There was the municipal elevator, the Oregon City Elevator, the green landmark, the city’s fantastic logo, the name of the high school newspaper I wrote for, the only outdoor municipal elevator west of the Mississippi River, that I rode for free all the time for the sheer hell of it, even later in my 20s and 30s when I took dates there for a ride and a stroll along the Promenade, down the path with New Deal stonework on one side, past the historic homes, oak and maple trees and rhododendrons, past my old orthodontist’s office and his gorgeous Farrah Fawcett assistant, the Great Hovering Presence in my youth. She was later the subject of my first published piece of writing, a strange confession that appeared in my high school literary review. I still can’t believe it was ever published.

Not too long ago, and this will be the only writing in this memoir about Oregon City to reference its present-day state of mind, I took a walk around Clackamette Park on a cloudy December morning and admired the boatless rivers. I stopped near the confluence, near a large pile of cottonwoods blown up there by a flood. A shiny purple bag on the ground arrested my attention. Resting near the bag was a syringe. I considered the syringe and its provenance. I considered the syringes encountered everywhere I go in Oregon: beaches, woods, rivers, streams, streets, sidewalks, parking lots, parks, trails, malls. I considered what this meant for American culture.

An elderly man spooked me out of my consideration of the abandoned syringe. He materialized from the standing cottonwoods, the ones with exquisite beaver gnawings, the ones about ready to fall. He said “Merry Christmas” in a Russian accent. I said “Merry Christmas” to him. He moved on. I watched him walk over the purple bag and syringe and stop at the river’s edge. He urinated into the river and then knelt over and washed his hands. I moved along and talked to squirrels and geese.

At the Promenade later, I watched a lone smokestack on the west side of the river puff smoke or steam or whatever it was. Two Japanese tourists snapped photographs of the falls and the sprawling, spellbinding and once-bustling industrial site. The Elevator beckoned me to ride, but I didn’t have time. Next time.

I have lived some great stories on this Promenade. I have been in love with someone here, many, many years ago. She wore purple that summer evening.

The Promenade is a great place to walk and talk with someone you love. It is a great place to sit on a bench and write. Much of this book was written on the Promenade.

Another syringe appeared.

I saw a transient wearing a striped poncho standing on a rock, talking loudly to himself. He yelled something to me. I waved and kept walking. I saw the I-205 bridge, easily the ugliest bridge in Oregon, one without a shred of grace. In its foreground, I saw the old Conde McCullough bridge, one of the most beautiful, graceful bridges in Oregon. I considered the contrasts between these two bridges and what it revealed about American culture. A lot.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)

Twelfth and Jackson was also the location of the public swimming pool, where I would go and watch my fawn-like and soft-spoken girlfriend compete in swim meets, perhaps my favorite pastime in high school and perhaps the last time I was truly supportive to a girlfriend or partner. She used to knit me sweaters and ties. She taught me how to play chess on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire while a dozen taxidermied animals looked on.

From my senior year journal:

11-23-81

I did something this weekend I have never done before and enjoyed it immensely. My girlfriend came over and we played Scrabble. It was very relaxing, increased awareness, and was fun. It sounds weird but I really enjoyed it. There was nothing emotionally tied to it and that was nice for a change. To be interesting you have to be interested.

I lost my virginity to her on Halloween night of my senior year. We had gone to party dressed as gangster and moll. She’d sewed her own silk flapper dress and it clung spotted to her body in the rain that pelted us that evening.

There was also the matter of the coin flips that took place between me and my girlfriend. The story went like this:

We always went to the bowling alley on our dates although we never bowled a single frame. She always drove us in her brown Pinto and we kept the sound of the AM radio low because we loved to talk.

I always flipped a quarter and she always called it in the air. If I lost, I had to sneak into the bowling alley, sneak into its fetid men’s restroom, fit the quarter into a condom machine, and turn a silver knob until a little wrapped package plopped out in a tray below. If she lost, she had to sneak into the women’s restroom and do something similar although she never gave me a description of its décor. I can’t remember the brand, color, state of lubrication or texture of the condoms we each purchased, but we never went without one. In 1981, the Oregon City Bowling Alley was the only business in town an underage and responsible couple could buy condoms after hours. Most went without. This was also the same year the NY Times first reported on a “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”

After the purchase, my girlfriend would fire up the Pinto and we would drive Molalla Avenue toward Singer Hill and explore Oregon City’s historic area east of the bluff overlooking the Willamette River and the paper mills. We always searched for a vacant and unlit place to hide the car and have sex in the back seat. The Pinto probably deserved its reputation as a terrible, even murderous American compact car, but the Hatchback model she owned was incredibly spacious with a huge curved rear window that allowed for scenic views and plenty of maneuvering.

