The night flows & stars subtly shift as we watch the drug deals, the scurvy folk stumbling about on strange addled missions, grumble of idiot traffic up & down Fremont.
posted by on March 27, 2003
The following morning, dim sunlight on barely opened eyes equals pain.
I crawl off of Nathan’s couch hurting from lower intestine to fore-brain. Nathan comes out of his bedroom in slightly better condition. I rise, greedily drink water, thoroughly brush teeth & we head for La Fonda, home of the two pound burrito.
I order a couple of adobe marinated chicken tacos as well as a steak taco. A mere ten minutes later I’m very very close to regurgitating my ill-advised dead animal breakfast. I’m no vegan, tho I have been one before & sometimes I think it’s a nation I should reapply for citizenship to. Stomach slowly settles, I push onwards & out…
Christian soldier that I am.
Seventy-second and Killingsworth starts the ride off right with a toothless, whiskered scepter of a man. Squinting through a huge pair of yellow-tinted, thick plastic glasses, he’s framed at the bus stop by two equally frightening old ladies, also toothless and bearded. I turn to Jeremy with a look of combined glee & horror. “The ride has begun!” I yell over the roar of traffic.
We pass a disheveled yard with trash strewn about and a mutt barking ferociously from the porch. “BEWARE OF DOG” and “SALE” are scrawled in dripping black paint on two signs which are nailed to the porch rail. Another sign, nailed to the garage door: “TOOLS FOR SALE. TOOLS FOR SALE.”
We’re on our way, east then north, then east again. A slow zig-zag towards Killingsworth & 82nd. The class structure of our city begins to betray itself thru slowly shifting, nearly imperceptible details. Yards go from badly maintained to barren to well-kept to barren & junk-filled. Sidewalks rot out, disappear as the appropriation of tax-dollars rot out & disappear. Small subtle traces of our unspoken American caste are everywhere if you look for them.
Not until we reach our jumping point do we stop. The Grotto hovers over us or so the sign says. A wreck of a building swaddled in dark forest, sudden enigma. Nate stands in the drive-way taking pictures as I roll closer trying to determine if this sprawling jumble of chipped & fascinating architecture is inhabited. I notice a light on in one of the windows. I notice a black cat sitting in another one of the windows.
We know nothing of this place, though I will research it later. Founded in the twenties, this monastery is run by a sect of Catholics called the Servites. This place is also known as the Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother. An actual Pieta by Michelangelo apparently inhabits the grounds, sixty acres of meditative garden, somehow preserved thru the long century, a place of reverence, weeping.
As for now, we move on to the next entrance. Roll back thru the long driveway looking for answers to what this place is. I, personally, determine that this place is more-than-slightly spooky.
Like the set of a B-horror movie, I almost expect badly made-up zombies to come staggering out of the bushes at any second.
I’m heading for the dilapidated smashed-up greenhouse when I realize that there’s a cop parked less than a hundred feet away.
We both try to look innocent, which is fairly easy, since we are.
Another time then, strange Grotto, I will explore you.
Back out onto 82nd. The strip is surprisingly clean at this point. Well maintained motels advertising good rates for the airport stragglers. Mostly boring business fronts & the usual toil of traffic, though nowhere as dense as later on.
We hit a side street to check out the state of this areas neighborhoods & find nothing interesting except a little park filled with fun playground stuff. I make myself nauseous again on a little merry-go-round & Nathan swings on the swing-set & makes death-defying leaps from his uppermost apex. I recount for him the story of how an old friend once jumped from a swing-set when his chain-wallet became unfortunately entangled with the seat.
The results were ugly if hilarious.
We stop at the Chinese Village bearing a huge sign that gets right to the point: FOOD. We head for the neon LOUNGE and enter our first dark & smoky hovel for the day. The first thing I notice as my eyes are adjusting to the extremely dark environment is broken English and cackling from the corner, which I soon see is the product of a gang of six ancient Chinese men who are already drunk at 2 in the afternoon. We both order Tsingtao and sweet & sour chicken. It’s amazing how predictable ghetto Chinese food is, no matter what state or neighborhood you’re in. How do they consistently create such a gelatinous neon pink, chicken-like delight?
Halfway through our meal, a haggard couple traipses in and sits directly behind Jeremy, thereby putting them directly in my view. The moustached & mulleted, baseball capped Romeo squeezes his woman up against the divider and sets out exploring her oral cavity. Pausing only for a quick breath, cigarette or brief mumbling conversation, they continue to tongue each other, order, more tonguing, more squeezing, etc. throughout our entire meal. The joking regulars continue to crack loud jokes in the corner, a lady-lotto-robot methodically plugs away at the loud bleep-blooping video poker four feet from our table, they’re STILL tonguing, TV blaring a Martha Stewart cooking show; I slurp a large chunk of dripping pink “chicken” and find myself totally comfortable, relishing a dark & comforting early evening lounge moment on 82nd.
