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The Third Place, One Story

November 16, 2011 by Miss Anthrope

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of the Third Place lately.  I came across a short documentary recently about Urbus Orbis – the quintessential Third Place – where Tom Handley mentioned The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, the book from which this term originated.  It was from this point that the obsession started…or rather, the research began.

I’ve always had a Third Place – for much of my life that is.  From the time I was able to release myself from my father’s domineering clutches.  And maybe that’s where it all started: from those clutches – because it was safer to be surrounded by others, even strangers, who were willing to protect me from the penetrating talons of this paranoid lunatic, clearly high on cocaine.

These Third Places were predictable enough to provide comfort and safety yet fluid and dynamic enough to entertain the imagination and inspire the intellect.  A meeting place for friends, and for strangers who would become friends.

For me, it all started in 1987, in one particular coffee shop in Eugene, Oregon – a place that my father deemed safe enough to drop my mother and me off for an hour before picking us up again in his jalopy.  In that brief time, the people who I met in this coffee shop ignited an involvement in the punk scene that lasted years.

Despite the strength of my father’s paranoid grasp, I managed to leave when I was fourteen, finding solace in these Third Places.  Being a penniless kid, the Third Place became the street.  The coffee shop closed down and the punks started meeting on a certain corner on the university campus.  Sometimes, the freaks in town for Rainbow Gatherings or Grateful Dead shows would co-mingle.  We would meet story-tellers, drug dealers, local characters, and schizophrenics, and they were all equal in the eyes of The Corner and those who loitered there.  A person would never be lonely on The Corner.

When I was fifteen, I hitchhiked to Portland, where the Third Place was immediately apparent: all of the punks and street kids hung out at Pioneer Square.  I immediately found my family there, within the first hours of arriving.  And in the Square, many horrible and wonderful things happened.  I have memories of people who are now dead and people who I occasionally see on the streets still, people who would never recognize me now.  On New Years Eve 2005, one woman I used to know asked me if I could spare some change.  There were lines on her face but she looked the same – she used to be a friend.  I didn’t say anything.  It was too complicated.  I was walking with two friends, dressed in a black silk evening gown on my way to the salsa club.  I just said, “Sorry.”

In the following years, the Third Place took the form of various cafes, coffee shops and bars, often where I worked – which, by definition, should not be a Third Place because the Third Place is neither work nor home.  But it sometimes happens that way, when one finds oneself drawn to these places off-work, when all your friends are there.  One of these places was Urbus Orbis.  There were so many beautiful – and terrible – conversations and interactions with strangers that happened at these Third Places.  Magical things happened.  Mundane things happened.  Terrible things happened.  There was addiction, depression, crisis, drama, and emotional outbursts.  Those who congregated there were producing great art, great music, great writing – and some of these people we saw every day and once knew well, have gone on to claim their hard-earned fame.

Some of us, however, just happened to be in the right place at the right time but managed to squander opportunities and to take the wrong turn.  We find ourselves lost and isolated, constantly reminiscing, perpetually nostalgic; present only physically, living in a different time and place in our minds.  I never thought I would be one of those people.  But I awoke one day and realized this is who I am now.  And all of the great things I’m doing, and all of the great things I will be doing soon – they suddenly don’t matter anymore.  They seem too structured, materialistic, mundane, riddled with rules and tiny boxes.  I find myself longing for the ebb and flow of chaos and unpredictability.  I long to know those I once knew.  But those who I once knew are not those people anymore, and time can never be reversed.

Despite feeling pathetic, a lonely loser in the midst of a mid-life crisis, I decided to embrace this nostalgia and to wallow in it.  It was at this point that I came across the short documentary on Urbus Orbis, made just before Urbus closed, in 1997.  It brought to my conscious attention that which seems obvious now: the concept of the Third Place.  So rather than simply being lost in a different time and place, I’ve begun to pursue this idea.  And it really is apropos.

I recently made a decision to buy a neighborhood bar…not a specific bar – I still need a few years to save the money.  It’s a decision I’ve been going back-and-forth on for years, but for some reason – suddenly – it seemed like the right thing to do, worth dismissing all of the fears that have plagued me for years.  I realized that, without being conscious of it – before it was defined for me – I have been stewing on this idea of the Third Place for a long time.

The Hideout was an appropriately named bar, located in an industrial area, near a highway, on a dead-end street that lead to a factory – a place you would never expect to find a bar.  It had a neighborhood dive feel, dimly lit and smelling of decades of stale beer and cigarettes.  During the day, around noon, the Polish factory workers would get off of their ungodly early shift and sit at the bar, drinking shot after shot of cheap vodka and peppermint schnapps.  “Just one more,” they would always say.  After a while, I realized, they didn’t really mean it.

