Fugatives & Refugees

Quests: Adventures to Hunt Down

Each of the following is a real trip—minus the risk of flashbacks. Make the effort and live a few hours in somebody else's world. Here are fourteen local outings that prove no way do we all live in the same reality.

I. The Self-Cleaning House

The sign on the gate says do not step on the poison ivy or feed the bull and it's not kidding. That, and the Great Dane, Molly, will rip out your throat.

This is the world-famous Self-Cleaning House, designed and built by Frances Gabe, an artist, an inventor, and a great storyteller. Here in her house the walls are concrete block, with entire walls made of special blocks mortared sideways so the hollow cores form little windows. Sealed on both sides with Plexiglas, the windows hold small knickknacks you never have to dust.

Some open blocks in the wall are glazed with amber glass, giving the rooms a golden honeycomb light. A beehive feeling. "The light ought to go from one side of the house to the other," Frances says, "clear through."

One door is a solid slab of casting resin with slices of bark sealed inside. Frances was so in love with the red-purple color of the local poison oak, she tried to mix paints to match it. She never could, so she tried to save it by casting it inside resin. To her disappointment, the resin turned the bark black.

To clean the house, you just turn on the water to a spinning spray head in the center of each room's ceiling. You add soap through a stint in the plumbing. The wash and rinse water run down the sloped floor and out through the fireplace. You turn on the heat and blower to dry everything. In the kitchen, open work shelves allow all the water to drain through to the floor. A hatch in the wall channels trash down a chute to the garbage can. Clothes are washed and dried as they hang on hangers hooked to a chain that pulls them through each process in a three-part cabinet. The first part is a washing closet, the middle third is a dryer, the last third is the storage closet where the clothes wait, ready to wear.

Frances chose concrete block to dissuade termites, carpenter ants, and gophers. "They're all looking for living quarters and they'd be very happy to share mine with me." Despite the concrete, a chipmunk keeps getting in to eat her bananas.

The walls are covered with paintings and pencil sketches Frances has done, all of them waterproofed to protect them from the overhead soap and water sprays. The floors are sloped a half inch for each ten running feet. The only item that's not waterproof is a rug on the floor that has to be rolled and set aside when the room is washed. The house has withstood two earthquakes, three floods, and the hurricane of the 1962 Columbus Day storm.

Framed on one wall is a U.S. government patent for the Self-Cleaning House. "It was the only patent of its kind the government ever issued," Frances says. "Instead of a single sheet, this is like a book." Behind the top sheet there are twenty-five different patents for different aspects of the house.

Today she wears a bright red sweater and slacks, and black-framed glasses. Her gray hair is curly and short. She walks as little as possible, moving from chair to chair, to finally a wheelchair that lets her move around her studio, from her drafting board to her desk to a half dozen other projects. Molly, her Great Dane, is always beside her.

Born Frances Grace Arnholtz in 1915, she went to eighteen different grade schools, moving around with her father, a building contractor. "I was born a most unusual person so I had a heck of a time in school," she says. "Everything moved much too slowly. My last day, I stood up in class and screamed at my teacher, 'You told us that last week!'"

She adds, "I just wanted to get an education and get out of there!"

Frances graduated in 1931, at the age of sixteen. At seventeen, she married Herbert Grant Bateson. "He was six-foot-two and I was five-foot-two, and we got kidded a lot," she says. "He was a building contractor, and I was my husbands boss."

After their divorce she changed her last name to Gabe, a name she invented using the first letters of her middle name (Grace) her maiden name (Arnholtz) and her married name (Bateson). She explains, "I added the E to keep it from being 'Gab.'"

The hearth of her bedroom fireplace is paved with hand-cast tiles, printed with her initials, F.G.A.B.

In the 1940s she designed her self-cleaning house and toured the country with a model. It's just returned from a two-year loan to the Women's Museum in Dallas, Texas. "Now," she says, "people are yelling for floor plans for the model."

