LEAD STORY Voices Four Portlanders in their own words For the past several weeks we've all been subjected to history-in-a-hurry. Years, decades, even entire centuries have been reduced to four paragraphs of text or 15 seconds of video. The brilliance of Bach became an incongruous rest stop on KINK's countdown of the 102 most influential musicians of the millennium, wedged, at No. 38, between Jackson Browne and Tom Petty. The legacy of Oregon powerbroker Glenn Jackson became a four-sentence photo caption in the Dec. 28 Oregonian. Even here at WW, our 25th-anniversary issue on Nov. 10 managed to squeeze a quarter-century into 103 pages. It may seem odd, then, that this week we're dedicating a significant chunk of space to four Portlanders most people have never heard of. Yet we've found that our annual Voices issue serves as a nice break from the end-of-year focus on fame and misfortune. We see no reason to start the new century any differently. As is often the case, we found that the four people selected share something we didn't anticipate when we first talked to them: They are all, in their own way, outsiders. As founder and director of the Northwest Afrikan American Ballet, Bruce Smith takes comfort in the acclaim given his young dance company but struggles with the hardships of running an arts organization that is seen as second-tier in Portland. Madison Clell, a talented comic-book writer, battles to make sense of her inner voices. Tracy Blakeslee, owner of Fantasy Video, is the man who brought smut out of the dark ages. And Jenny Durham, the winner of a prestigious national academic scholarship, has taken a route to college that is anything but typical. It's true that none of these four was in the running for Time's "Person of the Century," but we think each, nonetheless, has a valuable experience to share. Bruce Smith A trip to Africa convinced a Jefferson High grad that there was more to his history than seen on television. On stage, the bald man with the mischievous grin warms up the crowd by explaining that in Africa, people don't dance in front of strangers. So audience members are asked to introduce themselves to seven of their seat mates. For some it's a bit uncomfortable, but in the process, a bit of that wall between performer and observer gets knocked down. In many ways, removing barriers is what the Northwest Afrikan American Ballet is all about. The 13 young dancers perform Bruce Smith's original choreography, based on traditional African dances, with an energy that is contagious. Smith founded the company in 1982 using kids from Jefferson High School's arts programs. It was a homecoming of sorts for the 1968 Jefferson graduate. Smith graduated from Lewis & Clark College with a graphics degree, but his first love was drums. He spent six years traveling and recording with the local R&B group Pleasure (on Fantasy Records) before a trip to Senegal got him hooked on the African beat. Since then his troupe has evolved from a small high-school ensemble to an internationally recognized professional company. When we called Smith to ask him to be interviewed for our annual Voices cover package, he let out a long sigh before responding. "You know," he said, "there are only two things I'm afraid of. One is dying. The other is ending up on the cover of Willamette Week." He eventually agreed to meet dance critic Catherine Thomas and news editor John Schrag in his office, nestled in a corner of the Matt Dishman Community Center in North Portland. Willamette Week: How does an R&B drummer become the founder of a ballet company? Bruce Smith: I got a grant to go to Africa to study dance and music, and one of the things I had to do to satisfy the grant was make a little presentation. I called it an experiment at PCC Cascade Auditorium. I picked some dancers from Jefferson and taught them some movements and taught the drummers some rhythms. It just...well, people were dancing in the aisles. It just snowballed from there. So how did you end up teaching at Jefferson? One day I was playing drums for a class and the teacher was doing jazz runs across the floor with students. She says, 'Now this time, let's do it with pulses, and this is ethnic,' and I left thinking, 'These kids don't know what ethnic means. What she's doing is a characteristic of African dance form.' So I went down to the vice principal and said, 'We need a traditional African dance class in the school, to make the program more well-rounded.' What was the first class like? I had eight students, and they were the eight students who had the guts to take it. They were really scared because they didn't know what it was going to be like. I'll never forget our first recital. The other classes had 20 to 30 kids leaping across the stage in all these patterns, and here's my little class. Eight kids and three musicians. They were really scared. I said, 'It's just us together on stage. You dance to us. We'll have fun--if we just show we're having fun, we'll bring everybody in.' And they put the African Dance class in between two ballet pieces. Wrong. They should have never done that. Why not? The students just went absolutely berserk. The next year I had 16 students, and the next year I had 24. Eventually, I ended up with two beginning dance classes, one advanced dance class. And I was going around to three middle schools three days a week. It just grew. And it was all about giving them the information about what this dance is and how you can trace it back. Why did a history lesson strike such a chord? All we knew about Africa is what I call Tarzanism. It's what we saw on TV: the starving kids with flies on their faces, Africans with hardly any clothes jumping around, spitting. We didn't know there's a valid technique and characteristics that contribute to other dance forms. We didn't know that ballet is a French word that means 'a dance that tells a story.' All we know is classical ballet, but there are all kinds of ballet in different cultures. Was there any resistance from white students to sign up for that class? For some, yes. But others really like the live feeling. Just like it was with the African American kids, they needed to get the information first. They needed to know, 'It's