I had been wishing and praying – in the way that atheists do, anyway – for a job as a bartender.  It was around this time that the owner of the Hideout Inn showed up to the coffee shop where I was working.  She and I started talking – about something completely unrelated from what I recall – and eventually, she asked me if I wanted to work for her.  I said hell yes!  Later on, she told me that she’d liked my dreadlocks…how disappointed she was when I showed up to work after cutting them off.  I think she was trying to attract the hipster crowd (from what I hear, it was a success).

The owner was a woman in her thirties who had bought the Hideout with her husband just before I started working there.  That old bar held a special significance for her because her father had been a regular there, and after he passed away, she decided to buy the place.  She had an anything-goes attitude, which I’m sure the regulars appreciated.  She encouraged me to give away free drinks every now and then – to keep people coming back – and she never discouraged me from drinking on the job.  But despite being the drunk that I was, I wanted to stay in control of myself and keep a handle on the more rambunctious customers, so I saved my drink for later when I would have a beer or a shot of whiskey with some of the regulars, at the end of the night.  Those were good times and regretfully, I didn’t work there long.  Despite this, I’ll always remember the owner of the Hideout Inn.

Both she and Tom – the owner of Urbus Orbis – shared something in common: while they were proprietors of a “great good place”, they never over-extended themselves to control it.  They seemed to share the philosophy that it’s the regulars who control the Third Place – it is a place owned by the people.  So when I finally do own this bar, this Third Place I’ve been dreaming of, I may have to fight all of my instincts to do it, but I’ll be turning it over to the regulars.  Because in my life today, this is the missing piece.

Posted in Chicago, Journal Entry, Life, Philosophy, sociology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Urbus Orbis

November 5, 2011 by Miss Anthrope

It’s November, 1996.  I’m twenty-two years old.  I board a one-way flight from Seattle to Chicago and arrive in Wicker Park with everything I own: a cat in one hand, a small suitcase of insufficient clothing in the other, and a few hundred dollars to live on.  My new home is a brownstone three-bedroom flat with two front rooms, bay windows and polished wood floors.  Like my apartment in Seattle, there isn’t any furniture, it’s just a hollow space where the sound of your own voice ricochets off the walls and echoes back to you like a symphony.  It’s not really my apartment, I’m just loitering.  It’s actually the apartment of an on-and-off boyfriend, a hot thirty-four year old Jewish engineer who moved to Seattle just about the time I moved to Chicago – but the company he works for is still paying for the old apartment.  I had agreed to pay him some rent as soon as I could get myself on my feet, but instead I drink the money away.  I’m pissed at him for not being in love with me and living in his apartment free of charge for six months is my revenge.  I know.  I’m an asshole.  No need to lecture.

There isn’t much in the neighborhood.  The main streets are littered with vacant storefronts – some boarded up – and cheap furniture stores like used car lots, but there’s one coffee shop I come across called Urbus Orbis.  I walk across creaky wood floors and stand at the counter in front of an angry woman making lattes.  She has short, messy dyed red hair, a white shirt and no bra, and she won’t look at me.  I’m uncomfortable.  I need a job.  After what seems like an eternity of self-consciously shifting back and forth and pretending to look around, I ask her if they’re hiring.

” I don’t think so.”  She doesn’t look at me.  I walk away.

The floor at the apartment is hard and I need something to sleep on ASAP, so I go up to the futon store on the third floor of the same building.  There are no other customers, only three stoned men standing around, lecherously watching me as I walk around the space, wood floors, exposed brick walls, tall warehouse ceilings, and furniture everywhere.  I pick out an inexpensive mattress, no frame, pay for it in cash, and ask if they can deliver it down the street.

That evening, the delivery guy brings the futon over.  He’s bald with a long goatee and a creepy stare, a black trench coat type who looks like he might still play Dungeons and Dragons in his late-twenties.  He sees my empty apartment and asks me how long I’ve been there.  I tell him I got into town yesterday and don’t know anyone, etc.  He tells me he’s going to this bar  down the street to meet some friends later if I want to come down and meet some people, it’ll be real mellow, I should come down.  But when I get there, it’s just him, sitting at the bar, looking morose.  The place is empty and I realize I’ve been conned into a date with someone who looks like Anton Lavey.  But it turns out to be not such a bad thing.  He says he knows the owner of Urbus Orbis and he thinks they’re hiring.  He says he can try to get me a job there – and he does.

So I have a job at the local coffee shop within the first week of moving to Chicago.

But it turns out it wasn’t just any coffee shop – it was the apex of Wicker Park, the main artery of the  intellectual and artistic community and drug culture.  The line between those who worked there and those who frequented the place was blurry and after the cafe closed at 11pm, our conversation would spill out into the bar on the corner, where we stayed until the early hours of the morning.  Among my closest friends was an off-again-on-again crack head with a newscaster face and a propensity for mechanics’ jump suits and cheap vodka, an old school Wicker Park cab driver who sold ecstasy, a woman who would eventually turn out to be a suburban house wife, and a multitude of artists, writers, film makers, computer geeks, alcoholics and junkies.  Urbus Orbis – loosely translated as “the city of the world” in Latin – was a place where the unwanted were embraced.  The first place that ever felt like home.