The parking lot of a huge stone church near the John McLoughlin House was our most frequent and preferred spot. We never drank alcohol during these Pinto moments. We never smoked cigarettes, let alone pot. We never had the radio playing. Neither one of us had a curfew to obey. We invariably left the condom behind as a reminder to next morning’s churchgoers, whatever reminder that churchgoer wanted to conjure; it could go either way. We always laughed about that.

The police never rousted us.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)

In my junior year, I landed in a creative writing course taught by Doug Winn. I suspect now it was his first teaching job, and he must have been in his mid twenties, reedy, with wavy hair and a bushy mustache.

It was a small class, maybe fifteen students. Winn required us to keep journals and often made observations in the margins. He also dictated a commentary on cassette tape about our writing during the semester. Some of Winn’s commentaries were made in public places such as a Laundromat, where bizarre characters would occasionally interact with him as he spoke into the recorder. We met Winn’s inaugural distribution of the tapes with utter astonishment—we didn’t know they were coming. At lunch I raced out to my car, plugged the tape into the cassette player, and listened to what my teacher had to say about my writing. I also heard him recommend authors.

Winn told me something about my writing’s wry voice and candid sexual content reminded him of Kurt Vonnegut and that maybe I should check this author out. I did, the very day Winn advised this. I rushed to the school library and found the novel Breakfast of Champions, thumbed its uncut pages, and noticed some peculiar drawings, including ones of the American flag and a female’s pubic hair.

I devoured Breakfast of Champions and the rest of Vonnegut’s novels. I’d never read anything like them: the voice, satire, time-bending, moral outrage, revisionist history, tone, and the bursts of ribald sexuality. Next Winn mentioned Norman Mailer. I’d never heard of him either. I took the bus to Portland to visit for the first time, Powell’s Bookstore, a holy and cavernous literary place Winn suggested I explore. There, I bought The Executioner’s Song, The Armies of the Night and The Fight.

The Armies of the Night, Mailer’s third-person account of his chaotic participation in a protest march against the Vietnam War, initiated me into a brave new ego-centric world of personal writing. In this book, I read sentences such as: “He had in fact learned to live in the sarcophagus of his image—at night, in his sleep, he might dart out, and paint improvements on the sarcophagus.” Immediately, I began emulating Mailer’s third-person point of view when writing about Matt Love, now the only subject I deemed worthy of my prose.

Winn launched a literary magazine that year and I got the impression then he might have paid for the press run himself. He kicked off this venture in grand style by convincing the police to cooperate with the magazine’s staff to stage a phony automobile accident in front of the school. Thus, we called the magazine Pile Up on 12^th and Jackson and it contained five of my pieces, including a non-fiction story in the style of The Armies of the Night called “Love Among the Little Girls.” No wonder after reading this bombastic piece and another one titled “Girls, Soon to be Women, that I Have Known,” Winn commented on tape: “You have a little of this attitude that nobody is smart but me and that kind of attitude is not fun to be around. I don’t get a good response that a reader gets into that kind of attitude.”

In my senior year, I took an independent study in creative writing with Winn. Together, we developed the academic requirements for the course and they called for a journal, a book review a week alternating between fiction and non-fiction, a film review every other week, a piece of reportage or an essay a week, character sketches, poems, a film treatment, and a major short story at the end of the semester. Winn also expected me to teach his beginning creative writing class for one period. I doubled all the written requirements and taught for a week.

As graduation loomed, Winn invited a few students over to his ramshackle house for dinner and cooked us a spaghetti feast while incense burned and a jazz record played. That evening, he presented us homemade candles as special writers’ gifts. It felt like we were reenacting some Last Supper rite but absent the impending crucifixion. A few days later, Winn found me at school and handed over my graduation present in a neatly gift-wrapped package. I tore it open right there and beheld tattered copies of Henry Miller’s trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus, Nexus and Plexus. Without any sort of preface to Miller, whom I had never heard of, Winn told me, “I think you’ll like this guy, now go out and become a writer.”

It was my junior year. I’d retired from football the previous season after the ankle injury and intellectual exhaustion with arrogant coaches (in plaid polyester shorts) who breathed bromides with every scream. I had a Super Bowl crush on a fellow junior, easily the most exotic female on campus with her signature clothes, hair, makeup and movements. She was foreign born but not a foreign exchange student. Her most arresting style was matching or clashing headbands and leg warmers. She was utterly self-exiled from the popular crowd. I suspected they feared her. No one could fathom her. I no longer recall how we met or what established and eventually deepened our mutual attraction. We might have had a class together that first semester. I do remember our first and last date together—if date is the word. It transpired at a football game, the last Oregon City High School football game I attended.

