This is the first installment of a tripartite mini-series about Spring Break: events from almost a month ago now, coming to light by virtue of my mastermistressidiot and some sore remarks on the discipline of writing. Discipline I evidently lack. Her pronunciation of evidently like evi-dent-ly, sounding curled and gnarly in the American way.
So it starts in Northeast Portland, where we spend the weekend walking. On the day before break, the Friday, she wears the wrong shoes and bubbles up a liquid blister on her foot. On Saturday she wears her Converse instead of those monkish clip-clops, and the muscle all along the outer side of her right foot, just below the shin, begins to inflame. She and Holly had been to see Warpaint at the Wonder Ballroom the evening before, and the resultant cocktail hangover manages to seep from her head, down her back, and into the thighs and lower legs, culminating in the feet with a triumphant throb. On Saturday night she consults symptomchecker and decides, with certainty, that she has developed gout. On Sunday she wears the Converse again. If I have gout, she thinks, it can't be helped and the shoes I wear will barely make a difference and bugger this, the sun is shining. By Sunday at 5pm she is limping around Lloyd Center shopping mall on her tiptoes and making all sorts of gallant men relinquish their seats on the bus. Sunday is also the day she gets her tattoo, so the bandage on her right forearm lends texture to what is fast becoming a martyrdom complex, complete with sigh and slanted eyebrows.
She had proposed Northeast Portland as a walking destination with all the smiley innocence I have since begun to suspect. I later discover that this is where Atlas Tattoos is located, on Albina above Mississippi, but for over 24 hours she devils a weave, and I am summarily hoodwinked. Whilst I eat a sloppy meatball sandwich from Garden State, she announces she needs the portaloo. She returns after an improbable 20 minutes; I am polite, refrain from asking questions. In fact, she tells me in the safety of retrospect, she had used that 20 minutes to talk to a tattooist about walk-in appointments for the following day.
But we're not going to talk about the tattoo anymore. At 22, already making up for the sobriety of her youth, she says. No, instead we're going to talk about the ignorant bliss which suffused the whole of Saturday, before she slunk away on Sunday and confounded my sense of propriety. BT = BeforeTat. We bus-it up to Burnside on the 75, and walk all 39 blocks down to MLK Boulevard in a sunlight that, bless it, tries really hard to burn away the wet on the pavements and the roads, and the heavy air. She listens to Leonard Cohen, and I listen to The Beatles. Last year I persuaded her to buy me a separate ipod, and things have since been more agreeable. I suggest that we could be compared to a married couple who at last decide to have separate duvets or separate beds, just for space and leg room, and she says, 'No Consette, we are not like that, not like that at all.' Consette can't do similes, she says.
Burnside is really great - nouveau riche by Laurelhurst, deep in vintage stores, restaurants, yummy mummys etc, and then bit by bit extracting itself from village quiet and turning into the dusty precursor to downtown we had hoped it would become. We follow signs saying COMICS COMICS COMICS!, into a warehouse and down a rusty stairway, hoping for goodness sake this isn't some sinister childcatcher trapping. It's not. It is wonderful. Emerging into the light again, we turn right at MLK and walk another 20 blocks or so northwards to Viking Soul Food, a sheen aluminium (not aluminum) cart that sells smoked salmon lefses for under $5. A lady from the neighboring cart comes and sits next to us on the bench, and I feel guilty for not choosing her BBQ ribs. The idiot seems very interested in the life of a foodcarter, which concerns me for obvious, practical, Consette-thinking, reasons. I project forward a decade or so, and envisage the lowliness of our future life. 'I wanna write books and I wanna make biscuits', she insists. Not so lucrative, I say. And what she says in response I can't put on the internet, or it might upset the grandmother. Speaking of which, the grandmother sent the idiot another email last week. I don't come out of it very well, it must be said. I think she thinks me rather verbose, rather stuffy. Quote (sic):
Incidentally will tell that ghastly Consett creature that I never gave her permission to call Margaret ...what a liberty! And if she can,t think of anything nice to say about my eldest granddaughter she can jolly well shut up.
This is a shame, but whatcanyoudo. From Viking Soul Foods we amble off west in the direction of Mississippi, and I buy my second lunch (the meatball sandwich). The foodcart site lies on the crest of the Mississippi hill, with downtown just there to the left, and Portland's spaghetti junction of flyovers to the south. The sun is less insipid; I bask for a while. She goes to the infamous 'portaloo'. Later we sit in Fresh Pot coffee and spy on a man who is either Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro, or Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro's just-as-hairy-and-attractive doppelganger. The idiot sends a message to England (Rebecca MacDonald) and tells her the news. SUPREME BEARD SEDUCES AMERICA. We like a beard, especially when there might be a Scottish accent beneath it.
The day ends, somehow, with friends in an English pub on Belmont. I know from the idiot's expression as she walks inside that this is the sort of sneering opportunity she can't resist, that this English pub will be nothing like an English pub, and that no 'pub' in America could ever really be a pub. But as it turns out, the smell in the Horse and Brass does in fact approximate the smell of England. The post-smoking ban admixture of stained carpet, fried food and Toilet Duck. A Wetherspoons pub, but an English pub nonetheless. And dare I say it, with better beer.
Consette x
No comments:
Post a Comment