Fugatives & Refugees

preserving the fringe (a postcard from 2002)

The trouble with the fringe is, it does tend to unravel. By the time you read this, small parts of it will already be obsolete. People don't live forever. Even places disappear.

My first week living in Portland, in 1980,I called my grandmother for her birthday. This is from a pay phone at the Fred Meyer supermarket on Barbur Boulevard, just downhill from my two-bedroom apartment and stoner roommates. My grandmother and I talk until I have no quarters left, and the operator cuts the line. This is midsentence, and I have no money to call and tell her what's happened.

Instead, I go home and fire up the bong. The big party bowl smokes like a bonfire of dope, and my roommates are in the kitchen, cutting up a little block of hash.

There's a knock on the door, and it's the police.

My grandmother has panicked. Portland's the Big City, and she thinks I was mugged on the pay phone. She's called the police and begged them to make sure I'm okay.

It's impossible the cops don't smell our dope, but all they do is tell me to call home. After a scare like that, the party's over.

This spring, twenty-two years later, I'm writing a check for my grandmother's tombstone. A few stomach pains and she's gone. Like the Church of Elvis and the Van Calvin Mannequin Museum, eventually all we have left are the stories.

Any book is just a collection of short stories, and writing this book, I listened to so many people as they revealed their three lives. Mail carrier—anarchist—minister. Dancer— writer—political organizer. Writer—father—elephant keeper.

As Katherine Dunn says, every corner does have a story.

At the corner of NW Vaughn Street and Twenty-eighth Avenue used to stand the world's largest log cabin, built out of old-growth logs, eight feet in diameter. The size of an airplane hangar, it was built for the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905. In 1964 it burned in a mysterious fire. According to Portland architect Bing Sheldon, the 405 freeway was supposed to extend out along the route of Saint Helens Road. The only things stopping it were neighborhood protests and the historic log cabin. "The only reason they didn't move it was that it was so bloody big," Bing says. "The rumor is it was more than likely burned down by the Oregon Department of Transportation."

He says, "That's a bit of urban lore, but there are plenty of people who believe that if ODOT didn't burn it down, then they hired someone to."

At the comer of SW Eighteenth Avenue and Taylor—directly behind the PGE Park Scoreboard—video director Gray Mayo says you can kayak through the storm sewers downtown. By lowering your kayak through a manhole at that spot, you can navigate now buried Tanner Creek all the way to the Willamette River. Looking at the manhole covers, he warns, "The S means human waste. The W means storm water. I'm pretty sure ..."

The most I can ever do is to write things down. To remember them. The details. To honor them in some way. This book is not Portland, Oregon. At best, it's a series of moments with interesting people. This year will take me to England, Scotland, France, Italy, and Spain, plus forty American and Canadian cities, but I always come home to Portland.

If this is love or inertia, I don't know, but my friends are here. All my stuff is here. I moved to Portland in 1980 because it rains a lot. I moved from a desert town called Burbank, Washington, where my grandparents had a small farm. I moved

to Portland because it's dark and wet, and all my friends from high school moved to Seattle. Because I wanted to meet new people. To hear new stories. That's my job now, to assemble and reassemble the stories I hear until I can call them mine.

I got my wish. What I traded my tonsils for.

It only seems right to end this book with one of my favorite stories:

Lady Elaine Peacock was elected the twenty-ninth empress of the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court in 1987.

As beautiful as Dionne Warwick in her prime, Lady Elaine (aka Elwood Johnson) founded "Peacock in the Park," an annual drag show in the Washington Park Amphitheater. It's still held the last Sunday in June, supposedly the driest day of the year in Portland, and attracts a sellout crowd of thousands.

In 1988, when Lady Elaine was to relinquish her crown to a new empress, she and her mother, Audria M. Edwards, did a mother-and-son, song-and-dance production number in matching gowns.

According to Walter Cole (aka Darcelle XV), this was onstage in the Egyptian Ballroom of the Masonic Temple, now part of the art museum at 1219 SW Park Avenue. There, Walter says Audria collapsed at the end of the number and was rushed to the hospital. She died of a heart attack, while her son was still performing. "It was overwhelming," Walter says. "The atmosphere was totally heavy. We knew she was dead, but Peacock was determined to go on. She lasted right through to the end."

So much of this book isn't part of Portland's official history, but it should be.

Elwood Johnson died of AIDS in 1993, but the Audria M. Edwards Scholarship Fund that he established is still supported by his other legacy, the annual "Peacock in the Park" show. The last Sunday each June, the show still starts at 3:30 p.m.