OK for you to do that.' Were any of the kids the first year white? No. How do you get a bunch of buff young men to sign up for a ballet company? What gets males coming to me is that African dance is very specifically male and female friendly, in that there are specific masculine men steps, very athletic, gymnastic kinds of things that are different from female things. Still there is a lot of work to be done in this country as far as male dancers are concerned. I imagine you've been following the problems at Jefferson. Yeah, I taught there for 12 years, and I saw it coming. It's all about support from the school district, you know. There's a lot said: 'We support Jefferson. We support arts education.' But when you look at the paper, where is the money? What's your sense of the dance program at Jefferson now? From what I can see, it's really struggling. When you take a lot of money out of a program, it's hard to just put band-aids on. That's one reason that I stopped teaching. There was a threat of me not having musicians for my class. How can I teach dance without musicians? So I said, if this is going to start happening and you're cutting part of my program, you're cutting me, too. But if the choice is giving someone money for math class or for someone who wants to have a live drummer, isn't the choice simple? No, it isn't. I'm a proponent of arts education, and that is still a very new concept for the powers that be. It's been proven that taking dancing and taking music enhances your discipline. It enhances your problem-solving skills. And with that, it enhances holistically every other subject that you touch. So what are we dealing with here? Are we dealing with a situation where it's about the kids? Or is it about numbers? Did it ever seem weird working in a program that, in effect, was designed to bring white kids to Jefferson? Well, that's what a magnet school is. But there was a weirdness in the school dance company, the Jefferson Dancers, in that, in auditions there was some weirdness over who to accept and who not to accept. What got to me was the outside media coverage. Because it was in the neighborhood, because there were a lot of things going on in the neighborhood, they would say the 'Jefferson neighborhood.' But when there was a bomb set off at Benson years ago, no one mentioned the fact that the highest crime rate is in Southeast. So there was a lot of, 'I'm not sending my child to Jefferson because you might get shot in the halls.' There was a different city inside those walls that people didn't know about. Everyone got along with each other. One reason a lot of kids came to Jefferson is because when you are in a school that's very artsy it's more kids-friendly than some other regular kind of subject magnet school. That's what drew a lot of kids. Kids could wear what they wanted. There was a breaking down of cliques. The music department and the dance department and the theater department would get together and do The Wiz. We had a successful program that at one point was one of the top four performing-art high schools in the country--in the country. People don't know that, but it was. All of that stuff was going on inside the school, but outside it was like, 'I'm not sending my child there.' So I saw the made-to-fail thing coming all along. And now there are these dance programs starting up at Parkrose and Beaverton, and Jefferson is failing. Why? I think people really didn't like the structural placement of where that school is. Do you ever have the temptation to use the power of the dance to make political statements? To talk about what happened to African culture when it got here? I don't mind doing that, when I'm hired to come in and do a lecture. I did for a literature class at Portland State and we talked about a lot of different things. However, on stage, in a performance, I want to stay away from stuff like that. I just want people to be happy... Do you purposefully change anything from traditional dances? For example, are there any roles, such as drumming, where you'll have women take traditionally male roles? Well, traditionally, women don't do the South African Boot Dance. But we have women do it. And you will see women drum in the future. One thing that I do leave out is religious things. It's not my place to go into the secret society and do some religious stuff. What's your ideal vision as a choreographer? What do you really wish you could do? I want the whole program to be exposed. I know there are other people doing it in other places in the country, but I don't know that they're doing it the same way that we do it. So my first and foremost vision is to be able to tour this monster and go to the black colleges in the South. Do you ever feel odd that you perform in one of the whitest big cities in America? Clearly you're providing needed education to white audiences, but don't you ever want to connect with more black people? Definitely. This society is so dysfunctional that for different reasons we want to connect to both audiences. Obviously I'm trying to deal with history and heritage and with my people, and at the same time, non-African Americans need to realize that we are more than what you see on TV. Does that make you wish you were based in a bigger, more cosmopolitan city? You know, I look at being here as kind of a barren ground. There's no other African dance company like this around here, and there are advantages to that. If we were in New York we'd be lost in the shuffle. Companies are a dime a dozen in a place like that. Here, there are less obstacles. It gives us a chance to really concentrate on what we're doing. The disadvantage is we have to go other places for training. That's really the only disadvantage. Anything else on your wish list? Artistically, I want to continue to be an institution here. After being together 16 years in Portland, I want the city to acknowledge us as being part of the majors. There is the Big Five here--the symphony, the ballet, the museum and the others that get all the funding. We're part of the smaller arts. We all fight for the last little chunk. Yes, the majors do impact kids. However, we impact kids in a whole different way that is just as beneficial, and