Stitch Witchery: Closed Heart Surgery and the Proverbial Kidney Kick

      

All photos in this post by Jolie Griffin*

I’d rather not say
if I’m
weak or tough
alright or crushed
giving up the ghosts or hiding them away 
                          – Cannonball by Amelia


In this city, self-preservation is a full-time occupation 
I’m determined to survive on this shore
                    – Talk to Me Now by Ani Difranco

                        

More than once in the last week I have been shocked awake by radiating back pain – so intense that it wakes me in the wee hours of the morning.  Each time, I bring a heating pad to bed and try to wrap it around my waist so that I can fall back asleep.  That tactic has only worked once – the first time.  Every time after that, I give up and just get up early, irritated at the lost sleep and tired of fighting for sleep. I even go to work early so that I can maybe get done early and make up some of the lost sleep. But instead I just repeat the process. The second morning this happened, in lieu of rushing to the hospital to confirm that I was not dying from a tragic kidney disease, I did what any modern girl does – look online and try to self-diagnose.

I found many, many possible causes for my pain – ranging from too much office work to a kidney tumor.  The most common cause if this is indeed kidney pain and not disguised muscle or spinal pain?  Physical trauma.  Like a punch or a kick to the kidneys.  Even though I know that can’t be it, I still find myself trying to remember, making sure I haven’t been pummeled right in the kidney (actually, evenly on both kidneys), really really thinking back to make sure I didn’t just forget. Before I can even pass the half a minute I spend doing that memory hunt, I am already lost in the image of two footprints on my lower back – my kidneys kicked as though my back were the seat in front of an impatient child in a car or a movie theater. As if I walked away from someone very, very angry at me who can lift both legs up at once and slam their feet into my back.  As though their feet were dipped in black paint and the soles of their shoes are perfectly shaped and flat, like the footprints of my childhood Saturday morning cartoons. It’s an image I can’t let go of.

I’ve been leaning a lot on metaphors lately.  We all need them.  They are not the frivolous seasoning of short stories and literature classes.  They are how we understand things – how we feel things, how we come to comprehend the things that are beyond words.  Magic.  Tiny little passports into something else.  Impossible to live without. Like blood or air or water.  See?  Necessary. To live is to simile.  I know that for certain.

My heart has been the one hogging the most seats in my brain’s metaphor plane lately.  I have had all sorts of ways to imagine my heart in order to try to grasp what I am feeling and to imagine what I can do to change that.  I am nursing a heart that is fractured in several directions, but I am most recently overwhelmed by trying to coddle my second broken heart of the year.  Not fair.  Not at all.  And so I whine about it to myself, stomp my feet and complain to my own heart that it is doing me wrong by being so vulnerable, so susceptible to things it should not have even tried to want right now, so soon after.  Too much love lost in too short a span of time.  And then I tell myself to quit being a fucking crybaby and suck up.  Bootstraps, my friend.  Bootstraps.  I actually have them and should be using them.

For months, I have felt that I want to fashion a heart made of steel – a steel drum of a heart that you can beat out a rhythm on but that won’t break or even dent.  A warrior heart.  An alleyway campfire heart.  An industrial strength pumper that’s built to last. That image has been failing me for weeks now.  It’s cold. It’s hollow.  It doesn’t breathe or move or live.  As much as I might think I want that – it will never be me and I can never make it me. And nothing I am doing is turning even one small cell of my heart to steel.  None of it.

The phrase that kept coming to mind over the week that fully undid my steel heart dreams was tender hearted. I was feeling very tender hearted.  No other way to put it.  I felt as though just living, just walking and standing in the world was pressing on it too roughly, way too roughly. I kept picturing a freshly harvested liver or kidney – pushing your finger tip into it, gently, and still blood would ooze out and pool around your finger tip.  My heart: a soft, swollen thing to be prodded. When that visual image hit me, I had an urge to squeeze my eyes shut and erase that image along with a simultaneous urge to shut the doors and pull the blinds, to turn off the computer and dim the lights.  Make my world smaller. Cocoon my tender heart.

