Fugatives & Refugees

(a postcard from 1995)

"Where you're going, there are huge pits in the floor and broken glass everywhere, so it's important you do what you're told," says Marcie. This is after dark, under the east-side on-ramps for the Morrison Bridge. A block away people are waiting on the sidewalk for tables, for a nice dinner at Montage. Here at SE Belmont Street and Third Avenue, a crowd of men and women wear army-surplus fatigues, disposable Tyvek coveralls, and radiation badges. These people carry military C rations and covered casserole dishes. They cradle warm garlic bread wrapped in tinfoil.

The idea is, we're going to the first potluck after a nuclear holocaust: Portland's semiannual Apocalypse Cafe.

Marcie says, "I hope nobody has to use the bathroom, because the toilet facilities at the event are a little primitive. They're what you'd expect after the end of civilization."

All we know is to wait here. We each pay Marcie five dollars and get slapped with a biohazard warning sticker. A huge shipping truck pulls up and someone jokes that it's the shuttle to the party.

The big door on the back of the truck rolls up, and Marcie says, "Get in and be quiet." As people climb in, hesitant to go back into the dark depths of the cargo box, Marcie says how illegal this is. At any traffic light, if there are police near enough to hear people talking inside the truck, we'll be busted.

Climbing in, people talk about how illegal aliens suffocate in the back of trucks like this. People sit, crowded together on the metal floor, feeling the truck's diesel engine idle.

Marcie says, "After we park, you need to follow orders." She stands outside the tailgate, ready to pull down the door, saying, "If you don't stay inside the rows of candles, you could be injured or killed." She says, "I can't stress this too much."

She says, "What we're doing is felony trespassing. If we get caught, and you don't have a photo ID, you'll have to spend a night in jail."

Then she pulls the door shut. Inside the truck's cargo box, it's completely dark. We all jerk and sway together as the truck starts forward in first gear.

A voice says, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if when they opened the door, we were all dead from carbon monoxide fumes?"

Another voice says, "Oh, yeah, that would be just fucking hilarious."

In the dark everyone sways together, whispering guesses about our route based on right and left turns and the truck's speed as we shift up through the gears. You can smell chili and garlic and fried chicken. When the truck gears down to a stop, we're all quiet, mindful of the police officer who might be just outside.

You can't see your wristwatch. You can't see your hands. The ride seems to go for hours and miles. Then the truck stops again and backs up a little. The door rolls up. Open. To our light-hungry eyes, the candlelight outside is blinding bright, and we follow the trail between candles and deep black concrete holes in the floor. We're in some vast concrete warehouse.

A woman drops her casserole dish, and it breaks on the floor. "Fuck," she says. "It's the end of the world after nuclear annihilation, and I broke my hot bean dip."

The rest of us wander back through huge empty rooms where fires burn in rusted trash barrels. The arms and legs of mannequins are wired together and hang overhead, dripping with lighted candles. Gruesome chandeliers. An old eight-millimeter movie projector clatters, showing army training movies and Christian cartoons on one pockmarked wall. There's a buffet of food, and a band is setting up. In the bathrooms every toilet bowl is broken and stuffed with litter and dead rats.

The word is, this is the old Greyhound bus barn under the west end of the Marquam Bridge. Members of the Portland Cacophony Society have cut off the padlocks and connected the power. In another huge concrete room, bowling lanes are outlined with little votive candles. Instead of bowling pins, lovely breakable objets d'art from junk stores—china vases and statues and lamps—are the target at the end of each lane. Nearby are boxes of plates and glasses for you to throw against the concrete walls.

The word is, this whole building is condemned and the bulldozers and wrecking balls will clean up our mess in another week.

The band starts and people are beating on anything metal with scraps of pipe. People run through the maze of concrete rooms, holding flashlights and glowsticks. The deep holes in the floor are the lube pits each bus used to park above for service work. Underground tunnels connect the pits, and it's easy to get lost. Stairs lead up to abandoned offices on the second and third floors, those offices heaped with rotting blankets and human shit. In the spooky dark we discover the dirty needles and dead cigarette lighters of junkies who've given up their turf for the night.

In the main room there's dancing and drinking and plate breaking. There's food and movies. A police helicopter passes over the broken skylights and just keeps going. Right then, somebody rolls a bowling ball, a perfect throw down a candlelit alley, and the ball smashes a lovely hand-painted statue of Miss Piggy.