→ Introduction: Unraveling the Fringe
“Everyone in Portland is living a minimum of three lives,” says Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love. She says, “Everyone has at least three identities.”
She’s sitting in the window of her apartment in Northwest Portland, rolling cigarettes and smoking them, her long blond hair parted in the middle and tied back. She’s wearing black-framed glasses. The radiators clank and a siren goes by, four stories below on Glisan Street.
“They’re a grocery store checker, an archaeologist, and a biker guy,” she says. “Or they’re a poet, a drag queen, and a bookstore clerk.”
Rolling another cigarette, she says, “It’s tricky because all the rich people are in disguise. You never know when the scruffy guy across the counter could be someone rich enough to buy the store, chew it up, and spit it out.”
→ Talk the Talk: A Portland Vocabulary Lesson
You say,"Or-GAWN." I say, “OR-a-gen.” Nothing-short of a California license plate—marks you as an outsider faster than how you mispronounce local words. Here’s a quick guide to local slang and how to say words such as Willamette, Multnomah, and Couch.
→ (a postcard from 1981)
Acid and LSD are the same thing. I’m only telling you this because I didn’t know it.
This year, I’m nineteen years old and living in a rented room on the second floor at 2221 NW Flanders Street. The Hampton Court Apartments. My friends and I, we buy our jeans at the Squire Shop on SW Broadway and Alder Street. We wear high-waisted, buckle-back carpenter pants with a loop midway down the thigh, so you can hook a hammer there. The Squire Shop has the white-denim painter pants and the striped engineer jeans. We listen to the Flying Lizards and Pink Floyd.
→ Quests: Adventures to Hunt Down
Each of the following is a real trip—minus the risk of flashbacks. Make the effort and live a few hours in somebody else’s world. Here are fourteen local outings that prove no way do we all live in the same reality.
→ (a postcard from 1985)
Our third night shooting on location, no one can find our meat.
The set dressers and props people are pissed. They bought special cuts of meat for this, steaks thick as dictionaries. Chops big around as tennis shoes. They spent time rubbing the raw meat with face powder so it wouldn’t shine under the hot lights. So it would look okay on camera.
This is a music video being shot at Corno’s Supermarket at SE Union Avenue and Morrison Street. The band is called Cavalcade of Stars, sometimes just COS, and the song is called “Butcher Boy.” All night, from the time the market closes until it opens, a video crew is here on location. Night after night.
The chorus boys are dressed as butchers in long white coats, but with big blue-eye shadow eyes and cheekbones defined with smears of plum and magenta. Their hair, moussed and teased into stiff crowns. The chorus girls wear oversized sweatshirts in Day-Glo yellow or pink, with the collar and sleeves ripped off. They wear striped tights and pull the sweatshirts to one side so one bare shoulder always shows. Their hair is streaked with bright green or pink and tied with scraps of orange or blue lace. Their eyes are sunk into deep holes surrounded with black mascara.
→ Chow: Eating Out
Now that you’ve read the preceding story about dirty meat. . . let’s go straight into planning dinner. Some of my favorite cooks have agreed to sacrifice their secret recipes here. Make one, or make them all, and have a best-of-Portland dinner party. If you’re in town eating at any of the following places, chances are I’m at the next table.
→ (a postcard from 1986)
Somewhere a man’s hollering about devils and demons. From some other hospital room he’s bellowing and screaming about how the niggers and fags are out to get him. You can hear him all over the third floor when he screams, “Get away from me, you cunt!” And his shouting just goes on and on.
This is Emanuel Hospital, the big medical complex at the east end of the Fremont Bridge. I’m here as a volunteer for a charity hospice. My job is to take people places, mostly relatives of dying people. Mostly, I drive visiting mothers from their motel to the hospital. After their son or daughter is dead, I might drive them to the airport for their flight home.
→ Haunts: Where to Rub Elbows with the Dead
From ghost stories to cold spots, the dead seem to linger among the living in Portland. Here are sixteen local opportunities to look up old friends.
→ (a postcard from 1988)
This year I’m living in a two-story town house at 1623 SW Montgomery Street—with severed heads and hands hidden in the back of every kitchen cabinet. Some are male, most are female.
My roommate, Laurie, works as a window dresser at the downtown Meier & Frank department store and tells me about meeting guys and fucking them in the store’s big display windows along SW Fifth Avenue. You have about two feet of dark, filthy room to maneuver, she says, between the inside wall and the scenic partition that the mannequins stand in front of. Beyond the mannequins is nothing but plate glass and a zillion people walking past. The narrow space limits your sex positions but it’s private. Plus, Laurie says, you get the thrill of rush-hour crowds waiting for their bus only a couple feet away.
Unless you want to get fired, she says, you can’t go too wild or you’ll make the mannequins shake.