I’ve never been one to look back, never been one to reminisce, always moving forward, forward, forward.  But something has changed.  A switch has flipped.  Now I reminisce all the time, dividing my mind between where I am now and where I once was.  Try not to judge and I’ll do the same.

I was going to go to the Dominican Republic next year for my vacation…but now I’m thinking Chicago, maybe St. Louis and Madison.  I’d like to interview some of the people I used to know, some of the people I lost, some of the people who I’ve found again, and get their stories about Urbus Orbis, find out who they were and who they are now.  I want to write a book that’s set at Urbus, or loosely based on that time, or at least a collection of stories, or interviews…or something…I don’t know what it’ll be yet.

I thought maybe it was all in my head…what Urbus Orbis meant to the neighborhood.  But then, I came across this twenty-minute documentary (Urbus Orbis: a short documentary by Andrew Huff) which validated everything – all of the nostalgia, all of the stories, the memories, the best and most dysfunctional time of my life.  I wish it were here again…Anyway, the documentary is rough, divided into two parts.  I know just about everyone in it (though there are some important people missing).  I would estimate that it was filmed some time in 1997, not too long before Urbus Orbis shut the doors forever.

If you were one of the many people to spend twelve hours a day at this “third place”, or if you have a story related to it, let me know.  I would love to talk with you.  I might even meet you for a beer in Chicago in the spring…

Posted in Chicago, Life | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

Lost Love and Chicago Summers

August 20, 2011 by Miss Anthrope

[Originally written years ago...]

The first time I visited Chicago, I stayed in a seedy hotel in what is now an upscale neighborhood on the north side, near Wrigley Field. The air was hot and moist. The staircase to my room was dark and smelled of stale urine, cheap wine, and a failed attempt to hide the smell with a pungent cleaner. I wasn’t excited to see him, like I should have been. Not only was I dispassionate, I was nearly comatose. There was a large crack in the ceiling above the bed. I lied in the bed for hours, my skin sticking to the starched white sheets that still smelled of bleach, blankly staring at that crack, waiting for Mike to arrive.

I was still living in Seattle at the time and Mike was traveling around the U.S. for work, avoiding our relationship, sending the rent home every month. Exhausted from being on the road constantly, working long days, sleeping rarely, and eating nothing but the food the highways offered him, he arrived an empty shell. We had been maintaining a long-distance relationship for six months. But it was this trip to Chicago that made me realize it was the end of Us. There was a part of us both that cared too much – cared so much that we killed what once lived. I didn’t realize at that time that my resentment for his leaving had become an impenetrable armor, turning me off and shutting him out. But I drove him away with my fears, my jealousy and insecurity. And if there was anyone to blame for his leaving Seattle, it was I.

I was a young and selfish fool who couldn’t be satiated and would never be appeased, like all the other young and selfish fools. There was no way for me to know that I might one day look back twelve years later to feel a malignant sense of regret. The memory of this time clings to me and has become as much a part of my heart as the blood running through it or the oxygen that feeds it. And the qualities in Mike that I was too immature to appreciate, the qualities that once were a source of contention that pressed deeply on the sore spot of my soul, are now qualities that have become an integral part of me. But I’m digressing. After that, after Mike left Chicago, I sat broke and aimless and empty, staring out across Lake Michigan, and through the waves of heat rising off the pavement was the Chicago skyline, looking old and wise. That skyline had seen it all before. It made me feel small and insignificant. I never wanted to leave that spot.

The next time I visited Chicago, a couple of years later, I stayed with a friend of mine who was shacked up at the time with his lawyer boyfriend in a grandiose apartment, an old greystone with stained and polished wood trim, large bay windows, and fifteen-foot ceilings. I’d never seen such an apartment on the west coast. It was situated on a quiet side street lined with trees that looked as old as the city itself, with thick trunks and majestic winding branches. It was May and it was cold. That was when I realized that Chicago didn’t have spring. Having failed to pack my winter wardrobe, I spent much of my time indoors, obsessively baking apple pies, and in the evenings, I would drink red wine with Josh until we both passed out. The one night we did go out and I nearly got into a fist fight with a drag queen and I still can’t remember why.

Finally, on a blisteringly cold November day that same year, days before Thanksgiving, I arrived at the Chicago airport with a single suitcase in one hand and a very pissed cat in the other. And I stayed for five years.

I got a job that first week at a coffee shop called Urbis Orbis in pre-gentrified Wicker Park, back when Milwaukee Avenue was littered with empty storefronts and cheap furniture stores with signs in Spanish and plastic coverings on the sofas, the kind that people didn’t take off when they brought them home. There was filth everywhere, trash on the streets. No one seemed to notice or care. Chicago was the first place that ever felt like home.

