to piece together the mystery of Beckel's death.
Alive, Jon Beckel would have been a full-employment project.
Now, it is for his friends and acquaintances to wonder
what happened to Beckel on July 1--and debate who he was
at core.
Although Beckel's death is deeply unsettling, few people
who knew him are surprised that his life led to such a
moment. The 5-foot-11, 180-pound man lived large, played
large, irritated even his closest friends and was infamous
around Portland for picking fights that he regularly lost.
He could be a saint or an asshole.
"Like rain in Oregon, you just had to wait five minutes,"
says Terry Nelson, a friend of 19 years. "That's the enigma
of Jon Beckel."
He was an accident, not just waiting to happen but often
seemingly wanting to happen.
"Jon led with his chin everywhere he went," says Nelson.
"He was an amazing performance artist in how he lived
his life. But you get those intense highs and lows with
people who run emotionally on four barrels with a rich
setting."
On many Portlanders' scorecards, Jon Beckel was brilliant,
but his smarts were not college-bought.
After graduating from Madison High School in Northeast
Portland, he left his native turf for Santa Barbara, Calif.,
where he worked in a Jack-in-the-Box and art galleries,
eating Mexican bread and salsa when cash was low. It was
here that he and Nelson met. They were later banned from
the oceanfront pier for public drunkenness and wearing
trench coats in 100 degree weather.
Trapped with no money in that most conservative of California
cities, Beckel, with Nelson in tow, drifted north along
Interstate 5 to Portland, a city that suddenly went from
being a place where he'd been an awkward, mouthy teenager
to one that was his playground.
It was 1985.
Nelson says his friend was fueled by visions of living
out the minimum-wage fate parceled out to most men who
passed on college in the 1980s.
"One of the things Jon feared was that life had dealt
him a hand of cards that required him to work at Fred
Meyer's, leaving him under the fluorescent lights, saying,
'Thank you, have a nice day,'" says Nelson. "He'd do anything
to avoid that."
He and Nelson opened Time for Fun, a vintage watch shop
on Southeast Belmont Street. Vintage watches were a hot
item in those days, the harbinger of the 1990s retro clothing
craze. After later moving the shop to Southwest Ankeny
Street, Beckel persuaded Nelson to turn half of the space
into a 24-hour espresso bar, the first in downtown Portland.
Renamed Cafe Omega, it was a hit with hipsters, low-lifes
and police officers alike. But owning a single watch-shop-cum-coffeehouse
wasn't the fast track to riches.
Still, by 1990 Beckel had scraped together enough money
for a two-story, gabled house at the corner of Southeast
Yamhill Street and 33rd Avenue in Sunnyside. The roof
had a yawning hole. Neighbors' first memory of Beckel
is of their new neighbor, drunk and perched on the steeply
pitched roof, arcing empty beer bottles onto Yamhill Street
to see what kind of pattern the glass made.
But after three years of 12-hour shifts, Beckel and Nelson
had little to show for their efforts besides exhaustion.
This was not living.
Sensing he was on the verge of being wedged into the
quotidian, Beckel turned Cafe Omega over to Nelson in
1991. For a time, he cooked at Acapulco Gold's.
And then came Beckel's master stroke. Together with Daris
Ray, a chef from Louisiana, he opened Le Bistro Montage
on Halloween 1992. Located on Southeast Belmont Street,
it was a restaurant unlike anything Portland had ever
seen.
Sure, there was white linen on the tables, and Beckel
and his staff wore boiled jackets crested with a monogrammed
M, but these were flourishes of restaurant snootiness
operating as wry social commentary.
Holding 44 people, Montage played into that studied blue-collar
style that had roared through a bored generation of young
adults like a Galaxie 500. Wine was served in tumblers,
the lone beer was Rainier and Ray's pasta and meat dishes
revolved around a single roux. Montage's culinary drawing
card was "mac and cheese" for $1.50.
It wasn't the food that compelled people to line up in
the rain and drive the neighbors crazy with their late-night
chatter while waiting for a table. Rather, it was Montage's
peculiar ambience that made the off-beat bistro so addictive--and
that was almost solely Beckel's handiwork.
"It fills a space you didn't even know you had, and life
without it is unimaginable," WW wrote in naming
Montage Restaurant of the Year for 1993.
The restaurant spoke to Portland's burgeoning indie culture--and
its heroin-chic afterbirth. It was a subculture of post-punk
rockers, filmmakers, theater artists and their allies
that defined what was cool in every major American city
from 1990 to 1996, when all that was indie--goatees, piercings,
lingerie as casual wear--had been so thoroughly co-opted
by the mainstream that tattoo shops sprang up in suburban
shopping malls.
It was a late-night salon for slackers, run by an impresario
of the highest order, one who was typically as drunk as
a Las Vegas showman.
Beckel's schtick was refining low humor into living art.