It was then that I decided I needed a break from Facebook, of all things.  I am not one to bemoan lost time or some sort of lost connection because of the book.  That wasn’t it at all.  It was that I suddenly needed to be in control of what I saw and not only who I talked to, but who talked to me.  Control.  Not surprises.   Less noise.  Not so many voices.  So I did.  For the first time since joining Facebook.  I wasn’t isolating myself – I still emailed and texted and went places with friends.  I still wasted plenty of time online and bantered back and forth with people on the computer or on my phone. I met with friends for drinks and food and trivia and laughing and crafting. I went to derby class and stood in the cold, wet parking lot talking with a close friend before parting ways. I talked to friends and family on the phone, at length and about all types of things. I was not shutting myself in and hunkering down in some sort of lonely cocoon. But no blue screen. No red box of notifications. No pressing the little f on my iPhone to see what everyone else was up to right then.

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that this came immediately following a visit by my ex-in-laws and the loss of any quiet solitude in my house – something I have come to depend on.  Immediately after taking the first, gentle steps to start the real severing of this love that is breaking my heart, again.  Immediately after the void of my mother opening up like a canyon wider than the horizon.  I realized I was getting dangerously close to losing my words, to not knowing how to say what needed to be said, to not having a way to feel it all with meaning. The idea of all of those hands, and so many other grubby fingers, pressing into that soft, meaty, waterlogged heart that was so not steel, so not tough, so not safe was triggering survival mode.

Almost fifteen years ago exactly, I moved back home to Fresno from San Francisco and I was in a very similar state of mind. I was sorting out a lot about who I was – I was coming out of all kinds of different emotional turmoil: a tragically fucked up romantic relationship (I needed to decide on giving it one last chance or jumping ship), a loss of friendships that had meant the world to me (I needed to decide if there was any hope in reaching out more or if I should just wait for time), a total re-envisioning of my future (jobs, education, location). And for the very first time in my life, I lived alone.  My own place. No one else around unless I let them in. I could sit in silence or I could crank the stereo up. I could sit and cry and no one would be concerned or need explanations.  I could scatter painting supplies across the kitchen floor and have no one to worry about.  I could sit up all night writing without waking anyone.

I cocooned myself.  Not in some hope that a beautiful butterfly would emerge.  That’s never been my dream, or even a useful metaphor for me. I just needed that warm, small place to rest, to just be, to think and feel and sit with it all – painful or not.  I still went out with friends. I still worked and had dinners with my family.  But I shrunk my world and hid out, in the coziest of ways.  I fully understood the extent of my hiding out when I went to see an artist friend months after moving back – to have him work on a tattoo for me – and he asked me how San Francisco was treating me.  I had been so quiet, so successful at narrowing my world that a whole group of old friends had no idea I had even moved back into town.  When I think back to that time, when I make a mental picture of it, it looks as though I took the largest, softest blanket and pulled it all the way around me, over my head and under my feet and laid in that warm, dense air – occasionally fighting off the fear that I might suffocate – in order to rest and feel and ache.  It was one of the most spontaneously creative and loneliest and loveliest and highly restorative times of my life. 

The urge my tender heart inspired felt the same.  The very same.  Close the blinds.  Step away from the window.  Draw a smaller circle around myself.  Let fewer people in.  Sit with the discomfort, the hurt, the ache – really sit with it.  Figure out how to give up on my steel drum heart dream – figure out how to mend this tender heart.  If I can’t have that steel heart, then I need to stop letting the elements slam against it, stop acting like it will stand up to that and then being surprised when it gives, when it bleeds, when it hurts and hurts and hurts.  Wise up.  Step back.  Find a new metaphor, because this tender heart one sucks.  It’s not a keeper.  It needs to be edited out of the story, quick-like and with precision.

