three- PDX

At around 10 p.m. a young man leaves Deschutes Brewery where he just had a fight with his girlfriend who walked out 20 minutes ago and is now on a bus headed back to her apartment. It’s cold and he wraps his scarf around his neck in a simple loop tie. He’s not sure where he is so he walks down the biggest street in the direction he thinks is downtown. Left with a cigarette and his pride, he decides not to call her to apologize and instead determines to walk back to her apartment on his own. He didn’t realize that he was almost an hour away on foot and that the clouds gathering above were about to take a long hard piss all over him.

Ten minutes of walking, smoking, and regretting finishing the pitcher of beer before attempting to chase after his girlfriend, the young man from out of town recognizes where he is. He sees The Boiler Room, a karaoke bar the couple went to the first time he came to visit, and realizes he’s walked into Chinatown. Feeling smug and proud of his genius navigation, like a true New Yorker, he struts into the closest convenience store and rewards himself with a fresh pack of cigarettes. A click of the lighter later the victory march resumes and he crosses Burnside Street into Downtown.

He passes Voodoo Doughnuts, waving at the line of hungry hungry hippies, drops a buck in the cup of the guitar wielding cowboy-goth hipster reciting the gospel according to Al Green to the newly college-graduated California emigrants on the corner of 3rd and Yamhill, and doles out cigarettes to three teenage hobos dipping their feet in one of the fountains near Pioneer Square. He knows he’s still far but the Hawthorne Bridge is in sight and across it is the Southeast part of town where the apartment is.

The bridge is longer than it looks and the wind faster and colder. The scarf is losing its warmth and the young man zips up his brown faux-fur bomber jacket to the neck. His legs begin to get tired as he reaches the middle of the bridge. The cold stings his hands and he forces them into his pocket, leaving a lit cigarette held loosely by his shaking lips. He looks ahead across the bridge at the town and feels sad. There are no skyscrapers and no bright lights. The buildings and houses are no taller than four stories and most of the lights are turned off. He realizes for the first time that he still has forty long mostly quiet and desolate blocks to walk on this cold and dim night in the Pacific Northwest. And as he breathes in deeply to muster his courage, he feels a cold wet drop of water land on his head and roll down his face. A few minutes later and nearing the end of the bridge, it begins to rain… hard.

The first ten blocks is painful. His legs start to cramp underneath his drenched jeans and his feet are wet and sore. Hawthorne Boulevard is a gradual uphill incline and there are points where it resembles California Street in San Francisco. There are a few cars driving around and fewer people on the street.

The next ten blocks takes him past a pub and a couple strip clubs, this city is known to have the most strip clubs per capita with 50. He thanks God for the strip clubs; the bright neon lights remind him of New York and the guys smoking outside are the only other people on the streets besides himself. For a few minutes he feels less lonely.

The rain lets up a little as he reaches Southeast 30th street. Just nine more blocks down, a left then five blocks to her apartment. Tired, wet, and starting to get depressed he makes it up the last uphill section of Hawthorne and sees the big funeral home he noticed on the bus heading downtown two and a half hours earlier. He smiles thinking about how close he is to the apartment.

The next nine blocks is bright and filled with people. He passes Cup and Saucer Café, Chopsticks, Cold Stone and Bridgeport Ale House. It’s raining harder but he no longer feels wet or sore. He’s numb but also relieved. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it under the awning of a Bank of America. Across the street is the Fred Meyer Supermarket that sits on the corner of Southeast 39th. He crosses the street, turns left onto 39th and he’s five blocks away from his girlfriend’s apartment on Belmont Street.

The rain has slowed to a drizzle and he feels his phone vibrating in his left jean pocket. He pulls it out and sees that he has 2 missed calls and a voicemail. Without checking who called or listening to the voicemail, tired and miserable he immediately dials his girlfriend ready to tell her he’s sorry. She has been waiting for him at the Walgreen’s on 39th and Belmont, worried and also sorry.

As he walks the last couple of blocks he remembers how he felt leaving Deschutes an hour earlier. It’s his fault that all over his body he is either sore or numb and every piece of clothing he has on is soaked all the way through. But every minute he had walked he thought about her and how he should have stopped her from leaving. Every minute he had walked he felt more and more sad that she wasn’t with him.

