I'd buy whatever you would sell to me

The thing about Portland is that at two pm on a Tuesday afternoon you can decide you feel like Going Out, and you can flip through one of the two alternative weeklies, skim the readings and theater and film and music sections, weigh the potential fun of a Blazers game and darts in a neighborhood bar against three dollar Slumdog Millionaire in an old restored church that now serves up movies and beer, and decide finally on the alt-rock Austin band you haven’t heard about in seven years that’s playing again up on Mississippi.

And even though you live in a place with all these choices, you can drive there at five minutes to showtime, park half a block away right there on the street, walk up to the door and buy a ticket for fifteen dollars. The audience is small and on their feet already for the opener, and everyone is quiet and attentive. Between sets you sneak across the street to the place that serves southern food, open at ten to ten with a single waitress; you share a pile of fried okra as big as a basketball, and blackened catfish, and mac n cheese.

You hurry back in time to catch the headliner’s second song, and the room is more full now and vibrating, but still so small that you are reading the insignia on the lead singer’s t-shirt, admiring the bass’s crooked smile. Between songs the keyboardist chats with the audience like it’s a dinner party. He asks someone to look up a fact on her cell phone, and she does.


Before I moved here from Eugene I had this Portland fantasy, and the fantasy went something like this: Portland will be what I love about Oregon, plus what I miss about New York. It will have things to do on a Tuesday after dark, but these things will not require reservations and the right outfit and copious amounts of cash. And here I am dancing around in my blue sneakers with stars, and once in a while my boyfriend slips his hand into my back pocket like we’re teenagers, and I can’t believe my fortune.