Portland, they wrote.

Portland is a city of readers. But you know that. Whether it's the rain, our fertile brains or the easy availability of used copies of Gravity's Rainbow, this city worships at the church of the written word.

What you may not know is that over the past 15 years Portland has become a city of real writers--writers who have agents, contracts and even appearances on New York Times bestseller lists.

To salute this wealth of talent, we invited some of the city's leading writers to...write. All we asked was that they write about Portland.

What did we get? A memoir of a young writer's struggle to find work. A view of Portland in 2010. An African American poet's criticism of a bland, white city, along with a teenage girl's hormonally charged love letter to Portland. One writer contributes an excerpt from a forthcoming novel set in Portland, and another discovers that the Grotto is this city's soul.

This collection does not indicate the existence of a "Portland School" that resembles the Chicago Renaissance or other regional literary movements of the last century.

What it does suggest is that Portland is very much a writer's town, one with which the world's readers are becoming more familiar.

One final note: In a wonderful gesture, all 11 of these Portland writers contributed their fees for these essays to the Portland Schools Foundation.

  RICHARD MELTZER

The father (uncle?) of rock criticism as we know it, Richard Meltzer, 58, is the author of a dozen books, including a novel, The Night (Alone), and the music anthology A Whore Just Like the Rest, which earned him the 2001 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He's written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and fronted the punk band Vom, and he's currently the vocalist for Smegma. In October, Da Capo Press will release his latest collection, Autumn Rhythm: Musings on Time, Tide, Aging, Dying, and Such Biz.

NO PISSPOT UTOPIA

In the two so-called major cities where I lived the bulk of my life before Portland, I could never quite reconcile living in my own silly skin, writing straight from my own dizzy center of gravity, with the prevailing winds of, well, call it the cultural climate Writ Large.

In the first of the two, a huge, "important" goddamn place, I was regarded by certain people with jurisdictional clout, scenemakers and tastemakers and such, as an anti-intellectual--a hooligan and scoundrel who should be tarred, feathered, run outta town. No sooner had I moved to metropolis No. 2 than I found myself branded, without having missed a beat, an intellectual, a purveyor of the thought-crime of thought, which in that neck of the woods made me a radioactive leper.

In Portland, where I've spent the past eight or nine years (and still ain't changed the beat), I've never felt like anything but a fucking CITIZEN. Nobody especially cares if I write or behave "profanely," "inanely" or with grim solemnity--or all three, simultaneously. Which definitely takes the heat off being and behaving. When you're not constantly looking for a reaction, one way or the other, you're (what the hey) free. If in fact there are style sheets for heart, mind and body, it hasn't hurt me any--changed my basic mammal status--to ignore them.

Portland, f'r the record, is the only place I've been (even visiting) that feels even REMOTELY like a community of the relatively free--and I'm not talking electoral politics or pisspot utopia. I can't imagine another city this size, in 2003, monster cops and poverty notwithstanding, being as civil--or as un-neurotic (even libertarian assholes have their atom of compassion).

It helps, no doubt, that what we have here is basically a backwater beyond the main currents of recent history, one where so many ripples of designated past-tense etcetera remain present-tense all the way: beatnik, hippie, punk, Wobbly...hey: the rock-roll '50s, the mom-and-pop '40s. Chronological diversity is nothing to sneeze at. Sure, yuppie-like beings, entrepreneurs and consumers alike (you know who you are), are fucking with the water, but they ain't come close yet to destroying the place--as they have everywhere else--and they certainly haven't overturned the space-time NATURE of things Portland.

When Allen Ginsberg first read Howl in public (the Six Gallery, S.F., '55), the only poet on the bill with a San Francisco pedigree was Philip Lamantia. Michael McClure was from Kansas...Ginsberg himself was the sole rep from New York (Kerouac was in the audience but didn't read)...and TWO POETS, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, were from Portland. The standard conjecture that Beat went national when N.Y. met S.F. misses the truth by a notch. What occurred was New York met PORTLAND in San Francisco.

Dig it: A shitload of key ingredients in Beat-as-we-know-it have their roots here, and still live and breathe here. It'd take another 5,000 words to pin down that totality, but try this on for size: the confluence of KICKS and CELLULAR CONCERN. Hey--wouldn't you say that that, in a nutshell, is Portland?