The coffee shop was a magnet for every drug addict and wayward individual in the neighborhood. Aside from the homeless, the prostitutes and drug addicts, customers included an eclectic mix of chess-playing computer geeks, aspiring movie producers, and twenty-something hipsters who all came regularly to drink coffee all night and take abuse from the beautiful yet dysfunctional women who worked there. The only customer who commanded respect from everyone who knew him – and everyone knew him – was Joe. Joe was an older guy, maybe in his mid-sixties, and looked inarguably deranged. The story was that he had sustained a heavy hit on the head during a construction job which had left him brain damaged. He never conversed at length but ended every sentence with “Ain’t it?” and would laugh heartily as though he’d just delivered a punch line, baring a set of mangled rotting teeth, then would go sit in the corner, drink his coffee and stare into space for hours. Joe never once paid for coffee.

The employees at Urbis Orbis would go to work either drunk or hung-over, take turns getting stoned in the back, and continue to drink throughout the shift. One woman sold dope out of the shop and another was stealing money to support a cocaine habit. After work, we would drink at the bar on the corner until the early hours of the morning, along with any of the coffee shop regulars who stayed around long enough to join us. I spent a lot of time those days with one of the regulars, a thirty-four year old guy named Derick with the handsome face and large jaw of an evening news caster and a full head of slick black hair. You would never know by looking at him that he was a crack-head or that he lived out of his van. When he opened his mouth, though, you realized there was something not quite right and upon closer inspection, he had a pale and greasy complexion with cheap vodka oozing from deep pores. He was damaged, there was no doubt, but no more than the rest of us. What made him different was that he had a heart of gold and was one of the most observant and intelligent people I’ve ever known.

I remember one evening, an evening like any other debaucherous evening at the coffee shop, Derick was sitting at the counter next to another regular, Shane. Shane, resting his head on his hands, began to turn a pale shade of blue. Derick was the only one who noticed. Quickly and discreetly, Derick picked Shane up and pulled him into a dark corner to perform CPR and return the life once again to his limp body before the ambulance arrived. Shane had just returned from the bathroom after shooting a large amount of heroin into his arm.

Oddly, it was this time, living in Chicago, that I remember most fondly.

Chicago. A Bukowski-esque city, rough around the edges, climatically bipolar, self-segregated into neighborhoods pressed up against one another…each steeped in a distinct culture…each speaking a different language, saturated with bars advertising “Zimne Piwo” — “cold beer” in Polish, had a certain beauty that I craved in my early twenties. The beauty of suffering. It seemed that there was even an unuttered truth, a forbidden knowledge, that the whole city suffered together – suffered the cold, suffered the heat, suffered the filth, the gunshots outside the windows, the dealers on the corners and the prostitutes walking the streets, suffered the bewitching torment that was Chicago. And this suffering somehow brought people together and made them stronger.

Strangers on the street would strike up conversations on the first day it snowed. When it was beautiful, magical, before the snow began to rise six feet along the sides of the street and turn black from pollution, while it was still warm enough to snow, before the temperature dropped below zero. People on the street struck up conversations on the first warm days, when the dragonflies were mating, before the heat became unbearable. And when the heat became unbearable, we adapted. The children in the ghettos and the barrios would run and laugh and play in the fire hydrants as the water flooded the streets. People would drive by slowly as the children washed the cars by spraying water from the hydrant. The heat would rise and the moisture in the air would grow heavy. The earth itself would swell as breathing became arduous. The sky’s complexion would grow luminous with unnatural color and suddenly…a climax of thunder and lightning would fill the sky as the torrential rains fell and the streets flooded, cooling the air and washing the filth off the city streets.

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The Colors of Fes

August 20, 2011 by Miss Anthrope

 

[Originally written years ago...this was my first husband I refer to in the story, FYI]

The Medina is like an arid jungle. There are countless ways to get lost or to die in the jungle without a guide. And the litter of dead, abandoned kittens lying along the edge of the path is a stark reminder of that fact. The Medina is a veritable maze, the buildings and cobblestone the color of pale clay. There are no cars that run down these narrow streets. There’s hardly enough room for people to pass one another. The people, like the old city, are comfortable and settled in their ways, unblemished by development, unmarred by Western influence. The men wear jalebas and shuffle along in leather slippers with pointed toes, the women wear hooded caftans. The old men drink sweet mint tea and sit together in silence. When the donkeys pass, they brush you with the side of their round bellies, their fur course and musty. The decrepit buildings on either side of you block out the harsh desert sun. It smells like the dust of ancient ruins, Moroccan spices, and freshly-tanned leather.

