Fugatives & Refugees

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Recycled Gardens is open May through October, Thursday through Sunday. During the off-season they're open Saturdays only. Of course your dogs are welcome, so long as they don't mess with Betsey, the friendly, one-eyed resident dog.

  Rooftop Sculpture Garden

  At the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, SW Third Avenue and Main Street, take the elevators to the ninth floor and walk the length of the floor to the glass alcove on the south end. Outside that door is a garden and gallery of sculpture, called "Law of Nature," by Tom Otterness. The walls are carved with quotes about justice and conscience by writers from Mark Twain to Maya Angelou.

  (a postcard from 1995)

  "Where you're going, there are huge pits in the floor and broken glass everywhere, so it's important you do what you're told," says Marcie. This is after dark, under the east-side on-ramps for the Morrison Bridge. A block away people are waiting on the sidewalk for tables, for a nice dinner at Montage. Here at SE Belmont Street and Third Avenue, a crowd of men and women wear army-surplus fatigues, disposable Tyvek coveralls, and radiation badges. These people carry military C rations and covered casserole dishes. They cradle warm garlic bread wrapped in tinfoil.

  The idea is, we're going to the first potluck after a nuclear holocaust: Portland's semiannual Apocalypse Cafe.

  Marcie says, "I hope nobody has to use the bathroom, because the toilet facilities at the event are a little primitive. They're what you'd expect after the end of civilization."

  All we know is to wait here. We each pay Marcie five dollars and get slapped with a biohazard warning sticker. A huge shipping truck pulls up and someone jokes that it's the shuttle to the party.

  The big door on the back of the truck rolls up, and Marcie says, "Get in and be quiet." As people climb in, hesitant to go back into the dark depths of the cargo box, Marcie says how illegal this is. At any traffic light, if there are police near enough to hear people talking inside the truck, we'll be busted.

  Climbing in, people talk about how illegal aliens suffocate in the back of trucks like this. People sit, crowded together on the metal floor, feeling the truck's diesel engine idle.

  Marcie says, "After we park, you need to follow orders." She stands outside the tailgate, ready to pull down the door, saying, "If you don't stay inside the rows of candles, you could be injured or killed." She says, "I can't stress this too much."

  She says, "What we're doing is felony trespassing. If we get caught, and you don't have a photo ID, you'll have to spend a night in jail."

  Then she pulls the door shut. Inside the truck's cargo box, it's completely dark. We all jerk and sway together as the truck starts forward in first gear.

  A voice says, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if when they opened the door, we were all dead from carbon monoxide fumes?"

  Another voice says, "Oh, yeah, that would be just fucking hilarious."

  In the dark everyone sways together, whispering guesses about our route based on right and left turns and the truck's speed as we shift up through the gears. You can smell chili and garlic and fried chicken. When the truck gears down to a stop, we're all quiet, mindful of the police officer who might be just outside.

  You can't see your wristwatch. You can't see your hands. The ride seems to go for hours and miles. Then the truck stops again and backs up a little. The door rolls up. Open. To our light-hungry eyes, the candlelight outside is blinding bright, and we follow the trail between candles and deep black concrete holes in the floor. We're in some vast concrete warehouse.

  A woman drops her casserole dish, and it breaks on the floor. "Fuck," she says. "It's the end of the world after nuclear annihilation, and I broke my hot bean dip."

  The rest of us wander back through huge empty rooms where fires burn in rusted trash barrels. The arms and legs of mannequins are wired together and hang overhead, dripping with lighted candles. Gruesome chandeliers. An old eight-millimeter movie projector clatters, showing army training movies and Christian cartoons on one pockmarked wall. There's a buffet of food, and a band is setting up. In the bathrooms every toilet bowl is broken and stuffed with litter and dead rats.

  The word is, this is the old Greyhound bus barn under the west end of the Marquam Bridge. Members of the Portland Cacophony Society have cut off the padlocks and connected the power. In another huge concrete room, bowling lanes are outlined with little votive candles. Instead of bowling pins, lovely breakable objets d'art from junk stores—china vases and statues and lamps—are the target at the end of each lane. Nearby are boxes of plates and glasses for you to throw against the concrete walls.

