Down by the creek there’s a small town by the name of Irondale, a single lane of highway tacked down right in the middle of a lush forest wilderness the likes of which would do Marty Stouffer proud. I found the rest of my hobo buddies camped out among a few modest houses and sheds situated on a dozen acres littered with mobile home trailers and smelly Meth
accoutrements
, a display resplendent of the region’s claim to fame in the local papers: seedy clusters of mutant skinless stripped-bare mobile home trailers. This was one of the famous Meth squats of Irondale, a real mustache on the face of depravity. The
Jefferson County Leader
routinely sent out reporters to lurk behind some crap-filled bathtub, taking notes. More than one soul had been absorbed. Irondale stood as a living monument to Meth dudes who had casually reached a level of ingenuity whereby — after selling the metal siding off their trailers for scrap — they found themselves with nothing left to practice tagging on, so they put the word out, soliciting others to haul in something to fill the void. A yard full of wrecked shit fulfills many needs, doubling as shelter, jewelry, target practice, and…? Some neighbors were once baffled to see a Meth squatter hauling a boat filled with garbage on a trailer with no wheels. When the trailer couldn’t be coaxed into going any further it was unceremoniously abandoned out in the middle of the road, which even by Meth squat standards is pretty resourceful. The garbage that actually did make it onto the property was cast off behind some trees, or used to prop up one of the corners of the skinless trailer, or else dragged off by wild animals for use in their own squats. Very little could grow on Meth squat land and what did was burned down. Massive jamborees were held around giant cauldrons of altered medicine that bubbled delectably away at the fire.
Fizzle
…
hisss
… Sick with the indulgent atmosphere we hopped a train to Portland a few days later and in the middle of loitering here and there we happened upon a free show at the teen center. It seemed like the same bag of bagels was following us all over town. The show was put together by friends of those riot grrrls Josh and Knowles picked up in Olympia last month, the book-smart ones with sour old letterman jackets. The door was open to all walks of life: panhandlers, veterans, Vag Warriors. Pamphlets were piled next to uneven glances at the door. We paused underneath a sign proclaiming “Ladies! Chart Your Mucus!” over a crude pictogram showing four skirted stick figures dancing in an agrarian netherworld of crosshatched crops. Murph wrinkled his nose, “Too much information!” A woman in a paisley vest came up behind them. “Bite the apple, babe,” she said, not stopping as she walked by. “Ooh, seeecret knowledge,” Josh hissed.
Too much info
,
too much info
they chanted in unison.
Those two riot grrrls weren’t even there but their friend’s band, Touch Boob was. (About Touch Boob: Totally chilling all the time up in Tumwater, they spoke often of life “in the middle of [their] new magical, mysterious, mind-blowing bio-dome. It’s full of various independent stoner-friendly ecosystems. Some are jungle habitats, [others are] enchanted forests filled with endangered mythical beasts and/or creatures… we smoke weed.”) They sucked and it looked like it was going to be a long, tedious evening, so we poked around in the storage rooms in the rear of the hall, filling our pockets with small stuff that caught our eye, only to return to see a band called the Slaves in pressed street clothes, sticky blooms of sweat heaving, gobbling at the air cuz they could barely breathe. The singer was all laid out on a giant platter at the base of the stage. It was clear that something strange was going on. Sure they were from the same school of overcompensating, guilt-tinged showmanship as the DC scene, where efforts to make a safe haven turned rock shows into public displays of group ecstasy, but something bright and adorable shone in their eyes. When he looked down at me I felt sure I was not returning the gaze to anything alive. He seemed shut down for the duration, and that made it okay
okay to do or say or think all sorts of strange things.
All the girls piled up in front of the stage to face the spectacular god of rock presenting himself like a stuffed, glory-basted offering in front of them. They hit him and kissed him and toyed with his cock and balls. After the band finished their set, in a silence like death, drenched in sweat he finally lay: on the floor, on
whatever
, lay pretty much passed out while the girls did whatever they wanted to do to him; he was a passive observer to his own evisceration, spread before a haunted, hunted clutch of demon pervs, girlvert witches. They just dug in. Took his shorts off, had sex with every part of him, whatever. He “slept” through it, locked in a post-gig trance, his body a human sweat lodge fueled by self-pity. Numb to all the voices but his own, the pounding in his head, stained voices of headache after headache. He had beaten so many, pummeled them with his fists: “You wanted me, this is me,” he said… The riot grrrls ran around yanking down banners and sweaty shit, chanting
I see a punk club, he sees a strip bar!
