Jennifer Robin - Death Confetti: Pickers, Punks, and Transit Ghosts in Portland, Oregon

Death Confetti: Pickers, Punks, and Transit Ghosts in Portland, Oregon

2016 by Jennifer Robin

All rights reserved

A Feral House book

ISBN 978-1627310406

Feral House

1240 W. Sims Way Suite 124

Port Townsend WA 98368

www.FeralHouse.com

Book design by Jacob Covey

Photo Credits: Kurt Eisenlohr, Jud Muir, Kenneth

Barton, Nick Giampietro, and Jennifer Robin

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

Contents

WellDeath Confetti, if you want to know what it means, it is about being caught between life and death, or more accurately, conception and death. It is being caught between a fist and a kiss, a job and a gun, a burning building and a fifty-story leap to the street. In this book it means my consciousness hovering in a sack of meat like a case of static electricity that will not quit, and I am telling you about the places I have lived, and the people I have brushed against with a combination of sexual desire and disbelief.

Id better assert this right away before you get restless: Civilization is a nightmare-illusion, a three-dimensional spreadsheet perpetuated by machines that hypnotize meat. Our cars, our laundered sheets, our air conditioning and our lies to lovers are prayers and death ritualsdepending on the hour, depending on how often we blink.

Death Confetti contains parables of smut, prophecies of the future-past. I call the time period we live in the future-past because we inhabit micro-environments, micro-identities, and use our micro-skills and seek relief with the pressing of micro-buttons; and we have learned to forget when we need to forget, and we have learned to curate virtual selves, but we are losing track, faltering; fiction gone bad!

Can you stand up and tell me who you really are? Can I tell you? Really?

I am not a normal person. No one is. I was born in Syracuse, New York, raised by a reclusive set of grandparents and a bedridden mother, and when I wasnt in school, I was warned that I must not leave the house, because they believed that agents of the white slave trade, roving street gangs, and the Mafia were teeming in the bushes, or at least within a one-block radius, ready to prey on fresh meat. You could call it a Catholic upbringing, but at times it felt as if I was studying life from a space lab, trying to figure out what people on Planet Earth didwith shaky evidence and a lot of curiosity.

Whenever I had a chance to go outdoors, say to a supermarket or to church with my grandmother (she was the driver in these circumstances) my shut-in mind would be OMNIVOROUS for any details of the outside world.

I learned to drink in as much as I could from the windows of my grandmothers car: auto mechanics smoking outside a muffler shop, African-American women in bubble-shaped kerchiefs outside a beauty salon, shaky elderly men shuffling in the snow appearing homeless and in search of a grave. The goal was to make an hour-long excursion to the outdoors last for days in my imagination. Tee-vee (which I was allowed to watch) was a pale imitation of what I saw from the car windows, or the times I was allowed to walk into banks and grocery stores with my grandmother. I was ANEMIC for the real.

Even now as I approach middle age like some sort of comet grazing the Earths stratosphere, I find that my thirst to drink in the textures of strangers has not abatednot one bit.

When I was seventeen I left home to do what most kids from sheltered households do: Ingest as much poison, have as much sex, and risk my life as many times as humanly possible to understand what I was missing. I lived in Rochester, Baltimore, New York City, London, and France, before traveling across the United States to see what I could find on Americas West Coast.

I accepted the invitation of a prodigal son whose father was a higher-up in an electronics empire. This boy was taking so many psychedelics that he got bent on the idea of driving his car across the country to find his guru, and ultimately, his god.

I packed light. I filled a plastic bag with a silver dress, combat boots, a pair of jeans, makeup, and printouts of the stories I had written in the past year.

Ill help pay for gas. Ill ignore his tantrums. I bet this will be over within a week, I assured myself, thinking that in seven days time I would magically be in San Francisco, sipping espresso with computer programmers and warlocks.

This week turned into a summer-long camping trip in the exclusively claustrophobic company of two hippiesrife with riddles, lectures, and role-playing to the point I felt my mind melting. We passed through San Francisco, but didnt remain. We came to a stop in Portland, Oregon.

It was November, and the fog had rolled in. I didnt plan on staying here, but I sank right in, a barnacle on a shipwreck in the rain.

A shipwreck? Yes. Portland was a small city just starting to have a taste of the advertising and tech-firm money to come. Much of the downtown area was what is affectionately referred to as dirty old Portlandresidential motels, industrial buildings, a nonstop parade of heroin dealers coughing Chiva? Chiva? to a nonstop parade of addicts in Chinatown.

The city was cheap, and it was easy to find employment. Portland had clean water (fresh from mountain streams!) running from the tap. It had thriving punk and literary scenes. And similar to the zombie tee-vee shows that are all the rage these days, the artists I met would nervously eye the fringes of the city where their parents and people like their parents lived, ready to tear their eyeballs out: angry white men and women on the losing end of the logging and manufacturing industries. Until the nineties, skinheads prowled the city streets at nightso Ive been told by men who grew up here and proudly state that they risked beatings to walk around in sequins, in drag, with blue hair, with black girlfriends.

Not many native Portlanders in the eighties could have dreamed of our current real-estate bubble, or of the tee-vee shows that film on location downtown, or the citys ironic-art-capital status on the worlds stage, or the Silicon Valley raiders, or the rent hikes and Naked Bike Rides and Voodoo Donuts and the condos landing like spaceships in the wreckage of Victorian homes demolished with shady permitswho could conceive at the time of the change about to come?

Now, in 2015, you can find communities of Koreans, Mexicans, African-Americans, Russians, Pakistanisbut they are light-years out in the suburbs, with the metropolitan area remaining, according to the most recent census, seventy-four percent white.

Portland has an Ikea, an Apple Store, strip clubs and shopping malls, new foodie districts where artisan cocktails and pouches of chocolate-chipped-sake-braised fetal boar lips are served for a clientele who works hard to play hardand the aging punks rage, sometimes with great eloquence, that the new standards of living have caused entire neighborhoods to be evicted on three weeks notice.

I showed up in PortlandI cant quite say movedalmost twenty years to the day I type this. I was twenty-two. My hormones were at full blast. I was desperate to be at rest after months of rolling. My directives, as established at seventeento experience real emotion, real contact with other people, all of the things you only learn by sucking cock, smoking rock, climbing cliffs, sleeping in catacombs, getting pregnant, and making a lot of mistakeswere fully enforced at this time.