When we drink, Laurie tells me about her childhood. How her mother used to get up every Sunday morning to cook a hot breakfast. While her mom was busy, Laurie would crawl into bed with her dozing father and suck his cock. This was every Sunday morning for years, and after a few gin-and-tonics Laurie can see how this might color the rest of her life.
→ Souvenirs-. Where You Have to Shop
TO get A mannequin of your own, check out Grand & Benedict’s “Used Annex” at 122 SE Morrison Street. They usually have enough naked dummies for a creepy afternoon in the Twilight Zone. For a cheap souvenir or a relic from Portland’s history—we all have that magpie urge to acquire stuff—check my favorite places for finding something unique without spending a ton.
→ (a postcard from 1989)
It’s August in the Swan Island shipyards, and I’m exploring the inside of an old cruise ship while it sits in dry dock.
The ship is the S.S. Monterey, a forgotten passenger liner. She’s been mothballed in the Alameda section of San Francisco Bay since the 1960s, until the Matson Lines towed her to Portland for hull work. They’ll do just enough work in the United States to allow her to be registered here, then tow her around the world to Finland, where she’ll be gutted and refitted for luxury cruises to Hawaii.
The man showing me around is a marine architect named Mark. I met him at a potluck, and Mark told me about living aboard the ship while it was moored at the seawall along NW Front Avenue, waiting for its turn in dry dock. Without fuel or passengers, he says, the ship rides high in the water—so high that when anything from a barge to a canoe goes past, the towering ship will rock from side to side. The white hull is streaked with rust and bird shit, and the staterooms inside are hot and dusty.
→ Unholy Relics: The Strange Museums Not to Miss
The truth is, I’m a lot more interested in collectors than collections. From Frank Kidd, a man who had few toys as a kid but now has one of the largest collections in the world, to Stephen Oppenheim, who hung antique lights as backdrops for 1960s rock concerts and now sells them, here are nine local museums and a few of their “curators.”
→ (a postcard from 1991)
When I first got beat up, Gina asked if any of the attackers was named David. She was blaming everything on what she called “the Curse of the Davids.”
Gina had met her latest in a long series of men named David through a personals ad. They’d met for coffee, and he seemed sweet, sweet enough that she invited him to her apartment for dinner a few days later. Gina lived on the top floor of the Hadley House Apartments at SW Salmon Street and Twentieth Avenue, and I lived on the second floor. The walls were so thin that on any night I could hear at least three different television shows in the apartments around mine.
The writer Katherine Dunn is right about every corner having a story. I was attacked at the corner of SW Alder Street and Fifth Avenue—it’s the Red Star Grill now. I was leaving a gym on a Friday night, just at dusk, and coming around that corner I was jumped by a group of young men. They were black and wore black-hooded sweatshirts, and the first one slammed a fist into the side of my jaw so hard I fell sideways and bounced my head off the sidewalk.
Someone shouted, “Twenty-five points.”
→ Getting Off: How to Knock Off a Piece in Portland
“The jig’s up—people are having sex in Portland,” says Teresa Dulce. An advocate for Portlands sex workers and the publisher of the internationally famous magazine Danzine, Teresa says, “Instead of fighting the inevitable, let’s try to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease.”
Teresa sits in the Bread and Ink Cafe on SE Hawthorne Boulevard, eating a salad of asparagus. Her eyes are either brown or green, depending on her mood. Since her car broke down outside of town in 1994, she’s been here, writing, editing, and performing as a way to improve working conditions in the sex industry.
With her pale, heart-shaped face, her thick, dark hair tied back, she could be a ballet dancer wearing a long-sleeved, tight black top. With her full Italian lips, Teresa says, “The sky has not fallen when there’s been trade before. There are plenty of guys who just want to knock off a piece and are grateful for sex. If there were as many of us getting raped and killed as people say, there wouldn’t be a woman left standing on the street.”
→ (a postcard from 1992)
Riding my bike, I hear the music and go to look. In the dozen blocks between Lloyd Center and the Steel Bridge, here is the opposite of the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade.
→ Nature But Better: Gardens Not to Miss
From the annual Rose Festival parade to the International Rose Test Gardens—where Katherine Dunn wandered, inventing the concept for Geek Love— Portland is a city of gardens. Some are lumps of nature trapped in town, like Elk Rock Island. Others, like the Maize and the flower-covered parade floats, are very man-made. Most fall somewhere in between.
→ (a postcard from 1995)
“Where you’re going, there are huge pits in the floor and broken glass everywhere, so it’s important you do what you’re told,” says Marcie. This is after dark, under the east-side on-ramps for the Morrison Bridge. A block away people are waiting on the sidewalk for tables, for a nice dinner at Montage. Here at SE Belmont Street and Third Avenue, a crowd of men and women wear army-surplus fatigues, disposable Tyvek coveralls, and radiation badges. These people carry military C rations and covered casserole dishes. They cradle warm garlic bread wrapped in tinfoil.