Most of the shops in the Medina are small and dim, like caves burrowed into stone. Each craft is passed down from generation to generation, and you are more likely to see a small child working in the shop than you are an old man. In Morocco, the children are the workforce. Everything is hand-crafted with astounding detail. It is all art. The vibrant, woven rugs of wool and silk. The silver trays and teapots, engraved with intricate designs. The small colored tea glasses, adorned with gold paint. The glistening polished bowls, plates and tiles. Vivid colors bloom in defiance from the monochromatic desert landscape.

I have a thing for rugs and I have traveled across the world to find one.

When you visit a rug shop, you are expected to relax and take your time while they unroll a multifarious assortment of rugs at your feet. They make you comfortable, sit you on a long couch of rich velvet fabric, and serve you syrupy green tea made with fragrant handfuls of fresh mint. They hold the teapot high above the tiny glass as they pour, allowing the hot liquid to splash onto the silver tray.

The first rug shop we visit is the largest in the Medina, set up in an old palace. They take us up to the roof to admire the view, to see the labyrinth from above, to watch the leather tannery, where men holding large sheets of cow skin stand knee-high in clay vats of henna and saffron and indigo. After we descend the grand staircase back to the shop, I try to relax as I sip my tea, surrounded by piles of rugs, marble walls, and gold accents, but I find it impossible. The shopkeeper and I share no common language. Our conversation consists of only nods and smiles and confused looks. The culture is so foreign to me that I’m constantly worried about ignorantly offending someone, not staying long enough to drink tea, struggling with my inherently American impatience. When I stand to leave, unable to communicate my apologies other than by the exaggerated look on my face, the man hurriedly unrolls more rugs to show me, and in a frenzy of unknown words and desperate glances, I walk away. His desperate countenance fades into a disapproving one.

I find myself again lost in the maze. My husband wants to veer off the path we’re on and follow another path which narrows and moves upward toward a set of dilapidated apartment buildings with small windows cut into stone. I have a bad feeling about this. As I’m following him, walking along the narrow path, I find myself surrounded by a gang of small children mottled with dirt. I don’t like children. They make me nervous. They begin speaking to me in French. I futilely tell them to get lost in English. They continue to bombard me with French and as they begin to laugh, I can see they are laughing at me, laughing at the stupid tourist, laughing at the fear in my eyes. A boy grabs the end of my skirt and lifts it up and they all laugh and I want to hit him, bad. I suddenly feel alone, surrounded by a pack of sadistic mongrels. Tears well in my eyes. I spin around in the direction I came from and walk away quickly, almost running, leaving my husband behind me with the echoes of laughter.

“Salaam alaykum.” Several women, smiling, wearing vibrant caftans and head scarves of lustrous satin, are sitting on the porch as we arrive at the house of the groom’s family. Their faces do not betray any question as to who we are or why we have come.

“Alaykum salaam,” I respond.

We remove our shoes at the door and enter to find our American friend and his Moroccan wife. She is is stunning, with her dark hair tied back in curls and a beautiful blue lace caftan stretched across her pregnant belly. She introduces us to her mother and father, and although we do not speak the same language, they each, in turn, cradle our hands in both of theirs for a moment, and with smiling eyes, they welcome us. The front room is large and open, with high ceilings and wall-to-wall carpet. People fill the room, some sitting and some standing, all family. The room seems to be divided – men talking with men and women talking with women, and only occasionally, a furtive glance between the younger people of opposite sexes. Several generations live in this house together. If there is a disagreement between family members, the entire family gets involved to resolve it. Privacy is a word unknown to them.

We sit in silence on the couch, steeping in our aching self-consciousness, as the servant brings us tea. A joyous feeling permeates the room. One of the servants, a jubilant round woman, unleashes a shrill cry, and suddenly everyone in the room breaks into song, people dancing and clapping. My husband had bought a beautifully embroidered jaleba to wear for the occasion, but as I look around the room, I notice that all the men are wearing suits and ties.

The family doctor has provided documentation to affirm that the bride is a virgin. The dowry has been paid. Now is the time when the groom’s family pours into the street, a colossal singing procession, to meet and offer gifts to the family of the bride. In the meantime, the bride is preparing for the wedding. The female members of her family paint her hands and feet with henna as she sits, displayed on her lofty throne before a grand wall of tiny colored tiles, a garland of ivy hung above her head. The two families melt together to become one, and as the band of Berber men in yellow robes play wooden flutes and drums, everyone dances and sings with intoxicating fervor. The bride holds her hands in front of her to dry as the groom takes his place beside her. The two are distant cousins but have only met once before this day. The groom’s family presented him with photos of five different women from which to choose. Now the chosen one sits, an eighteen-year-old with round cheeks, dark red lips, and dark curls upswept into a golden crown to match her necklace and the gold lace that accents a dark and lustrous green caftan. The groom is twenty years old, with a long thin face and long nose, wearing a black suit, white shirt and tie. The groom is beaming, but the bride rarely smiles. The groom was not chosen.