over and over again. Okay okay, I understand that the stage can be a very strange place to be a girl. I thought originally that this is what men talked about when they waded around with that stabby-serene look at the girls on stage with no clothes on. I will never be able to get my mind around strippers and their kind — they are intangible beings. But if you’re not, if you’re a
boy
up there on stage rocking out, well then I might perv out on you. Don’t be scared it doesn’t hurt. It’s just me looking, eyes as big as dinner plates… I see a punk club and I see a strip bar. (Rock ’n roll
is
stripping for girls; DUH! it’s the secret history of rock.) Take for instance: Seth and I are not even at the same show right now. He has no clue. I want to grab him and point and yell, “Look at what’s happening all around you!” Look at her eyes bugging out of her head as she gazes upon the moistened god of war onstage, in full attack mode! (no jangly bullshit) She’s begging him with her eyes! She’s perving out on him with the dead face of the preacher afraid of looking possessed, or of the con man who can’t give it all away…
A couple girls with college accents are doing a research project about local gangs of bloodsucking delinquents. The next day they came out to our camp and talked to Knowles and Josh, then seduced them. Ahh they’re a dying breed. Not many girls out there anymore who wear big shirts with stretchy skirts, boots and a bob, barrettes; eyes crossed like a Burmese cat. Their politics are evaporating faster now that the wind is blowing so much, and the day will come soon when they’ll end up mere rockabilly chicks, their obsessions waning into topics of mall shoplifting, puberty, teen cliques, high school, guns, male criminals, whores, and ’60s French pop. But they remain very resourceful, and like us, will create what they want if it’s not already there. They have their organized shit together, unlike us. We’re just DIY perverts. DIY dirt, DIY death. We do it ourselves oh yes. Seth put my shoes back together with tape. We make do with slipping into unlocked cars, motel stationary, and eating off open plates at the mall foodcourt. We circle around the fire perched on abandoned furniture, or other objects found on the street. Scrounged is better than bought. Sponging is better than working. Our hands are frozen in scooping gestures and our pockets are just big flaps, permanently stretched out by being filled and emptied so many times. Most nights our campfires looked like a crap convention. It’s dumb but it’s true. A huge cardboard cutout of a beer cheer-leader in a cowboy hat had been creased and “seated” in the Best Comfort Chair by either Knowles or Josh. I said, I’m throwing her into the fuckin fire! and sat down.
“You see,” Josh settled into a bag of pumpkin seeds, “the East doesn’t really exist. Austin is almost already as far as it goes for us. San Luis is pushing it to the South. All those awkward jackassholes in New Jersey just seem so fuckin corny. I don’t know how else to put it. Theirs is the land of dorks.” The Other Washington was the only Eastern place they were willing to acknowledge. DC was
okay
. The scene there set off a firestorm of humorless, stageless hardcore acts that popped up across the country, where sometimes the stage was just the patch of floor where a band played, surrounded by all kinds of kids freaking politically. In these cases, instead of feeling like I was on their level, I always felt like I was looking down over the proceedings, watching the events unfold and therefore sanctifying it like witnessing a birth or a live sex act. Always overlooking. Always occurring underneath my gaze.
Josh and Knowles sat and debated the proper direction of the lucky horseshoe. One said it went like a
U
so that all the good luck would collect inside.
“But if it were the other way, luck would still collect in it,” the other one said.
“What do you mean?”
“Luck could come from below…”
He scoffed. “Good luck comes from Hell — ”
At the Black Bear Evangele had set up shop in the corner booth. He parked his cart in the aisle and the restaurant went down eight notches on the classiness scale. He laughed wildly to punctuate every casual remark but nothing was actually funny. He opened the small nondescript paperback book he had with him to reveal intense numerological calculations filling the margins, often obscuring the very words his figures were meant to expound upon. I heaved a giant sigh of relief: he was just a crazy fucker, a manic jackass and it wasn’t just
me
… Across his table were arranged, painstakingly in neat piles: three rolls of masking tape, two lighters, various ripped-in-half cigarettes, empty cigarette packages both foreign and domestic, multiple piles of two quarters, a banana, two jackets, newspapers, and some leaves.