To see her self-cleaning house, drive south on Interstate 5 through Portland to the Newberg exit. Then take Highway 99W south through Tigard to the town of Newberg. At the far side of the small downtown area, look for the traffic light at Main Street and turn left. Follow Main through another light and a stop sign, where it becomes Dayton Avenue. Follow Dayton Avenue until it crosses a bridge over a ravine. Take the first right turn, onto a gravel road, and veer to the right. The Self-Cleaning House is the last house on this road. But—and I cannot stress this enough—call first! The number is 503-538-4946. Be polite and expect to negotiate a small fee for your tour.

Sitting in her studio, with the wide windows looking down into the canyon of Chehalem Creek, Frances Gabe works on more floor plans for her famous house. "In high school," she says, "my psychiatrist told me, 'You're many times over a genius. The world belongs to you, and don't let anyone tell you anything different.'"

2. House of Cunt

Forget the Vagina Monologues. This three-woman, two-man theater troupe has gone from parading the street in nothing but G-strings made from human-hair toupees to opening for the Oregon Ballet. Wherever you find them, they'll be pushing the envelope with their experimental comedy and music.

3. Volcano Basketball

On Portland's east side, Mount Tabor, Mount Scott, and Rocky Butte are all volcanic vents left over from the last eruptions of now dormant Mount Hood. Until the next eruption, an asphalt basketball court on Mount Tabor fills the dormant crater.

4. Adult Soapbox Derby

Every August, grown-ups race their homemade cars down the steep slopes of Mount Tabor. Cars crash. People are hurt. And someone wins. It's a blast. Look for the preliminary race around August 10, with the finals two weeks later. Or hang out with the racers at the sponsoring bar, Beulahland, 118 NE Twenty-eighth Avenue. Phone: 503-235-2794.

5. Santa Rampage

Drinking a hallucinogenic liqueur—made by soaking marijuana in rum, and called "Reindeer Fucker"—the jolly "red tide" of several hundred Santa Clauses crashes elegant holiday parties, storms through swanky restaurants, boogies in strip clubs, and generally keeps Portlands Central Precinct busy and paranoid. Most American cities have their own "Rampage," but Portlands—held the second weekend in December—is still one of the biggest and best. For more details, see "A Postcard from 1996."

6. The Emily Dickinson Sing-Along

Did you know you can sing any poem by Emily Dickinson to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas"? Well, come the Belle of Amherst's birthday—December 10—join the crowd at Cafe Lena, 2239 SE Hawthorne Boulevard, to sing the collected works of Dickinson.

7. Abandoned Timberline Highway

From the lower end the old road to Timberline Lodge is almost impossible to find, according to Portland architect Bing Sheldon. The original route to the lodge, it's a curving scenic two-lane road that crosses stone bridges and skirts huckleberry fields. Bing says, "It really is an undiscovered treasure." Like the lodge, the road was built during the Depression but was obsolete and replaced by the end of World War II.

"It's still paved, and you can still drive on it," Bing says. "It's a wonderful engineering feat, built on a six percent grade." To find the old road, he says, start at the top, at Timberline Lodge. Driving down from the lodge, look for the first post of the ski lift and a road that heads off to the right, passing under the ski lift.

8. Fire Department Ride-Alongs

The Portland Fire Bureau responds to about one fire every three hours. If you can wait, you can ride along. According to a spokesman for the bureau, you must be eighteen and, yes, you can ride on the fire engine. The only thing you can't do is go into the fire. Bummer. To make your plans, call the chief at one of the fire stations.

9. That's No Lady

Most people think Gracie Hansen is dead.

Hansen was the queen of Portland for years, the big-busted, loud-laughing queen of the Roaring Twenties Showroom at the Hoyt Hotel, a faux—Gay Nineties palace of antiques and special effects built by some of Hollywood's top set designers.

