by Travis Mateer

A text I received yesterday got me thinking about how little I knew in 2011 when I began coordinating Homeless Outreach Teams for the Poverello Center. I was the naive fixer of other people’s problems and quick to explain away the alcohol dependency that took hold in order for me to maintain my own illusions.

One of main funders of the H.O.T. program back then was United Way of Missoula County, led by Susan Hay Patrick, so it’s not surprising that the first call I responded to came from United Way at their old location near the red Xs on Higgins.

The idea of having an alternative phone number for NUISANCE related issues surrounding chronic homelessness was an idea I worked my ass off to make a reality, but when I think about that first call now, from the perspective of 2024, I can only shake my head and marvel at how weird things are getting for me. Let’s see if I can explain myself without adding unnecessary fodder to the HE’S CRAZY crowd hoping I go Three Mile Island.

Ok, we’ve already established I’m a drunk, so there’s inherently a bit of irony involved in the fact my job entailed, too often, responding to alcohol-related behavior from chronic alcoholics downtown, but when you consider the intoxicated woman I first helped on my first H.O.T. call had the same name as my then-wife, things start to get interesting. The other aspect of that call will have to remain vague for now, since it involves the person taking legal action against me.

My pattern of trying to help others in order to avoid dealing with my own shit didn’t ultimately help Minnie Chiefstick, who died very close to my daugher’s birthday in 2020. Four year before that, when my little girl was first born, I was in the hospital when I read about the passing of Jade Gunhammer, another notorious street person who once threatened me while I was with my kids downtown enjoying the River City Roots Festival.

Below is a picture of Jade. Please excuse the image alteration, I had a new app at the time that I was playing with.

I name-dropped Jade and a few other notorious street characters while getting booked into jail by a detention officer with a pretty familiar first name, Travis. While in jail the book that helped keep me grounded featured a guy named GUY who was into surveillance. That made me chuckle.

What did NOT make me chuckle was what happened when I watched Late Night With The Devil a few weeks ago. This is where things get weird, but first I have to rewind quickly back to 2016, when I stopped working at the homeless shelter, hung out with my newborn girl, and did the cliché drinking writer bit with a work of fiction you can check out at the substack I never promote.

What sprung from that work of “fiction” was a scene that seemed to echo, or manifest, in real life when Lee Nelson was brutally murdered in a very similar fashion to a homeless character in my story. Around that time I also had a young woman reach out to me, and she had the same name I gave my fictional wife, which was Madeline.

Ok, with this in mind, here’s a portion of the plot of the movie, Late Night With The Devil, from Wikipedia, and you better believe the emphasis is mine:

The film’s prologue is framed as a documentary investigating an unexplained event that occurred on the night of Halloween 1977, during the live broadcast of a sixth season episode of the successful variety late-night talk show Night Owls with Jack Delroy, which competes for ratings with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Through his celebrity connections, Night Owls host Jack Delroy makes regular visits to “The Grove”, an elite California camp for rich and powerful men. Some time later, his wife Madeleine dies of cancer, and her death has a major effect on Jack as Night Owls halts its production. Jack ultimately returns and, in order to boost the show’s ratings, decides to do a special occult-themed episode on Halloween. Special guests for the show’s episode include self-proclaimed psychic and medium Christou, skeptic and former magician Carmichael Haig, parapsychologist author June Ross-Mitchell, and June’s latest subject Lilly D’Abo.

During the broadcast, Christou experiences a premonition about someone named “Minnie”, which Jack reveals was his private nickname for Madeleine.

I’ve tried to relegate these types of posts to the new blog I created for my last road trip, one3twenty, but I don’t use images over there, and I want to show you a very special Billy trolling me from the Outer Range.

My middle name, which is William, is the name that really got me realizing how some names just seem to be EVERYWHERE. I even kept a special little moleskin journal just to list all the different Williams I came across. I was near 200 when I gave up.

The Billy pictured above is a character from Outer Range and MY GOD his singing is out of control. Also, unoriginal, which I’m going to cling to in order to avoid the obvious guilt-by-name-association potential for someone with more than few videos of him belting out poem-songs accompanied by a Ukulele at his Vimeo page.

Autumn Rivers, the hippie character from Boulder (not Missoula) who appears in episode one, and who I mentioned in yesterday’s post, reminds me of the Summer Higgins character from Yellowstone that I speculated was a not-so-subtle jab at Missoula. Here’s my not-so-subtle-titled post featuring that speculation:

A Message To The Myth Makers: You Will Not Win This War (July 17th, 2022)

When I looked up Minnie Chiefstick’s name I got this NBC Montana article about the Poverello Center memorializing 25 names, and among them are Lee Nelson’s name and Sean Stevenson’s name. I’ll contrast my two links, which go to DOZENS of articles, with how my former employer chose to remember them, which was by scrawling their names on pieces of cardboard then posting them on their fence.

Marking important moments in the passing of time is not something I intend to disrupt on June 27th when the Poverello Center has their 50th anniversary thing, but were I to provide some sort of ENHANCEMENT on the street, with puppets, I know what t-shirt I’ll wear!

Who is this STREET LEGEND? I’ll let Al Pils tell you from a 2007 Missoulian article:

“Me and my buddy Pat were talking about some interaction someone had had with Randy, and someone else asked who Randy was,” Pils says. “We thought, ‘He’s a legend, everyone should know who Randy was.’ “

Who Randy was, Pils says, was “this infamous street person who hung around Worden’s and the Sinclair on Broadway. He was gray-haired and always carried a sleeping bag, He was foul-mouthed and grumpy, but he had a high profile at the Pov, where he’d stop by for a new sleeping bag and a meal sometimes.”

And let’s not leave out Ellie, who had this to say about these t-shirts HONORING her homeless clientele:

Ellie Hill, executive director of the Poverello Center, says the shirts are a great way to honor people who made Missoula a more colorful place. That the Pov benefits makes it very special.

“We thought it was so fitting that we brought Al on board – literally,” says Hill, who asked Pils to join the center’s board of directors about six weeks ago.

“These people (Tommy, Red and Randy) ate and slept at the Pov from time to time, and it’s a fitting benefit for them” Hill adds.

Yes, fitting indeed.

If you, dear reader, see fit to benefit a gofundme ask with MY name on it, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is ready for your donation.

Thanks for reading!