  The word is, this whole building is condemned and the bulldozers and wrecking balls will clean up our mess in another week.

  The band starts and people are beating on anything metal with scraps of pipe. People run through the maze of concrete rooms, holding flashlights and glowsticks. The deep holes in the floor are the lube pits each bus used to park above for service work. Underground tunnels connect the pits, and it's easy to get lost. Stairs lead up to abandoned offices on the second and third floors, those offices heaped with rotting blankets and human shit. In the spooky dark we discover the dirty needles and dead cigarette lighters of junkies who've given up their turf for the night.

  In the main room there's dancing and drinking and plate breaking. There's food and movies. A police helicopter passes over the broken skylights and just keeps going. Right then, somebody rolls a bowling ball, a perfect throw down a candlelit alley, and the ball smashes a lovely hand-painted statue of Miss Piggy.

  Getting Around: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to Meet

  Until the next Apocalypse Cafe—and the next ride in the back of a moving van—here are a few transportation-related people and places. The first, Reverend Charles Linville, is the man who cut the padlocks off the empty Greyhound bus barn and made the party happen. When he's not breaking and entering, he delivers mail out of the University Station Post Office.

  Jiffy-Marr—"Get legally married in ten minutes or less or your money back!"

  The cool way to get married in Portland used to be the Church of Elvis. Same-sex marriages, group marriages, you could even marry yourself—they were all "legal" at the Church of Elvis, where the minister would charge you five bucks, give you toy rings, and make you swear to her own spooky oath. The fun part you didn't know about.

  After the ceremony you were forced to carry a huge sign around the block, dragging tin cans and telling the whole world you were hitched. All of downtown was in on the joke, and people would honk at you, wave and shout. You looked like an idiot, but everyone smiled and waved and loved you.

  The Church of Elvis is no more. But no sweat. Enter Reverend Charles Edward Linville and his Our Lady of Eternal Combustion Church, at 1737 SE Miller Street in the Sellwood neighborhood. Phone: 503-232-3504.

  There, the Reverend Chuck runs "Jiffy-Marr." With the promise: "Get legally married in ten minutes or less or your money back!"

  You can't miss the place. In 1996 several hundred Santa Clauses stood in line, waiting to pass through the metal detector and drink shots of whiskey for breakfast. Above the front door is a painting of Reverend Bill, the resident black Labrador retriever, who's also a registered Universal Life Minister who can perform your marriage.

  Parked in the driveway are Reverend Chuck's cars. They include a 1973 Ford Torino, covered in a zillion things that suggest danger and painted with yellow and black warning stripes. There're rifle shells. Busted eyeglasses. A time clock. Broken pieces of mirror. Danger and warning signs. Plus there are dead fish and deer skeletons dug up by Reverend Bill. And there's countless rubber nipples from baby bottles. "People can't resist these," Reverend Chuck says. "You'll see guys in business suits sneak over just to tweak a nipple when nobody's looking." The car's theme is "Things That Can Get You in Trouble." The seats are covered in bobcat fur, with the taxidermied heads still attached.

  The Reverend's second car, his "Jesus Chrysler," is a Chrysler Newport Royale, crusted with a ba
h-zillion rusted doorknobs. Shotgun shells. Clocks. A rusted metal model of the Golden Gate Bridge runs the length of the roof. Next to it is a turbine vent painted and mosaicked with jewels and mirrors until it's a huge crown. The hood's covered with elegant gold-flocked wallpaper. The windshield is topped with a flashing back-lit acrylic sculpture of Christ's face. "People describe it as a nightmare. I wanted to use a lot of sharp pointy things so if people tried to steal parts, they'd bleed for it." Up front, he's hung sleigh bells.

  His first art car was a 1967 Chevy Bel Air that he bought for $200 after moving to Portland from Los Angeles in 1983. One of his first jobs here was at the Oregon Humane Society on NE Columbia Boulevard. "I never had to kill anything," he says. But on swing shift he did have to load the incinerator. "At first, you'd handle the animals very reverently, very gently and tenderly, but eventually you end up hard-balling the kittens against the back wall of the incinerator. Summer was the worst. It was cat season, and we'd always have a big stack of more cats than we could burn."

