"Going to Portland, A Ways Away"
It was a warm, ale-washed spring two years ago when Denny and I drove to Portland for a good time and a woman I had swung with at the Memorial Day parade in my Northern California town. In no part of her could I see a region. She said she was from Portland. Portland, Oregon, I thought, Portland Oregon. I said it aloud three times-“Portlandoregon”-shaking the head in my voice. The word pitched up in the middle, regarded the high registers, and I hummed it out several more times like a disappointed dad. Portland, Oregon.
Portland.
She was there. Her lack of a tan shone in my mind like the thoughts I heard her rake out when she visited the city two weeks back, slamming around in my head like someone I had welcomed in to drink all my liquor. She had a thirst, and I hoped I hadn’t scared her with my loudness. But then there was no use in underestimating her. The space between her wide-set eyes was unconcerned with things like intoxication. She was that old inside, which I wasn’t used to. Still, I daydreamed for a red second about saving her from rape, having to kill a man for her. To prove myself.
At the parade, Madeleine and I-that was her name, Madeleine-hashed out our individual schools of child rearing, as flirting boys and girls will. Usually, a girl gave me the sense that she was vetting me, and I could feel my sperm under her microscope. I have to say Madeleine more joked than evaluated, which was nice.
“I’ve always been of a mind to beat my children,” I said. “Not drunkenly and that, but to give him something to brag about to his friends.” I mean, I was half-serious.
But Madeleine was sporting enough to laugh at this. “Yeah,” she heaved. “I just want to be as eccentric as possible. I think I’ll live glamorously through my children’s memoirs.”
The local high school marching band dragged past, crashing and heaving like a walrus.
“See, it seems different-ethically, now-if you’re conscious of why you’re acting weird at your kids than if you were just drunk or mean. I don’t ever plan to be a mean drunk.”
“I do,” she smiled. She talked loudly then of hating New England, and I identified. We danced to the tickling of the salsa band float, but not with each other. Huge papier-mâché presidents rolled by, shipping slow up Main Street. A hatch on Lincoln’s stovepipe swung open and screamed white smoke, scaring the shit out of me. I looked at Madeleine and feigned annoyance at her beautiful guffaw.
After the parade I took her to Wilson’s Bar-Be-Que. As I finished her slaw she asked me if I was seeing anyone.
“I see many people.”
“Ha, ha. Did I mean ‘date?’ I think that’s what I meant.”
“Dating. No, dating no one.”
She laughed. “That’s nice.”
I returned the question, looking up from the cup of slaw to show her its importance.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Ah,” I said. “Ah. You don’t have, like, a stronger opinion?”
“Well,” she forked her brisket, red-faced. “No. Yes. I do have a stronger opinion. I don’t like dating people. I don’t like any dating thing I’ve ever done.”
“Me neither.” That was true.
“Well, it’s just that-do we have to talk about this? I hate talking about this.”
“No. It’s OK. We can have a silent relationship, if that’s agreeable.”
That night, after Wilson’s, I followed her up oily stairs to where her bed was and buckled at the falling of her black dress. For the first time since Daisy I throbbed at someone’s touch. We didn’t say a damn thing. It was like the feeling of getting a new cat after an old one had died, but multiplied by a god-sized number. She left in the morning and I whistled home, telling Denny we were going to Portland in a week.
“She’s hot. Crazy,” said Denny. He had a thing for these feral women, too.
“Yeah, I suppose,” I said. Then something behind my eyes broke. I remembered she hadn’t told me where she lived, and Katherine, our mutual acquaintance, was on a plane to her research station on the Weddell Sea ice shelf in Antarctica. “Ah, fuck. I just remembered-I don’t even know where she lives.”
“No sweat. Call Kat.”
“She’s in Antarctica, man.”
“Holy Christ. Yeah? Yeah, I guess so. Crazy.”
There was a pause while both of us tried to think, but all I could do was repeat the words of the problem in my mind, as I do when confused or buffeted by a strange intellectual wind.
“Well,” Denny crept towards me. “What about Daisy?”