maybe even more across this whole state. If the city would acknowledge us and the state would acknowledge us as being one of the majors, we'd have that status, and we'd have our own building. In Africa, there is the concept of griot. He is the archivist, the drummer, dancer and storyteller. Do you see yourself functioning as a griot? Yeah. I was told that once by an African. He said that I'm an ambassador. I have a lot of African friends who are really glad that I'm exposing their culture to America. I think one of the most emotional experiences I've had is when we went to Johannesburg in May of last year. We performed for a telecommunications conference and were the only Americans there. After we finished that show there was an African that came backstage, and he said: 'I want to talk to your dancers.' I gathered them around, and he said: 'I don't really care that much for dance, I'm an African and don't laugh at me but what I saw you do tonight touched my spirit.' He poured out all this passion to the dancers, and I just lost it right there. It was something that I always wanted to happen. To be able to take dancers back there and for them to get validated and for us to get validated. And it was a full circle for me. The Northwest Afrikan American Ballet will hold its annual Heritage Concert on Feb. 12 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Madison Clell What do you do with two dozen personalities? Have them collaborate on a comic book, of course. Most artists have a hard enough time trying to follow one muse, the voice inside compelling them to create. So consider the plight of Madison Clell, the 28-year-old artist, writer and publisher of the comic book series Cuckoo, a witty, savage exploration of her own collision with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Though years of therapy have "integrated" her, Clell has roughly 24 different alternate personalities ("alters"), shards of herself that splintered loose when she was repeatedly sexually abused as a child and adolescent. A buoyant presence in person, Clell uses Cuckoo to explore the psychological phenomenon formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder and often incorrectly dubbed schizophrenia. Sybil it ain't. Clell grew up in Southern California, in a neighborhood crawling with known child molesters. Still, it would take years before the abuse she suffered at their hands came to the surface. Instead, the young Madison escaped into an elaborate fantasy world. As a teenager, she was known as a spooky kid, unable to account for her time or actions. As a 21-year-old University of Oregon art student, Clell fell prey to uncontrollable hallucinations, flashbacks and stretches of missing time. Her therapist diagnosed her as DID, a controversial pronouncement. While thousands of people, almost all victims of severe childhood abuse, profess to suffer from DID, the ailment is often sensationalized in the media. Some doctors doubt it even exists. Clell has reluctantly come to accept the diagnosis. After years of therapy, she no longer switches from one personality to the next. She can still summon all the "alters" inside her, though--from the Italian-speaking kitchen queen to the out-of-control angry young man to Lisa, the 4-year-old science wiz. Cuckoo, a hit in the cozy world of alternative comics with its 10th quarterly issue on the way, includes them all. Cuckoo's slim volumes contain the raw reality of child abuse--and the madcap task of managing bank accounts and credit cards when you don't know who you'll be from day to day. The combination has won her fans ranging from hardcore crime writer Andrew Vachss to cinema-certified medical legend Patch Adams. Clell recently sat down with WW staffer Zach Dundas at the eastside hipster haunt Beulahland to discuss a comic book that, more than any other, is a true team effort. Willamette Week: How long have you been in Portland? Did you move here from somewhere else? Madison Clell: I'm one of those Californians who moved up here. Went to school in Eugene and moved up to Portland in February of '97. My therapist moved up here from Eugene, so I thought this was the next logical step. What do you do for work besides Cuckoo? Before I did just the usual piddly jobs, like being a barista and, you know, working in a performing arts center taking tickets, and getting run over in the parking garage. I'm now in a small investment group. That definitely is nice, very nice. Cuckoo does not bring in income. Cuckoo has obviously had some critical success. What's the readership? Roughly, about 4,000--3,000 or 4,000. It's clear you felt that doing a comic book was the best way to face your identity disorder. It wasn't a conscious decision to do a comic book, but I just snuck into it. Several years ago I had this whole fantasy world. I had characters and a plot. I was going to write the epic novel, and every year...I'd start writing two pages. It was really sad. Basically, it just stuck in my head. I was obsessed. Then I started reading a few comic books. Was your diagnosis a real epiphany, or was it a realization that came over time as you worked through therapy? I don't remember it clearly enough. I remember the session where suddenly I realized, but I couldn't really believe it. Everyone I know who actually has it is constantly denying it. What are the misconceptions many people have about DID? Mainly what I see is an emphasis on the fascinating aspects of DID--it's kind of a circus. "Oh look, this women doesn't know she's a prostitute at night!" This sort of extreme thing. "Oh, this man thinks he's a woman and doesn't know it." I see an emphasis on the parts of disassociation that are fun for other people, but I don't see much attention paid to the source of the reason why disassociation is made possible--hideous, horrible abuse from complete sub-humanoids. The other one that pisses me off is that DID doesn't exist. To me that's like saying, "Well, you just don't make sense." Denying everything. What I find fascinating about Cuckoo is that you've managed to fit so many different voices on a page and make them very distinct. When I started, I thought there was this one front part, it was the main part that controlled