We arranged to meet at halftime of the Homecoming game. Why halftime? Why not opening kickoff? She made the call. She was quarterbacking. We met near the concession stand. A light rain fell. As she approached, I saw she was wearing a red headband and red and white-striped legwarmers. Our school colors were red and white. We got close. Her face was flushed, crimson, and sported a crooked smile. She slurred a little hello and teetered. She gave me a big hug and I breathed in deep: hair, body, soul. It was all booze. She reeked of alcohol. I had never smelled it up close on a person like that, evaporating, damn near visible, but I knew what it was, even though I didn’t really drink in high school and had never been drunk. She told me she’d been drinking rum and produced a half pint out of her purse that was almost empty. She didn’t offer me a belt. In the background, I heard the marching band. I saw the glare from the lights. I smelled hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on the grills. The PA was announcing some raffle or car wash. She took my hand and led me away from the concession stand, into the darkness of the nearby side streets. She asked where my car was parked. My Dasher was a few blocks away. We found it and slid onto the back seat. She took a final belt of rum and the bottle somehow got stowed. We started making out. I think I got drunk on rum from kissing her. A rum makeout fog clouded the windows. We were probably in there until the fourth quarter. All we did was kiss. The session concluded. I walked her back to the stadium. She disappeared into the crowd. She’d invited me to come along, wherever she was going, but I declined. I have no idea why. It might have been the dumbest decision of my life up that point and for the next 20 years. I never told a single person about this “date.” I recorded it in my journal where no one has ever read of it. We never had another date. We never spoke of what happened. There was never a knowing look from her in the halls. Every time I see a Dasher, I wince. Luckily, Dashers are almost vanished from Oregon.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)

There was the Oregon City Library in my youth, a Carnegie gem, tiny, with a wading pool and swing sets out front. I walked or bicycled or drove to that library hundreds of times. I was always alone.

I did my reading and research there, and checked out double or triple albums by Stevie Wonder. The Secret Life of Plants is still overdue. I probably owe $5000 on it, but I owe Stevie Wonder more, because there was something in his music (and in particular that mysterious album) that sowed a seed within me that would later grow into an explorer’s heart.

The Oregon City Library was also the place I explored sex. No, not actual physical contact or anything like that! It’s where I researched how to have sex before I had sex! The story goes something like this:

On October 31, 1979, L wrote in my sophomore-year journal, the first one I ever kept: Today is the best day ever!! I’m so glad there is no school!! I love spending time with Matt!! He means everything to me!! He’s so special!! I hope we last forever!! I can’t explain how I feel about him. It is just like all of me wants to devote myself totally to Matt.

L was my first high school girlfriend. We began going together at the beginning of our sophomore year at Oregon City High School. I took her to the Homecoming Dance and my older sister drove us and bought me some cheap champagne for the occasion. After several intense sessions of making out and light petting, L and I discussed losing our dual virginity. Neither set of our parents had said a word to us about sex and the required sexual education course called Family Living was scheduled for next fall.

Thus, we discussed losing our virginity rationally, as if it were talking through a geometry proof or how to install a new kitchen sink. We knew practically nothing about the physical act of sex. It was 1979 and the only place anyone could buy a condom in Oregon City was the bowling alley, in the restrooms, via a coin operated machine that worked about half the time. High school students were having a lot of sex back then, in cars, in trucks, on floors, in parks, in the woods, in the bleachers, but first sex was still largely about imagination prior to it actually happening.

Let me assure you, I had a novelist’s imagination about potential sex with L but a journalist’s preoccupation for the facts to get it right for us. So, I, a budding newspaperman, naturally assumed control of the investigation into proper intercourse and sought out literature on the subject. L was all for this and told me to report my findings as soon as I discovered them. This literature took the form of a little hardback red book about sex that I found in the Oregon City Library. The book’s title is long lost to me now, but I do recall a publishing date in the 1950s. You get the idea. It was more of a manual why you shouldn’t have sex before marriage than a guide how two teenagers could execute the best wholesome deflowering experience. A date stamp inside proved the book hadn’t been checked out in fifteen years. It was square, squarer and squarest, American sex before the Pill and feminist manifestos on the female orgasm. Nevertheless, the book did contain some black and white photographs of a generic couple in various states of stiff coupling that were somewhat educational although certainly not erotic, which I think was the editorial point. I didn’t dare check out the book and take it home. Instead, I read it standing in the stacks and I think might have even taken notes.

So at one point I didn’t know anything about how to physically have sex with L and then I read the little red book and thought I did. I told her this on the phone and we made a plan. A few days later, she dumped me for a jock and I hated that she documented me as sucker in my journal with her girly handwriting. As for the sex, it had to wait.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)