“What about her.”
“What the hell is that? You know. What state is all that in, what’ll she do?”
Damned if I knew. I had left her about a year and a half ago and just seen her again recently. There was a death in the family that long year or so ago and she screamed and sobbed with a loss so big it seemed to predate the age of television. I felt I’d have to stab my heart to get over the sound, but instead I just left. “I’m not with Daisy. I’m not obligated or-or in debt or some shit. What are you talking, Dennis?”
“All I’m saying is….”
“Is what?”
“All I’m saying is: this Portland girl’s got gray eyes, friend. Those eyes plot.”
I knew he was right.
My brains were fairly whisked by a melancholic radio on the way to Portland. Each second of that soaking, breathing music filled me with some long-buried lust for confession, some stirring Catholic heat that made me want to break down in front of her and just be as mushy as all hell. I’d marry her, ring her fingers up, drag her into sheets with me, parachute into jungles to get her. Just as long as she watched and saw. Even as Denny drove in silence I had all the sexed misery of Poe in my heart, and it couldn’t be pumped to my limbs fast enough.
“Keep it low, Denny. I want to crack this beer.”
Static tickled in and phased out again. Halfway through my beer I fell asleep and dreamed vividly about Madeleine. We sat in a diner with mirrored walls and pink neon tubes bouncing and scraping near the ceiling. “Remember when you loved me?” she asked. Not knowing where she was coming from, I couldn’t answer.
When I woke up I saw that Denny had finished my beer. I fell asleep again as he asked if I wanted to drive, and, wanting Madeleine again, I got Daisy. I saw her a month ago, after we hadn’t spoken for about a year. We drove around for hours, trying to catch up and forget at the same time, aiming my Taurus into the park and pretty much going for a long while until I turned it around at the city limits. She asked me how I was feeling from all the way on the other side of the car and I think I painted her a nice picture of laughed-at torture and big brains saddled with wriggling promise. I think I scared her a little. It did wonders for my self-esteem. Later on her couch she suddenly put her hand through my hair and it was like an alien was touching me. I think-I think-I stared at her for a second before I fell into her and she mothered me the way I needed to be.
Somehow Denny had piloted us to a place in Idaho called Twin Falls, and we stopped there. Students from the College of Southern Idaho were hanging out in the town, reading textbooks on air conditioning repair and diesel mechanics. A lot of them were older, and I felt out of place. I had spent my five years at college trying very hard to learn about literature and art, but mostly I just spent lots of money, whatever I had, and as soon as I had it. Denny didn’t care about how anyone regarded him, and was in a thick marijuana haze by the time we reached Twin Falls anyway. We went into a diner and ordered breakfast for lunch. The college rodeo team was sitting behind us, ten gallons tipped up and forward, the freshmen introducing themselves around. Baker City, Benton Creek, Hooper, Chickadee, Moville. California, Utah, Arizona, Montana, and great, reeling Idaho. Finally, Denny got more curious than shy and said, “You boys rope?”
“Yessir,” said a few of the older ones.
“I’m Harrison.” A small, wiry forearm begged a shake from me and Denny. “We rope better than most, man. Got twenty-four top-ten finishes, three national titles that say so.” He paused. “You ain’t from ‘round here, right?”
“Nope,” said Denny. “Got a cousin in Phelan, California. This joker next to me is fixin’ to marry her.” I waved sheepishly, not daring to mimic Denny’s new tonguing like a cowpoke.
Denny didn’t eat his food when it came, but I was starving for a deviation from our travel diet of fried chicken, cough drops, and ginseng tea. While Denny told the ropers dirty jokes, I ate and looked at a newspaper. There was a picture of a toddler eating at McDonalds on the cover, folded over with obesity, pointing at something, wanting to put it in him. My eyes shattered. My ribs cracked. I was a sack of flour busted open in all its corners by the swift iron wallop of a golf club. I could barely keep from crying, furious because I didn’t know why.