The idea is, we’re going to the first potluck after a nuclear holocaust: Portland’s semiannual Apocalypse Cafe.
Marcie says, “I hope nobody has to use the bathroom, because the toilet facilities at the event are a little primitive. They’re what you’d expect after the end of civilization.”
→ Getting Around: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to Meet
Until the next Apocalypse Cafe—and the next ride in the back of a moving van—here are a few transportation-related people and places. The first, Reverend Charles Linville, is the man who cut the padlocks off the empty Greyhound bus barn and made the party happen. When he’s not breaking and entering, he delivers mail out of the University Station Post Office.
→ (a postcard from 1996)
One side of NE Multnomah Boulevard is Lined with Portland police officers in full SWAT gear, Kevlar face shields, and body armor, holding black riot sticks.
The other side of the street is lined with Santa Clauses in red velvet suits and big, white beards. It’s the thin blue line versus the fat red line.
This is Portland SantaCon ‘96. Aka the Red Tide. Aka Santa Rampage. Every year, members of different Cacophony Societies flock to a host city. From Germany, Australia, Ireland, and every state in the U.S., they’re here in almost identical Santa suits. All using the name Santa. No one’s male or female. No one’s young or old. Black or white. This is some 450 Santa Clauses in town for seventy-two hours of special events. From karaoke to roller skating. Political protests to street theater. Strip clubs to Christmas caroling. They jingle sleigh bells and carry spray bottles of Windex, blue window cleaner they use to squirt each other in the mouth.
→ Animal Acts: When You’re Sick of People-Watching
The day I spent with Portland elephant keeper Jeb Barsh, he compared the city to a zoo. Comparing the city government to zookeepers, Jeb said, essentially their job is the same: to keep a population as happy as possible inside a confined area. Portland’s size is limited by the Urban Growth Boundary—our cage, so to speak—and somehow we’ve all got to coexist within this limited space. Here’s a look inside the other zoo, plus a few more animal-related events.
→ (a postcard from 1999)
In July of 1995,I sat down with a group of friends and showed them a type-written manuscript called Fight Club. We were drinking beer, and I asked everyone to make a wish on the manuscript. Everyone there had said something, done something that went into the story, and it just seemed right they should get a reward.
→ The Shanghai Tunnels: Go Back in Time by Going Underground
You can’t come to Portland and not hear stories about the downtown tunnel system.
Michael Culbertson, the concierge at the Benson Hotel, will tell you how kids used to get into the tunnels through an abandoned building a block off the waterfront in Old Town. Remembering his childhood in the 1940s, he says, “There used to be a whole culture down there. Our favorite place was an old, abandoned Chinese restaurant with beautiful ceramic murals. We fixed it up, and that became our clubhouse.”
Adam Knobeloch, an engineer at the Freightliner Corporation on Swan Island, will tell you about a trapdoor in the basement of the old Broadway Theater, and how he’d wander lost underground.
→ (a postcard from 2000)
Ten days before the end of the millennium, nobody I know has plans to celebrate. We’ve all stockpiled bottled water and canned tuna. As Y2K and the threat of global chaos gets closer—all those computers crashing—it seems a shame that everybody’s staying home to guard their Sterno for New Year’s Eve.
That day, an ad in the newspaper says the Bagdad Theater is still available. The Bagdad is an Arabian-style movie palace leftover from the 1920s. The theater has a print of the movie Fight Club. This is too much to resist.
→ Photo Ops: Get Your Picture Snapped at These Landmarks
Just so you have proof you were in Portland . . . here are some swell local places to use as a backdrop when you say “cheese.”
The Bomber
Yes, a World War II B-17 bomber. It’s Lacey’s Bomber at 13515 SE McLoughlin Boulevard.
The Castle
At the corner of Glen Echo Avenue and SE River Road stand the crumbling ruins of a very swank medieval-style nightclub, complete with towers and battlements.
→ preserving the fringe
(a postcard from 2002)
The trouble with the fringe is, it does tend to unravel. By the time you read this, small parts of it will already be obsolete. People don’t live forever. Even places disappear.
My first week living in Portland, in 1980,I called my grandmother for her birthday. This is from a pay phone at the Fred Meyer supermarket on Barbur Boulevard, just downhill from my two-bedroom apartment and stoner roommates. My grandmother and I talk until I have no quarters left, and the operator cuts the line. This is midsentence, and I have no money to call and tell her what’s happened.
Instead, I go home and fire up the bong. The big party bowl smokes like a bonfire of dope, and my roommates are in the kitchen, cutting up a little block of hash.
There’s a knock on the door, and it’s the police.
