When I moved back to Portland in 2006, I had no idea what to do. I had a cohort and a place to live, but that was about it. The Portland house was set up even before I got there: five of my closest friends in a Craftsman on Clinton Street, on an incline, right off the bike route, the most attractive kind of traffic corridor. It was beyond irresistible. We called it The Stain. (My idea.)
I had just spent five months in Idaho, sleeping in the basement room of my mother’s house—my high school room, in fact, still painted an angsty adolescent crimson and brown—while working part-time at an independent movie theater, drinking too much, sucking up desert heat like a lizard, confused. I spent my off-days watching daytime TV, drinking Mom’s lukewarm coffee through Oprah, cracking my first beer at the earliest hint of Dr. Phil.
I spent the first few weeks in Portland porch-dwelling, swilling beer from the corner store across the street. Six-dollar six-packs of Anchor Steam, Rogue, Deschutes, it seems impossible now. In retrospect, Portland’s cheap, delicious beer didn’t do a whole lot for my long-term sense of well-being. But it felt so good at the time.
When I arrived it was still summer, and we would sit on the porch transitioning from caffeine to booze like the day was just one long beverage, waiting to be consumed. Pnut and I would lazily ogle the boys going by on their bikes. On particularly hot days, we’d prance around the front yard in makeshift underwear bathing suits, hosing ourselves off. The bike-boys must have thought we were putting on some kind of show for them, and to some extent we were. We even invented a playfully degrading term to describe them. Wieners. It was perfect. To us it meant hot, and to them it meant schlubby. They’d never know. I’d sit on the porch, drinking my coffee, and as an attractive boy rode by, slowing at the hilly exertion, I’d creak the screen open and shout inside to Pnut. “Wiener! Come look!” Thinking back on it, I realize that it was exactly this kind of hyper-ironic logic that explains my inability to get laid in Portland.
One morning I wandered pallid and under-functional to the Clinton Market for a restorative ginger ale, when I ran into a particularly insouciant college character headed to the same destination. In the face of my crust-eyed languor, he informed me that he had stopped drinking, by which he meant, he elaborated, that he was now drinking no more than five drinks at a time. (And thus was born The Greyscale.)
In any case, I didn’t have much saved up, so this so-called idyll didn’t last long. When I drove over from Boise, trailing my tinny little jalopy all the way along I-84 ’til my hands trembled at the road’s 80 mph measure, I brought along a “tip jar” full of cash saved. I think I managed to stow away about $200 that summer. I probably spent it the first week I was in Portland.
I started panicking even before I blew through my cash, applying to jobs far below my qualifications, unsure just what I was worth, underestimating as it turns out, but that didn’t matter much.
…
(to be cont’d. Fuck off, I’m tired.)
