I first arrived in Portland during a golden era. The city was still rough around the edges, but slightly less grimy and dangerous than in previous years. I wasn’t the only one who had gone west seeking creative counterculture comrades. Flocks of disillusioned youth who felt tired or unwelcome by the antiquated traditional attitudes that dominated most of the country also found Portland to be a beacon of a more laidback, accepting future. The city was full of shared houses of idealists, working as little as they could while juggling passion projects on the side. At the time, it felt positively brimming with possibility. Sure, I was frequently woken from my makeshift bed on a friend’s couch by gunshots in the night, but it did keep costs down.
My first room was $250 a month. It had a linoleum floor that I covered with rugs from the thrift bins where they sold unsorted goods by the pound. The house used grey water, the runoff from sinks, to flush the toilet, which as a good environmentalist I was willing to deal with, even though it gave the house a musky odor. There was a small, unkept backyard and a front porch that was a favorite spot of a local one-eyed black cat that my roommate would hang out with even though every time it got into our house it would run upstairs and pee on her mattress. I found a shitty job in a call center, and at night I’d draw, make collages or cook big pots of kidichari with my roommates. I volunteered at the co-op down the street and got a bike so I didn’t have to take the bus everywhere. I was home.
Until ten months later when we were kicked out so the owner could sell the place. Unbeknownst at the time, our migration had unintentionally set in rotation the great wheel of gentrification that would later swallow up most of what we had built. We had primed the pump, and in a few short years Portlandia would bring a second wave of youth who wanted all the hipster cred of living in the ‘it’ place without actually contributing anything other than their parents’ money.
I moved into the attic of an artist house I was friends with, an unfinished room floored with mattresses and a variety of miscreants. The room was affectionately called the ‘opium den,’ a title that, while not literally accurate, was true in spirit. Lest you think that a questionable name, the title chosen for the house itself, despite many objections including mine, was The Trash Factory. What wonderful implications. It was a joint commercial/residential space that had previously been a brothel, and then a quickie wedding chapel owned by the former chief of police. Its front door opened to a four lane throughway right off a highway exit, sometimes on summer evenings we would sit and drink and smoke on the porch roof overlooking the street, inevitably witnessing countless car crashes. In lieu of rent for my humble accommodations, I cooked meals, washed the endless piles of dishes in the sink, and helped to build a recording studio in the basement.
By this time I was working as a dumpling chef for a super hip ‘fusion’ (asian food made by white people) restaurant downtown. I loved my coworkers, especially hanging out and joking with them after everything was shut down, often while finishing up any bottles of wine that had been open for ‘too long’. The job was stressful, as kitchen jobs are, and it was exacerbated by management’s high expectations matched with their lack of understanding about how kitchens actually function. To cope with the stress my direct supervisor recommended alcohol and would personally get me drinks from the bar when they thought I was too worked up. This created some unhealthy habits.
But really, even outside of the drinking culture at work, I wasn’t responsible enough to handle a place where there was always something interesting going on and so many vices were easily accessible. I attended house parties, concerts, raves, dance nights, gallery shows, movies, bars, food carts, clubs, and all other distractions of a modern urban life. And I lived it up, until I eventually crashed out. Broke and humbled, I crawled back to Vermont to put myself together before impulsively launching into my next adventure.