That the majors of either coast rarely if ever "recognize" our town is fine by me, and not because those other places don't themselves count, or 'cause their regionalist cooties are as unappealing as the crabs.... It's simply that the non-ironic idiot PRIDE of big, important places can be downright carcinogenic. Whenever somebody in a bar tells me how great it would be to have major-league baseball--or for the Trail Blazers to win the Big One--my knee-jerk response is "No!--we're way better WITHOUT!" All that Big Time self-consciousness tends to do is make a populace more governable. (I've, uh, seen it firsthand in two majors, y'know.)

Better that we are (and remain) what we already are. F'rinstance: the largest outpost in this big dumb theistic republic where most folks are atheists, or if not most, literally, a fuck of a lot (right?)--atheists in principle, not simply godless materialists, atheists by default. F'rinstance: the distance here between "high" and "low"--aesthetically, conceptually, cosmologically--is inconsequential compared to anywhere else. These things matter.

As far as all this major-minor biz actually goes, there are lotsa folks, prob'ly, whose bottom line will forever be that a dearth of "big-city attractions" kinda makes Portland a ONE-HORSE TOWN. Gosh, let's even say it is, but hey: It's one where our ONE-HORSE UNIVERSE feels more than comfortable resting its big, dirty feet.*  

 

ANTHONY SWOFFORD

Anthony Swofford, 32, is the author of the critically acclaimed Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. He is currently at work on a novel.

 

A JARHEAD IN STUMPTOWN

When I arrived in Portland in August 2001, the state of Iowa had me listed on its unemployment rolls. One of the jobs I applied for in Portland was an entry-level position at Powell's Books. I assumed I'd be a cinch for the job. I'd never worked at a bookstore, but I spent most of my days with books, reading them and buying them and checking them out of libraries, or working on my own first book.

The Powell's elevator was filled with other bookish hopefuls--tattooed hip young girls and waifish brooding gents in their 20s whose dark V-neck sweaters stank like a week's worth of Virginia Cafe nights. After dropping off my application, I returned home and called my literary agent. She was sitting on the 60 pages of my book I'd sent her in August. It was late September, the country having just received the ghastly wounds of Sept. 11. Publishers weren't buying books, and she was unsure of how a literary military title would be considered. I asked her about the air in Lower Manhattan. She asked me if I'd ever worked in espresso.

I tried for other jobs. Barback, haberdasher. After hanging out with Earl and Ned at Earl's Barbershop on Alberta, I thought about barber college. I had a sharp haircut courtesy of Earl, and my shoes gleamed like jewels after Ned spent 10 minutes on them. I looked and felt employable. I lined up at seven the next morning with 300 other men trying for 10 jobs at the Pepsi warehouse off Sandy. Pepsi never called. Powell's never called. Earl cut my hair again, and Ned shined my brogans.

In late October, my agent called and said that after consulting with another agent she was sending my book out. Shortly after that I had a book contract--plus a deadline, and a bit of an income. I rented an office in the Semler Building downtown and wrote seven days a week. When stuck in a scene, or simply exhausted, I'd walk up and down the six flights of stairs, looking for an image, a phrase, moving with the blind faith that is necessary in order to write, looking to serve what my mentor Joy Williams calls "that great cold elemental grace which knows us."

After Jarhead was published, I read for the first time in Portland at the Hawthorne Powell's. The reading ended with two audience members, a Vietnam vet and a recent Marine recruit, telling each other to fuck off. I smiled. A perfect Portland moment.

This is the Portland I write: unemployment, hard work on a book, barbers and shoeshine men, another fucking war, Powell's not hiring me but later selling my book--not just selling, but getting behind my book. Other great bookstores have done the same: Annie Bloom's, Looking Glass, Broadway Books--stores staffed with wonderful people who love books and Portland and would never have hired me for behind the counter.

Even though I'm moving to California soon, I'll keep my Semler Building office, because my first book was made inside of it, and parts of my Portland self still roam the stairwells of the Semler and the streets below.*

 LARRY COLTON

Of all of Larry Colton's accomplishments, he is proudest of the work he did as a columnist for Willamette Week many years ago. Since then, the former major-league baseball player, 61, has been on a downhill slide. Oh, he has published a few books, including Idol Time, Goat Brothers and Counting Coup: A true story of basketball and honor on the Little Big Horn. He is also the founder of Community of Writers, a Portland nonprofit that teaches writing in public schools. But these achievements pale next to the work he did for this very newspaper.