Evangele
mind you, was up at the counter spinning around in his chair to the tune of “Oh Sherrie,” which he had playing on his boom box. If only the other guests knew he had infiltrated their little private club… his eyes raced to all of the sets of keys sitting on their tables next to plates of breakfast. His eyes stared at the keys for so long he saw them in his hands. All these people sitting there eating and talking didn’t even realize: he would be sitting comfortably in their Jacuzzi tubs with two redheads by dawn — of that he could be sure. He scribbled some lyrics on a receipt paper and passed it to a woman seated next to him. She slapped his face and stared hotly out the window… Shop dust has formed a protective coating on an old bucket of coffee on the floor of a 7-Eleven. The coffee is getting thicker and thicker, leathery and rare. Seth didn’t see me watching him like a lech as he climbed down a handful of stairs to the parking lot, his legs buckling out of starvation as he lowered his way down. I looked upon this fragile display lustily, and with perverted curiosity. I was drunk enough to fuck some way no two people had ever fucked before. Problem was, we couldn’t even stay awake, being out of our minds in the reek of DM syrup fumes, falling all over each other. I decided to take a nap in the bathtub. Sitting in the middle of all this steam I noticed pieces of flesh sloughing off in great grey sheets, plunging into sticky bathwater, each dissolving into a layer of ash on the surface of the anonymous liquid. Spelling ominous secrets.
Shortly before running away Kim brought home two puppies she bought out in front of the grocery store. They went nuts at our house and ate our stepdad’s slippers and peed on our paperwork from the county office. He sent them to a shelter where one was put to sleep and the other went to live with a woman in Eugene. The dead one was dying anyway, and had a series of shots to finish him up. Our stepdad was the head of our house mom like Jesus was the head of the church, “This is not a matter of dominance; it is a matter of love.” Kim danced in circles on the kitchen floor; she said, “I’ll play this song till I can’t take any more.” As for her friends Rick, Ronnie, Peetie — that whole
other
gang of slutty teenage hobo junkies — all those guys came from bad homes. They’d had enough and they ran away. They pissed off cops with their screw you attitude and fucked up bodies, got beat up too many times for being fuckup transient whores. They got holes in their throats from spewing bile in the general direction of city limits. Peetie had a patchy flat top and a tattoo that said JÅCKE OFF + DIE in block letters and wore the same brown t-shirt every day with the sleeves rolled all the way up. He used to look normal, his cheeks were filled out in well-fed youth, his teeth used to be straight, but several months on the road and all the drugs and stuff had made him totally skinny, leathery skinny. More like a cart horse that got whipped all day. At our foster house jars of half-formed houseplants sat along every horizontal surface. Some were just collections of sprigs of green threads — weeds really — in cups of water. How do they do that, grow a little plant in a cup of water? Orange roots twisted around in the murky glass. I thought I saw one twitch and send up a line of bubbles, but no… Other plants looking like paper mâché wings dipped in slime rested on pieces of cardboard on the floor. Those ones were actually rooted in dirt. Flat green flaps of shell on a stick. I’ll water it in a little bit and it will gurgle at me for more till all the mites living in its soil have scrambled up its stalk for safety.
The safety of mites? Did I just care about that?
Kim folded the cat’s ears back like felt-covered leaves. She was surprised how perfectly they seemed to fold into little compact darts. They look better this way, she said. She remembered folding her dog’s ears down and back so the skin side was showing. She used to say that it was his hairdo… “Wait a minute,” Kim said, sitting in her darkened bedroom with Rick in the afternoon, “Just cuz you bought me a video doesn’t mean I have to put out. Anyway, we’re friends.” She had just finished saying this when he snuck back up into her face and for a second she felt sure it was going to happen: First Contact. She bristled as he moved in for the kiss. Sharply she pulled away. “Fuck man, your breath smells like a taxidermist’s workbench — ”His face reminded her of many she had seen who came to Oregon to die. There was pathos in Rick. He was dark and squirrelly. Shy and eager to please, untrained and raw. Needful… Kim couldn’t get him to stop shifting around like a dog smoothing out a place to sleep. Problem was, sleep proved elusive those days. They would have to lessen their death-grip on speed/consciousness/life for that one…