City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where aspirants are knighted in Forest Park, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store.
Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me.
Happy Labor Day! Today is for me the fourth of a four-day weekend, so I feel I’m doing the holiday justice—though I have been engaged more than usual in the work of self-promotion over the course of it, which is in itself laborious. Ah, well. Let’s get to it:
Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
“I can stay the fucking night,” he says, as the car slips to a halt, “but not any longer than that. I’ve got to be getting the fuck back. This, this is,” leaning over the wheel, looking about through the windshield, the bated chug of the idling engine, the half-empty lot under relentless sunlight, the bulk of the motel’s two-storey wing, dusty pink, the trim painted white where it isn’t a dark brick red, “not the place for the fucking likes of me. Did they,” he squints into a frown under those pushed-up goggles, “paint, the whole fucking building, while we were out?”
Jo, in the passenger seat, watches through silvery aviator sunglasses, a label still pasted to one lens, UV Protection, as he leans even further forward, peering about. She says, after a moment, “No?”
“Because it was not that fucking,” he says, sitting back, “I mean, it was the same color as your fucking,” taking her in, a cord-handled brown paper bag in her lap, weightily full, it says Fred Meyer in thick red letters, and her short-sleeved shirt of salmon, the wide maroon placket of it edged with white piping. “Huh,” he says, deflating.
“Yeah,” says Jo, hauling up another cord-handed brown paper bag, as weightily awkward, from the floorboard. “Look, if it helps at all, I can hook you up with a room, later. This place is never anywhere near capacity,” but he’s shaking his head, as if annoyed by the very suggestion, “no, seriously,” she says, gathering the cords in one hand, reaching with the other for the handle of the door. “Just come by any time after nine, I’ll get you a key.”
“I ain’t about to start sleeping in a God damned bed, your grace,” says Sweetloaf, with a wince, “there’s not a fucking thing about this fucking situation that calls for that level of, of whatever the fuck. I mention my fucking itinerary because of the implications it might present to your plans for whatever kind of fucking response.”
“I’m not,” she says, letting go of the handle, “going back,” and “I know, boss, I know,” he’s saying, “you made that pretty fucking clear.”
“…like Little, Big crossed with Revolutionary Girl Utena.”
“The surrealism, the lush detail, and the loving attention to local Portland culture…”
“—to explain how this is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks plus Portlandia with a smattering of Little, Big and Chinatown.”