Before 1961, Gracie Hansen was a schoolteacher from Morton, Washington, who dreamed of chucking the small-town life in central Washington State and moving to Seattle. There, she wanted to stage a burlesque show at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. "She needed fifty thousand dollars," says choreographer Roxy Leroy Neuhardt. "The story is, she found forty-nine Chinese men with a thousand dollars each and one Greek with a thousand." He says, "And they ended up serving Greek food—for whatever reason."

After the fair closed, the only things to stay were the Space Needle and the Monorail. Harvey Dick, who was renovating Portland's old Hoyt Hotel, recruited Hansen to come south and put on her burlesque show in his new showroom. His bar, the Barbary Coast, had no electricity, only gaslight, and it was famous for the urinals in the men's room: a sculpted, landscaped waterfall you peed into. Says Roxy, "They took a huge dirty old garage and when they were done, you'd swear that whole room had come around the Horn in the last century."

It was at the Hoyt Hotel that local actor Walter Cole first put on a dress. As a lark. It was a gown that Roxy had "borrowed" from Hansen's wardrobe.

"Gracie saw it and she was very angry," Walter says. "But she didn't say a word because she didn't know me."

About drag queens, Walter and Roxy say they're nothing new in Portland. Every burlesque and vaudeville program had a female impersonator, usually the master of ceremonies. The famed impersonator Julian Eltinge was a Portland favorite when he toured from New York, and a dozen pictures of him dressed as a woman still hung in Portlands Heilig Theater when it was torn down. Since the early 1900s, the Harbor Club at SW First Avenue and Yamhill Street had offered drag shows. It became the only bar in Oregon declared off-limits to members of the U.S.

Navy. In the 1930s drag shows moved to the Music Hall at 413 SW Tenth Avenue, which became Club Rumba in the 1940s. In the 1950s the Jewel Box Revue toured the country with female impersonators from Kansas City and played in Rossini's Clover Room, what's now the office space above the Finnegan's toy store.

In the 1960s Roxy was a choreographer and dancer in Las Vegas. He was in Hollywood when he met Hansen, both of them costume shopping for their respective shows. He came to Portland, but only for sixteen weeks, to help launch the new Roaring Twenties show. One night at the old drag bar Dahl and Penne's, Roxy met Walter Cole, a local actor and businessman. He'd owned Portland's first "Beat" coffeehouse, Cafe Espresso. And Studio A, a jazz club at SW Second Avenue and Clay Street. He acted at the Firehouse Theater on SW Montgomery Street. "Attorneys and doctors," Walter says, "that's all I ever got to play. At least I didn't have to do my own wardrobe when I wore a suit."

Since the early 1950s, the Imperial Rose Court of Portland had elected an empress every Halloween. In 1974, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Randy Shuts was a student at the University of Oregon when he won the national William Randolph Hearst Award for a newspaper article he'd written about the court. But like shanghaiing, brothels, and ghosts, drag queens aren't part of the official Portland history book.

In 1972, wearing Gracie Hansen's gown, using the name Darcelle, Walter Cole became the fifteenth empress of Portland, only the second empress elected in a new city-wide voting system that began the year before.

But Walter didn't just borrow Hansen's gown. He borrowed her entire persona. When the Hoyt Hotel went out of business, Walter in his own way became Hansen. Although diabetes took first one leg and then her life, Grade Hansen lives on, her jokes and dresses and loud personality, in the form of Darcelle XV

Well, they were sort of Hansen's jokes.

In her act, Walter says, Hansen carried a big feathered fan. But when she was learning a new routine, the fan would be paper so she could write her jokes on the inside. Her memory wasn't so hot. She'd stop, read a joke off the fan, and tell it. "When she needed new material," he says, "she went to see Totie Fields in Las Vegas and smuggled in a tape recorder."

Walter says, "I inherited all her wardrobe, and I'm still using parts of it. Her jewelry. Her sewing room... I'm still sewing on some of those sequins and beads and rhinestones from the Hoyt Hotel." He points out a framed photo of himself as the character Darcelle, wearing a sequined blue Gracie Hansen gown.