On the other side of the Walgreen’s parking lot, in front of the main entrance, she is standing in the rain looking across at the young man from the east coast. Both smile as he walks faster and faster towards her. It took him over an hour to find his way back and though she’s still mad she brings him close to her and starts to lead him back to the two-story apartment building. She asks him if he’s cold and tells him he’s an idiot for walking all the way back. He tells her he’s sorry and she replies that he’s an asshole.

They reach the apartment and head straight into the bedroom, shedding their wet clothes along the way. Naked they dive under the thick blanket, wrapping themselves in each other’s arms, each trying to keep warm in the other’s embrace. Outside the rain has stopped and it doesn’t take long for the two to fall asleep.

In the apartment below, unable to fall asleep, Dylan is sitting with her feet up on her couch and a six-pack of a local microbrew on her coffee table. Three of the bottles are empty. On her legs is her laptop playing another episode of Dead Like Me. She thinks the main character is a fictional T.V. version of her self, except for the undead grim reaper part. It’s after midnight and both the episode and the bottle in her hand come to an end. She opens another bottle and puts on another episode. In a little while, she’ll finish the last beer and she’ll lie down in bed waiting to fall asleep. Around the same time the two upstairs will wake up and have the makeup sex they were too cold to have before. All around her in the apartment complex, couples will be having some kind of sex: the married couple next door having angry sex, the lesbians across the courtyard having loud sex, and the dog in the apartment above them having guilty sex with a giant teddy bear. Another Saturday night in Portland, Oregon that Dylan is spending alone.

two- The Thursday Tattoo

Two lines meet, creating a sharp point. Seven sharp points, a star, surrounds a sacred centerpiece; a scroll, four numbers, and gold filigrees. Dylan draws a sheriff’s badge for a dead sheriff’s brother, who wants to memorialize his heroic sibling on his right shoulder. She alternates hands as she touches up the details. Her lines are straighter with her right hand and her curves bolder with her left. The sheriff’s brother jokes that she’s showing off. Dylan laughs politely; a two syllable monotone laugh, the kind you hear when you’re not worth a fake one. She has a right to be arrogant. Dylan can draw anything, with anything, better than most people can. She would have gone to some art school if her father would have paid for it. He bought her an economics degree instead.

Satisfied with the badge, Dylan hands the mockup to Nick so he can start engraving the symbol on the man’s shoulder. Dylan never touches the ink gun. She designs tattoos for people who come into the shop with either an original idea or an interesting story. The badge wasn’t original but the brother told a tearjerker. She also doesn’t let Nick pay her for the two hours she works each day, drawing and keeping the books. She calls it her hobby, an outlet for her artistic hunger, which is true. But she also feels guilty knowing that she makes more money in one day than her best friend makes in a week.

Nick’s tattoo shop is small but clean. There are two stations separated from the waiting area by hospital curtains. In the waiting area sits two worn out leather couches and a bean-bag to keep the customers’ muscles relaxed while they nervously wait to get thousands of holes drilled into their backs, arms, and ass cheeks. On the white walls are old concert posters that Nick buys off eBay. Nick is an audiophile and installed a surround sound stereo system in the shop but keeps the satellite radio off while he’s working. The buzz of the ink gun keeps him calm and focused. There aren’t any pictures of tattoos on the wall. They’re all on the shop’s website. Nick believes that people should come in with their own idea. If someone doesn’t know what they want, either Nick or Dylan decides for them.
The shop is well known, locally, for Nick’s talent and negotiable prices. The first year it was opened, Nick had three appointments and a few walk-ins a week. To get more customers, he started what became known as “Tattoo Thursday”, one day a week when all tattoos were priced by size: $25, $50, $100 for small, medium, and large. That first Thursday he had three appointments and 7 walk-ins. The word spread that he was actually good and more people came, on other days too. A year after the opening, Nick changed the name of his shop from Nick’s Tattoo Shop, he admits to a lack of literary creativity, to The Thursday Tattoo.

Dylan met Nick while interviewing with different banks and investment firms. Having just opened his tattoo shop, Nick worked as a bike messenger to keep himself from starving. While in the same elevator, Dylan couldn’t take her eyes off of one of his sleeves. The sleeve was complex and the tattoos intricately but smoothly interwoven together. But it was just one tattoo that Dylan couldn’t stop looking at. Tied up in the middle of a Celtic knot was the name Audrey. She didn’t realize it, but she had started humming “Moon River”. Nick laughed and started to sing out loud, “two drifters off to see the world...” Redder than her lipstick, surprised but impressed, Dylan laughed and sang along.

