Parades and cigarettes.
So I wake up just the other side of sober, and my best green suit’s a wrinkled puddle at the foot of the bed. It reeks of cigarette smoke, and I’m remembering enough to be obscurely glad that gin doesn’t stain wool. When I stumble into the bathroom for some clumsy ablutions, I see in the mirror I’ve still got an earring in one ear. Leaning forward does alarming things to various internal systems keeping track of such stuff as balance and pulse rate, so I swallow three prophylactic Advils and blink until everything settles.
It was one of those nights.
“Jemiah’s having a party to celebrate her second book coming out,” said the email invitation. “It’s ‘dress code fabulous.’” So Kevin dyed his hair red and Jenn (“his” Jenn, and not “my” Jenn, and let’s not get into all that right now) had red streaks and rhinestone piping, and I had the aforementioned green suit and the walking stick from Guatemala, and Sara bleached her hair bone white and then washed some nameless sunset color into it, and my God, you should have seen Steve’s underwear. Fabulous? Oh, yes, my friends. Fabulous. —So: off we set for the Mallory Hotel, a ten-minute drive from the Lloyd Center, tops; maybe another ten minutes to find parking if we weren’t lucky. Or twenty minutes by MAX. If that. But—
See, we’re all plugged-in people. We smirk (or groan) at how W’s written up in the Guardian and we listen to NPR through our computers (though we’d really prefer it if they used Quicktime) and we’re flinging links back and forth to the decision on CIPA hours after it’s made and a whole day before those lumbering newsprint dinosaurs can get their summaries on the streets. (And let’s take a moment to note that that’s my local library on the front lines of this good fight. Yay!) —Television? That’s for watching DVDs on, right? Radio? What?
Problem being that us international elite knowledge-workin’ webheads somehow missed—the lot of us—the fact that Saturday, 1 June, was opening night for Portland’s annual Rose Festival.
“There’s an awful lot of traffic,” said someone.
“Oh, yeah,” said someone else. “It’s the Rose Festival, isn’t it?”
We tried to cross at the Morrison Bridge, but it was going up. Kevin (who was driving) pulled a deftly illegal U-turn, and we cut north to the Broadway Bridge. Much clearer. No one was on it. Other side of the river, we found out why: Broadway was blocked off and all traffic being routed up Hoyt.
“Is that a parade they’re setting up?” said someone.
“I thought the Southwest Airlines Grand Floral Parade—the signature event of the Rose Festival, or so I’m told—wasn’t till next week,” said someone else.
And they were right. This was the Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines.
So we routed ourselves up Hoyt. All we had to do was cross 405 and double back to the Mallory. And we’d be fine.
“You know,” said someone, brightly, “we could just duck back to the Lloyd Center, park there, and take the MAX in. It does run right past the Mallory, you know.”
“Nah,” said someone else, pragmatically. “We’ve already come this far, let’s stick it out. It can’t be that bad.”
Roughly 45 minutes later, we were parking Kevin’s car by the Lloyd Center and climbing out with much groaning and stretching. (This is how the suit came to be wrinkled. “If you wanted,” offered Steve, mischievously, “you could nip into our place and borrow an iron…”) —“You know,” said someone, pointing to the Lloyd 10, “we could just be evil and bag the whole thing as a lost cause and go see Star Wars.”
“There’s no booze in Star Wars,” said someone else. Grimly.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll be booing up a storm, myself…”
There was more like that. —The MAX, of course, was terribly crowded, since we weren’t the only ones to note the difficulty of maneuvering an automobile through downtown. It pulled away from the Lloyd Center stop and everyone already crammed onboard glowered at the people waiting at the 7th Avenue stop who shrugged and squeezed on anyway. At the Convention Center stop, the conductor got on the loudspeaker and said something no one could entirely make out about how the MAX wouldn’t be going all the way and anyone who wanted to cross downtown could mumble garble squawk.
“You have got to be kidding me,” said someone we didn’t know.
