Kevin Sampsell - Portland Noir

Pearl District

My side of the story… you want my side of the story?

That’s funny. The suits at the newspaper said the same thing when they fired me-that I should give my side of the story.

As I usually do, I chose to say nothing, and the next day the Oregonian ran its “Public Apology to our Readers” full of righteous puffery about how I “ acted maliciously and recklessly, ” how I “ broke the sacred trust between a newspaper and its readers. ”

Well, here we are again… someone pretending to want my side of the story, as if the truth were a box that you could simply flip over when you want another version. Well, there are no sides, no box, no truth.

We both know you don’t want my side of anything. You don’t want to understand me, you don’t want to know me, and you sure as hell don’t want to feel what I felt.

This is what you really want to know: Why did he do what he did?

Fine. You want to know why I did it? I did it to let her know how much she meant to me. That’s why I did it, all of it-for her.

This all began in late October. We’d had the same old fight, with the same stale grievances Tanya had been lobbing at me for three months, almost since the day I moved in: Blah, blah, stalled relationship; blah, blah, stunted growth; blah, blah, I worry that you’re a psychopath .

I said I’d try harder, but she was in a mood: “No, Trent. I want you out of here. Now.” I gathered my things. Carried four loads of clothes, shoes, CDs, action figures, and trading cards down to my car. I was about to drive away when I saw… him.

Mark Aikens, Tanya’s missing-link ex-boyfriend, was loping up 21st like some kind of predator, like a fat coyote talking on a cell phone. She had moved to Portland for this loser, even though she made twice as much as he did. She requested a transfer from the Palo Alto software company where she worked and found a small condo in the Pearl District, but she wasn’t in town six months before he’d slept with someone else and she tossed him out. Mark Aikens was a cheating shit.

He swung around a light pole and skipped up the steps of our old building. She buzzed him up. A sous chef at Il Pattio, Mark Aikens was one of those jerkoffs who acts like cooking is an art. She always said he was sensitive, a good listener. Now he was up in our old condo, listening his sensitive, cheating ass off. For two hours I sat in my car down the block while this guy… listened. It had grown dark outside. From the street, our condo glowed. I knew exactly which light was on-the upright living room lamp. She got it at Pottery Barn. Through our old third-floor corner window I could see shadows move across the ceiling from that light and I tried to imagine what was happening by the subtle changes in cast: she’s going to the kitchen to get him a beer; he’s going to the bathroom. How many fall nights had I snuck home early from work and looked up to see the glow from that very light? It had been my comfort. But now that light felt unbearably cold and far away, like an astronomer’s faint discovery, a flicker from across the universe and the icy beginning of time.

I might have gone crazy had I stared at that light much longer. In fact, I’d just decided to ring the buzzer and run when the unimaginable happened.

The light went out.

I sat there, breathless, waiting for Mark Aikens to come down. But he didn’t. My eyes shot to the bedroom window. Also dark. That meant she was… they were…

I tooled around the Pearl having conversations with her in my head, begging, yelling, until finally I crossed the bridge and drove toward my father’s little duplex in Northeast. I parked on the dirt strip in front and beat on his door. I could hear him clumping around inside. My dad had lost a leg to diabetes. It took him awhile to get his prosthetic on.

When he finally answered, I said: “Tanya threw me out. She’s seeing her old boyfriend. She said living with me was like living with a stalker.”

“You always did make people nervous,” my father said. Dad was a big sloppy man, awful at giving advice. Since my mother’s death, he’d been even less helpful in these father-son moments. He sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” I said.

“Christ, Trent.” And he invited me inside. “Why the hell not?”

Before all of this, I loved my job. And I’m not talking about the job as portrayed in my five-year-old performance evaluation, the low point of which (one flimsy charge of harassment stemming from an honest misunderstanding involving the women’s restroom) the newspaper found a way to dredge up in its apology to readers. No. What I loved was the work. As a features copy editor, I pulled national stories off the wire, proofread local copy, and wrote headlines for as many as five pages a day, but my favorite (because it was Tanya’s favorite) was “Inside Living”-page two of the features section, the best-read page in the O -with syndicated features like the crossword puzzle, the word jumble, celebrity birthdays, and Tanya’s favorite, the daily horoscope. That’s how we’d met, in fact, four months earlier, in a coffee shop where I saw her reading her horoscope. I launched our romance with the simple statement: “I edit that page.” Within a week we were dating, and a month later, in late July, when I was asked to leave my apartment because the paranoid woman across the courtyard objected to my having a telescope, Tanya said I could move in with her until I found a place.

Now, to some, I may indeed be-as the newspaper’s one-sided apology to readers characterized me- strangely quiet and intense, practically a nonpresence , but to loyal readers like Tanya, I was something of an unsung hero.

Each morning during those three glorious months, she would pour herself a cup of coffee, toast a bagel, and browse the newspaper, spending mere seconds on each page, until she arrived at “Inside Living,” her newspaper home. I couldn’t wait for her to get there. She’d make a careful fold and crease, set the page down, and study it as if it contained holy secrets. And only then would she speak to me. “Eleven down: ‘Film’s blank Peak’?”

“Dante’s.”

“Are you sure you don’t see the answers the day before?”

“I told you, no.” Of course, I did see the answers the day before. But who could blame me for a little dishonesty? I was courting.

“Hey, it’s Kirk Cameron’s birthday. Guess how old he is.”

“Twelve? Six hundred? Who’s Kirk Cameron?”

“Come on. You edited this page yesterday. Now you’re going to pretend you don’t know who Kirk Cameron is?”

“That celebrity stuff comes in over the wire. I just shovel it in without reading it. You know I hate celebrities.”

“I think you pretend not to like celebrities to make yourself appear smarter.”

This was true. I do love celebrities.

“Hey, look,” she’d say finally. “I’m having a five-star day. If I relax, the answers will all come to me.”

It’s painful now to recall those sweet mornings, the two of us bantering over our page of the newspaper, with no hint that it was about to end. And this is the strange part, the mystical part, some might say: on those days Tanya read that she was to have a five-star day… she actually had five-star days. Now, I don’t believe in such mumbo-jumbo; it was likely just the power of suggestion. But I did begin to notice (in the journals in which I record such things) that Tanya was more open to my amorous advances when she got five stars. In fact, after our first month together, I began to notice that the only time Tanya seemed at all interested in being intimate, the only time she wanted to… you know, get busy, bump uglies, bury the dog in the yard… was when she got five stars on her horoscope.