Hangover still lingering even as Nathan makes noise about beer.
Conveniently, we are edging into lounge-land. They seem to be spaced about fifty meters apart at this point. We consider the Utopia Lounge but decide on Chinese Village. FOOD, the sign proclaims. We echo it. Food, yes, food.
We lock our machines & enter the dimness. Laughing patrons & mock Chinese-cum-tiki decor greet us. We sit down at a surprisingly comfortable booth & place our orders with the cute but barely comprehensible waitress. “Tsingtao & a number B lunch special, please.” I say. “Number B!” scoffs the waitress. Stupid fucking honky, I think, as I scoff at myself. She scuttles & I start reading the results of the Mercury sex survey as Nathan begins scribbling down his impressions of our mundane little adventure. Next to us, a table of drunken Asian men are hooting & hollering & unbeknownst to me, there’s a trashy couple practically dry-humping a mere 12 inches behind me. Nathan will fill me in on the details later. I read on, oblivious.
40% of Portlanders get off on public sex.44% get off on ear tonguing.
52% prefer dirty talk.
Our food arrives & we get our four hundred pennies worth. Strange meat in crunchy rice, pseudo-chik’n smeared with canned sweet & sour sauce & a slimy chow-mein. I smother my stomach’s horrified screams with big gulps of beer. We finish a third of our food & settle up. “Want box?” ask the waitress.
“I’d rather not see this in the light.” responds Nate.
We begin walking our bikes south, talking & digesting. We stop at a sketchy pawnshop where the Korean proprietor watches us very carefully as we make a slow circle thru all the stolen merchandise. No doubt making sure that we aren’t kleptomaniacs, irony supreme.
Then, at Nathan’s urging, we stop at a tobacco/head shop where Nate tries to find a new dugout. I try to buy individual cloves but find out that this activity, this selling of individual cigarettes, is against state tax laws. Each cigarette must be individually packaged, the girl at the counter tells me.
Makes perfect sense, I say, baffled again.
Onwards, we pass so much or so little, I remember nothing of it at all.
The blur of shit-Americana; Thru this hangover, I see everything as horrible yet uninteresting. Nathan rides slow, snapping digitally-encoded pictures of it all. I simply cruise, dodging the flailing balloons of car dealerships, the jagged chunks of broken 40-ouncers & the stumble of obese pedestrians.
Everything so ugly, so trite, so sad.
I was tired before we even began.
& then we slide, willingly, unwillingly into the realm of Wal-Mart. Vast expanse of asphalt, vast expanse of store, brilliantly repulsive in the neon dusk. I immediately want, have to see the inside of this monstrosity & I say so. Nate’s game & so do we go. We travel miles, light years, it seems, dodging cars, across paint-divided oil-stained plain. We lock up machines & stride inside. The hordes press outwards, inwards, to & fro. Stacks of cheaply made items tower about us. I can only think of the factories that these items come from. Low-paid NAFTA victims molding, assembling, stacking, boxing, marking & here it all is, the pentacle of economy wrought by the economy of human misery.
“Welcome to Wal-Mart!” chirps somebody’s grandmother.
My parents, upon retiring to Florida, unable to sit about, found work in a Wal-Mart. I don’t remember what my father did there but they stuck my mom by the front door, yes, greeting people. Hello, welcome to Wal-Mart, hello, welcome to Wal-Mart, eight hours a day. I know that my father almost got fired for simply saying the word ‘union’. My parents usually keep jobs for 10-20 years on average. They lasted at Wal-Hell about three weeks.
We head straight for the video games, mature adults that we are. We elbow some twelve years olds out of the way & I play the new Metroid on Playstation Two. Nathan fucks off on the new Gamebox. After about ten minutes Nathan’s behind me, staring at my repeated attempts to figure out the controls. He points out the problem.
“You suck.” he says & I have to concur.
We fight our way out, knowing that there is not much daylight left. We’re moving faster now, down the slow slope, past the cemetery, past the deserted disco, past Value Village. Fred Meyer looms on our right.
I see, but don’t point out, the small fruit stand I used to frequent when I lived out here. They sell damaged & imperfect produce, or ‘cull’ as they call it, at incredibly cheap prices. Arbys flashes past. The traffic does not. People with bored, irate expressions, sit, buried cars deep, at the 5:30 stoplights.
