Many of you have been asking where I’ve landed since leaving San Francisco, and I’ve been holding off on responding because 1) I’ve been fucking busy trying to move and 2) I really wasn’t sure where I was going to end up. My official statement, where I said I was going north with no specific destination in mind, wasn’t good enough for some of you. I’d get messages asking WHERE exactly the place was that I wasn’t sure I’d move to. ?!?!? Wanting to spare you all a digital text reenactment of “Who’s On First?” I ignored your messages, but not your desires to know more. Today, you finally get the news.
I’m living in a town in Washington state, not far from Portland, Oregon.
To be honest, I don’t know much about Portland, other than there’s supposed to be a lot of gluten free people and trees. My boyfriend and I passed through the city one night last year on our way to a Sasquatch conference. We stayed at the Jupiter Hotel, where all the employees have at least one earring and your room comes with drawing chalk and a single complimentary condom. The city felt artsy and fringe and kinda poor, appealing to all my being-an-artist-is-suffering sensibilities. So I’ve rolled the dice and set up shop close to the city of Portlandia but not in it—snagging a house in a small town where the cost of living is low, the scenic views are brilliant green, and the Mexican food unfortunately tastes like white people made it.
I’ve managed to get myself a sweet pandemic bunker with room for a home office, complete with Buffy the Vampire Slayer Funko-Pop decor and a footrest in the shape of a yak. I have a kitchen with enough counter space to comfortably chop a vegetable, a backyard, and a TV room (the American dream). It’s all alien to me. I got so used to living in 600 square feet of space in the Bay Area that I recently got lost and went into the wrong room on my way to bed.
But before you get too jealous, get this…
When we viewed the house before deciding to rent, we were required to wear masks. So when we did a walk-through, everything looked great. A place that was almost twice the size of where we lived before at a fraction of the cost? TAKE ME, BABY.
Well, a week later, after we signed on the dotted line and got the keys, we opened the door to our bathroom without the protection of our thick, double-ply masks. And it was like walking into a Porta Potty. Seriously. It was the kind of smell that makes you wanna dump bleach into your nostrils and throw up your entrails.
We got to work trying to solve the stinky mystery, scrubbing the toilet, the floor, the wall. No change. For a couple days we left the window open and shoved towels under the door to keep the smell from seeping into our hallway. When nothing helped, we called the property management company. A plumber informed us that there was significant water damage along the baseboards directly behind the toilet. We asked if the culprit was a roof leak. Or old pipes. Or mold. But actually, he said, it was pee.
Yeah. You read that right. PEE. URINE. THE GOLDEN SHOWER.
The plumber said that whoever lived here before us was just peeing around and over the toilet, missing the bowl constantly, never cleaning it up. He suspected that the culprit was a little kid whose parents didn’t teach him to properly wrangle his own hose. After further investigation, however, we discovered that it wasn’t a child, but the home owner’s elderly father, who lived alone in the house for many years and recently died. So not only is our bathroom wall soaked in piss, but we’re haunted by a DEAD MAN’S PISS. I’m terrified that one night I’ll awaken to the sound of liquid splashing, open the bathroom door, and find some ghost in a World War II uniform—cocking his shaft and spraying our wall, forever doomed to miss.
Apparently the flooring, baseboards, and not-so-drywall need to be ripped out and replaced, with projections that we may be inhaling piss particles for another couple months before construction is finished. To cope, I’ve been using the bathroom just when I absolutely need to, showering only when I see cartoonish, green fumes emanating from my armpits. (So yeah, my personal hygiene remains unaffected.)
In other news, even though rain water is always seeping through my sneakers and my nose has icicles hanging from it, the cold air is clean and there’s no broken couches or shattered beer bottles all over the streets. So the walks are considerably more enjoyable than where I came from. Unless there’s an impromptu Trump rally, of course.
While strolling through the quarter-mile stretch that is downtown, a MAGA parade of trucks lurched onto the streets. For an hour, vehicles were packed bumper to bumper, blasting “Proud to be an American” from their speakers while the drivers shouted, “Four More Years!” One man sat up straight, grinned, and waved at me from the driver’s seat of his blue pick-up, which had a Donald Trump as Captain America flag sagging from the pole attached to the back. A passerby with two pitbulls chained to her wrist stopped in her tracks, punched her fist up, and started screaming “Black Lives Matter!” at a loudness that clearly passed the threshold of what her throat could take. Her dogs were cowering, yelping, and shaking—pulling their ears back at the sound of the truck horns and the shriek of her voice as it cracked. Ah, suburban life in the modern world.
Another surprise I probably should have expected is that small towners like to walk around totally naked from the neck up. Mask-less fiends! Middle-aged women and their teenage daughters will run into acquaintances, shake hands, touch arms, and laugh their coffee breath into each others’ faces, while grown men say things like, “I don’t know about getting that vaccine. I’ve seen too many of them movies where people just end up zombies!” (Even zombies don’t want your brains, buddy.)
A horror scene, indeed. But more horrifying than the Dead Man’s Piss? It remains to be seen.
Anyway, that’s it for now. If I don’t respond to your messages immediately or at all, rest assured that I appreciate your curiosity and I’ll share more news eventually. You will be the first to know if I find a former resident’s pile of shit festering in the back shed.
Thanks for reading.