Giving up on the book made me twitchy.  For a day.  I had to retrain my arm to not reach for my phone while standing in line, while waiting somewhere, while getting ready to settle in for sleep, while eating my cereal in the morning. I missed everyone.  Even the people I stayed in contact with – I hate missing out on things.  I was reminded of one of my oldest childhood memories – of how I handled being sent to bed while the adults were still up and talking.  I would crawl, so quietly, out of bed and stay low to the floor while I made my way to the door.  I would lay down on the carpet, with my head jutting out into the hall and turn my head so my ear was facing the living room, so I could still hear what was going on even if I could not see it.  I would piece together the conversations out of what bits of sentences I could hear.  Make sense of them as well as any seven or eight or nine year old could.  I wonder now if I ever fell asleep like that and had to be lifted into bed later.  If my parents knew but didn’t have the heart to tell me the jig was up.

I had to come to peace with not knowing what everyone else was posting, what they were doing, what people were saying in response.  It was odd hanging out with friends and knowing they would be commenting about the night or posting a picture and I would have no idea.  But really, all I missed after that first day were my friends – the ones I communicate most with on the book.

I really made peace with my phone, too.  I came late to cell phones and only begrudgingly started carrying it around with me until I became a business owner.  Then I had it with me all the time.  On the nightstand while sleeping in case the alarm company called or an employee was sick and I would have to jump out of bed at four a.m.  During that spell, I also found the use of texting (something I used to think I was too old to learn to do well or even to enjoy).  Because of all of this, my phone often feels like an extension of my hand. And because I don’t always like being reachable, I sometimes feel conflicted about how reliant I am on this gadget.

During the week I was off the book, I touched it less, held it less, used it less.  Even checking email, my detox drug when I would reach for my phone those first couple of days, dwindled.  There are a lot less emails in my life when you subtract out Facebook.  Unexpectedly, completely apart from my need for space, I got my hands back.  The phone is again something apart from my body.  Not human.  Not finger. Not palm.  At least for a while.

Sitting in this quieter world was calming and terrifying.  I had to deal with this weak, crybaby heart that won’t toughen up.  I let myself cry – hard – if that’s what I needed.  And I let myself go out with friends and cry laughing if that’s what I needed.  But I wasn’t disarmed midday by too much – too many pictures, too many faces, too many people just popping up on the screen. I felt like I was returning to an olden time, before the interweb-age, and I could sit in my living room and just read or think or feel – sit with my achy heart and try to understand it.  I was (am) repulsed by that raw liver image of my heart and so I played a slideshow in my head of how I could replace that with something other than the lovely, etched, steel heart I have come to lean on, however useless it has been.

I started to imagine thick pieces of felt and children’s yarn.  Big knitting needles with eyes just like sewing needles. I could see myself threading one of those clunky needles with that chunky yarn and patching the felt together.  Bright, textured pieces of fabric stitched together like the old hanging envelopes we would make in elementary school for Valentine’s Day out of construction paper and yarn.  A blanket stitched pillow to replace my heart. I could see it encasing my heart, protecting that tender mass of blood and emotion, sewing it closed Coraline-style, messy and bulky and soft.  I like that image. It’s imperfect – but soft and cushioned, stuffed with enough batting to make it lumpy in places, just enough to absorb impact, but breathable, able to let small enough particles in and out.  Living, pumping, breathing – but not tender.  Not oozing.  Not raw. 

It’s hopefully a sign of the kind of wisdom that comes with age that it only took a week of semi-hibernation to restore enough to come back fully to the world.  That I didn’t need months and the kind of soul searching and gut wrenching decision making I needed at twenty-two.  That I did not opt to follow this line from one of my favorite albums that week (After All by Amelia) – misery loves gin, to wash down all the vodka.  Maybe I have learned some things, maybe I am better at handling this stuff.  Time away did exactly what I needed it to: allowed me the space from images and faces and names and words, the time to really feel what I need to feel, think about what I need to think about without distraction, to hurt if that’s what this is, to ache if the pain is too much, to be unable to escape it, but also to be in control of how the ache comes at me.