A POET NAMED LUPITA

The first time Lupita Carabes danced across my radar was last November during a visit to the fourth-grade class my daughter Sarah teaches at Lent Elementary in Southeast.

Sarah had told me about Lupita, marveling at what a great young writer she is. I'd heard the same thing said of her from one of the writers-in-residence who'd been to Sarah's classroom with Community of Writers, a nonprofit program dedicated to improving student achievement in writing in Portland-area schools.

The pretense of my visit was to spend time working with the students on how to narrow the focus of their writing. In truth, I just liked being in my daughter's classroom and getting energized by her students. With all the doom and gloom of the looming budget cuts (as well as the lack of vision and courage demonstrated by the numbskulls in Salem), I wanted to remind myself that there's so much good happening in our schools.

As I was about to leave, Lupita shyly asked me if I wanted to read a poem she'd written. It was titled Mexican Girl, and as soon as I read it, I had an idea. In a few days I was to be the featured speaker at a breakfast hosted by Northwest Business for Culture and the Arts. It was an event to honor the businesses in Portland that had contributed the most to arts and cultural organizations during the past year. My idea was to invite Lupita and have her read her poem to all these business folks.

On the day before the event, I returned to Lent School to work with Lupita on reading her poem. In the empty auditorium, she stood on the stage and read in a quiet, hesitant little voice. Sitting alone in the first row, I could barely hear her. I wondered if this was a good idea.

The next morning in the ballroom of the Governor Hotel, I sat at a table with Lupita, her parents and two siblings, all sharply dressed and looking proud. Lupita surveyed the crowd--there were a couple hundred barons of Portland business on hand. "Are you nervous?" I asked. She nodded. "But I practiced some more last night," she explained.

We listened as the awards were presented to the companies that had given the most, the top prize going to PGE (yes, the same company that paid $10 in state taxes and gave out fat bonuses to top executives). Then it was my turn to take the stage.

As I spoke, I kept glancing down at Lupita. She seemed surprisingly calm. I wasn't. I've done tons of public speaking, but on this morning I felt like I had cotton for a tongue. The words kept coming, but my mind was on Lupita. Somehow, I managed to finish, then motioned for her to join me at the podium. As she glanced out over the audience, she still looked calm.

Tom Spanbauer, 57, is the author of three novels, Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon and In the City of Shy Hunters.

Rochell D. (Ro Deezy) Hart, 26, has had four books published and has recorded one CD titled P.I.M.P.: Poetic Intellectual Making Progress. Hart's second book, A Black Girl's Song, was nominated for the Oregon Book Award.

 SANDRA STONE

Sandra Stone lives in Portland and resides elsewhere. Her first collection of poems, Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe, was published by Cleveland State University after winning its national poetry competition. In 1998, the book won the Oregon Book Award. She was also the winner of the General Services Administration's national design award for her sequence of literary quotations for the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse in downtown Portland.

OCCASIONS FOR BEAUTY

I think hometown, I mean dominion--an estate of the mind to depart from, a place to which, lifelong, I repair. To become a foreigner. Uneasy. With no mother tongue.

Pocketed like nesting boxes in my own province, there are two superb sanctuaries for invented exile: the Portland Classical Chinese Garden and the Japanese Garden, treasures of the city--preserves not in likeness to each other, but in their calibrated harmonies and juxtapositions, symbolic "events" and objects, in the illusion of ambiguous expanse, occasions for beauty.

These are not only places for the filling up of what is empty in myself, but amazing theaters of artifice, topography (swale, berm, hillock) and respite for the journeying mind.

It should not consternate visitors that in the Classical Garden, fractured glimpses from casework representing cracked ice are of Old Town. Any state of reverie must be drawn from within and can sustain dissonance. Both the Japanese and the Chinese have a word for this vista that translates as "borrowed view," the idea of a world beyond, as in the purposeful deep-set aperture in a Renaissance painting.

These gardens, unalike, become balconies for overlook, lanterns for the imagination. Centuries-old traditions, transmuted in one, replicated in the other--serial small moments of revelation.