Intent on finding the epicenter of this tasteless strip, we find ourselves drawn to an immense cementscape spotted with cookie cutter corporate outlets located, appropriately enough, in just about the middle of the main drag of 82nd. Everywhere you look are glaring signs demanding YOU BUY HERE NOW, and car after car after only-in-America-bigassoilguzzling-SUV-car.
The flow of traffic ebbs towards a center stream, bold yellow lines converging to form the automotive red carpet, which leads directly to our ultimate fuck-all-y’all corporation, the supreme apocalyptic spearhead: WAL-MART! I wish I had the balls to walk up and photograph the consumers wobbling away from the Rollback King, source of all shit useless & cheaply wrought. I snap a few undercover shots as I ride by people, but it’s getting dark & without a flash there isn’t much hope. Besides, I find myself entranced by the gray-faced vacant-eyed shoppers toting their plastic bags emblazened with that disturbing smiley face.
The parking lot couldn’t prepare one for the sea of elated shoppers bursting the seams of the WAL-MART box.
These stores seem to drop like clever bombs designed to destroy local economies, sent forth from an evil ship of unfathomable proportions, cloaked against the gray sky.
Or perhaps they emerge overnight from the depths of hell, transforming all who enter into shopping-addicted zombies which retreat for hibernation at the Grotto as the sun goes down.
There are so many goddamn people in the store I’m totally overwhelmed. We settle with a whirlwind tour of the Beast King of Consumption and escape free of purchase. We unlock our bikes and prepare to traverse the great expanse of parking lot back towards 82nd.
I nearly miss Henderson Avenue as we cruise past. I make a noise, we cross the street. We slide thru the edge of the trailer park that takes up the end of my old street. A scorched trailer with a huge gaping hole in it, stops us, says hello, welcome back Jeremy, it’s been a while, do you still love me? Nate takes pictures. An insanely cheerful woman talks to us & then begins digging thru the wreckage.
At the end of the block, is my first house in PDX. A squat two bedroom house with a wood-stove as the main source of heat. I’m looking at the ugly
grey exterior, the barren yet rather large yard, the scraggly Japanese Maple—& I suddenly see Jessie sitting on the steps, smoking a cigarette, giggling at something with her bright blue eyes.
She stands up & then does a handstand, falls over into the grass & just lays there, still smoking her cheap Winston.
Matt’s inside, playing the guitar. I can hear his strange little tune thru the uninsulated windows. Where am I? Who knows. Maybe I’m sitting in my bedroom, drinking wine, wondering where I’ll be in five years, wondering if we’ll make it past the Millenium or whatever. O fuck that. I’m probably pining for Monique, short-haired elvin interest, coffee shop crush. I’m probably wondering what her skin, her face, the small of her back feels like…
A group of children are playing on the corner opposite my ex-house. A tall pudgy blond girl shouts something at us. Still here, I think. I remember back, this small grubby faced kid, her father, her ass of a father. His constant lonely swigging of Hamms while standing in his yard, always trying to entangle one of us or all, in ignorant conversation. I remember the shouting, this same little girl running from the house, crying; Or his wife, coming out onto the porch with a black eye or maybe two. Bastard, fucking bastard abusive fuck, I remember thinking then, now. This girl, is she OK? She watches us pass.
Does she recognize me? I wonder. Is she OK?
We circle the block & a bare-footed woman snaps out of her trundling reverie at the flash of Nate’s camera. “What are you doing?!” she shouts & we keep riding. “Taking pictures.”Nate shouts back, stating the obvious.
In this weird-ass neighborhood, we are the weirdos.
To really let the sights soak in & to further experience the pace of the down & out, we end up walking most of the trip.
A pervasive, indescribable mood grows in me when presented with long stretches of wide, flat pavement. The drone of cars is endless, which would usually anger me, but today it soothes my plate-stupid hungover brain. I think about what it would be like for 82nd to be an endless sea of bicycles & street vendors & people walking. A similar rumbling racket would be present, but certainly more soothing than the exhaust-ridden car march. I know I will not live to see this, at least not in the oil-hungry empire of the US. We pass car lot after car lot, and once again, instead of being irritated, I find myself numbly looking at prices and considering the purchase of my own automobile.
Another blessing of being perpetually piss-broke: by default I am forced into a simple and non-destructive contribution to society.
We turn down a side road and within a half block the mood goes from frantic traffic & consumption to the stillness & mute lethargy of a trailer park on the left and a series of squat, ill-painted houses on the right. A group of kids squeal with afterschool glee.