I am already back to crackbook and loving every minute of it.  I have missed many of my friends and have missed the laughter even their virtual selves bring to me. One friend that I was in contact with during my Facebook Fast, when I told him I was coddling a broken heart, said: We’re too good for that – we should be breaking hearts.  I agreed, (I’m pretty sure I said Damn straight) but I know we both know we don’t mean that, not really.  I think instead that we should be breaking our own tender hearts into as many pieces as is necessary to reshape them.  Hold that tender muscle and craft it into something else that is resilient, but not hard and cold and hollow.  Find a way to think of that crucial organ – a container to pour it into, to label it and break down its ingredients – that doesn’t involve pain and bruising and sawing your ribcage open.

Take the steps necessary to narrow your world.  Turn off the phone.  Pull back.  Get out whatever supplies you need in order to craft a new metaphor.  Stitch your ribcage so it doesn’t crack open when you breathe.  Pull that needle in and out of your chest wall until your heart is a thing you can understand and make peace with – a thing that stands for another thing, sure, but something useful and safe and able to regenerate.  Kiss your friends goodbye for a while and get to working.  Let go of that impossible image, the one that only helps you keep breaking your own heart.  Stop talking, because the words are running out anyway, and close your eyes to see what comes across the back of your lids.  Pull all of your walls in and sit in the chair with a blanket.  Wrap it around your shoulders and make yourself small so that you can protect your core, shield your organs.  Get out of everyone’s way before they run over your fingers and your toes.

I will keep picturing this oddly stiff and flexible felt heart with its colored yarn seams and sutures that would make any plastic surgeon cringe – because the scars will be there, whether you sew like an artist or a hack, and so why not see them and make them part of what’s lovely, or at least try to.  My Coraline heart with too much batting that will surely compress over time, surely by the time I will need to feel more acutely again.  By the time those feet have vanished from my kidneys and my words seem endless again.  My aching back to hold myself up regardless of feet and trauma and pain.  The language to name it all and then to rename it and rename it until it feels right.  Until I can find the image to explain it all to my cells when my words fail to fix any of it.  My crafty heart with zig-zag lines and mismatched colors – soft and pliable and ageless.  My stitch-witched heart that fills up my chest and holds my ribs in place – a comfy, old-fashioned core to soften the blows.

*This post is another in the series of photo collaborations.  My good friend Jolie Griffin is always taking pictures, wherever we go, and I have often imagined a dream-blogging-life where Jolie populates my posts with her photos – guaranteeing good pictures and allowing me to focus only on the words. Within a day of mentioning this to her, I was gifted with photos she took with this particular post in mind.  She is not only a great friend with a lovely eye, she is my fairy godmother. Thank you, Jolie.

My Sweet Dirty Girl, Portland: City of My Heart (River Like My Soul)

*Collaborative post. Photos by Bettie Newell

Portland is the city of roses. It is the city of bridges. It is the land of bicycles. It is, I would say, the adult entertainment capital of the country – Vegas has nothing on us. It is hippy-ville. It is the land of fixed gear, skinny-panted, mustache-sporting hipsters. It is too white. It is wet and green and often grey. It is lush and fertile and often slimy and mossy. It is a liquid city – rain, river, beer and coffee. And it is the city of my heart – the one piece of land to build a cabin in my ribcage and light its fire, cozying up to the heat in my blood and holding on.

I visited Portland when I was a child – stayed with an aunt and uncle I had seen only a handful of times in my life. My great-grandmother, Nanny, and I took a Greyhound bus for fourteen hours from Fresno and then rode in my uncle’s car out to some neighborhood (turns out to be only six blocks from my own house now) to stay at Paul and Gisela’s house. I refused to eat venison and learned how to play poker during that trip. I really only remember the interior of that house – the shag carpet and brown plaid couch and dark wood dining room table where I believed I was legitimately earning my pile of pennies, one great hand at a time. The whole city was reduced to that small 1960’s ranch home in my nine-year-old mind.