everybody. I thought that, as that part, I was just going to write, and write about the other parts and be in complete control of everything all the time. And the other parts just came out and said, "No, you're not." Basically what happened was, whatever you see on the page, that's actually them writing. I know that sounds strange, but basically I write and draw what the voices tell me and it gets very specific direction from alters. They say, "I'm going to be in this panel, I'm going to be saying this, I'm going to be wearing this." As you've progressed since doing this, has that process changed or developed at all? It's the same system exactly. The one thing I hope that's been developing is technical skills and constantly trying to improve on that. What I like about drawing is that it's easier to convey emotion in pictures than in anything else. If I'm drawing an abuse scene, being able to draw, being able to look at a page and see this is an adult, this is a kid, being able to see the size difference. To me there are always things I just can't talk about. There are some situations for me that have no words. Comics greatly lend themselves to that. Most of your books are extremely disturbing, yet some are very funny, particularly about what it's like to manage your alters. Alters speaking Italian weirded me out. How does that work? I'll never know. I don't know but every once in a while a part just popped out and started speaking...I don't think it was real Italian. I think it was pidgin. Some Italian words? Yeah, my boyfriend at the time and I would try to look up some of the words, and it didn't really make sense. I don't know Italian, though I was exposed to Italian in a job I had. A little bit of travel. Somehow this part was in the part of the brain that had access to that, those words. It seems from Cuckoo that some of your different identities are at different ages, different points of development. Why is that? Do you have any insight on how that works? I don't know if there is any formula. It seems if there is a new trauma, that might create a new alter. I know for instance that one alter started around when I was 2-ish, grew up and stopped when something bad happened when we were 15. Maybe all the trauma stopped her there. The other alters just remain the same age. Some others are just stopped in a place where there is no time, so they don't grow. Have you identified how many alters there are in your case? I had, I don't know the exact number, I think it was 24. It was really interesting, I had this gigantic key chain. It started small and it kept getting bigger. I finally looked at it and I counted the keys that were on it and that was the exact number of alters I had. As the alters became integrated, I didn't realize this until later, I would take keys off: "I don't need this key anymore," and toss it. Subconsciously keeping track, I suppose. You discovered that this was going on when you were about 21, but had it been going on in your teenage years, or did it manifest itself when you started hallucinating? The DID started when I was 2 1/2 and was always there. Always part of my life. I didn't know about it until I was 21. Were you vaguely aware that there was something unusual? No, but there are lots of unexplained...I was this frustrating kid for all my teachers. I remember that there was something wrong with my memory. I would run into blank spaces, like at school. There was just something wrong. When you were a teenager, did you start dating? No, no. Actually when I started dating, my first relationship, that's when it triggered me. It was one of a couple of big triggers. It triggers a trauma? When you are dating things can get kind of sexual so it set me off, too soon. In high school I still lived in the same house, same place. I lived at home. It was not safe to bump into stuff like that. So you were at the University of Oregon when you were triggered and you started hallucinating and having these....? Things started in my junior year and then it really came to a head in the middle of the last year I was there. Some people say that MPD or DID is a very difficult diagnosis to make. Is that the case in your situation? Was it a hard process for the therapist to say, "Yeah, this is what it is"? I can't speak for my therapist. What it was was that I was flagrantly displaying the classic symptoms. I was losing time. By the time I got into therapy, I had no idea. I thought I had lost my mind. I was losing chunks of time. It must've been terrifying. Yeah, I was having...I was switching so much I'd be terrified and then fine. It was uncontrolled flashbacks to horrible things. By the time I was in therapy, I was aware that there was this other person in my head that was speaking about me in a third person. The thought of multiples didn't occur to me. The most my therapist said was, "Have you ever heard about MPD?" and I said, "Oh yeah, but I don't have it. I only have one person who speaks. And she is 7 and..." I'm not sure if she was amused by that. I was convinced that was not my problem. I never wanted to accept it. No one I know who has it ever accepts it. I think in the end they do--I do. I'm glad I have it, because without disassociating I would be a complete psychopath. Do you know a lot of other people with DID? Yes and no. Some people write to me. I'm not confirming or denying anybody's diagnosis. There are some groups. I've met a few people here and there. They've been kind of writing in here and there. Beyond those people, who else seems to be attracted to Cuckoo? Who are your fans? Lots of trauma survivors, mental-health professionals, lots of people who are into alternative comics. I know that there are some therapists who have stuck it in their waiting rooms. It was used in an English class in the University of Oregon. What did you get your degree in? Painting. I didn't do comics before that. Do you have any vision of how the series is going to unfold? I've read the nine books that I have. There's definitely a stopping point. I know what the last page is going to be, and we are working towards that point. I read a magazine article about autobiography. It said the best way to write is if you know how it's going to