East Portland Wanderings

For awhile I was obsessed with being homeless.

Alone in my cold apartment, which was really just a converted utility closet, I wondered what it would be like to live on the street.

In some ways, I was acknowledging the shaky ground I was on - barely employed, and barely scraping together enough to pay the $350 a month PLUS HEATING in the dead of winter in Portland, 2010. Sometimes I wonder what I'll do in 2020, the ten-year anniversary of my jaunt up there. Will I relive some of the trauma that I suffered there? Will I simply shrug it off and press on? Only time, and my resolve, which is pretty strong right now, will tell.

Anyway, homelessness. I wanted to reach out but I was shy. Pile the trouble with the cat box in the unventilated rooms, and I was depressed, despairing. I called my parents and Beth daily. I listened to Catholic Radio at night and sang along to the RENT songs I remembered in my head, holding onto the things that made me happy and that hurt less.

That's when I found Leslie Feinberg. It was perfect timing - at the big PSU library on the top of the hill. I had to request their novel from a public library in nearby Vancouver, and at the end I couldn't fling myself onto the light rail another time to return it. Put it in the return slot of the library on 87th and something instead. But Leslie, in those dark nights, kept me company. I devoured Stone Butch Blues, lingered on its tales of Jess, the protagonist that was a melange Leslie Feinberg and a fictional character. The most poignant moment was this - "Do you know if I'm a boy a girl?" This after Theresa, Jess' lover, leaves them for a butch who hasn't transitioned. This must've been Leslie's dying question, asked with such tenderness in their work that it made me cry.

Jess paid for their transition. They regularly got attacked in Buffalo and nestled their apartment keys in their fist like ninja stars on the New York City subway, ready to gouge an attacker's eye out if it meant returning to their flat in one piece.

I guess I paid for my transition, too. In Portland, I lived east of 87th, daring the city to harass me. 87th Avenue was the point of no return for the city's queers. Only crazy people lived beyond that imaginary divider. But I looked at rooms - apartment rooms, basement rooms, Victorian perches, west of there. They seemed dank and strange. Like a place that I wouldn't mind visiting for a day but not one I'd want to stay in. I looked at the lion-tamers and queers who looked like me and thought, "These aren't my people."

Sure, they were queer, but they had a different feel to them - practiced words and ideas peppered with sarcasm. I felt like an alien around them.

When I saw the little converted motel at the triangle past Foster and the Green Line, I knew I was home. The ramshackle homes reminded me of Cherokee Lane back in Stockton. The people were dressed in jeans and hoodies even on the cold November day I happened upon that neighborhood. I was closer to the Trees! And by those, I mean the redwoods that stood along the border between Portland and Gresham.

Really, I was trying to find Home. And maybe my recreation of Stockton in that foreign land presaged my return to Stockton the next year before its first snowmelt.

iI walked to Sellwood along the bike path behind my home a few times. I walked towards Gresham, too - little chirps of frogs from the teaching farm peppering my footfalls in the evening. I walked up the hill in the outer park in Northeast Portland to be with the Trees - and saw a toddler jabbering away so happily that it made me laugh. Smile at his parents, eyes meeting eyes, and move on.