In the Scholar's Study and garden, poetry is an integral element. In the Japanese, principally the nuanced voice of the landscape (itself, a poem): rocks, heart-selected (poems); paths with no visible juncture (poems). Also integral are the resonant place names. I choose not to distinguish; let them find seekers: Strolling Pond Garden; Moon-locking Pavilion; Zig-Zag Bridge; Half a Window Clustered in Green; Stone Mountain; Garden of Awakening Orchids; Moon Bridge, Celestial House of Permeating Fragrance....

Seasons commemorate an uncommon awareness of the
temporal. In the Japanese Garden, transience and passage marked by the vigor of the young, the longevity of plant and tree life in the heady force of a protracted middle-age. But in complex systems for support of the fragile, in the gnarled interdependence of roots, almost conjugal, in the brief lives of blossoms--veneration for age, the vulnerability of all living things.

In the Chinese Garden, precise in its refinements, an oblique overlay, juxtapositions of forms, blooms, fragrances; camphor in the Scholar's Study to enliven the senses.

The humdrum of commerce and traffic do not obtrude on this encapsulated weather.

In the Japanese Garden, the acoustics of running water, of silence prevail.

The clothes I wear say "traveler." In the Chinese Garden, I am preoccupied with small steps. I wear silken slippers. I move soundlessly across the bridge. In the Japanese Garden, I am a thousand-year-old traveler with knapsack, foot-weary, my battered hat a comforting eyesore.

These are Portland's illimitable rooms. Any citizen may joust with epiphany, open the album to continuum, embark on a trek to the interior, where the poet, inside the smallest box, nested in the Natural Garden (of Chaos), scrawls with invisible ink from the novelty shop.*

 

PHILLIP MARGOLIN

Originally from New York, lawyer Phillip M. Margolin, 59, has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the Oregon Supreme Court and the Oregon Court of Appeals. He was the first Oregon lawyer to use the Battered Women's Syndrome to defend a battered woman accused of murdering her spouse. All nine of his novels have been New York Times bestsellers. His second novel, The Last Innocent Man, was made into an HBO movie. His latest, Ties that Bind, was published by HarperCollins in March 2003. Margolin is also the president and chairman of the board of Chess for Success, a nonprofit charity that uses chess to teach study skills to elementary- and middle-school children in struggling schools.

Zoe Trope is the pseudonym of a 17-year-old writer in Portland. Her high-school memoir, Please Don't Kill the Freshman, will be available from HarperTempest in October.

WHY I LIKE PORTLAND

When I give talks about writing I am frequently asked why I set my thrillers in Portland. I answer that when most writers start their mysteries with "It was a dark and stormy night," they are using an old cliché, whereas I am simply describing what I can see out of my window. But the truth is that I write about our city because I am proud of it.

Every time I publish a new book, HarperCollins sends me around the United States on a book tour, which has given me a chance to visit the major cities in the Union. I haven't found one yet that I would trade for the Rose City. Portland is not as exciting as New York, Chicago or San Francisco, but it has them all beat when it comes to day-to-day living--getting up in the morning, spending a day at work and coming home.

One summer, when my son was 6, my wife and I brought him to Manhattan to visit relatives. My aunt lived on 23rd Street, and we were walking to Greenwich Village for dinner. On the way, Daniel turned to me and said, "I don't like this place. It's dirty, and there aren't any trees or birds." Portland has a natural beauty that's conspicuously missing from many of our nation's cities--even a child will notice.

When I lived in New York, I lived for my vacations, which would take me away from the city. Since moving to Portland, I have been of two minds about my vacations, no matter how exotic. I love to travel, but I hate to leave a place where I am surrounded by spectacular scenery. Before we moved out here, my wife--who has since changed her opinion--told me I would become bored with looking at snowcapped mountains every day. I am waiting. One of the great joys of summer is eating breakfast outside and looking up occasionally from my newspaper to see the slopes of Mount Hood.

One of the best things about Portland is the ease with which you can get around the city. It seems to me that you can drive almost anywhere in 20 minutes, and a walk on the west side of the river to almost any other point on the west side takes about 40 minutes or less. But you can also hop a trolley or ride a bus or ride the MAX.

Then there are the neighborhoods. I enjoy walks on 23rd Avenue, visits to Multnomah Village and the Pearl, or wandering around Hawthorne near the Bagdad Theater and Murder by the Book.