end. Would you mind if I talked about some of your alters? I'm not sure. Well, some of the ones who are in the book: Are all the names in the book the names that they have for themselves, or did you change those names? In most cases, they were the same. So is there an alter that's 3 or 4 years old that's a science whiz? Yeah. How does that happen? How does a 3- or 4-year-old become a science whiz? I haven't the faintest idea. I don't know if she just claims to be a science whiz. All I know is that in the section where she wrote about the computers, I had not a clue. I was just sitting there. I remember getting the basic computer manual with diagrams on it and I just sat down and said "OK, take it away." This voice, she just told me in my head, "OK, now say this, and do this, and draw this." It was like magic. There was just stuff, I'm mean logically I know it was just me in my head, but those weren't my thoughts. It was someone else's thoughts in my head. I was just writing down what I was told to do. I have no idea how that works. I still look at it and say "It's not me." I know it's me, but, I don't know, I didn't figure this out. Do you have other projects you want to work on someday? I have some painting projects. The topic I'm working on [concerns] the whole abuse issue; it's a strong issue with me. I don't feel like I'm lacking in material. I have a hunch that when Cuckoo is gone, I can get on my next soapbox. Clell's Web page, www.multiples.net, contains samples of Cuckoo. The books are also for sale at Reading Frenzy, 921 SW Oak St. Tracy Blakeslee Is that a stogie in his hand, or is Tracy Blakeslee just happy to be in business? Standing inside a booth the size of a bathroom stall, equipped with a chair, a tissue dispenser and a TV screen, Tracy Blakeslee feeds a couple of dollar bills into a video console and dials up the day's menu for the benefit of WW staffers Chris Lydgate and Caryn Brooks. As furious copulation fills the cathode ray tube, Blakeslee discusses the intricacies of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the inscrutable whims of the city's building inspectors. As far as Blakeslee is concerned, the on-screen carnality behind him is about as noteworthy as wallpaper. "Once you've seen one, you've seen them all," he says with a shrug. Without question, the 46-year-old Blakeslee is Portland's premier pornographer. His empire spans five Fantasy Adult Video stores in the Portland area, plus two more in Montana. He owns a sex club named XES and an entire warehouse piled to the rafters with magazines, dolls, dildos and other "marital enhancements." All together, he has 85 employees and annual revenues he puts at "not quite" $10 million. He's done it by taking the dirty out of the dirty bookstore business. You won't find broken windows or naked bulbs inside a Fantasy Adult Video: Blakeslee's stores are modern, clean and well-organized, sort of like a Blockbuster with blinky lights. His refusal to restrict his stores to run-down parts of town has led to clashes with neighborhood groups and city regulators. On one hand, Blakeslee is the epitome of the '90s businessman, with his CPA degree, his mild manner, his Ralph Lauren shirts. On the other, he is a profane, cigar-smoking hustler (during the interview, he tried to recruit Brooks for a movie), with a diamond earring, a generous paunch and a keen wit. Two weeks ago, Blakeslee gave a tour of his Northeast Sandy Boulevard headquarters and then sat down to share his thoughts. It quickly became clear that while Blakeslee may not care much for porn, he does care about the business of selling it. Willamette Week: What made you decide to become a pornographer? Tracy Blakeslee: I'm a CPA first and a pornographer second. I got into the business because I purchased an historic building [that contained an adult video store] from a friend of mine in Montana. They did a poor job of retailing; it was the old scummy-with-black-windows place. So, as a condition for them to stay, we told them they had to clean up the front so that it was politically and socially acceptable--so the neighbors aren't complaining about it--and sign a five-year lease. They wouldn't sign. But I was stuck with the building, and I said, 'You know what? I can do a better job than that.' That was when I went and found this technology for the video system. Its been a very interesting business ever since. As a gay kid growing up in Missoula... I wasn't a gay kid growing up in Missoula. You said that. You're not gay? I consider myself to be bisexual. I didn't have any gay partner until I was 27 years old. I was just assuming, I guess, that in a place like Missoula... I was born in 1953. So when I was a teenager, there was really no gay information available. There were no gay bars; it was all very informal and very secretive and on the edge. I remember the first porno movie I bought in Seattle in 1982 or something...ohmigod, it was such a novelty. Now gay life is sort of très chic. People come out of the closet when they're 11. Everybody loses their virginity by the time they're 14. There's no mystery left. What's your relationship to porn? I don't really have one. It's nothing that really grabs me. I mean, people will ask me, 'Did you see The Dirty Debutante,' and I say, 'No, and not the last 267 either.' It's just not something that really interests me. So if this is not what really appeals to you...do you understand why it appeals to your customers? Well, I'm not 100 percent certain, but I have some conclusions I've drawn. Demographically, the vast majority of our customers are middle-aged. It provides them a way to vicariously live through that. Before the advent of AIDS, people were able to get around much more. With the advent of the VCR and AIDS, it created a whole new need. For a lot of people the risk of disease is so overwhelming. Maybe that's changing now; AIDS is becoming more under control. How do you select the titles you have in the store? Actually, everything is computerized. We know exactly how many times a movie is rented, how many times a movie is sold. So we have a huge bank of information. And we have a guy who pretty much lives his life buying video for us. There are thousands and thousands