We were back on the road at seven, and Denny took some pills and kept driving. I looked at him steadily, trying to perceive anything I could. Denny had been shifting lately, twiddling restlessly one minute and gazing serenely at the sunset the next. He smelled bad. I got a whiff of the salt squeezing out his pores.
“Denny.”
“Yo.”
“Are you an addict?”
“That’s what the shades are for, man. Don’t want to cause a scare with my addict-eyes.” He flashed them at me. There was silence.
“Denny.”
“What.”
“What do you think about Madeleine?”
“Hmm. Maddy. Yeah, she looks good. Did you see her sway in that grass skirt?”
“I sure did. Hula-hula.”
His pills were really humming in him now, and I just wanted to look at Oregon. I opened a beer and swam in remembrance, calling up couches on which I sat with girls I loved, inadvertently emulating those cloud-covered living rooms I spent at my grandparents’ house, parents and uncles sighing and drinking Pepsi, my grandfather rumbling deep in his windpipe, grinding his vocal chords like phlegmy gears. Those couches I’d put my ass on stirred something in me. A cloud passed over the sun. I thought of how that gray cloudlight filtered straight through to my brain, and seeing the clean faces of my family made me giddy for all of our deaths. I could feel it thrumming in my toes, even now, years later. Would Madeleine and I crowd that dark space between the cushions? The cloud brushed past, and I beered on in the fragrant light, thinking.
At the hotel, I was tired and full of bile, and resented the ceiling I was staring at. Denny began ironing all his clothes. In my head I heard Daisy telling me she’d never let anything bad happen to me. She had whispered it, thrushed it into my wet ears, and I had shut down like any machine. She wanted to hold me to her bosom like that, I thought; it must have filled up the terrific space in her to have a head on her breast that she could protect. I leaned my head back. Our neighbor gave two orbit-breaking sneezes and then shut up. I was sick to death of girls named for flowers.
Denny was sitting on the desk when I woke up, drinking coffee and shelling peanuts, looking out at Portland.
“Look at that dang thing,” he said, pointing at the huge gold cross of the Archdiocese across the street. The guitar on his tape player was exquisite, holier than any words or artifacts I know. I lay on the floor listening to it, letting it bore glowing tubes in my head for a few minutes before Denny suggested I go to the police station to see if I could find out where Madeleine lived. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“It takes a man of faith to look up a girl at a cop station, but I know you’re full of it, sport.”
I told him never to call me that again and walked down to the police station. When I walked in, I was waved immediately to a waiting bench. On the other end was a young man rigid with anger. His eyes were red and he stared straight ahead with the loud, stung focus of forgetting. I think he thought that maybe he shouldn’t be there, that maybe these people had the wrong guy and, in their blue way, didn’t care.
One of these blues walked up to me, ignoring the man at the end of the bench, and asked what it was that I wanted. I saw the young man thrash him with his eyes, kicking and sucker-punching.
“Uh, I’m looking for someone.”
“What do you mean? You want to file a Missing Persons report?” He capitalized those words.
“No, no. I just need an address.”
He stared at me for a minute before walking away. When he came back he tossed me a phone book. Having always been bad at sports, the phone book hurt my hands and I dropped it, recoiling. I was hot and nervous at suddenly having to reveal my low degree of athleticism, and as I bent over to pick up the phone book another cop was leading a handcuffed man across the hall. He stared at me.
“Nice catch, fag.” The cop told him to shut his mouth. I looked at the cover of the phone book for a moment, but then put it down and walked back to the hotel.
I rested my head on the wall of the hotel elevator as it trundled up the stories. I want to end this day right, I thought, this afternoon of embarrassment, policemen and tarnation. Denny was waiting for this though, and had news for me when I got back to the room.
“Beer on the way,” he said, “beer on the way!”
Beer was, indeed, on the way, and we drank it when the room service cart arrived. On the public broadcasting channel, three old black men were chuckling through a hive of jazzed-out horns, thrumming bass and shattering snare and cymbal, stomping their feet, wagging their age at me. As I wondered if old black men where the only people who played that sort of music anymore, I noticed Denny drinking the beer out of the small garbage can from the bathroom. I had the coffee pot, and had to lift the lid to pour it down my throat without spilling it.