We pass an obliterated trailer with a gaping black & charred hole allowing you to look right through it, as if a fat missile happened to drop down, slip through the structure, then disappear causing no other damage. A mixed bouquet of dead campfire and burnt plastic hangs thickly in the air. The trailer is surrounded by seemingly flammable trees which droop within a few feet of the roof yet show no sign of fire damage. Weird.
If this charcoal spectacle were placed downtown, it would be a work of art, full of sympolism and crowded with intrigued onlookers. As an element of this quiet & forlorn sidestreet, a far southern offshoot of wily 82nd, it seems perfectly natural and almost unnoticeable.
At the end of the block, Jeremy grins and points to a tiny house painted all gray and informs me this was his first home in Portland. “I remember it being much nicer,” he says as we ride past.
A group of pubescent hooligans scream at us from across the street. “Shit, I have a picture of that blonde girl from when she was just a tot,” Jeremy says. Their four heads turn in unison to gawk at the colorful foreigners.
We turn another corner and I take some random photos without stopping. A barefoot woman stops and stares with a look I can only describe as flabbergasted. “What the HELL are you DOING??” she gasps. I suddenly wonder the same thing and laugh. “Taking pictures?” I reply.
Like Jeremy, I also lived a block off 82nd when I first moved to Portland. I guess one of the few advantages of this is you can only move to better neighborhoods: it’s all up from here. Within a week, my bike was stolen, even though it was locked to a pipe, inside the locked laundromat facilities of our ‘60s apartment complex (complete with obligatory unused & creepy swimming pool).
I remember those dreary 6 winter months on 82nd as one of the first really depressing periods in my life. I was a broken cog among many, an essential non-functioning element in a cold, wet, windy little economically depressed pocket of Portland. I fucking hated it. I was broke and job-hungry, waiting every day for that fateful call from the temp agency. There’s nothing like bussing & walking in the rain day after day, not a dollar for a meal, applying to jobs you know you’d hate. And then you come home to the wasteland of 82nd, to housemates depressed with the same dilemma, living in a dark & damp, squat & cramped little apartment. Like I said, I fucking hated it. And in doing so, I began to hate 82nd, which slowly came to represent cold & poverty & hopelessness in my mind.
Now five years later, I live in a new economically depressed neighborhood, the NE. There’s a completely different feel in NE, even though it’s also dirty & full of abandoned buildings, crackhead street folk on every block, with a lot of crime and little work to be found. Instead of the stubborn ignorance & trashy welfare pride, the sea of car lots & trailer parks, you find this strangely prevalant hope & bonding amidst old homes and businessesa neighborhood pride not present on 82nd. I think the fact that NE is an older neighborhood and was founded in a more respectable time for Portland when hope was fresh and growth was more thought-out is a big part of it. 82nd has become a showcase for the architectural stupidity & shallow, overconsuming corporate future of America-post-1972.
Back out to the Avenue & south. Intensive strip malls now begin. Dusk fades. We stop at the bridge over Johnson Creek. A kitchen sink stares at us from the scummy water. I point out some graffiti to Nate. BON JOVI RULES. How true, we murmur. Keep on. We have one more place to go. A place I’ve meant to go to for years, though for lack of courage, I never have.
Tonight, an old oath is kept.
Past the Dar-ron Motel, past the small junkyard, past the Tired Feat Tavern, the trail is warm, hot, scorching. A double-wide trailer set ten feet off of 82nd. Nearly windowless, it exudes slimy mystery, gimped danger. I am still hesitant, slightly spooked. Strip club, trailer, 82nd Avenue; These factors add up to something greater than the sum of their parts.
Onward. Be brave. We lock up our bikes.
The sign glows against the sky: The Beavers Inn.
“Rainier.” I say. Nate orders a Pabst. “Pepsi.” says the older yet still-foxy bartender as she turns to grab his soft drink. Nate corrects her & she’s not too friendly. Behind us, a girl in cheap lingerie makes love to the stage. Two, maybe three tired looking patrons stare at her. Scattered thruout the surprisingly spacious premises are about six other strippers. They seem to outnumber the
customers. My can of beer cost me three-hundred & seventy-five pennies.
I am horrified.
We play a game of pool, not saying much. Nate’s sprightly & wants to sit at the rack & check out a certain voluptuous dark-skinned girl. In fact, the bartender, in a suggestive yet intimidating voice, has urged our immediate engagement in this very activity. I am too empty, too sober, too exhausted to take in girl-flesh, not to mention broke. I slump there, on the shag-covered benches, considering my ridiculous beer. Now that I’m in here, I no longer care. The mystery & the fear have evaporated. I simply want to leave. I want to go home, take a shower, eat a meal, read a book.