  At the same time, Reverend Chuck was sneaking cats and kittens home to his apartment that didn't allow pets. He was running his own ads and finding owners for animals past their sell-by expiration dates. Even the French poodles with bad haircuts. He says, "I brought home a lot of dogs I was too embarrassed to walk in the daylight."

  Like everybody, one day he accidentally left a sack lunch on top of his car when he drove to work. That whole commute, people laughed and pointed. After that, he glued a coffee cup to the car roof. And always, people pointed and waved and laughed, trying to get his attention. After that, he glued a coffeemaker, then a waffle iron, then a whole breakfast to his car.

  "You've heard of Continental Kits?" he says. "I call this a 'Continental Breakfast Kit.'"

  Eventually, the breakfast included real Hostess Twinkies, still wrapped but glued to the car. "I've found a Twinkie will last up to a year if the package isn't breached. And when our neighborhood has an ant problem, they're almost never on the Twinkies."

  Since then, he says, "Me? I just love to stick crap on cars."

  He uses only 100 percent silicone glue. GE and Dap brands are good. Sometimes he drills the car body and bolts things, but in Oregon that means leaks and mildew. "I've caulked the hell out of it, and I still get that delightful basement smell." When it comes to cleaning all those toys and appliances and bones and whatnot, well... "If you look close enough, you see—I don't. This is Oregon," he says. "Let the sky wash them!" Besides, he loves the different "mutations" each kind of plastic baby head or rubber nipple or crucifix goes through—oozing white crud or cracking—when exposed to years of auto exhaust and weather.

  The upside is, "Most people I've talked to with art cars agree: You can get away with more with these cars than you can with a normal car. You can run stoplights. You can park across an intersection. When you reach a four-way stop, hardly anyone ever goes before you."

  The downside includes: "Everybody wants to touch and wiggle things." They break off the trophy figures of little gold and silver people bowling, playing baseball, shooting, golfing. "Ninety-nine percent of the reactions are positive, but every once in a while you get a screamer who says, 'I bet that car has AIDS!'" He says, "You can't have a thin skin if you're going to drive these things. You have to expect some vandalism."

  Another issue is the bees and hornets attracted to the colors and shiny mirrors so bright they might be a flower garden.

  And crows. Chuck has a selection of wild animal lure tapes he got from a hunting store—wild pigs mating, coyotes, crows fighting, bobcats in heat—and he plays them over loudspeakers mounted outside each car. When he plays the crows tape, a flock of crows appears and follows the car like a noisy dark cloud. "I love the speakers," he says, "because you're mutating the environment from two blocks away." If you play the tape called "Red Fox in Distress," every dog in the area barks.

  Living in Portland, this sort of acting out just seems natural. The whole city, he says, has a "small man complex."

  Adding, "Portland makes up for its small size with its loud and obnoxious behavior."

  Instead of animal tapes, he'll play bedwetting hypnosis records from the 1950s: ear-splitting recorded voices that tell every car in the parking lot or freeway, "We love you. We need you. If you wake up and have to go to the bathroom, you'll get up and come back to a nice, clean bed— and then we'll love you even more..."

  At Christmas he blares mixes of bad Christmas music and calls it "drive-by caroling." Still, all this fucks with Chuck's own sense of reality. "Now when I hear crows, I think: 'Are those real crows?' When I hear a siren, I think: 'Is that a real cop or just someone like me?'"

  Petroliana

  Glenn Zirkle meant well. His idea was to find one old-time gasoline pump and restore it as a gift for his boss, Dick Dyke, at WSCO Petroleum. In 1982 he found Ins pump. In 1985 he found another. Since then, his collection of "Petroliana" has pretty much taken over the corporate offices at 2929 NW Twenty-ninth Avenue.

  Now called the Historical Museum of Early Oil Days, it has at least one of everything you could possibly remember.

  Glenn walks you through the earliest pumps, the "blind fuelers" of the 1910s, then the "visibles" of the 1910s through the 1920s. The earliest visible is a Wayne Pump model 492 "Roman or Greek Column pump" built to look like a fluted white column. It's fancy as hell, but any repairs meant rebuilding the whole thing—including the leather gaskets.

  "I just started watching for the era of farms with old barns," he says. "They didn't go to town every day, so it was likely they had their own pumps."