An hour after Dylan finished drawing the badge, Nick finishes tattooing it on the sheriff’s brother. He is the last tattoo of this long Thursday. He pays Dylan $50 dollars for his medium sized tattoo and she tells him not to scratch it. A few moments later, the man leaves content and weak and the shop is closed for the day.

Outside the streetlights flicker on and the new buds sparkle on the tree branches. It’s warm and the whoosh from the cars driving by is the only sound. Nick has prepared the shop for closing and the only lights left on are the lamps at the stations and on Dylan’s desk. As Dylan packs her bag under the dim light, Nick scrolls through his iPod. He stops at a song and clicks it onto the speakers surrounding the dim-lit room. “Moon River wider than a mile…” The gentle guitar and Audrey’s voice filling the room, Nick blushes at the smile on Dylan’s face as she turns towards Nick, leaning against the door in jeans, flip-flops, and a black v-neck sweater with the sleeves rolled up. “Dance with me,” Nick says softly as Dylan walks towards him and the door. With a glow in her eyes she looks up into Nick’s, now standing close enough to hear his heart take an extra beat. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says gently. Bringing Nick’s hands up to her lips, she leaves a kiss on his fingers and walks towards the door.

As she goes out into the street, he watches her walk down the gray and orange sidewalk, her golden-brown hair tossing side to side. A warm breeze hits Nick’s face carrying with it a sweet fragrance. She turns the corner and Nick is alone.

The wind picks up, cold and thick, and Nick goes back inside. Audrey has stopped singing and the guitar hits its last note.

one- Meet Dylan

Inside the large cubicle-filled room of “We make money off of your money” Inc., our female protagonist slumps over her desk and pushes the keys of her keyboard down with her cheap French-manicured nails. The nail on her right index frames a small chip from a jammed Y button. The monitor screen frames her coded corporate creation, numbers tangled within words attached to other words; alphanumeric bullshit. She watches the 9 in the bottom right corner become a 0 and sits up with a smile in the corner of her mouth.

Imagine Mona Lisa as a number crunching Twenty-something with a quarter life crisis. Imagine her turning around in her computer chair; modern day Mona posing in a blouse from Saks hidden under an argyle from Macy’s, her eyes grazing within the black plastic fencing of non-prescription Wayfarers. Blue-green like Christmas lights, her eyes look towards the lunchroom. She waits until someone else walks in then leaves her cubicle.

She usually waits for more people to enter the lunchroom but today she doubled the distance of her morning run, mid-run, and had to miss breakfast. It’s Tuesday, and on Tuesdays she brown-bags her regrets, sprinkled lightly on homemade Caesar salad with a lot of dressing. There’s a Caesar dressing loophole in her rigid diet. Not that it matters.

She was a cross-country runner in prep-school. Her body is naturally athletic, slim and toned with legs that make pinstripes sexy. Her skin is a smooth light tan and atop her shoulders sits a pretty face with almond eyes and curved cheeks, one dimple on the left one. She was born with a naturally fast metabolism and can eat at least three solid meals a day but settles for two smaller meals after a big breakfast before work. One of an ever-shrinking list of similarities she has to her father, she tries not to work on an empty stomach.

She eats like a prisoner or a soldier. Hunched over her food, she eats like it’s a mission; with a steady rhythm, calculated chew to swallow ratio, and not a single moment to actually “taste” what entered her mouth. She doesn’t speak to anyone while she eats. She only responds when a coworker talks directly to her. It’s like church. When the guy next to you asks you a question, your answer is quick, quiet, and meant to end the conversation. Sometimes she’ll even bring a book to the lunchroom and pretend to read it. She has no desire to make friends at work. She has no desire at all while she’s at work. This job for her is like a waiting room; a waiting room where you get paid. But she’s not waiting for her dreams or her wishes to come true. She stopped wishing years ago. She’s waiting to have dreams again.

A quarter after and she stops eating before she gets full. Unlike her father, our heroine tries not to work on a full stomach. Meet Dylan. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Dylan works on an empty heart.