Nate asks if I’m getting another beer. I shake my head, urge flight. He conceeds & we slink out the door without ever having tipped the dancers.
We find dark sky.
Jeremy is obviously getting tired and is uninspired by the light show. We’ve been on this road for nearly 6 hours at this point and the charm is diminishing; entering Clackamas doesn’t even help.
With the last bit of strength & inspiration left in us, we decide we have to visit at least one sex-industry outlet to finish our ride.
As we roll up the Beavers Inn Jeremy informs me he’s always wanted to go inside but was always too afraid.
The first thing I notice is that the entrance is about 10 feet from the stage, placed so that the dancer gets a good look at the outside and anyone driving by gets a peek at the girl. We saunter up to the bar and wait for service. I yell “pint of Pabst” over the music and the bartender nods with the cryptic reply: “PEPSI.” Who goes to seedy strip joints in the early evening and orders Pepsi? Do these people look like me? I repeat my order and she informs me they only have Budweiser on tap. “OK, Budweiser.” Jeremy orders a can of Rainier that they charge him $3.75 for. I can tell this is not only as unimpressive to him as the light show outside, but irritating as well. We retreat to the end of the long, narrow room and sit by the vacant pool table. Jeremy says to me, “A six-pack of Rainier doesn’t cost $3.75.” I shrug.
I turn towards the stage and the early-evening collection of strange men and barely dressed, silicone-curved women walking about. The dancer is pleasantly plump but is playing awful, awful music. She really can’t dance either, and resorts to leaning well over the edge of the stage and brushing her large breasts against the men who stiffly receive the attention, appearing absolutely bored. Jeremy and I roll cigarettes and begin a game of pool.
The first dancer is interestingly awkward enough to divert my attention from our pool game. I don’t hit one ball in before Jeremy creams me. I rack and we start another. Jeremy again beats me. I can tell this is his singular joy from the tailend of our ride. He is not interested in sexy dancers or the bizarre clientele or the decor that apparently hasn’t been changed in 15 years, but does ween a scant smile out of killing me on the pool table. I order another beer and continue to be distracted by the naked women.
“I’m tired,” Jeremy says to me after the fourth game. The bartender walks up to us and asks “Wouldn’t you boys like to sit at the stage?” in an accusing tone.
“We’re working up to it,” I reply smiling, rolling another cigarette while spilling tobacco all over myself. She turns away with a look of mild disgust. Apparently we
aren’t operating under proper Beavers Inn protocol.
A big black girl makes her way on stage and selects some radio hiphop. A single, bearded man sits in front of her. There are maybe two other customers in the bar at this point, either at the lotto machine or talking business with another stripper who appears to either own the place or manage it (although she’s dressed to undress, as it were).
I tell Jeremy I want to sit & watch this dancer and he barely registers me. He is tired. As I begin to walk towards the stage, however, the closer I get, I realize that the girl is not attractive at all. Not only is she not attractive, she’s currently lowering her ass onto the face of the creepy, bearded onlooker, who’s looking as stiff & bored as the men before him. I am utterly grossed out by this. I walk back to Jeremy and inform him I’m ready to leave. We gather our things and make a quick exit.
I’ve never been so happy to see 82nd. I ask Jeremy if he wants to keep riding but it doesn’t look hopeful.
“South?” asks Nate. “Angelos? No. Home.” I say.
He mumbles something about Angelo’s but I’m not yet satisfied I was hoping to find that elusive crevice which will reveal all of ‘82nd’s secrets.
We begin our long ride back. The cars headlights are blinding & I am filled with a strange dread. Nate just shoots along with his hands in his pockets. After a couple of blocks, my small notebook falls out of my back-pocket. I stop, turn around, pick it up. Nate keeps going. I yell at him but my voice is drowned, like a wan ophelia, in the dirty roar of traffic. I never catch up with him.
Alas, it appears Beavers Inn has squashed our already diminishing drive to continue. We turn around and ride back, two tired and weary fallen soldiers among many, and find ourselves finally accepted and enveloped into the warmth of the 82nd armpit.
I eventually turn off of the Avenue, pick my sluggish way back. The silence of empty streets, rhythm of dim streetlights, like sudden nectar. I begin to feel better but I also know that we’ve accomplished little with our conceptual journey. Smog residue in lungs maybe, stronger legs, emptier wallets. Our near-crossing of Multnomah County, by means of its most wretched route, has simply confirmed my slowly assembled suspicions.
That sometimes ugly is just fucking ugly.
(Nate’s writing in italics. Jeremy’s in non-italics.)
