City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and union meetings are beseiged by ghost bicycles.
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.
Take it off, he’s saying, maybe, the staggering thumping walkabout drums, the sludgy drone of the guitar, hitch-stepping along, the whining, sneering vocals, golden apple mind, all so thick and loud as if they’re laid out in the very heart of the song, nowhere it could get any more, but here he is, pawing at her, gripping fingers slid ineffectually off the slippery gloss of her saggy short-sleeved shirt undone at the bottom tails of it lopped loose over his slopping belly, about her hips rocked forward, back, forward, and back, but the rest of the buttons fastened all the way up to her collar dark about her throat, forward, and back, his one hand slapping at her flank, reaching for her buttons, his grimace obscured by the dark, his other hand more definitely placed, gripping the pale seam at her shoulder beneath the ghostly sway of her hair, c’mon, he might be saying, the dim shapes made by his mouth, shake it? take it off, Ilanna be you. Olive, too, all of you.
Shut up, she says, without much of an affect in any direction, forward, and down, and close, and then up and back, away, and again, through and against and inside all that sound, the guitar still sluggishly belling but splintered within and above a wriggling carillon, she lifts a hand from where it’s been braced on the grimy carpet shifting her balance to compensate but still she’s forward, and back, and forward as she slaps his hand from her shoulder, stop it, she says, or no, or wait, let go, something, something, coming back, he’s saying something, pale fringe of his beard ruffling brushing his chest, his shoulder working twisting with the effort, see, be, me, “I wanna see,” he’s shouting in the sudden vasty silence, and hearing himself he slams his mouth shut. There’s footsteps in all that space left by the vanished music, sluff and squeak of a floorboard but also a heeling thump, she jerks up, alarmed, a shadow clunking passes rustle of rough cloth someone still behind her’s saying “Kept her warm, Hobie?” as she twists about still knelt there knees to either side of the man laid flat on the carpet.