When it came time to decide where to move to next – I had returned to Fresno from San Francisco to finish college and what was meant to be two years and one degree turned into five years and two degrees – we made a short list of cities comprised solely of places we had heard good things about. My partner and I had each lived in San Francisco, and when I moved away from the City, I was sure I would return. In the intervening years, however, my desires morphed and I wanted somewhere I could afford to live without either working three jobs or living with five roommates. For me, living in San Francisco had always meant living in San Francisco – not in some outlying Bay Area city – and over the years it took me to finish school, the reality of moving back became less and less attractive.

In anticipation of graduating in June, I made plans to visit Portland in August and had visions of cool streets shaded by canopies of trees, of cool breezes and chilly nights – wearing jeans and long sleeves in August was a luxurious prospect to two Fresno girls. When we arrived, it was during a (usual for that time of year) heat wave and the temperatures were right near 100. The sidewalks seemed dusty and hot and dry. Everywhere we drove, the lawns were all brown and dead. None of the streets made sense. We were lost as much as we weren’t. Signs would lead you halfway to somewhere and then no more signs would appear. People seemed grouchy. We were grouchy. It was not what we expected and certainly not what we wanted out of our next home. As days passed, though, the temperature dropped and we ventured into more and more green spaces. We heard from locals that the summers could be hot, but only for a few days at a time and only ever as hot as we had already endured. We began to see glimpses of the real Portland, visiting each quadrant and daydreaming about our lives here. As a bonus, one of my closest friends had moved here and we stayed with her in North Portland while we were visiting. She provided an anchor in a town further away from family than I had ever moved and her neighborhood gave me a (somewhat false) sense of diversity in Portland that made it feel like home.

We jumped quickly and with confidence. We came back in December to secure housing and packed up our cars and animals and all of our belongings and drove up here two days after Christmas in 2001. Our first few months were the grayest time of year here and we were surprised at how beautiful they were anyway. We drove out to the Gorge and explored the falls – the heavy mist of Multnomah Falls wetting our faces and our clothes and making us so cold that we had to sit in the car with the heat on high for five minutes to stop shivering enough to drive home. It snowed, the most pathetic of snow storms, a month after we moved here and we ran outside to try to form snowballs, to catch snowflakes on our tongues. I loved the drizzle and cloud cover and the way that a few hours of sunshine would make people walk around like smiling morons, faces turned up to the sky and skin warm with the sun. I loved the politics and the consciousness and the freedom of Portland after spending so many years stranded (by choice) back in Fresno after thinking I would never live there again. Portland was the political and moral oasis I always wanted. This was my place. These were my people. This was home.

Over the years, my relationship with Portland has matured – as any long-term relationship is prone to do – but my love for this city has only grown deeper. I can see its flaws. I can see its weaknesses. Some of them are gaping and ugly. We shoot too many people here. We (in a white liberal delusion) pretend we are inclusive and diverse. We don’t do enough to protect our children. We do way too many hard drugs. We do too little for our mentally ill. Still I love its beauty and its soul and its wide open heart. I admire its loud screaming voice with a polite greeting and a friendly farewell. I adore its fervor and generosity and seediness and grit. Whereas I have come to see San Francisco as my dirty little mistress – my first love that is hard to let go of, who I want to visit every once in while (and not tell Portland), who I want to stay up too late and drink too much with, who only ever sees me with eyeliner smeared as I stumble home at five in the morning – she is not who I trust with my deepest desires, not who I tell my darkest secrets or who puts their hand to my forehead to check for fever when I am sick – those things are for Portland, my love, my heart’s desire, the staid and true city.