Several days later, we are invited to join in a feast to commemorate the death of the eldest woman in the family. There are two knee-high tables set up on opposite ends of the front room, one for the women, the other for the men. I am invited to sit at the men’s table with my husband, which I am told is an honor, though I wonder if the men simply don’t want a Western woman corrupting the women’s table. I take my place on the cushion as one of the two servants, a mournful eight-year-old girl serves us bread. She was recently purchased from a rural town outside of Fes. I am told she will be treated well, treated as a member of her new family. But she will never see her siblings, her mother, or her father, again.

It seems the Moroccan middle class attempt to distance themselves from the lower classes through ostentatious displays of wealth – owning servants, holding lavish weddings where no expense is spared – though they are far from wealthy. One might compare them to the middle class of the U.S., who buy the illusion of wealth on credit, spending well beyond their means to purchase prestigious education, large houses, new cars, and the latest technology. They separate themselves from impoverished Americans, going so far as to deny the existence of poverty in the U.S.. “We live in one of the wealthiest nations in the world,” so the mantra echoes. But never have I seen such poverty as in the United States, where the illusion of equal opportunity strips the poor from any hope of dignity or respect. It seems in other countries, there is a certain dignity that even the destitute wear well.

The jovial round servant brings out a silver tray of couscous and lamb nearly the size of the table. The men begin to ravage the food with the fervor of starved dogs. I don’t eat meat, but I don’t dare to dishonor the family with such trivialities. I pick up a piece of bread and fold it around the couscous, fearing it may fall on the way to my mouth. Next, I pull off a small piece of the lamb and put it in my mouth, chewing slowly. It’s difficult to chew and I fear I may have to swallow the bite whole. There are no spices, only the flavor of death, of carcass. I swallow and proceed to eat couscous, hoping no one will notice my lack of enthusiasm for the meat. I notice my husband – left handed – is eating with his left hand and I surreptitiously nudge him with my knee. In Morocco, you eat with your right hand, clean your ass with your left, and the two are not to be confused. He continues, oblivious to the occasional looks of the other men.

I had read somewhere that when sharing a meal in Morocco, it is a considered great honor if someone offers you food from their own hand.

There is a man at the table who is as old as the desert itself. He is frail and moves slowly, couscous clinging to his mouth as he eats with great difficulty, his skin so pale that you can see right through him, straight to the face of death. He is the husband of the woman who died, and is now the oldest, the most honored and respected, member of the family. His eyes are glassy and red, and he squints as though it gives him great pain to hang on to life so tentatively. He takes a lump of couscous between his thumb and two fingers and presses it into a sticky ball. He catches my eye and extends his arm to me. I don’t understand at first and I want to look away. He nods his head to me, gesturing for me to take it. I smile and look at the lump of couscous all pressed together between his trembling fingers and I take it, with my right hand, and with a nod and a smile which I hope will communicate my gratitude.

We stroll back to our fifteen-dollar hotel room, breathing in the rare peaceful night. The incessant peddlers leave us alone, until tomorrow. Back at the room, I smoke hashish, open the French doors, and step onto the balcony. I crouch, unnoticed, watching the tiny people walk below me until sleep beckons me. I awake in the middle of the night to a two inch long cockroach crawling across my head.

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Alberta Street

August 20, 2011 by Miss Anthrope

[Originally written years ago...my how Alberta Street has changed!]

I fell in love with Alberta Street on a warm October Sunday, after the curtain of night had smothered the street and the moon laughed down at the loneliness in my belly from his lofty throne.

I had spent the day moving into a new apartment. The building was painted a flamboyant teal with blood red doors and bay windows and was located on a tree-lined street just off of N.E. Alberta and Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard. I moved from a quiet and mind-numbingly safe S.E. Portland neighborhood, a neighborhood teeming with large Victorian houses owned by forty- and fifty-something heterosexual white couples, with pristinely manicured yards where children laughed and played. Hawthorne Street was only blocks away, where waves of suburban tourists coming to shop on weekends brushed past teenagers with tight jeans, layered hair, and ironic mustaches, lamenting for the 1980′s they had missed while in diapers.

Alberta Street, on the other hand, had character. Grit. That city feel that I had longed for since moving back to Portland nine months before. It was a neighborhood where not everyone was white, thank god, though at some point during my twelve-year absence from the city, the neighborhood was infiltrated by an abundance of young white artists. Last Thursday and the Alberta Art Scene was born. Which made the neighborhood all the more enticing since I was also an artist, a leech coming to feed on the energy and momentum of an infantile art scene.

One might call it random chance, some might call it luck – still others may call it a curse – that I should happen upon a local bar on my first night in the neighborhood that exemplified the essence of Alberta Street. Burrowing in a dark and smoky corner was a stunning example of how this eclectic and unlikely mix of characters became suspended in a warm solution, in the womb of a community that accepts all who have been rejected.