He was an obsessed fan of Phil Silvers and Bob Hope, both
masters of comedic timing. Although he'd often sit down
and jabber with customers in the most genuine manner,
his most consistent approach at Montage--and in the Portland
bars he frequented--was to walk right up to people and
talk bowel movements and masturbation as if he were talking
politics and stocks.
"He wasn't from the here-and-now," says Nelson, now the
owner of Tug Boat Brewing Company. "He always tried to
take a loony situation and make it loonier. That was his
schtick."
The schtick and the restaurant were such a smashing success
that in the summer of 1994, Beckel and Ray moved Montage
to its current site underneath the Morrison Bridge. The
new place held more than 100 people and was regularly
jammed with uncool city dwellers and suburbanites who'd
come to gape at the hipsters. Beckel, of course, was still
the featured act.
"There's a lot of worshiping of people who refuse to
conform," says Anne Hughes, owner of the Anne Hughes Kitchen
Table Cafe and the coffee shop inside Powell's City of
Books. "A lot of young people are that way these days.
They want fun when they are eating, working and sleeping--and
he provided that."
The trouble with his act was he couldn't turn it off.
At times, it would devolve into a drunken Beckel mouthing
off to the wrong guy at a downtown bar or club and winding
up with his face bloodied. So poor was Beckel's choice
of opponents that he once had a cigarette stubbed out
on his face.
But these were Montage's and Beckel's salad days. He
met a sculptor named Rachel, and the two were married
that October. And he was making so much money from the
restaurant that he'd turned his junker house into a comfortable
home.
His universe seemed to be in order.
Initially, Rachel Beckel gave the wildman entertainer's
life some much-needed structure. Still, Montage employees
and Beckel's friends considered the match odd. She was
the quiet, introspective artist, while he was oftentimes
more like a performing animal. Rachel's work was hardened
in a kiln; Jon's work was ephemera stacked on top of ephemera.
But even as Montage prospered in the mid-1990s, the restaurant,
and Beckel himself, took an ominous turn.
Montage's core base of indie-hipsters had deserted the
restaurant. They found the place a charade, what with
all those urban tourists and a decline in service--running
out of bread or not having enough leaf lettuce on hand.
Beckel's drinking increased. In late mornings, Beckel
would walk in to the bar at Produce Row, bolt two pints
of Henry's Private Reserve and head back to Montage with
his first slug of medicine under his belt. And that was
before he cracked the seal on a whiskey bottle. Daris
Ray and the restaurant's employees ran the place while
Beckel roamed downtown's bars and clubs.
Meanwhile, Beckel and Rachel fought. She'd lock him out
of the house on occasion. In 1996, Rachel moved out, leaving
him behind with two cats and "a lot of demons to sort
out," as a friend puts it.
In 1997, Beckel moved to San Francisco. Plans were to
open a Montage in North Beach, but the deal somehow fell
apart.
By now he'd been banned from Montage's business. He told
former neighbors that he was moving to Fog City to devote
himself to screenwriting.
Renting a studio in Chinatown, he tried to work through
his mid-life crisis. It was not a pretty sight.
Beckel was scrambling to survive, going so far as to
work at a diner. He owed the Internal Revenue Service
tens of thousands in back taxes and paid Rachel, now his
ex-wife, $2,000 a month in support.
But he continued returning to Portland every few months,
unable to cut the umbilical cord, and stayed for weeks
at a time.
During one of those trips in 1997, he was arrested in
Milwaukie on a misdemeanor drunk-driving charge; he never
appeared at court hearings for a diversion program. The
next summer, he was stopped for drunk driving in Gearhart.
After working out a plea bargain in February 1999, he
didn't even show up to serve his four days in jail, much
less comply with any of the terms of his probation.
Two warrants were issued for his arrest--flags in the
criminal justice system that ultimately figured large
in the last days of his life.
At one point in 1998, he was in Portland long enough
to be involved with Bella Rattan, a woman who, according
to friends of Beckel, had it together even less than he
did at the time and who wildly exaggerated their relationship.
In November, a restraining order was issued against Beckel
after Rattan alleged that he'd twice smashed her into
a wall while drinking Wild Turkey. Rattan obtained a second
restraining order against Beckel on April 25, 2000, claiming
that he had sent her intimidating mail from Nicaragua.
Beckel, however, had recently moved back to Portland
to live with Juliette Jones. She was a friend of eight
years, and they'd remained in contact during his years
of yo-yoing between Portland and San Francisco; for her,
Beckel cut his hair above the ears.
He even told old friends and acquaintances he bumped
into that he was madly in love, although he wouldn't tell
them with whom. In recent weeks, he had been shopping
for a wedding ring.
The evening of June 29, he was drinking with members
of the old Montage crew at the Aalto Lounge on Southeast
Belmont Street, less than two blocks from his former home.
"It was like we'd seen each other yesterday," says Anne
Hughes, who ran into Beckel in the wine bar that warm
evening. "He seemed fine, but he'd definitely been drinking."
