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.
Ys—
I am sitting under an oak tree at least I think it’s an oak I don’t actually know for sure the leaves have lobes right and there are acorns I mean there are acorns so that is probably dispositive or whatever, it’s an oak, but the point is it’s an oak I’m sitting under as I write this, after I read what you wrote, I read that sitting on the bed in one of the rooms of my mother’s motel which is where Sweetloaf found me, how he does not know or will not say. It’s just the first place I looked he said when I asked him and he shrugged. First fucking place, actually. You know Sweetloaf.
My mother’s motel. She doesn’t own it. She manages it. I think she used to own it or part of it. I’m not really sure of the details but there was a deal a few years ago to sell whatever it was she had to cover some debt so now she just works here taking care of what she used to own and I think she’s even more in debt than she was.
My mother is difficult.
But there is a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in and breakfast in the morning and dinner before I sleep so it’s okay. I’m okay.
I can’t come back.
Please don’t ask me to come back.
It’s heavier for one thing. Heavier and darker and colder when I touch it or cooler at least to the touch I find myself I’ll press my palm against it in the shower even when it ought to be as hot or at least as warm as everything else with all the water but it’s cold, or cool, cooler, cool enough I find myself holding my hand over it my palm against it like I’m warming it taking care of it which is I mean it’s crazy
Right?
“It is fast, funny, sexy, and sometimes violent—”
“It’s serial fiction done right.”
“Long, complex with a lyrical rhythm to it that’s intoxicating.”