My first year here, I would see new pockets of the city, see new angles from familiar places, see the smallest architectural detail or natural phenomenon and my heart would, literally, swell. I was sure, in that first year, in that time it took to live through all four seasons that I would someday cease to be so rapt. I knew that the way light – even the little bit seeping through heavy cloud cover in February – made rain-soaked streets and sidewalks glisten would eventually get old. I was sure that the way grass and tulips and weeds seem to shoot out of the ground overnight like Jack’s beanstalk after the first sunny spell in spring, eventually that would seem ho-hum. But weekly, if not daily, something beautiful or striking or imperfectly Portland catches my eye and makes me feel grateful to have made this place home. I’ve even grown immensely fond of our dead summer lawns – the most natural of things that at first was so foreign to this girl from an (overly) irrigated desert. Those dormant brown patches are little reminders of what is to come – the magnificent green of Fall, like a second Spring, lawns and plants and weeds reviving as the temperature drops ever-so-slightly.

No matter how many times in a week it happens, I still love crossing the Ross Island Bridge. Even after so many thousand of times it doesn’t get old to come through the regular-ness of Powell Boulevard, especially if you’ve come around the curve of 17th avenue – past the brown and orange TriMet garage, like a building bussed in from 1972, past the train tracks and the shopping carts and the scattered sleeping bags, past the machine shops and roofing businesses to merge onto Powell, that wide, dirty freeway of a road. I love heading west toward the bridge – past the Shell station and Jack in the Box and Sock Dreams and whatever strip club is occupying the wood shingled island of a bar in that odd little triangle of land right before everyone merges onto the bridge (this week it’s the Lucky Devil – and it is, to be so close to the river, so close to the bridge). You drive through all of this and find yourself on the Ross Island with its almost frighteningly low sides that afford you a clear view of the city and the river and the space between – you find yourself in the open, able to see the rippling of the Willamette River and downtown sprawled out on the horizon.

Looking to the right, you see Big Pink, the rose hued building just beyond the layers and layers of bridges. In front of that, the I-5 Marquam bridge – so freeway like – each layer topped with little tiny toy cars moving like blood in those junior high biology movies about the circulatory system. And past all that concrete and motion you see all of the other short and tall buildings whose corporate names – Koin Center, US Bancorp Tower, Wells Fargo Center – do nothing to highlight their beauty, their stature and grace in front of the tree covered backdrop of the west hills and Forest Park. Pill Hill is straight ahead, like some movie mental asylum perched on a lush green hill (oddly old and modern and futuristic all in one). NCNM just below that and to the right, like an old brick schoolhouse on steroids, spreading the gospel of natural healthcare nationally from this small little block near the river, literally schooling the naturopathic nation. Ross Island to the south, miniscule beaches and green trees and perhaps a boat with a crane, returning the sand mined from the (barely) island so many decades ago, and if you look close enough, if you’re lucky enough to see it, if your eyes are that magnificent, you’ll spy a bald eagle protecting its nesting ground. Then the newest buildings on the west side of the bridge – glittery and shiny and reflective – like a gaudy diamond ring on a hand full of silver and turquoise.

Every time I drive back into the center of town from the Southwest, driving north on Barbur, I fall prey to the illusion that I am suddenly lost in the woods. As I curve around the section of Barbur that runs parallel to the Terwilliger Curves, those lanky up-stretched trees whose trunks are covered in vibrant green ivy trick me into believing I am not in a city at all, but am traveling to or from the mountains I grew up near. If it happens to be sunny, the cool dark lushness of that stretch feels like a relaxing sigh while your shoulders and neck un-tense and roll downward. And then there is the bridge, the messy merging on that is always somehow easier when traffic is at its worst – a Portlander’s manners working overtime when you literally have to take turns rolling on to the bridge, reminding me of the organized rush of a rollercoaster line, people moving to the left so you can rush in on the right, in measured numbers, with careful steps. Coming this way on the Ross Island Bridge, you see the last industrial lot left standing on the west side of the bridge. All of the large steel and metal pieces look strewn from up high on the bridge, look to a non-mechanical person like me as though a very large child tossed all of his toys off of the side of the bridge during a tantrum. I love the colors of rusted and weathered metal so close to the dark wet soil of the riverbank.