June 30 was a warm evening with a cool breeze out of
the west. Beckel was nervous. For three months, he and
Jones had kept their relationship shielded from onlookers;
now, they were going public. He was going out that night
to watch his fiancée play bass in the band Natron
at Berbati's Pan on Southwest 3rd Avenue.
As part of an anti-Portland Blues Festival show, Natron
himself was taking a page out of blues voodoo: He would
emerge from a glass-lidded coffin after midnight.
Sometime after 1 am, the show ended. Beckel talked to
his fiancée for a few minutes as she broke down
her bass rig.
Wearing a black jacket and a white shirt, he left Berbati's
between 1:15 and 1:30 am, heading for Jones' apartment
on Southwest Vista Place, heading also into a mystery
as big as himself.
To date, no one knows what happened next. But there are
a few facts that make it possible to entertain tentative
theories as to how Beckel died from a subdural hematoma,
i.e. bleeding into the brain, commonly the result of blunt
trauma.
At 1:47 am, responding to a 911 call made by an onlooker,
Portland police found Beckel bleeding from a cut above
his eye at Southwest 18th Avenue and Morrison Street.
He was too drunk to stand, according to law-enforcement
sources, and was transported by ambulance to Legacy-Good
Samaritan Hospital, where he arrived at 2:10 am.
Meanwhile, police had run Beckel's name through the state's
LEDS database. Two warrants for Beckel's arrest came up;
police asked hospital personnel to contact them when Beckel
was ready for discharge.
At 2:59 am, hospital personnel contacted police. Emergency
medicine experts contacted by WW said the hospital
could not have thought Beckel's injury presented any threat;
otherwise doctors would have insisted upon an X-ray as
a minimal precaution, pushing Beckel's hospital stay well
beyond its 49 minutes.
Instead, Beckel was discharged at 3:20 am. He went to
a pay phone and called his fiancée.
"He knew something was going to go down because of his
warrants," Jones says. "He sounded worried and said, 'I'll
call you back.'"
Officer A. Nakamura arrested Beckel at the hospital at
3:31 am. Twenty-five minutes later, he drove his white
squad car down the long spiral ramp to the Justice Center's
so-called "sally port." Nakamura handed Beckel over to
corrections deputies without incident. According to the
officer's custody report, Beckel's eyes were bloodshot,
his speech was slurred and his breath smelled of alcohol.
It was 3:59 am.
The Justice Center's booking facility is lit by fluorescent
lights, the floor is tan-and-orange linoleum, the cinder
block walls are painted cream. Detainees are searched
twice by a deputy dressed in green; shoe laces and belts
are removed. Fingerprints are taken, followed by mug shots.
Next stop is the nurse's station, where detainees are
asked a series of medical questions.
It is a noisy and stressful environment for all concerned,
especially early on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
The nurse's station is 200 feet away from the sally port.
Somewhere between those two points, Jon Beckel resisted
the process. An unidentified male deputy threw Beckel
to the floor with a "hair takedown," a procedure that
is to be employed when a detainee's actions are "ominous,"
according to Sheriff's Department policy. Because of the
takedown, Beckel's head hit the floor.
He was then placed in a 40-square-foot isolation cell
10 feet away from the nurse's station. The cell, which
has no mattress but offers a bedstead of solid wood, is
where rowdy drunks and potentially violent detainees are
held until they shape up.
With his dinged-up forehead and dirtied clothes, Jon
Beckel must have looked like just another uncooperative
drunk who needed to gather himself together.
Although the East County Major Crimes Task Force is looking
into each moment that Beckel was in the hands of law enforcement,
it is to the minutes and hours in the cell that its detectives
should pay the strictest attention. Lying in that cell
with his injuries partially masked by his inebriation,
Beckel slipped into permanent unconsciousness.
Saints and sinners bleed the same. For as many as 10
hours on July 1, Jon Beckel--both sinner and saint--bled
into his brain, and it seems that no one caught it until
2:30 pm when the Justice Center contacted 911.
Up at OHSU, on the evening of July 6, five people were
figuring out how to bid farewell to someone who'd left
as deep an imprint as Beckel had.
His father, Robert, had just signed the release forms
allowing doctors to remove his only son from life support.
Along with his second wife, the elder Beckel quickly departed.
That left Arthur Chessman, an old friend, and Rachel
and Juliette. After Beckel was removed from mechanical
ventilation and his heart stopped at 10:15 pm, they placed
crimson and white rose petals around his body.
"I keep getting phone calls and people say how much they
loved him," Terry Nelson said the following day. "Then
they say, 'The world has one less wise-ass now.'
"Beckel had such a god-damned great run. But it's so
like him not to go out quietly--he's got to leave with
a bang and a question mark."
--Kelly Clarke, Jenny Egan and Alley Hector contributed
research to this article.
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