of titles that we never get to. Do you watch them? Or do you just know what the category is? We deal with our suppliers...and there are a lot of suppliers out there. We do everything by categorization, things like anal, bisexual, gay, European.... Europeans tend to be nastier, much more graphic. What about the Internet--is that changing your business at all? It's expanding it. I understand you are going to make a movie. You know, we're thinking about it. You want to be in one? I don't think anyone would pay for that. You're wrong. You do not know people. Right, people will pay for anything. You could be a very big star. My mom would die. Chances of her running into it are pretty remote. That's true. We wouldn't use your real name. Of course.... I don't think so, I have a writing career. Just think what directions you could take your writing career in with your acting career. OK, so you're thinking about it, for real. So how does one go about this? It's actually not that complicated. Technology has made it very, very simple. Ten years ago you had to do everything on film. Now, with camcorders and computers and the new iMac, you can literally have your own film studio for a few thousand dollars. What would you say you are most proud of? What am I most proud of? Um, I think that we do a really, really, really good job. It's very adversarial establishing my business in Portland, and I think we've done a really good job with that. We are a class act. And I'm very proud of the way my stores look. I'm very proud that we're able to assist people. Just like I told the mayor, if nobody wanted us here, we'd go broke, and I'd have to get a job as a CPA someplace. That hasn't happened yet. When it comes down to it, what we're selling is privacy. I have a real problem with conservative Republicans. They talk about conservatism when they want to dictate to someone what they can do and what they can read. That is not conservatism at all. Conservatism is the right of every individual to do what they do as long as it's not harmful to someone else. You have to have respect for yourself, and you have to have respect for everybody else. And I'm very respectful of my customers, my employees, my neighbors, even my critics. I support them in their right to criticize me...[though] they're very intellectually dishonest. In what way? I had a policeman come in here one time and say, 'I'm looking for child molesters.' And I said, 'You know what, get your ass out. Don't talk to me about child molesters.' Same thing I told the city. If you want to put all the cards on the table, and form a commission and include everybody, including the Catholic Church...I'm willing to fund that. People say that [porn] creates violence against women, that it causes rape. All I can say is that we've had rape for thousands of years. We've had videos since 1983. Do people come to your store hoping to meet other people? Some do. Isn't it possible that your stores are being used for prostitution? Look, prostitution is the world's oldest profession, and we don't like them around the stores. I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars bringing customers in. If someone stands out there and grabs my customer and takes them away and gets their money, I've been robbed. I'm offended that the Portland Police Department is not doing anything to protect me. I'm a taxpayer. They're the criminal; don't blame me, for chrissakes. So what do cops tell you? They say, 'We watched six prostitutes go into your store last week.' I say, 'Are you going to give me a commendation for making your job so much easier? I bring in these prostitutes. You can just sweep in and grab them, and your life just became a whole lot easier.' I said, 'You let a known prostitute come into my store and you do nothing?' Are they right? Do prostitutes come into your store? How do I know if they're a prostitute? People's occupation is none of my business. If a consenting couple wants to go have sex in one of my booths or at the Hilton Hotel, it's none of my goddamn business what they do. What do you think about the city's current efforts to crack down on prostitution? I think if you're interested in prostitution, then you should be looking at every level. When the Portland Police were doing their prostitution stings, I asked them, 'What happened to the Heathman Hotel or the bar at the Hilton?' I said, 'You're only after the street hookers, you're not after the expensive hookers. Don't you think that's a little disingenuous? It's still a crime, isn't it?' Why not go after her? Just because she wears better shoes? Charges $500 for a blow job instead of $40? The mayor can think she's solved the prostitution problem on Sandy Boulevard. She just moved them out to 82nd...or wherever the fuck they are this week. You know, this just seems like bad public policy to me. How much money do they spend on this prostitution-abatement program? I'm a taxpayer--I'd like to know. Your attitude at the stores seems to be that if you don't know it's going on, it's none of your business. Is that true? We have very strong procedures in place. If anyone is obviously or overtly engaged in prostitution, they're booted out. If some 60-year-old white guy comes in with some 20-year-old black girl with a tight sweater, we'll say to the gentleman, 'What's your friend's name?' If he says, 'This is my girlfriend,' we'll say, 'What's her name? What's her age?' If you can't answer those questions, you can't come in here. But we're not the Gestapo. The idea that customers may have sex in the booths is OK with you, if it's consensual? Absolutely. Or the parking garage.... Again, I've had many conversations with the city. At different times they talk about cracking down on this or cracking down on that. But consensual sex between adults is still legal in Oregon, and if they don't understand that, then I'm not going to explain it to them. Which brings us to the topic of your gay sex club. How's it doing? We've got 5,000 members. I think it's far better to give people a place to go do something instead of the picnic tables in the park. For years there was no place to go. I grew up in Missoula, Montana. There was no gay bar, there was no anyplace. Chance encounters. All we're doing is giving people a place to go with safety and privacy. Did you have to have an epiphany of some sort when you made this decision to go into selling pornography? You know, 'I need to reassess who I am...'