It was a hell of a move that day What should have taken an hour took seven. Although I didn’t have many things to move, I had to make several trips across town after the ten-foot truck I reserved turned out to be only a small van. And my friend, Dan, and I spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to squeeze my oddly-shaped black velvet couch through the apartment door, uncommonly small even for an early twentieth century apartment building. We were able to get it partially through the door after four hours, then had to spend another hour trying to get it back out after I realized, or was finally able to admit, that it would never fit. I ended up leaving the couch in the lobby until I sold it, a few weeks later, to some hipster from Los Angeles for a quarter of what I paid for it three months before.

I had also been blown off that same day by some musician I’d been on a couple of dates with. He’d offered to help me move the day before, but when I called him at noon, he was already drunk and he told me he couldn’t help me. He didn’t answer my second call and I never heard from him after that. So after all this, and the previous week spent solely packing and cleaning the old apartment, I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Every limb was bruised and my body ached. Nothing sounded better than to wash off the sweat and grime, and the stench of things past, put on a nice skirt and a little musk, hop on my bike, and check out one of the local bars. So I left the piles of unopened boxes. And this is what I did.

There was something enticing about The Nest. There was a makeshift sign out front and the door was open, allowing one to peek in from the street to see the kind of quiet dimly-lit neighborhood bar that a woman could rest her tired bones in. Approaching the bar, the smell of stale booze and cigarettes poured out, reminiscent of the dives I used to frequent in Chicago, and oddly comforting. The floor was covered in a thin layer of cheap carpet and tables with ripped black vinyl chairs lined the wall across from the bar. There was a pool table in the back and colorful glass lamps from the ’70′s hung from the ceiling by thick chains. It was about eight o’clock on a Sunday night and the bar was nearly empty. My soul was thirsty. I pulled up a stool and ordered a scotch on the rocks.

The bartender was a guy in his late twenties with a short beard and greasy brown hair tied back into a ponytail. He wore a ripped tee shirt and his icy blue eyes had a far-away look, like someone on the brink of madness. I told him that I’d just moved down the street and he introduced himself as Phil, shook my hand, and welcomed me to the neighborhood. I wasn’t used to Portland bartenders being friendly. Hell, I wasn’t used to anyone in Portland being friendly. People in Portland are like the weather, cool and cloudy. At least they were in the neighborhood I was coming from. He introduced me to one of the regulars at the bar, a scruffy-faced black guy named Mike, with nonthreatening chubby cheeks and an infectious laugh. It turned out that Mike knew everyone in the neighborhood, and as the hours passed and the bar filled, he introduced me to the other regulars. Little did I know that I’d be sitting there six hours later.

Apparently, The Nest opened in January of that year and used to be a bar called Joe’s Place. There were still remnants of Joe’s place. A lot of the old soul and Motown on the jukebox. A poster of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior near the pool table. While some of the people that used to frequent Joe’s Place still went to The Nest, this bar had become a meeting place for a surprisingly diverse group of people from the neighborhood. In fact, I’d never seen such a diverse group of people in one bar, a mix of different ages and sexual orientations, colors, styles and ethnicities, and all seemed to welcome these differences unconditionally, which was evidence of the beauty of this neighborhood, this community. It was an indication of good things to come. A cold beer for the soul.

I met Joe one night at the bar months later. He was a short, round, black man in his mid-sixties. He was quiet and radiated wisdom but his eyes were sad and the sadness clung to his words as he spoke. His wife had died years ago and now he lived alone, ate alone, slept alone. He had owned Joe’s place for decades before he sold it. When I asked him why he bought the place, he said, “I figured I might as well own a bar since I spent so much damn time in them.” Sadness hid behind his laugh. When I asked him why he’d decided to sell it, he said he just needed a change. That was all. But the space between us became thick with things unsaid. I’d heard rumors that Joe’s Place had collapsed from mismanagement, but after talking to Joe that night, none of that mattered. He was just another one of us who sat at the bar waiting until someone came along who was willing to listen. I was that person on that particular night. And he was too.

Meanwhile, down the street, I had completed putting the finishing touches on my new apartment. All of the furniture from around the world, the hand-carved woods and colorful hand-woven rugs, had been strategically and carefully arranged; the kitchen fully stocked; the art hung on the walls. That apartment, though much smaller than the last, felt more comfortable. I felt at home at last. But it was more than just that apartment.

There was a lot I didn’t know that first night I wandered into The Nest. That I would still be going there regularly years later, for instance, and that I would meet several of my close friends there. That I would fall in love while sitting on one of those ripped-up barstools to a man who would one day be my husband. That Mike, the cheerful man who introduced me to nearly everyone I knew in the neighborhood, would eventually develop a reputation for grabbing women’s breasts in states of black-out, and would one day lose his job and home to alcoholism. That not everyone in the neighborhood always got along, and that even some of the regulars were destined to get kicked out of the bar for starting fights or pulling a knife on someone. And that, eventually, most of the regulars at The Nest would disperse, leave town or find other bars, as they were slowly replaced by others. And the more I went to The Nest, the more I realized how thick that smoky air was with all those years of things unsaid.

