Mike Paterniti
speaker
232 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 28 Jun
Mike Paterniti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The West End Cemetery is full of old Dead Sea captains and soldiers from the War of 1812, kids that died of cholera, and wives who after six or eight or ten children just gave up.
There are rich people under monuments, the Longfellow family in a vault, and paupers without so much as a wooden marker.
No one's been buried here since the middle of this century, and so the place has fallen into disrepair.
You see a lot of the marble and shell headstones and puzzle pieces on the ground are standing at crooked attention.
About ten years ago, the cemetery was a popular hangout for prostitutes and junkies, but now it's just dogs and their owners.
When I first moved to town a couple years ago with my girlfriend Sarah, we walked our dog in the cemetery.
There was this guy there named Jeff, a big brawny American Indian from the Duckwater tribe, I think, who sort of qualified as my first friend in Portland.
He told me how he grew up in Nevada and was adopted by white parents and then raised in a little redneck town where people didn't really like Indians.
He'd moved around a lot, and I pictured him as I was now, the stranger in a strange place.
He walked with me in the cemetery sometimes twice a day, whatever the weather.
Or rather, we were both being walked by our dogs.
His was a wolf mix named Kiana, with a vacant, slightly menacing glint in her eye, who liked to rough up young puppies.
And mine is a simple mutt named Trout, whose passion for chasing squirrels follows her lifelong commitment to rolling in poop.
It seemed like Jeff was always at the cemetery, sometimes up to eight hours in a row.
He said he worked at night, supposedly for a local scuba diving outfit, and that's why he had so much free time during the day.
He told stories, endless stories, about his high school football exploits and the blown-out knee that ended his college career at safety.
He talked about fishing, how he gillnetted in the rivers of southeast Alaska,
and then how he and his girlfriend had bought a house, and now they weren't together anymore, and she had the house, and he was here, a country away, walking his dog with people like me.
He didn't seem angry at all.
No, in fact, he seemed happy.
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