Chuck Palahniuk - Fugatives & Refugees

Marcie says, "After we park, you need to follow orders." She stands outside the tailgate, ready to pull down the door, saying, "If you don't stay inside the rows of candles, you could be injured or killed." She says, "I can't stress this too much."

She says, "What we're doing is felony trespassing. If we get caught, and you don't have a photo ID, you'll have to spend a night in jail."

Then she pulls the door shut. Inside the truck's cargo box, it's completely dark. We all jerk and sway together as the truck starts forward in first gear.

A voice says, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if when they opened the door, we were all dead from carbon monoxide fumes?"

Another voice says, "Oh, yeah, that would be just fucking hilarious."

In the dark everyone sways together, whispering guesses about our route based on right and left turns and the truck's speed as we shift up through the gears. You can smell chili and garlic and fried chicken. When the truck gears down to a stop, we're all quiet, mindful of the police officer who might be just outside.

You can't see your wristwatch. You can't see your hands. The ride seems to go for hours and miles. Then the truck stops again and backs up a little. The door rolls up. Open. To our light-hungry eyes, the candlelight outside is blinding bright, and we follow the trail between candles and deep black concrete holes in the floor. We're in some vast concrete warehouse.

A woman drops her casserole dish, and it breaks on the floor. "Fuck," she says. "It's the end of the world after nuclear annihilation, and I broke my hot bean dip."

The rest of us wander back through huge empty rooms where fires burn in rusted trash barrels. The arms and legs of mannequins are wired together and hang overhead, dripping with lighted candles. Gruesome chandeliers. An old eight-millimeter movie projector clatters, showing army training movies and Christian cartoons on one pockmarked wall. There's a buffet of food, and a band is setting up. In the bathrooms every toilet bowl is broken and stuffed with litter and dead rats.

The word is, this is the old Greyhound bus barn under the west end of the Marquam Bridge. Members of the Portland Cacophony Society have cut off the padlocks and connected the power. In another huge concrete room, bowling lanes are outlined with little votive candles. Instead of bowling pins, lovely breakable objets d'art from junk stores—china vases and statues and lamps—are the target at the end of each lane. Nearby are boxes of plates and glasses for you to throw against the concrete walls.

The word is, this whole building is condemned and the bulldozers and wrecking balls will clean up our mess in another week.

The band starts and people are beating on anything metal with scraps of pipe. People run through the maze of concrete rooms, holding flashlights and glowsticks. The deep holes in the floor are the lube pits each bus used to park above for service work. Underground tunnels connect the pits, and it's easy to get lost. Stairs lead up to abandoned offices on the second and third floors, those offices heaped with rotting blankets and human shit. In the spooky dark we discover the dirty needles and dead cigarette lighters of junkies who've given up their turf for the night.

In the main room there's dancing and drinking and plate breaking. There's food and movies. A police helicopter passes over the broken skylights and just keeps going. Right then, somebody rolls a bowling ball, a perfect throw down a candlelit alley, and the ball smashes a lovely hand-painted statue of Miss Piggy.

Until the next Apocalypse Cafe—and the next ride in the back of a moving van—here are a few transportation-related people and places. The first, Reverend Charles Linville, is the man who cut the padlocks off the empty Greyhound bus barn and made the party happen. When he's not breaking and entering, he delivers mail out of the University Station Post Office.

Jiffy-Marr—"Get legally married in ten minutes or less or your money back!"

The cool way to get married in Portland used to be the Church of Elvis. Same-sex marriages, group marriages, you could even marry yourself—they were all "legal" at the Church of Elvis, where the minister would charge you five bucks, give you toy rings, and make you swear to her own spooky oath. The fun part you didn't know about.

After the ceremony you were forced to carry a huge sign around the block, dragging tin cans and telling the whole world you were hitched. All of downtown was in on the joke, and people would honk at you, wave and shout. You looked like an idiot, but everyone smiled and waved and loved you.

The Church of Elvis is no more. But no sweat. Enter Reverend Charles Edward Linville and his Our Lady of Eternal Combustion Church, at 1737 SE Miller Street in the Sellwood neighborhood. Phone: 503-232-3504.

There, the Reverend Chuck runs "Jiffy-Marr." With the promise: "Get legally married in ten minutes or less or your money back!"

You can't miss the place. In 1996 several hundred Santa Clauses stood in line, waiting to pass through the metal detector and drink shots of whiskey for breakfast. Above the front door is a painting of Reverend Bill, the resident black Labrador retriever, who's also a registered Universal Life Minister who can perform your marriage.

Parked in the driveway are Reverend Chuck's cars. They include a 1973 Ford Torino, covered in a zillion things that suggest danger and painted with yellow and black warning stripes. There're rifle shells. Busted eyeglasses. A time clock. Broken pieces of mirror. Danger and warning signs. Plus there are dead fish and deer skeletons dug up by Reverend Bill. And there's countless rubber nipples from baby bottles. "People can't resist these," Reverend Chuck says. "You'll see guys in business suits sneak over just to tweak a nipple when nobody's looking." The car's theme is "Things That Can Get You in Trouble." The seats are covered in bobcat fur, with the taxidermied heads still attached.

The Reverend's second car, his "Jesus Chrysler," is a Chrysler Newport Royale, crusted with a bah-zillion rusted doorknobs. Shotgun shells. Clocks. A rusted metal model of the Golden Gate Bridge runs the length of the roof. Next to it is a turbine vent painted and mosaicked with jewels and mirrors until it's a huge crown. The hood's covered with elegant gold-flocked wallpaper. The windshield is topped with a flashing back-lit acrylic sculpture of Christ's face. "People describe it as a nightmare. I wanted to use a lot of sharp pointy things so if people tried to steal parts, they'd bleed for it." Up front, he's hung sleigh bells.

His first art car was a 1967 Chevy Bel Air that he bought for $200 after moving to Portland from Los Angeles in 1983. One of his first jobs here was at the Oregon Humane Society on NE Columbia Boulevard. "I never had to kill anything," he says. But on swing shift he did have to load the incinerator. "At first, you'd handle the animals very reverently, very gently and tenderly, but eventually you end up hard-balling the kittens against the back wall of the incinerator. Summer was the worst. It was cat season, and we'd always have a big stack of more cats than we could burn."

At the same time, Reverend Chuck was sneaking cats and kittens home to his apartment that didn't allow pets. He was running his own ads and finding owners for animals past their sell-by expiration dates. Even the French poodles with bad haircuts. He says, "I brought home a lot of dogs I was too embarrassed to walk in the daylight."

Like everybody, one day he accidentally left a sack lunch on top of his car when he drove to work. That whole commute, people laughed and pointed. After that, he glued a coffee cup to the car roof. And always, people pointed and waved and laughed, trying to get his attention. After that, he glued a coffeemaker, then a waffle iron, then a whole breakfast to his car.