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From Istanbul to Berlin

August 20, 2011 by Miss Anthrope

[Originally written years ago...]

As the plane left Zürich, there was a mist in the air that accented the setting sun, intensifying the bewitching blood red and Halloween orange sky.

It’s nice to be back in Berlin for a day of relaxation after spending the week immersed in the potent energy of Istanbul, a city with an estimated population of between twelve- and fifteen-million. Where raging seas of people course through main streets. Where cosmopolitan European chic mingles with Islamic tradition in a strange and, at times, unsettling way.

But I’ll miss those narrow cobblestone streets of Istanbul. Streets flanked by crumbling tile steps. Streets that wind down steep hills with views of the Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque, the enchanting reflection of lights dancing on the Seaof Marmara . I’ll miss drinking strong black tea with sugar from small tulip-shaped glasses. I’ll miss the enchanting call for prayer, song that echoes through the streets, calling the old men to wash their hands and feet in the fountains. I’ll miss the howling of feral cats outside my window in the middle of the night. I’ll even miss the transvestite prostitute drug-addict neighbor who frequently shouts at the top of her voice to some unseen and unheard person – her pimp, her john, maybe the voices in her head.

Though I don’t think I’ll much miss the cantankerous Turkish lady who sets shallow cardboard boxes of cat food out in front of the apartment for the feral cats to eat. She insists on leaving the window to the stairway open so the cats can come and go as they please, but refuses to let the cats into her apartment because they’re filthy. And they are. Loud, crying, moaning, mangy, filthy beasts who cough and hack up hairballs and shit liquid into the street. And though the cantankerous Turkish lady put a sign on the front door of the building that threatens to call the police on anyone who leaves the door open, even she insists on leaving the door open wide when the smell of cat piss in the hallway becomes unbearable.

I arrived at the hostel just after 8:00 P.M., then took a walk and found a cheap Turkish restaurant just around the corner. I seem to have developed a taste for Turkish food and, despite the country shift, was hesitant to give it up. Fuck German food anyway, the stuff is terrible. I ordered a kofte sandwich for three Euros. The man working appeared surprised when I thanked him in Turkish and he raised his right hand to his heart with a slight nod of the head as Turkish people do to express thanks. Yes, it’s a beautiful warm night in Berlin.

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Her Mirror and the Deafening Silence

August 20, 2011 by Miss Anthrope

[Originally written several years ago...]

The silence permeates the bus at 7:15 a.m.. The seats are filled but no one is standing. You could hear a pin drop.

But if you could hear all of the thoughts inside each person’s head, it would be deafening. You could fill the bus with the chattering voices. The roar would take on a life of its own, squeezing itself out of cracks in the windows, pushing itself out of the door, overflowing the streets and commingling with all of the voices inside the heads of those walking the streets. You could hear the voices talking over one another but not be able to pick out a single voice over the self-effacing chatter and the screams. The sound of the many voices would compound one another in an explosion that would resonate into the Milky Way and roar into the universe. It could be heard from the satellites and played back to us. And only then would we hear ourselves think.

You can feel the tension rise as she boards the bus. Some stare in astonishment, others in horror or revulsion, but no one can not stare, though some try. I wonder if she feels our eyes on her or if she has somehow grown indifferent to the penetrating stares that follow her like a shadow. She sits in the front of the bus quickly with her back turned to us. She pulls out a brush from her large bag and gingerly brushes her hair.

Her face is covered with a sickly thick layer of ghastly white makeup, with farcical pink lips, black eyes, and a head of hair reminiscent of a tattered old dish rag, frayed and combed stiffly away from her face into wispy silver meringue-like peaks. She could be much younger than she appears. It’s difficult to tell, her face hidden behind the demonic mask. She is a ghoulish caricature of tattered human remains, long neglected and recklessly unloved. I wonder if the others on the bus feel this visceral sense of mourning for the part of ourselves that we see within her.

For whom does she make herself up every day? And what is it that she sees when she looks into the mirror? I can only assume that this image is not the same image that I see now. Was she once a beautiful young woman? Is it this image that still stares back at her? We will all one day look into the mirror and see a very different image than the one in our mind’s eye, or so I’m told. Time moves quickly around us while we stand still. Our bodies will become a center of dissonance as our skin is pulled to the center of the earth and our soul reaches to the heavens.

Will my own mind play a trick on me? Will I one day step onto the bus to be mocked, feared and misinterpreted by others who construct a wall between themselves and I, disregard me, and define me as insane or inhuman? The terror that she evokes is a terror already present within me. She is more than just a clown. She is uncertainty. She is loneliness.

I get off the bus and she stays.

Posted in Bus Stories, Journal Entry, Life | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

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