Not So Much the Buildings

I was sure it wouldn’t be the people.

I was sure it would be the buildings which finally killed me.

Take for example the Albina Press, the new one on Hawthorne of course. (It would be madness to miss the old one, sheer, indulgent madness on my part.) Each time I remember the Albina Press the furniture begins to shift, moving left to right and rearranging like real life Tetris blocks. Tables pile on chairs, counters turn 180 to form walls and a bathroom where the front door should be. It’s difficult now to call anything bigger than a doorknob, solid. In the end it’s nothing short of an exorcism. The whole building runs down Hawthorne at a righteous clip- leaving behind a sorry trail of interrupted conversations and Sweet n’ Low- before jumping butt first into the Willamette. It sinks instantly.

October has more than her fair share of fire exits. Albina Press, Music Millenium, the back patio of the Moon and Sixpence, wasting away one square inch at a time. The loss is barely perceptible at first. My eyelids oblige, raising like garage doors and later both ears follow suit, offering an escape hatch for anything eager to slip free. It is only in November, when I can no longer remember the smaller details of Beulahland- the water dispenser or the cut of your head slouching against the back booth, which bathroom falls left and which right- that I finally admit to the loss. All those safety bricks, those planks and partitions infused with the home town taste of beer, of cigarettes and God-forbid, decent coffee, the very things I’d planned on hooking into, have turned to smoke and ghosts.

I am senile when it comes to buildings.

“What about Powell’s?” I ask myself, up to my armpits in romance novels at the local library.

“Of course you can still remember Powell’s, can’t you? The bookish smell of the front foyer, receipts slipped inside the pages of just-bought novels like crisply folded hospital sheets. The surly-faced chap behind the coffee counter, the Street Roots man with his cardboard sign, the way your shoes squeak too loud in the fiction section and people glare and you think, ‘Damn it, it can’t be my shoes. I’m wearing different shoes from last week. It must be my actual feet that squeak. Perhaps I should start walking on my hands when traversing the aisles of the fiction section, selecting volumes of Steinbeck and Carver with the un-socked toes of my right foot.’ Surely you haven’t forgotten Powell’s already, have you?”

“Not so much the moments,” I say to myself, “Not so much the moments, but the shelves are surely sliding so you’re unsure even what color the fiction room should be, though dear only knows how many million hours you’ve spent crouched and blissful under the letter S feeling the weight of literature burning in the back of your thighs.”

Scared of losing everything, even the sound of the speaker system announcing worship on the top floor, I make a list of the very best seconds and surprise myself. For these clever seconds on tenth and Burnside aren’t bricks or even books, but rather flesh and blood moments with mouths and teeth where the mortar should be.

1.The morning with the photography books when we told our stories in maps and pictures, racing from one rack to another, plotting a six thousand mile journey from home to Portland to the possibility of all tomorrow’s ships and planes. The way you smiled your thin-mouthed smile over black and white potato fields and I saw for the first time that your hands were spades and your teeth, far from perfect. Practicalities aside, this was a grand thing in my book.

2. The afternoon in the fiction section, right there under the letter T with Blankets in my hand, when I looked to my left and saw the man with tiger tattoos crawling up his arm, Thoreau splayed open in one hand. (Perhaps it wasn’t Thoreau. Perhaps I only imagined it this round and this good, but casual poetics would claim Thoreau a fitting choice.) I looked long and hard at those tiger inks clawing out from under the cuff of a blue, plaid shirt and that shock of black, dive hair emerging from the collar and I thought to myself, “Holy Hell, it’s a fat Ryan Adams.” Then lo and behold, three days later in the evening paper, I realized it was the fat Ryan Adams and I might have smiled at least for all the heartbreak songs of my student days.

3. The evening we three, dressed all in black with eyeliner eyes, turned up late for the wrong reading and sweated our way through two hours of cancer and climbing Everest: center right in the front row, with nothing but thoughts of escape fermenting in our doughy heads. And afterwards how we laughed and ran almost a block in heels, pausing to laugh at the lights as if everything had suddenly come loose inside.

4.Finally the late afternoon in the foyer, Carson McCullers breathing down the back of my neck and the feeling that I was shrinking into the soles of your shoes. How I steadied myself and thought for the very first time, “I could marry you right here in the foyer of Powell’s between the special offer books and new releases. I could stand on a pile of coffee table books to reach your mouth. They could shut the store around us and eventually we might leak into the literature.” How I turned away and felt my cheeks burning for I’ve always been too blunt for that kind of good fortune.

I have surprised myself, for each of these losses is neither bricks nor board, but rather flesh and blood moments with mouths and teeth and arms I thought incapable of such a very long stretch.