What about that rain, though? I love it. It makes all that green and those fabulously colored flowers. And, of course, it helps me make our state sound like a creepy place to live, which is great if you write murder mysteries.*

 ROCHELL HART

Rochell D. (Ro Deezy) Hart, 26, has had four books published and has recorded one CD titled P.I.M.P.: Poetic Intellectual Making Progress. Hart's second book, A Black Girl's Song, was nominated for the Oregon Book Award. Her next book, a collection of biographies of black women from around the United States, will be released in 2004. Since I Lived to Tell the Story, another collection of poetry, will be released later this year.

WORDS WITH NO LIMITS

I hate to throw the race card, but as a black performance artist in Portland, it is hard not to. A native of this city, I have been a published author, motivational speaker and performance spoken-word artist (a.k.a. poet) for quite some time. Throughout the years, I have performed on countless stages across America, including such artistic hot spots as New York and Chicago. After carefully sifting through my opinions about life in Portland, I am convinced that as a minority artist, this is one of the hardest cities to survive in.

Be assured that my opinion is not merely a woe-is-me cry. The fact is, only 1.6 percent of the entire state is African-American, with most other ethnic backgrounds weighing in at even less. In a state where it was once illegal for minorities to reside (racist laws remained on Oregon's books until the late 1920s), it's no wonder so few minorities choose to call this place home. Those of us who do must struggle daily to have our voices heard and to make a serious impact.

As an activist and socialist, one of my greatest personal challenges is being taken seriously by the majority of my "peers." Since so few minorities reside here, it seems that the vast majority in this city doesn't consider oppression, social segregation, injustice and racial profiling as "serious" issues confronting Portland. Through the revolutionary, black-feminist perspective that informs my writing, I choose as my most urgent undertakings to validate both minority existence in Portland and the issues that prevail in our communities. But in addition to striving to vindicate our existence here, I struggle to be someone who finds and initiates ways to improve our quality of life.

In Portland, however, my message of righteousness often falls on the ears of a crowd whose majority simply cannot relate. It is seriously challenging (though I am up to the challenge) to recite my signature poem, "Never Question Who I Am," to an audience whose only other minority representatives are my family and friends. The rest of the audience, even with the best intentions, simply seems indifferent to the realities I raise my voice to:

"I am a vibrantly vivid collection

Of ghetto reflections

I am a compilation

Of mass communication

I am black powered, cynical, reigning queen

Supreme

Surpassing surreal expectations of any-

thing you ever thought I would be."

Beyond the obvious factors of family and friends, I don't know what has kept me in Portland. But since I am here, I have decided that rather than assuming defeat I will advocate for stronger minority acceptance and presence. Eventually, I hope to see the "City of Roses" become a greater garden of colors.

 KATHLEEN TYAU

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and an Oregon Book Award finalist, Kathleen Tyau, 56, is the author of Makai and A Little Too Much Is Enough. She is currently working on another novel, Mele, set in Portland and Hawaii, from which this is excerpted.

NEW TRIBAL ART

Not the Fourth of July yet, still June, still raining in Portland, but Zack Gonzalez is a firecracker. He's a long string of red ones on a short fuse, and every little thing sets him sparking: The big lunch crowd, the hot grill, rattling pans. The tiny kitchen where Zack, his father Noho and the cook Bobby bump elbows and okoles in a workspace one coffin wide.

But at three in the afternoon, Noho's Hawaiian Cafe on Clinton Street is empty except for Zack's grandma, Mele Na, dozing in her chair by the front picture window, and Zack, in the kitchen marinating meat--and babysitting, so his tutu doesn't wander off like Auntie Miki, whose body wasn't found for one whole year. Only the music keeps him from exploding. The reggae beat vibrates through his headset and into the can of shoyu he's pouring over the beef. He gives the meat a good lomi-lomi and wishes it was Marie he was massaging.

Marie, the Indian chick he met last month at the Hawaiian benefit concert for the public schools. While he was dancing to Bruddah Waltah with the other kanaka kids, she sneaked up on them with her digital camera. In between sets, she showed him his picture on the small, bright screen. When he saw his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth hanging open, he said, "I look stupid." "No," she said. "This is rapture. You're homesick." Startled, he followed her outside to the parking lot, where they talked and kissed until she found out he was a junior at Cleveland. Her, with two degrees.