“Never catch me in one of those beer helmets,” he grinned. “Things are for fat jokers.” I agreed. “Seriously, now. What kind of dipshit wears beer on his head? I mean, no sane man drinks beer through a straw. I like to hear it gurgle.”
“Should we get some food?”
“All rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full,” he said, pouring, pouring, pouring.
I ordered two club sandwiches and ate both of them.
“My dad always said that beer tastes better after yardwork of some kind.”
Denny stopped, crouching and holding his beer can like an idol. He set it on the ground and walked on his knees to his suitcase, from which he pulled something metal and hinged. They were garden shears.
“Good fucking plan,” he marveled, and broke out into song.
“Write on the cross at the head of my grave
To women and whiskey here lies a poor slave
Take warning dear stranger, take warning dear friend
They’ll write in big letters these words at my end!”
I smiled, galloning the beer away, watching Denny hallelujah and decapitate the cornered rhododendron so musically.
We woke up late in the afternoon, and Denny offered to drive us around the city, hoping to find Madeleine. At first this seemed like a waste of time, but then I could almost hear Denny laughing around town, trailing his long hair and dumb luck behind his Chevy like a big net. I knew what being in that net was like. It was black as a womb, and never birthed a thing. We set up a nice twang on the radio and cruised low with the top down, two weird fancy-pants rockers among the turtlenecked crab-eaters in the uptown thick.
The waterfront came up fast and we grumbled around the blocks in traffic, past old men tooting bad horns on the corners and white ski lodge hippies strumming in the light air. I thought of skiing once with Daisy. We were on the couch, me being driven wild by her black tights and ski socks. I felt hot skin trying so hard against cold glass, the lovely tongue. It had once been like water when she whispered to me, but then it felt like breathing molasses. Something had changed in me, but maybe not. Maybe I couldn’t have anything to do with that child, being that child all the damn time. That was more like it. Sometimes I wanted it to be cold; the cold jerks my face out of just about any trashy funk I’m in. But then sometimes you can’t stand it any more, and you want the sun to fry your skin. Always when thinking about places I’d want to live, I first consider tropical islands, but then reject them. I don’t think I’d be able to think down there. All the weed and palm trees might start to get so heavy it’d ruin me on the place forever. I feared my ruin, my wreck on Daisy. But places like Russia, Sweden, Canada, even New England, the cold there breeds a particularly nasty creature. Like little bald rats running around everywhere, listening to polkas and blowing mouth-farts through their fat cheeks. Everything about that is shit. It takes a big, strong man to turn down a warm bed when he’s tired. And even if I’m strong, I’ll never be big. Maybe there’s something to be said for living in a temperate place and letting summer gum over you-just taking it.
Madeleine and I met on the corner of two streets-Summer and Acorn, maybe. I really don’t remember. She was dressed down, but her blue jeans might as well have been the black dress I trampled the week before. She wore a sequined shirt.
“Spirit of ’76. That’s quite a t-shirt,” I said.
“Hello, Conrad,” she flashed. I felt like a war hero when she said it. “Where’s Dennis?”
“In the hotel. So, this is your city?”
“Conrad, what are you doing here?”
I didn’t really know, and I told her.
“So-you’re not here to see me.” It was not a question.
“Well, no. I am here to see you. Is that all right?”
“Yes. Yes, it’s quite all right.”
We went to her apartment and undressed immediately. It was the middle of the afternoon, and we were Olympians.
“Conrad,” she whispered. And there it was. My throat tightened like a viper, and I thought I was floating on suds, or sinking so far into nothing I would never come out. Of course, all women sound different, but it is the truly loving gust that sounds the same-no, it smells the same. Especially in that post-coital embrace; the star eyes and action-tossed hair, and she breathes that cold milk-smelling air right through me.
“Conrad.”
“Yes.”
I knew I would have to say something soon. Maybe we would sleep until nightfall. I tried to speak, but I was too deaf.
“Conrad.”
It was my name. Yo-ho.