SLOUCHING TOWARDS PORTLAND
(Portland Monthly, May 2004)
It’s summer, blazing, and I’m meeting the friend of a friend, X, at a coffee place in the Northeast. I say “place” because it feels more like a community center than a commercial endeavor. The black interior walls, the exposed pipes, the scrawled chalkboard menu all evince a firm stance against slick. Out back is a shady area where a tiny square of rutted concrete sports a lone table. X and I settle into the rickety plastic chairs making wary small talk. Though I am here for information, I am trying not to be invasive. But the informality of the place eases us and soon, between sips of juice and iced coffee, we begin exchanging personal stories. X used to be a woman, or maybe a girl, but now he is, if not fully a man, at least partway to becoming one. Or maybe he is not going all the way to manhood, but he couldn’t be called a woman either. He’s telling me how he grew up hating his breasts, knowing he wanted them removed. He didn’t fit in his suburban high school so he moved to a downtown Portland school where he felt free to become himself.
He lifts his skintight muscle shirt to show me his newly-sculpted chest, the results of testosterone and mastectomy and a realignment of nipples. Beneath the undulant pectorals are thin white scars, undisguised, a proud part of this new thoracic landscape. I can’t get enough of looking – at his chest, his face, everything. He indulges me gracefully. I am stuck in a hologram. From one angle I see a softness of form that suggests the resident XX female, from another I see the insurgent facial follicles of a male. He tells me there was a time when he looked more male and considered having “bottom surgery,” but now he thinks he won’t. He inhabits himself so confidently, conveys no sense of needing to be firmly set in one gender, no regret at the radical, irrevocable changes he’s made. He embraces, it seems, the process of becoming.
I envy X, and he gets me thinking. About so many people I know in Portland who have fled the East, the Midwest, California, people who were stuck in the wrong jobs, or the wrong marriages, or landscapes that didn’t suit them. They sought the Northwest as a place to make changes, as a place to become something “other.”
Like the guy I meet a month or so after meeting X. I’m at the Rose Garden to see the Simon and Garfunkel concert. Standing in a mobbed bar trying to get a bite to eat before the concert, everyone is pumped; strangers are sharing pizza slices and conversing easily. The guy next to me has moved to Portland from Chicago. With his long hair pulled back in a ponytail I wouldn’t have pegged him for an accountant, but that’s what he is–or at least what he has been. He’s not only a bean counter, he’s a bean counter with a longing to write songs, and he’s begun doing just that – taking workshops, performing around town, making some recordings. He looks at me and my partner with the pleading, soulful gaze of an artist, as if to say: Will it work out? Later, as I sit in the concert, I can’t stop thinking about him, and the line that howls out at me more loudly than any other is the one that now still plays in my head: “Oh what have I done and why have I done it?” Why have I spent all these years in the wrong place, the wrong body, the wrong marriage, the wrong job?
Suddenly I’m hearing these narratives everywhere. Perhaps I’m simply understanding my own story. I am from back East, a small town in Boston’s penumbra that prides itself on being at the heart of the nation’s history. Paul Revere rode through that town. The house I grew up in was within walking distance of Walden Pond. It’s a lovely, but self-important place that can easily keep you stuck.
When you grow up on the East Coast part of the job of maturation entails going West. A girl can’t call herself a woman until she has wrenched herself free from turnpike snarl, traversed the mountains of western Pennsylvania, the Kansas cornfields, the Rockies, the desert. She has to go far enough to dip her fingers in the Pacific. It’s an honored rite of passage, a recapitulation of U.S. history. But–she doesn’t have to stay. There is something perverse in the people who stay. They are the ones who can’t cut it Back East: the misfits, the rebels, those with bad credit ratings or low SAT scores, those who are uncomfortable in their own skins.
Since moving West from New York, first to California then to Oregon, I’ve gained a child, lost a marriage, begun a new phase of a writing career. I’ve lost certain opportunities and found other ones. Sometimes I think I’ve blown it – “Oh what have I done and why have I done it?” – leaving cities that held (still hold) deep friendships, operating on some possibly mistaken belief that I need a new container for each new expression of self. I understand how irremediably an Easterner I appear to be–short and dark and fast of speech and movement–and I ask myself why I would choose to live in a place known for its long-legged, Scandinavian descendents. But I’m trying to think more the way X does, not polarizing things so intensely, accepting the process of becoming. I’ve lived in the Northwest for seven years now, long enough to feel altered and grateful.
When I was in fifth grade I did my state report on Oregon. It was one of those laboriously hand-written jobs in which most of the information was purloined from Volume 16 (MUSHR to OZON) of my family’s Encyclopedia Britannica. I had never been to Oregon, but even before I began my “research,” I had vivid pictures in my head. I knew about Oregon’s swift, fat rivers and skyscraper trees. I knew it was a place of volcanic mountains and prize-winning salmon. I pictured Oregonians as universally tall, outdoorsy, adventuresome, fit descendents of frontiersmen like Lewis and Clark.
My research confirmed these notions, and I wrote with great confidence. I included pictures of the state flower and animal, and I fussed over a full-page crayoned drawing of the state flag. When I stood in front of the class for my oral presentation, my “main point” was that Oregon was special because of its impressive array of natural resources. Except for a brief nod to Salem which required mentioning as the state’s capital, I didn’t talk about cities. Cities weren’t the point. Trees were the point. Rivers were the point. All those fish!
How could I see Oregon and Portland then as I see them now, as places with a deep acceptance of the human need for transformation, places that emanate an understanding that we never stop becoming? In another recent naked, stranger-to-stranger conversation (this one in a sauna), I asked a woman from New Jersey why she had moved to Oregon. “The West was drawing me,” she said. “And I have a son with special needs. Oh,” she said, lifting her palms to indicate how impossible it was to explain, “A whole soup of things.”
When I lived in New York and California, people were always leaving. Leaving to get things other places promised. Portland is a place where people come to stay. People come here to try to see, as X does, between the polarities, embracing, as X does, even the thin white scars that mark the landscape and testify to the struggle.