Welcome to the Borderland, fellow outsiders and liminal human beings!
You know how a place can be like a person that you had to leave even though you were still in love with them? That is how Portland, Oregon has always been for me….
Ever since I left Portland, Oregon, I have dreamt of its tree-lined streets and space-age neon encased in permanent dampness. Bike punks spilling out of Alberta Street houses, rotting under the weight of Doc Martins; hipsters in striped shirts and Jimi Hendrix velvet slacks, will forever run through the shadows of my Texas mind.
After twelve years, in the only city I’ve ever called home, my dreams became a reality when I returned last week with my husband, Sunny, to see some old friends and hold the hand of my mother-in-law, now dying in a Coos Bay Nursing home.
It was like nothing had changed. The people, still pasty and tattooed, were smiling at me like they were on E because the sun had finally returned after nine months of grayness. The bars and rock clubs I once danced in, feeling sexy on too many whiskey cokes, were flashing pink neon, beckoning to return to my salad days.
Even the park I was married in with its fir trees, dirty city living ducks, and algae-filled pond called me back, back home.
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Sunny was elated when his mother took my hand and told me she loved me. I wondered if she remembered me. When we first arrived, she mistook Sunny for his brother, Bob. We could move back to Portland, and visit mom once a month. Coos Bay is only a four-hour drive. I could go back to making movies at Carolyn Court with the drummer, Andrew from Dead Moon, as my neighbor. But Sunny reminded me that the rent has gone up at old Carolyn Court and Andrew was dead along with Ben Z., and Jeffrey Wonderful.
I remember how we left twelve years ago, busting across the desert in a 90s 4-Runner which died right as we exited I-35 into south Austin. With a dead car and no jobs, we were eating a steady diet of refried beans, HEB tortillas, and hiding our despair inside six-packs of beer. Eventually, we would sleep on the floor in an apartment with a pool under a freeway overpass. Living it up at the Spanish Trails, got me a mattress, got me a pool, as Sunny liked to sing, floating in tepid water, drinking under flickering street lamps, unemployed after midnight.
On the way to the airport back to Austin, TX, we drive past Sandy Jugs, a strip club shaped like a giant moonshine bottle. Sunny tells me my skinny friend Cindy could have never worked there because only big girls with big boobs were allowed. He knows this because he used to go there, before we got together, with his coke-dealing friend Whitey.
“Used to, that’s a joke; you kept going there our whole relationship.”
My words will be used by Sunny as evidence for how moving back will do nothing but bring up the worst bits of our past.
I disagree. No one will break my dreams. “If you drank or went to a strip club now, I wouldn’t hound you about it; I would just leave you.”
“I haven’t done any of that in eight years.”
Our fight ends with us racing to the baggage counter to check in a shotgun that Sunny inherited that last time we came to Oregon for his father’s memorial service.
Apparently our Walmart TSA-approved gun case is a piece of shit, and the Alaska Airlines lady tells us we cannot board the plane.
A Lyft driver takes us to Sunny’s brother’s house to dump the gun before we miss our flight.
Sunny tries to figure out what will happen to the gun now that it is in his brother’s possession, “Maybe he can sell it for me.”
“Or maybe he’ll just put it on his wall like everything else you leave at his place. Damn, your brother has got it all, the house on Mt.Tabor, a shotgun, your Dali painting, a beautiful wife.”
Our flight to Austin is about to board. We are eating cold pizza my best friend, Jun, bought us the night before.
“Are you kidding?” He bites into the pizza frustrated.
We’ve been together 18 years, through ulcers, illicit drugs, betrayals, and unrealized dreams. Sunny still can’t tell if I’m being sarcastic or dead serious. Probably because even when things go south, I still believe that “all of life is a stage and we are merely players in it.”
I should have been an actor, but I was unwilling to get a nose job or move to LA, so here we are….
In five years, I will sell all my shit, and we will move back to Oregon. But this time I will no longer be a young woman with dreams of controlling my husband’s addictions while simultaneously becoming a big-time director. No, I’ll be closing on fifty, hoping to get a little piece of land outside of Portland, a refuge from the 4th industrial revolution and the new false gods of this digital attention-drugging age. A place for rescue dogs and a reunion with the land that once took me in, with unconditional love when I was a broken teenage runaway without a manual for living.
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Peace, Love, and Gnosis, your pal,
Borderland Delia-Ann
Oh and if you’re new on here check out what I am all about: Intro to I Can Only Give You Everything
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