Fugatives & Refugees

(a postcard from 1991)

When I first got beat up, Gina asked if any of the attackers was named David. She was blaming everything on what she called "the Curse of the Davids."

Gina had met her latest in a long series of men named David through a personals ad. They'd met for coffee, and he seemed sweet, sweet enough that she invited him to her apartment for dinner a few days later. Gina lived on the top floor of the Hadley House Apartments at SW Salmon Street and Twentieth Avenue, and I lived on the second floor. The walls were so thin that on any night I could hear at least three different television shows in the apartments around mine.

The writer Katherine Dunn is right about every corner having a story. I was attacked at the corner of SW Alder Street and Fifth Avenue—it's the Red Star Grill now. I was leaving a gym on a Friday night, just at dusk, and coming around that corner I was jumped by a group of young men. They were black and wore black-hooded sweatshirts, and the first one slammed a fist into the side of my jaw so hard I fell sideways and bounced my head off the sidewalk.

Someone shouted, "Twenty-five points."

After that, every time anyone kicked me in the head or the back, someone shouted, "Ten points." Or they shouted, "Twenty points," if they kicked extra hard or their shoe landed in my face. This all lasted about the length of a traffic light. Then they were running away, and I got up and shouted after them. Then they were chasing me, and I ran for the lights and traffic of W Burnside Street.

That same night Gina's plan was to cook dinner for her tatest David. He came over and sat on her sofa, and she gave him a glass of wine to drink while she finished in the kitchen. Her apartment had a kitchen-living room layout where you could still talk to each other but not see from room to room.

When I called the police after my attack, the officer on the phone said I'd screwed up by not going to a hospital for treatment. Something to always keep in mind, walking in downtown Portland. He called it a "wilding incident" and offered to send me a form I could fill out and mail back.

Instead of going to a hospital, I'd called Gina from the telephone booth at NW Fourth Avenue and Davis Street, the little one shaped like a Chinese pagoda.

That same night, it wasn't more than a glass of wine later when Gina had come out of her kitchen. She wore a frilly apron and quilted oven mitts and carried a steaming glass dish of lasagna. Her hair all sprayed in place, her lipstick perfect, she said, "Dinner's ready."

The door from her apartment to the hallway was standing open. It was open, and her latest David was gone. The glass of wine was empty, sitting on the glass coffee table. On the sofa was a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine, open to an illustrated article about vaginas. Outside in the hallway stood some old-lady neighbor still holding a sack of garbage and peering in at Gina.

Sprayed across Gina's new sofa were big gobs of fresh sperm.

Gina stood there, smelling her own hairspray and steaming homemade lasagna.

And the old-lady neighbor in the hallway said, "Gina, honey, are you all right?"

It was right then her telephone rang.

That's why I never made it to the hospital. For the next few weeks I couldn't chew with my back teeth. The inside of my cheeks were so bruised and split that I ate everything in nibbles with just my incisors. But that night in the fake pagoda phone booth, when Gina told me her story, her theory about "the Curse of the Davids," the cum still soaking into the sofa beside her, no matter how much it would hurt later, I had to laugh.