But he wasn’t. The MAX trundled across the river and shuddered to a stop outside Pioneer Place, end of the line, everybody off—almost as close as we’d gotten yet, but still with many blocks to go. Though not so many we couldn’t walk it. (Despite the fabulousness of some of the shoes being worn.) So we surged ahead and—
Oh. Right. The Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines.
You ever try to cross a parade with that many corporate sponsors?
“Well, shit,” said someone.
“The Skybridge!” cried someone else, brightly.
The Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines, was trundling its way down 4th, between the two big blocks of Pioneer Place. Which are connected by a third-floor Skybridge. Saved! We dashed into Pioneer Place and clattered up two flights of escalators (okay, we stood impatiently still in a horde of people who’d had much the same idea as the escalators jerked us up too slowly) to find the doors to the Skybridge shut and locked.
“You know,” said someone, as we were jerked back down two floors, “there were people on the Skybridge. I wonder if they got locked in there somehow, or…”
“Not really caring,” said someone else.
None of us at this point were too terribly into the whole people thing. But: we were fabulous, dammit. We had our goal; it was a simple one, easily accomplished. We were bright. Resourceful. Thirsty. And it was only a few thousand people between us and our Excelsior. We’d tried ignoring it, going through it, going over and across it…
We ended up walking around it, and got to the Mallory in time to hear Jemiah finish her first reading. And put in a drinks order, but really, the important thing was to be there to support the book and the reading and what the hell was taking those drinks so long?
This, then, all of it, perhaps goes some way towards explaining why I threw down martinis at a steady clip, and perhaps also why I’m glad gin doesn’t stain wool. And why I am stingy with details as to the witty and amusing things Johnzo said and Victoria said and Kirsten said and Jemiah her own dam’ self and I’m sorry, I can’t find a link for Ralph the Chiropractor (it was Ralph, wasn’t it?) and if I did realize suddenly (or was told) that the reason Brandon had been naggingly familiar was that she’d taken some photos for Anodyne (yes, I’d been the managing editor, but it was only for a few months and I was always misplacing memos), or that vampires are (yet) big in the Zeitgeist not so much because of the linkage of blood and sex and disease and death (though yes, of course, that’s there) but because they are all of them so very tired and jaded and numb and laden with ennui (not such a bad thing to pretend to be when everything’s moving so far so very quickly), or that Portland doesn’t have a Cleveland (but it does have a Clyde), or that the rhetoric of cane gestures bears some intriguing similarities to the rhetoric of cigarette gestures which it might well be worth exploring when less impaired, and there was something in all that about tall redheads, wasn’t there? —Well. None of that is important enough to go into any of the details that are anyway thin on the ground, today. But that is, perhaps, enough to give you a taste. Oh! And Steve was able to inform us all that eating a torched M&M was rather like nibbling a chocolate chip cookie that had been in the oven a wee bit too long. There.
The cigarettes, though—
See, none of us smokes. But quite a few of us smoke, from time to time. Socially, you know. At parties. If someone else is. That sort of thing. I’d brought along the packet of cloves I’m working on this month; I’d had maybe two or three of the 20. There’s now just the four left, and that doesn’t count the pack of regular smokes someone nipped out and bought when I wasn’t looking.
So that, see, explains the whole reeking of smoke thing. —And I didn’t even tell you about the bar full of bitchy Rosarians. Or the Commodore. (Which wasn’t the bar that was full of bitchy Rosarians.) And did anyone ever figure out what the hell those big guys on the TV set were doing, with those giant rocks, and that wall? I wasn’t imagining that, was I?
(Jenn? “My” Jenn? Though she regretted missing an opportunity to wear her ball gown, it wouldn’t have had much fun on our trek, and anyway, there was the whole ankle thing from last week, and besides all that, she’s getting close to getting the first chapter done, so she stayed home and drew and made merciless fun of me when I staggered in at what, 2:30 in the morning? —Thanks to a bucket brigade of rides organized on the fly by people who’d had less to drink than I. Anyway, go, look, see!)
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