? No, it's pure business. My family has done it for 85 years. It wasn't a big deal until I opened Tigard. That's what made me really rich--all that publicity. If you had not gone into this business, what would you have done? I don't know. I'm sure that I would have found...when I left Missoula in 1987, I couldn't find a social life, so I moved to Seattle. I was a controller at a fly rod manufacturing company. God, even that sounds sexual. It's definitely penile extension. Would you be rich no matter what you were doing? Rich is a state of mind. Oh, come on. It is, it is. We see these little old ladies around with a Cadillac and diamond rings...turns out they have $45,000 in the bank and Social Security. Well, that's not rich by anyone's definition. Everybody thought they were rich. They thought they were rich because they had everything they thought they needed in life. Americans don't know how lucky they are. And everybody here lives so well, compared to the rest of the world. People just don't realize how well-off they really are. Money is important to you. Money is a means to an end. It allows you to do things. Jenny Durham "Street kid." "Dropout." "Runaway." Jenny Durham will soon have another label: "College freshman." Over the past five years, Jenny Durham has slept in a lot of different places: under the I-5 bridges in Seattle, under the bushes in front of the Multnomah County Library and in finer doorways all over Portland. But for the next four years, thanks to a Horatio Alger Association Scholarship she won this November, the slight, red-haired 18-year-old will be sleeping in a dorm at the college of her choice. Durham, who is earning a General Equivalency Degree at New Avenues for Youth, was one of 100 seniors nationwide awarded an Alger scholarship. The 10-year-old prizes recognize students who combine financial need, scholastic excellence and the ability to overcome adversity. More than 250 colleges nationwide, including Lewis & Clark, have agreed to supplement the $10,000 Alger award, making it a full scholarship. Getting a free ride to the halls represents a dramatic change of course for Durham. Her family moved moved constantly around the Vancouver, Wash., area when she was young, dodging bill collectors and complying with eviction notices. In the summers, they'd leave Vancouver and squat in campgrounds until school started again. The baby-faced Durham grew up fast. At 13, as most of her peers mall-hopped and anxiously watched each others' hormones change, Durham fled her parents' home. Soon after, in ninth grade, she quit school. Five years, a couple of arrests and countless cold nights later, she landed at New Avenues for Youth, a downtown Portland social-service provider that includes a school for street kids. The staff at New Avenues helped her get into a transitional group home and back into school. Geof Garner, Durham's teacher and mentor, says she is one of the most determined of the hundreds of teenagers who filter though New Avenues' doors every year. "A lot of kids come in here from tough backgrounds," Garner says, "but what Jenny has overcome is amazing." Last month Durham talked to reporter Nigel Jaquiss about dropping out, dumpster-diving and her thoughts about dorm life. Why did you leave home? I left because my father had moved back in with us and I didn't want to be around there. I don't like the way he's treated me and my family, mostly my Mom, all my life. How do you two get along now? In the past two months, probably better than ever. He went to drug and alcohol rehab, which he has done several times, and it's never helped. But this time he came back and he's talking about being a drug and alcohol counselor. Where is your mother? Over in Vancouver. She lives with her boyfriend in his van on the side of his daughter's house. How about your siblings? My brother right now, he is in prison, in Shelton, [Wash.]. My sister's in jail. They're both in there for possession of methamphetamines. You told me that your brother and sister both dropped out of school in ninth grade, and then you did, too. Do you fear that there is some family pattern? Drugs made my family fall apart, the drugs and alcohol. My sister, she could have had a scholarship. She could have been in college right now. She went to the Math Olympics, I think when she was in seventh or eighth grade. Then drugs caught her. Drugs and hopeless love. My brother, I don't know how he fell into it. His artwork was so great. I've always felt like I didn't belong in my family. Not necessarily that 'they switched me in the hospital' kind of thing, but I just felt, growing up, that my sister was so good at math, and my brother was so good at art, and I couldn't do anything. What frightens you? That I might follow in those footsteps. In my head, I can't see it happening, 'cause I don't know what I can possibly do, or want to do, that could get me in a situation like that. I think I've got more of my Mom in me, and she's only been in jail twice. So I don't really have a big fear of going to jail. Why did you drop out of school? School's always been a real struggle for me. Math, teachers, the social situation--it just didn't work. You have all these groups like the preps, the G's, the hippies... What's a G? Gangster. So how do you go from being a dropout to winning a prestigious scholarship? It's always been there. I don't know, I've always seen myself as wanting to stand out, and I've always wanted to be conspicuous. I want to be known after I die. I want my name to be the one on the Goodyear Blimp, I want to do something with myself, and I can see that there's steps I have to take in order to do that. Did you need to drop out to get where you are today? I didn't need to, but I guess it's better now that I did. I got a majority of the 'let's go break the law' kind of thing out of the way. I mean, I'm sure I could have got where I'm at now without dropping out, but I don't think it would have come quite as fast. Are there a lot of resources