  "Visibles" provided gas from a ten-gallon, thirty-inch-tall glass tank perched at the top of the pump. First the fuel was pumped, by hand or power, up into the glass tank— like a cylindrical glass fish bowl—which was marked with levels for each gallon. This way the buyer could see the gas. Glenn says, "They'd want to feel like they were getting the amount they were paying for." Then the fuel was gravity-fed down into the car.

  Next are the "clock face" pumps from the 1930s. On these, a big hand spins around the face of the pump once for each gallon, and a smaller hand moves slower, keeping track of the total number of gallons. From the 1940s through the 1960s there are the "three-wheel" computer pumps, with three places to record total sale in the days when gas prices ranged from 19 to 30 cents per gallon. After the 1960s higher gas prices led to the "four-wheel" computer pumps.

  Besides the pumps, you'll find a hoard of drive-away premiums: toys and dishes, most of them painted with the red Mobil Oil Pegasus. Plus countless antique metal signs and rare items like the porcelain scallop shells that used to sit on each corner of an original Shell gas station roof. A few years ago, Glenn got his best buy when he tracked down a retired worker from the port fuel terminal. This man had taken a load of old service station signs, all of them the baked-porcelain kind that last forever. He'd hauled them up into the mountains around Vernonia to roof a shed with. When Glenn finally found the man, he'd just torn down the old shed and was hauling the antique signs to the dump. "He said, 'You'll pay me for those signs?'" Glenn says, "I wound up buying sixty-three assorted signs from him."

  When visiting, keep in mind part of the building is still offices. WSCO Petroleum is the fuel distributor that owns the local Astro chain of gas stations, originally called "Tricky Dicky" after president Dick Dyke. Glenn says, "Nixon got in trouble, and away went that name." The company's logo, a grinning red-headed kid, is still around town.

  The Spruce Goose

  This airplane, dubbed a "flying lumberyard" by critics, flew just one time: November 2, 1947. Now Howard Hughes's "Spruce Goose" has been reassembled outside of Portland. For more details, check out www.sprucegoose. org, or drive by the Evergreen Aviation Museum at 3850 SE Three Mile Lane in McMinnville, Oregon. Phone: 503-434-4180.

  Street-Legal Drag Racing

  If you've got seat belts on your car and a fluid-overflow system for radiator boilovers, you can drag race in Portland. Go
to the Portland International Raceway, Wednesday through Friday. For loud cars, up to 103 decibels, races go from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. For cars up to 90 decibels, there's late-night racing until 1:00 A.m.

  The track is in West Delta Park at 1940 N Victory Boulevard. Phone: 503-823-RACE. Check out the schedule at www.portlandraceway.com.

  The Train Yards

  Portland and railroads, it never stops. For years Portland boasted the worlds shortest railroad, running the couple miles from Milwaukie to the east end of the Marquam Bridge. It was called Samtrak because Dick Samuels maintained the rolling stock and his wife, Dawn, was the engineer.

  Before that, local kids used to play on an ancient steam locomotive that stood in a flower bed in front of Union Station—until Hollywood property scouts bought the engine and restored it as the "Hooterville Cannonball" for the television series Petticoat Junction.

  For a look at vintage trains, take SE Seventeenth Avenue, just north of Holgate Boulevard, and turn east on Center Street. Go one block until the street dead-ends at a railroad crossing. Cross the tracks into a large gravel parking lot filled with trucks. Bearing right (southeast), pass through the gravel lot until you come to another railroad crossing. Just beyond that is the partial roundhouse with a small white sign that says Brooklyn. Park along the one-story building adjacent to the roundhouse. A heavy red door right under the Brooklyn sign lets you inside.

  Inside are steam locomotives as big as houses, being restored by volunteers who love them.

  This is the home of the American Freedom Train, engine number SP4449, built in May 1941. It crossed the country as part of the Bicentennial in 1975-76, and it's still red, white, and blue. Come by on a Monday or Wednesday afternoon and look for Harvey Rosener, the man who built the first high-speed graphics card for a network PC and who works on the engine with his fellow "Friends of the 4449." Also, check out the engines latest trips across the Pacific Northwest on www.4449.com.