Orphans

Alberta Street is a womb. Bright fundamental primary colors bleed like toboggans down its birth canal. The Know, La Sereneda flash by like candlelight as I ride my bike down its festive, dead street at dawn. I only do this in my daydreams because in reality I'm too stuck to get up before dawn or even noon, staying wet-nursed in my thoughts until it would be disgraceful even to the most sickled among us to keep lying in bed looking out the window at the old wooden trellis-looking carport of my attorney neighbor – she drives a really cool Porsche from the 80s - and at the trees and sky, waiting for someone to call or text, or waiting until I can convince myself that I am worth getting up for.

I wasn't always this way. It was about the time I moved into the house on Everett Street that I began to have this fearful longing when I saw families pushing their prams around like cotton candy carts in a world where sugar is good for you. My best friend from college, a blond haired, chubby rubric for confidence whom I met on the first day of freshman orientation in the quad sitting like an about to be squished bug on the grass, giving, loving soul that she was, went through the questions with me with an authority that I needed at the moment, then invited me to her dorm for dinner.

After college we rented a huge four-bedroom house on Everett Street in N.E. Portland where it starts to get hilly with a weather vane, using coffee shop tack boards to find Mark, a stuck-up guitar player, son of a lawyer in the mid-west somewhere, smoke-pot-in-the-back-of-the-pizza-store worker, piss in bottles in my room because the only bathroom is downstairs kind of guy, and Joe, petite red-haired, wears polyester pants and quirky shirts, sweet, guitar player also, but it's not something you as readily remembered because he didn't brag about it like Mark did.

We got along well. By that I mean that we didn't have any fist fights or yelling matches, just some mean looks from Mark from time to time because he knew he was being judged for the piss bottle thing, because he didn't even try to take care of it, and the house was really nice. I had the back bedroom that overlooked our rad overgrown lawn that became, through the spring and summer, a real Walt Whitman long-eared rabbit and field-mouse tumble. I don't remember the seasons there, most of my memories are of summer and the one memory I have of winter when Jack Shit and some other Seattle punks got snowed in at the house, we sat on the couch looking cool and watching “Gleaming the Cube.” Jack said he was celebate. “For how long,” someone said, laughing at him. “Indefinitely.” “It's just an excuse for not getting rejected,” I said. He looked at me, knowing I wanted to sleep with him. I felt stupid.

Everything changed when I started making fliers for shows and turning the basement into a club. April moved out and Mark moved out and these two people whose names I won't use moved in because the female of the couple and I didn't get along because she was really unintelligent and mean, which is the worst combination of characteristics a person can have. She worked at one of the jerk off joints on 82^nd and he returned the bottles that came to our house like seaweed. He was super nice, though. He reminded me of Eore and defended me one time saying, Cristen is my friend, as plain as a paper bag.

The shows were pretty much the same. The Portland scene was big back then, and the punks in Portland and Seattle were kind of all part of the same cesspool, and even though we wouldn't admit it, we liked each other and tried to hang out as often as we could. It usually went like this: a band we knew in Portland or up in Seattle decided they felt like playing, one of our friends from the band came over to drink and hang out in the backyard told us this, so I'd think to myself, who would be good with these fuckers? Like if it was mod-punk like the Riffs, I might ask some harder core band like the Obliterated to play the same show to balance them out, or if it was surf punk, which Riot Cop was back then, I might ask some band from out of town who was touring to play to draw more people so that crickets couldn't be heard chirping in the background.

It was as desolate then as it is now. During the day I either made fliers, sewed patches on my clothes, taped old videos like another State of Mind or the video for “TV party Tonight (all right!),” and thought about who I wanted to make out with. Toward dusk I started drinking. There were at least four or five people living in the house and they always had friends over, big amounts of forties being drunk, so I was never lonely. By around 10 o'clock I was always yelling about something, singing loudly, calling people, trying to prove that I was not dead, not dead and very, very capable of showing off my ability to inspire (annoy).

We had a bar in the house. It was a real bar, like something out of an 80s yacht movie. You know, a movie that features a yacht, like one with Goldie Hawn. It was faux wood, and not stocked very well, a few bottles of lower shelf vodka and whiskey, not much else besides the ability to imagine it tasted better. I liked to stand behind it and play cards with guys, it's a powerful thing to be behind a bar. One time Carl, this fucker who took advantage of me and vice vers when I was drunk, and I played dice. Hardly anyone was over that night so I was hanging out with him out of desperation. I don't like playing dice. It seems bad. But we were playing dice, and I really zenned out on what was going to be rolled next. I got to the point where I could predict what the next roll would be. I did it enough times in a row that it really started turning Carl on. He was impressed. I felt powerful; I was sitting behind the bar rolling dice and calling out the rolls before they hit the bar. I should have been satisfied, amazed at this. I should have just gone to bed by myself. I could have lay in bed like I did when I was in high school, before I called my mom from my boyfriend's backyard and convinced her to let me stay out all night by convincing her that she would be even cooler than she already was if she let me, when I used to sleep in my bed every night listening to Bob Marley and Van Morrison, thinking about how big everything was, looking at the patterns on my closed eyes, acknowledging I was there in my room, alone but less alone after thinking about being alone.