for homeless kids in Portland? Yeah, there really are. Compared to other cities, like Vancouver or San Francisco, this is a paradise for homeless youth. I mean, you've got the business people walking around who'll give you cigarettes, maybe some change. And then you've got the shelters, you've got Annex, there's Streetlight Shelter, Outside In, Garfield House, Bridge House, Green House, New Avenues, they're all right there. Is it too easy for kids to be homeless? I think that often, I really do. And, as much as I would love to contribute and make it better for kids, you know, like to donate money, I don't know if it's the right thing. Am I just giving them a place to flop? What are they going to do the next morning? They're going to go out, they're going to get high, they're going to go home and go to sleep. And it frustrates me. I've had a friend down here that I saw when I first started coming down here about five years ago or so. And he's still in the shelter. Why? Because he can be. It's free, it's warm, it's got TV, Nintendo, movies, laundry, a shower. There's an urban legend that a lot of street kids are just posing, that they're middle-class kids trying out a new identity. Yeah, I've seen that. But they're not down here that long. The ones that have actually been down here are here for pretty good reasons. When new kids show up, we like to know why they are down here. If they say, 'My parents said I had to do the dishes!,' we're like, 'Go home--go home, will you? So you have to do chores. So you have to clean your room. So you have to go to school. Big deal. Let me have your birth certificate, I'll go to your home.' What's the hungriest you've ever been? I've been hungry, but, honestly, in Portland, even in Vancouver, I've never been a day without eating something. It's easy to get food. There are so many resources. In Vancouver, Dunkin Donuts puts bags or boxes of donuts beside the dumpsters, and me and my friend Lynn, we'd sleep in the park, Waterworks Park, and go over to Dunkin Donuts and rummage through the boxes and find the ones we liked. Have you ever eaten out of dumpsters? Yep. Old Country Buffet in Vancouver. It was the weirdest thing I ever did. I can remember that and laugh. Where have you slept outside? Under the bushes in front of the library and in front of the Guild Theatre. That sucked, 'cause the lights are on, like, 24/7, and it's real hard for me to sleep with the lights on. I had to, like, dig myself inside of my hoodie. Do you carry a weapon when you're sleeping outside? No, I know how to yell and I know how to fight. I've seen too much violence go on, so I don't do weapons very well. How did your family react to your getting the scholarship? Um, my mom is really excited. My teachers, Geof [Garner] and Josh [Laurie], helped me find this frame in the back at New Avenues, and I put the scholarship in it so it looked nice, and when I gave that to her, she had tears in her eyes. A lot of kids here on the west side of Portland have all sorts of advantages. Do you feel, having basically raised yourself for the last five years, that you've missed out? Not at all. I feel very strong, mentally, compared to them. People who have had things handed to them on a silver platter all their life may have had it good, but in the long run, I think what it's going to come down to is that there's a fine line between living and surviving. I think it's going to be a struggle for them to have to learn how to survive. Wherever you end up going to college, it's unlikely that many of your classmates will have been homeless. Do you worry about fitting in socially? I don't really care too much about what they think of me. They're going to like me for who I am, what I stand for, what I want to do--not what I was, where I came from and what I went through. I'm sure there are a lot of kids I can relate to, whether it's been like moving out and going through the homeless struggle or fighting with their parents at home, a 'Give me my car keys, it's a Friday night' struggle. One way or another, we're going to be able to relate. What are you going to major in, or what you are interested in studying? I've always had the thought of being an actress. I like doing plays and skits, drama. I already consider myself an actress. The clothes that I wear, they're not just clothes, you know. They are my moods. When I feel one way in the morning, I put on that kind of costume that day. What's the hardest thing about being on your own? Something that comes up a lot is the parent's signature, at the bottoms of the applications. I filled out this thing last night, at Blockbuster. They wanted a parent's signature. Or when I need a shoulder to cry on, or I need a couple of bucks, it's tough. How do you pay for things? I work. Like, I was a door-to-door sales associate for Kirby, selling vacuum cleaners. I made a lot of money, but I had nothing to show for it at the end. I was paying the rent, my food, my cigarettes, doing the gas-money thing, doing the bus tickets, passes, eating out at lunch, all that, and like, new clothes here or there, not too much, and by the end of that period it had all been spent, like you got to spend money to make money. Do you think some kids should drop out of school? No. I don't think anyone should drop out of school. But I think it's part of somebody's fate, it's like a time of their life when they have to either get to know themselves, get to know what's out there, or just have a little bit of free time and get to know what they want for themselves and out of life. That's what it did for me. I dropped out, did drugs, did the traveling, did the Rainbow Gathering, the hippie thing, the hitchhiking. Did you ever think you would be where you are now? Yes and no. No, I didn't think I was going to do it this fast, but yes, I knew that something had to go right in my life soon. There was never a doubt in my mind. When you're at the bottom of the hole, and you can't dig no more, you come out in China. The sun's got to be bright again. I knew it was going to happen, sooner or later. I didn't know how, I didn't know when, but I knew it was coming. It had to.   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published January 5, 1999