On a sunny day, no matter which of the central bridges I take (and particularly if it is one of those magic warm and sunny spring days that feel deserved and stolen all at once) the sight of the Willamette glistening in the sun, the sparkle of light against the water and the boats you can see in any direction, amaze me and make me feel lucky to be here. I love water. I love bridges. I live in a city where I can cross any number of bridges across a river that divides the town in half and see rippling movement and the baseness of nature – where air and water dance. Seeing jet boats and sailboats and dragon boats while running a basic errand, crossing a river wide enough to seem substantial yet narrow enough to see both sides in one sweeping glance, fills me with a child-like awe and gratitude.

Once in a while – especially when life throws me a curve ball, when big change happens in my life – I ponder moving back to California. I am the only one in my family to move away and I now have not only my adult family, but three nephews whose smiles can make me forget anything else for the moment that their wide open faces are looking up at me. I think that maybe I am missing their lives, missing all of the small moments that make up who they will become. I believe you can be happy anywhere – can make happy anywhere – but when I think of leaving Portland, it is like thinking about leaving my legs behind. I am sure that if I ever move away from Portland, there will be some sort of phantom pain shooting through my limbs for the rest of my life, an empty space where my heart waits for Portland to come back to me.

When I take the bus home from work, it crosses the Steel Bridge right after stopping at the Rose Quarter – that odd glass and concrete cluster of buildings that reminds me of Los Angeles for the one block that it lasts – (excepting all those bike lanes and the old fashioned Portland streetlights) it is all cement and neon and crowds, sports and concerts and events. After that boring, any-city place, the bus drives past the last light before the bridge. It drives past the back of a large silo-style building, a mass of round concrete shapes shoved together with an aluminum building oddly perched on top, like a giant picked up an industrial shop, stretched it out to a ridiculously long shape and then set it down for a moment and forgot it there. The back of this hodge-podge looking building is painted with a giant mural of three Trailblazers and Greg Oden stares you down (tastefully, thankfully, clothed in his uniform) along with two of his teammates. All three pairs of eyes following you in the creepiest of ways if you keep looking while the bus moves forward – and then, when you look away and free yourself from their collective gaze, the river opens up before you. You can see off toward the St. Johns Bridge, can see the Steel Bridge (one of my very favorites, the way it cradles the railroad tracks below like a caring mother who has swaddled her young) – can see it shadowed by the eerie Fremont Bridge and surrounded by the colorful condos flanking the west side of the river. You can see the cranes on the east side of the bridge and the large tanker docked right there – loading or unloading or just sitting there – and the water stretching off to the north, moving north, defying gravity and logic.

I am always wowed, at least a little, by the river and adore the mix of industrial and commercial and recreational. The debris caught at the edge of the river, swaying with the current, and then the mighty mass of the water and the smell of industrial work hovering in the air, oil and flour and dirt. Then we are in Chinatown (that one or two blocks with special street signs on bright red lamp posts and an arch – little else but the shockingly beautiful Chinese Garden to make it feel like a legitimate Chinatown). In a flash we are in Old Town – the grit and grime and soup kitchens and halfway houses. The wandering woman yelling at the no one in front of her. The man slumped against the wall of a vacant building with a paper bag propped next to him. The lines of people waiting for lunch or dinner to be served. The Sisters of the Road cafe serving hot meals for an unbelievably inexpensive token, the most rock n’ roll of low-cost food kitchens.

Then Davis and Couch and Burnside – to the corner with the once-strip-club-turned-amazing-cuban-restaurant-back-to-the-now-way-more-vibrantly-painted-cabaret-club, marking the arrival at Burnside and the crossing over to a whole new quadrant. Stopping to let people off at Burnside, I know we are leaving the section of town that most reminds me of San Francisco, that makes me remember the relief of Fall’s first rain in the Tenderloin, the smell of clean wet sidewalk overtaking the piss and shit and beer and vomit smell you hadn’t even realized you had almost gotten used to before those drops of rain started falling. This sensation, this memory, makes me fond of Old Town and Chinatown. There is nostalgia in the similarity – an affection for the realness of a city, for the broken and drunken and lost people of a city and a love for the folks who show up there, every day, to be there for their fellow humans. I love a dirty city almost as much as a green one – find comfort in a place that is conflicted, volatile, transitional.