Now she only wants to chat online. It's not sex--her interest in him--it's tribal. She's photographing transplanted indigenous people for an art exhibit. She herself is part Tillamook; her ancestors fished the Nehalem.

"My family has ali'i blood," Zack wrote her. "That means royal. But haoles own the island where my tutu was born, so she can't go back."

"Your people got screwed," Marie replied. "And so did mine."

"Does that mean I can see you?" One week later and still no answer.

A flash goes off. He swivels around. It's her with the camera. Marie, wearing a tight Lycra top, blue and gold beads. He flings his headset, cap and apron into the sink, shoyu, garlic and all. "The door wasn't locked," she says. "Is that your grandma by the window?"

Cool air blows through the cafe, but he feels only Marie's eyes searing his back as he washes his hands and sniffs himself. He takes her up to the roof, to his mother's garden. The rain has stopped, and the rose petals are sparkling. He pulls her into the hothouse filled with orchids and bromeliads, even a small papaya tree. Marie laughs as she looks down at the scattering of sand. "My sand box used to be here," he confesses. "I was 4 when we left."

She touches his puka-shell choker. He can hardly breathe. "Leave this on," she says, "but take off your shirt." He grins, but she's already aiming her camera at him. At least it's not digital.

Five clicks and he's at Sunset Beach, Kekaha, Makena. Ten more and he's surfing Tunnels, Hookipa, Waimea. One roll and he's a Roman candle. He's Mount St. Helens, Mauna Kea.

Downstairs, bright light shines through the glass, waking Mele Na. She's been dreaming about biting flies, red volcano dirt. She grabs her cane and heads for the door. If she walks fast, she can reach the cool upcountry before the sun gets too hot.*

Copyright 2003 Kathleen Tyau.

 zoe trope

Zoe Trope is the pseudonym of a 17-year-old writer in Portland. Her high-school memoir, Please Don't Kill the Freshman, will be available from HarperTempest in October. She can be reached via email at zoe_trope@hotmail.com

A TALE OF TAWDRY TEENAGE ROMANCE

"What's Portland like?" I repeat the question. The girl who wants to know lives in Arkansas, thousands of miles away. Her name sounds like the stars and I want to impress her, say something really smart and beautiful and romantic.

"It's, um, a city, and it has a river and a mountain, well, actually, a lot of mountains, and light rail, which is like the subway but above ground, and so many bridges and a giant bookstore with, like, six floors of books and I love you so much! Uh, I mean I love it...this city, so much."

I'm waiting for her to hang up. Because, upon reflecting only seconds later, I realize that it is, quite possibly, the worst monologue I've ever given in my life.

And Portland, baby, I'm sorry for all the disservice I've done to you by cutting you down to your cold bare bones in these nervous descriptions. How can I possibly sum you up in a few sentences to a girl who's never bounced on the Crystal Ballroom floor or wiped Rocco's pizza grease off her chin? Yes, you've got that bookstore and that river and these freeways scarring your heart. But you've got to understand that I love you for everything you are and everything you could be.

This is me in my silly teenage romanticism, being entirely in love with you. I'm going to make you a mix CD, mosh with you at Meow Meow, flirt with you while leaning against SMYRC's pool table, buy you a sundae at Shari's at three in the morning. Oh, baby, this is love! This is the worst kind of love! The love where I get on the 84 to the 2-oh-5 to the 43 just to be with you. And you take the 26 straight to my ribcage.

But I'm sure that when we part ways, when you finally break my heart, I'll have plenty to say about you. Our parting will be messy and dramatic, complete with an "I, Anonymous" paragraph in the Merc and a "Rogue" article in the Week. But don't worry, I'll find numerous ways to shame you and mock you with my friends. "Portland was too vegan to eat me out!" I'll exclaim. Or maybe I'll tell them about your raver phase: "Portland hit me in the eye with a glow stick at Klub Z!"

When the laughter dies down, there will be an uncomfortable silence. Eyes averted. A quiet cough. And in that moment, Portland, my love, you will know that I never meant all the terrible things I say. You will know that really, I'm only jealous. Then I'll buy you tickets to the next Justin Timberlake concert and we can drive up to Mount Tabor late at night and make out in my car. I promise.