Fugitives & Refugees
Also by Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
Invisible Monsters
Survivor
Choke
Lullaby
Diary
Fugitives & Refugees
A WALK IN PORTLAND, OREGON
Chuck Palahniuk
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material to:
Anton Pace and Delta Cafe, for the recipes “Fritters,” “Fritter Dip,” and “Black-Eyed Peas.” Reprinted by permission of the Delta Cafe.
Le Happy Bar, Inc., for the recipe “Faux Vegan Crepes.” Copyright © 2002 by Le Happy Bar, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Le Happy Bar, Inc.
Michael Cox and Wild Abandon, for the recipe “Dean Blair’s hemon-havender Scones.” Reprinted by permission of Michael Cox and Wild Abandon.
Copyright © 2003 by Chuck Palahnink
ISBN 1-4000-4783-8
For my grandmother, Ruth Tallent
1920-2002
Contents
Introduction: Unraveling the Fringe
Talk the Talk: A Portland Vocabulary Lesson
Quests: Adventures to Hunt Down
Haunts: Where to Rub Elbows with the Dead
Souvenirs: Where You Have to Shop
Unholy Relics: The Strange Museums Not to Miss
Getting Off: How to Knock Off a Piece in Portland
Nature But Better: Gardens Not to Miss
Getting Around: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to Meet
Animal Acts: When You’re Sick of People-Watching
The Shanghai Tunnels: Go Back in Time by Going Underground
Photo Ops: Get Your Picture Snapped at These Landmarks
preserving the fringe (a postcard from 2002)
Fugitives & Refugees
Introduction: Unraveling the Fringe
“Everyone in Portland is living a minimum of three lives,” says Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love. She says, “Everyone has at least three identities.”
She’s sitting in the window of her apartment in Northwest Portland, rolling cigarettes and smoking them, her long blond hair parted in the middle and tied back. She’s wearing black-framed glasses. The radiators clank and a siren goes by, four stories below on Glisan Street.
“They’re a grocery store checker, an archaeologist, and a biker guy,” she says. “Or they’re a poet, a drag queen, and a bookstore clerk.”
Rolling another cigarette, she says, “It’s tricky because all the rich people are in disguise. You never know when the scruffy guy across the counter could be someone rich enough to buy the store, chew it up, and spit it out.”
Smoking, she says, “The nice little old ladies from the West Hills—with their sweater sets and pearls—they’re all rabid advocates of the death penalty.”
Those green, wooded hills fill the window behind her.
Art and bookshelves fill the walls. The rooms are painted heavy gem colors of deep red and green. Yellow freesia bloom in a vase on the dining room table. In the kitchen, hanging above the sink, is a framed photograph of Kather-ine’s maternal grandmother, Tressie, who cooked for a railroad crew, working her way west through the Dakotas at age eighteen.
Katherine’s theory is that everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives us the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits.
“We just accumulate more and more strange people,” she says. “All we are are the fugitives and refugees.”
In 1989, when she wrote her bestselling novel Geek Love, Katherine set the story in Portland. The novel— about an outcast circus sideshow family who work to have mutated, birth-defected children to boost their ticket sales—is easily the most famous book that uses the city as a background. Katherine wanted her story set in a place without associations in people’s minds.
“When I was a young woman in Paris,” she says, “I couldn’t walk through the city and see it without seeing it the way the Impressionists did. Because Id seen it through their eyes, it was impossible to see it any other way.”
The genesis of Geek Love was here. One day Katherine’s seven-year-old son, Ben, refused to walk with her through the International Rose Test Gardens, so she walked alone among the hybrid roses. “I thought to myself, ‘These would not have occurred in nature—I should’ve designed a better child.’”
She swam in the basement pool at the Metropolitan Learning Center, swimming and writing the book in her mind. For years she wrote “The Slice,” a weekly newspaper column that documented oddball Portland happenings.
Now, Portland has its own identity, she says. “It’s no longer this blank look when someone says Portland or Seattle or Walla Walla.”
Now Katherine Dunn is working on a new book. Geek Love is being reissued, for a new generation of fans. Still, she’s not planning to leave.
“First of all,” she says, “I can’t drive. Besides, when you walk down the street, every corner has a story.” She smokes, exhaling out the window above Glisan Street. “Here,” she says, “the rolling history of your life is visible to you everywhere you look.”