Fugatives & Refugees

(a postcard from 1985)

Our third night shooting on location, no one can find our meat.

The set dressers and props people are pissed. They bought special cuts of meat for this, steaks thick as dictionaries. Chops big around as tennis shoes. They spent time rubbing the raw meat with face powder so it wouldn't shine under the hot lights. So it would look okay on camera.

This is a music video being shot at Corno's Supermarket at SE Union Avenue and Morrison Street. The band is called Cavalcade of Stars, sometimes just COS, and the song is called "Butcher Boy." All night, from the time the market closes until it opens, a video crew is here on location. Night after night.

The chorus boys are dressed as butchers in long white coats, but with big blue-eye shadow eyes and cheekbones defined with smears of plum and magenta. Their hair, moussed and teased into stiff crowns. The chorus girls wear oversized sweatshirts in Day-Glo yellow or pink, with the collar and sleeves ripped off. They wear striped tights and pull the sweatshirts to one side so one bare shoulder always shows. Their hair is streaked with bright green or pink and tied with scraps of orange or blue lace. Their eyes are sunk into deep holes surrounded with black mascara.

For take after take the boys flop the steaks around behind the butcher counter, trying to look busy, tossing the meat with dirty hands and dropping it on the floor. The girls dance with shopping carts as partners.

Local celebrities make cameo appearances. The rock critic John Wendeborn drinks champagne in the background of one shot. Billy Rancher, the lead singer of Billy Rancher and the Unreal Gods, looks thin and cool, his hair frosted in streaks, his band poised to be Portland's next Quarterflash.

Me, one night out bar hopping with friends, a stranger gave me a business card and said to come for an audition. Now my role is to give the lead singer, Rhonda Kennedy, a come-hither look and make love to her in the meat locker. While dry ice fog cascades over us, we writhe naked in an antique bed surrounded by frozen sides of beef.

The blue and red lights in the meat locker are melting the frozen meat. Pork and beef blood drips on us. It drips on the purple satin bedsheets. Rhonda gives me my first cocaine, a fat envelope I take into a bathroom stall. I have no idea what to do, so I poke my nose into the white dust and inhale it all in one long breath. My face flushed red, dusted with white, I could be a slab of our missing meat.

And Rhonda says, "That was for all of us."

She and I, we embrace and spin together under the colored lights, we fall into the big damp bed, and Rhonda's breasts bounce out the top of her black lace negligee.

And the director yells, "Cut."

Between takes, while the crew sets up the lights and cameras for the next shot, Billy Rancher and the chorus girls link arms and walk down SE Union Avenue, filling the empty street at three or four in the morning. These flashy, glam kids, they walk the half block to the all-night Burns Brothers truck stop. They smoke clove cigarettes and order coffee and dazzle the tired gas jockeys.

Almost no one here is getting paid. We're each promised a percent of the profits from the sale of the video. We pray for a heavy rotation on MTV.

Within a couple of years, Billy Rancher will be dead from cancer. John Wendeborn will be fired. The Corno's Supermarket will close. Union Avenue will be renamed for Martin Luther King Jr. Even the greasy old Burns Brothers truck stop will be replaced with a new minimart.

Soon enough, the Dalai Lama will slap Rhonda Kennedy across the face and she'll become a force for the liberation of Tibet. She'll chaperone a team of Buddhist monk "skeleton dancers" on the Lollapalooza Tour with the Beastie Boys. Fifteen years after we spent our night in a bed soaked with cold animal blood, Rhonda tells me nothing is as nasty as sharing a tour bus bathroom with Buddhist monks: They're not allowed to touch their penises and refuse to piss sitting down.

Still, that night wearing all our blue eye shadow, we're thinking this will make us famous. We will look young and hip— forever.

It's at some point that night the set dressers get word about the missing meat. The extra-thick steaks and chops, coated with makeup, fingerprints, and floor dirt, was ground into hamburger. By mistake, the day shift sold it all to customers.