If you ask, Does it still fit him?

Walter says, "Yes... ?"

And the staff of his nightclub laughs.

"Okay!" he says. "So I added some feathers on the side. That's no sin!"

In 1972, when Walter opened his nightclub in Old Town, Roxy was in the original show. His first night tap dancing there, "Roxy's first boy tap dance got this," Walter says and claps once. "The next night, in drag, he got a standing ovation because nobody'd ever seen a tap-dancing drag queen."

Officially called "Walter Cole Presents: That's No Lady—That's Darcelle XV and Company," Walter and Roxy still run the last real burlesque show in town. In the North End's dark tradition of cabarets and music halls, it's a storefront theater, where—sick or well—the show must go on. Even now, at seventy-one years old, Walter Cole still adjusts the stage lights. He cleans the toilets. He makes his own costumes. When it rains too hard, the gutters flood the basement, and mopping up is also his job.

But when the curtain rises, he's wearing Gracie Hansen's gowns and jewelry, laughing her laugh. Telling her jokes. Well... telling Totie Fields's jokes.

"The only way I'll retire is when they plant me," Walter says. "And I hope it's during a full house."

"And he's just gotten a laugh," Roxy says.

"And I've just gotten a standing ovation," Walter says.

Darcelle's is at 208 NW Third Avenue. Phone: 503-222-5338.

10. Behind Closed Doors

Portland is chockablock with beautiful, historic houses, and on the right day, you can walk right in the front door. To qualify for property tax breaks, the owners of historic houses and buildings must open them to the public at least one day each year. On any day you can go to the website of the State Historic Preservation Office, www.shpo.state.or.us, and find out which local houses are open.

11. MONK-FOR-A-MONTH

Here's getting away from it all. Live as a Trappist monk for thirty days at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey. You'll be out of bed for vigil prayers at 4:15 every morning and spend your days working with fellow monks, binding books, baking fruitcakes, and tending the forest that surrounds their isolated abbey. You'll be assigned a mentor to show you the ropes. The monastery is southwest of Portland, in the small town of Lafayette. Phone: 503-852-0107. Or write: Monastic Life Retreat, Trappist Abbey, Lafayette, OR 97127.

12. Triceratops Cleaning

Sixty-five million years ago, a baby triceratops was trying to cross a river in what would someday be eastern Wyoming. Well, the little tyke didn't make it. She drowned. Now she's "field jacketed" in thick plaster and waiting for you to come help scrape away the millennia of hardened mud. According to Greg Dardis, OMSI earth science lead educator, this cleaning will take the next fifteen to twenty years.

"Paleontology is all about humility and patience," Greg says.

"And calluses," adds volunteer Art Johnstone, as he scrapes away with a dental pick. The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is at 1945 SE Water Avenue.

13. Eviction Court

For anyone who thinks the tradition of oral storytelling is dead, this is a must-see. Go to the Multnomah County Courthouse, downtown, at SW Fourth Avenue and Main Street. Enter through the main door on SW Fourth Avenue and go to Room 120. Eviction Court meets Monday through Friday at 9:00 a.m., and all dirty laundry is loudly thrown around. It is the professional wrestling of the courthouse.

14. The De-Virginizing Dance

The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been playing as a midnight movie at the Clinton Street Theater for more than twenty years. According to Rachel, a student at the Metropolitan Learning Center in Northwest Portland, anyone who has never been to the costumed audience-participation event is labeled a "virgin" and hauled up onstage for a rite of passage. The legally eighteen are separated from the under-eighteen, and... "They took this one girl up onstage and stripped her naked," Rachel says. "Then they wrapped her in gauze and dribbled this sticky red stuff on her and called her a used tampon." Rachel calls this "the de-virginizing dance." After all that you must swear to come see the show at least three times a year.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show plays every Saturday night at the Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton Street.