Portland’s adult industry is like that for me. As a feminist (and one who has been called a feminazi), I have deep and visceral reactions to a lot of the pornography industry, feel it in a very personal way (no academic disconnect here). But as a liberal, as a progressive, as a liberated woman, I also embrace sex and the freedom to express it. I get, really get, the advantages to openness and shamelessness. You can not walk half a mile anywhere in town (well, maybe in the West Hills – but I don’t spend any time there) without passing by the heavy wood door of an adult video arcade, a swinger’s club, a lingerie “modeling” storefront or a strip club with $2.00 pabsts and a cheap buffet. It is the same live and let live mentality that makes life here so free that guarantees my right (and yours) to see some absolutely naked ladies at pretty much any hour you might have the desire and promises the opportunity to also order some ribs or a ribeye if you need to kill two birds with one purposefully placed stack of one dollar bills. Sure, Oregon has a lot of hippies – but we’ve got a lot of perverts, too (for good and bad), a real source of local pride for many.

Even the Willamette River, the north-flowing water working like spawning salmon to get to the Columbia River and then to the ocean, is a dirty little wench – her water tarnished with human waste every time we have a really intense or long rain, our aging sewage system overworked and lazy during truly wet spells. Locals know that the alluring look of the Willamette can be like a siren call to a ship-wrecked sailor. Swimmers: beware. Canoers: row steady. Fisherman: cut bait and pick up take out. Particularly on specific days (warnings are issued) you don’t want to get any of that water in your eyes or your mouth or in any open wound. And yet it is still the heart of the city – the scene we build parks around, the landmark we build esplanades along, where people bike and walk and dream and hold hands, where people boat and ski and dinner cruise – the essence of the city in a very primal way – Portland’s dirty, lovely, faithful and moody spirit.

Portland, as a whole, is a rippled out version of the Willamette. I love it despite and because of these contradictions. My true love is a bawdy, tree-hugging, hair-triggered, sometimes shit-filled part-time stripper who volunteers with Cascade Aids and The Blanchet House of Hospitality while growing her own vegetables and lobbying for more solar panels to power the lights for Darcelle’s nightly performance of old-school drag-queenery. Portland knows who she is and is not ashamed, but still tries, all the time, to fight the good fight, to argue with herself over what is right and what is wrong. She marches and petitions and then has a beer at Dante’s hoping to catch Storm Large with her top down. Her core is often rummy and tainted and, literally, rife with infection – but is more often surging and pushing and working to move against gravity.

I know I am no native – worse, I am a transplanted Californian. My love is no less real for that fact. And Portland may or may not know who I am, let alone love me back. Still, I wait at the dance for Portland to notice me, my back against the wall for the best view of the floor. In the high cuisine greasy spoon that is Portland, I sit at the bar and think of no one else. My mind may wander to other cities occasionally – I may fantasize about a San Francisco sojourn or a dreamy life lived in Old San Juan. I may, for the smallest of moments, wonder if I am in the right place. When I look down the curve of the dinged up bar, past the water stained wood and the recycling bins separating out the glass and plastic and paper, past the compost bucket for food waste, when I see Portland’s tangled hippie hair hiding her hussy eyes – I have no doubts. I sing along with the jukebox and say Hold me closer, Portland Dancer . . . count the hybrids on the highway . . . lay me down in sheets of organic cotton . . . you’ve had a busy day stripping for your pay.








*While not being gifted at photography, I have several close friends who have a talent for the lens.  This is the first in what I hope will be a series of collaborative posts using my words and the photos of these talented photogs. When I was writing about Portland, I immediately thought of Bettie’s photography and her eye for a place – for both its beauty and its realness.  I sent Bettie an early draft of this post and she ventured out to see what caught her eye. She, too, loves grimy Portland and her pictures are more than I could have hoped for – thank you, Bettie, for singing along.