Chuck Palahniuk - Fugatives & Refugees

13. Eviction Court

For anyone who thinks the tradition of oral storytelling is dead, this is a must-see. Go to the Multnomah County Courthouse, downtown, at SW Fourth Avenue and Main Street. Enter through the main door on SW Fourth Avenue and go to Room 120. Eviction Court meets Monday through Friday at 9:00 a.m., and all dirty laundry is loudly thrown around. It is the professional wrestling of the courthouse.

14. The De-Virginizing Dance

The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been playing as a midnight movie at the Clinton Street Theater for more than twenty years. According to Rachel, a student at the Metropolitan Learning Center in Northwest Portland, anyone who has never been to the costumed audience-participation event is labeled a "virgin" and hauled up onstage for a rite of passage. The legally eighteen are separated from the under-eighteen, and... "They took this one girl up onstage and stripped her naked," Rachel says. "Then they wrapped her in gauze and dribbled this sticky red stuff on her and called her a used tampon." Rachel calls this "the de-virginizing dance." After all that you must swear to come see the show at least three times a year.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show plays every Saturday night at the Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton Street.

Our third night shooting on location, no one can find our meat.

The set dressers and props people are pissed. They bought special cuts of meat for this, steaks thick as dictionaries. Chops big around as tennis shoes. They spent time rubbing the raw meat with face powder so it wouldn't shine under the hot lights. So it would look okay on camera.

This is a music video being shot at Corno's Supermarket at SE Union Avenue and Morrison Street. The band is called Cavalcade of Stars, sometimes just COS, and the song is called "Butcher Boy." All night, from the time the market closes until it opens, a video crew is here on location. Night after night.

The chorus boys are dressed as butchers in long white coats, but with big blue-eye shadow eyes and cheekbones defined with smears of plum and magenta. Their hair, moussed and teased into stiff crowns. The chorus girls wear oversized sweatshirts in Day-Glo yellow or pink, with the collar and sleeves ripped off. They wear striped tights and pull the sweatshirts to one side so one bare shoulder always shows. Their hair is streaked with bright green or pink and tied with scraps of orange or blue lace. Their eyes are sunk into deep holes surrounded with black mascara.

For take after take the boys flop the steaks around behind the butcher counter, trying to look busy, tossing the meat with dirty hands and dropping it on the floor. The girls dance with shopping carts as partners.

Local celebrities make cameo appearances. The rock critic John Wendeborn drinks champagne in the background of one shot. Billy Rancher, the lead singer of Billy Rancher and the Unreal Gods, looks thin and cool, his hair frosted in streaks, his band poised to be Portland's next Quarterflash.

Me, one night out bar hopping with friends, a stranger gave me a business card and said to come for an audition. Now my role is to give the lead singer, Rhonda Kennedy, a come-hither look and make love to her in the meat locker. While dry ice fog cascades over us, we writhe naked in an antique bed surrounded by frozen sides of beef.

The blue and red lights in the meat locker are melting the frozen meat. Pork and beef blood drips on us. It drips on the purple satin bedsheets. Rhonda gives me my first cocaine, a fat envelope I take into a bathroom stall. I have no idea what to do, so I poke my nose into the white dust and inhale it all in one long breath. My face flushed red, dusted with white, I could be a slab of our missing meat.

And Rhonda says, "That was for all of us."

She and I, we embrace and spin together under the colored lights, we fall into the big damp bed, and Rhonda's breasts bounce out the top of her black lace negligee.

And the director yells, "Cut."

Between takes, while the crew sets up the lights and cameras for the next shot, Billy Rancher and the chorus girls link arms and walk down SE Union Avenue, filling the empty street at three or four in the morning. These flashy, glam kids, they walk the half block to the all-night Burns Brothers truck stop. They smoke clove cigarettes and order coffee and dazzle the tired gas jockeys.

Almost no one here is getting paid. We're each promised a percent of the profits from the sale of the video. We pray for a heavy rotation on MTV.

Within a couple of years, Billy Rancher will be dead from cancer. John Wendeborn will be fired. The Corno's Supermarket will close. Union Avenue will be renamed for Martin Luther King Jr. Even the greasy old Burns Brothers truck stop will be replaced with a new minimart.

Soon enough, the Dalai Lama will slap Rhonda Kennedy across the face and she'll become a force for the liberation of Tibet. She'll chaperone a team of Buddhist monk "skeleton dancers" on the Lollapalooza Tour with the Beastie Boys. Fifteen years after we spent our night in a bed soaked with cold animal blood, Rhonda tells me nothing is as nasty as sharing a tour bus bathroom with Buddhist monks: They're not allowed to touch their penises and refuse to piss sitting down.

Still, that night wearing all our blue eye shadow, we're thinking this will make us famous. We will look young and hip— forever.

It's at some point that night the set dressers get word about the missing meat. The extra-thick steaks and chops, coated with makeup, fingerprints, and floor dirt, was ground into hamburger. By mistake, the day shift sold it all to customers.

Now that you've read the preceding story about dirty meat... let's go straight into planning dinner. Some of my favorite cooks have agreed to sacrifice their secret recipes here. Make one, or make them all, and have a best-of-Portland dinner party. If you're in town eating at any of the following places, chances are I'm at the next table.

The Alibi

With sculpted hula dancers under black light, woven palm fronds and coconuts, this is Portland's answer to Gilligan's Island. Portland's only tiki bar, the Alibi is at 4024 N Interstate Avenue. Phone: 503-287-5335. It's the summertime home of "Exotiki," the annual festival of bad tropical music, featuring twenty-four-hour pagan voodoo weddings. Wintertime, it's the stomping grounds for the Santa Rampage karaoke singers.

Delta Cafe

According to cafe owner Anastasia Corya, these fritters make a great appetizer. According to cook and filmmaker Ryan Rothermel—whose films include Ampersand and Lover or Liver —you might add two diced jalapeño peppers to the dip. These recipes are for restaurant quantities, so throw a party or do the math to cut them down. Better yet, go to the Delta Cafe at 4607 SE Woodstock Boulevard. There isn't a disappointment on the whole menu. Phone: 503-771-3101.

FRITTERS

12 cups white flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons salt

12 eggs

5 cups milk

¾ pound butter, melted

4 cups com kernels, raw

4 cups cooked black-eyed peas (see recipe below)

Mix the dry ingredients. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well. Heat an inch of vegetable oil in a frying pan and cook the fritters until golden brown.

FRITTER DIP

5 pounds cooked black-eyed peas (8 cups)

1 27-ounce can diced green chiles

1 pound jack cheese (4 cups), grated

½ pound butter, melted

Mix all the ingredients together. Put one-third in a food processor and blend it into a paste. Mix the paste back into the remaining two-thirds. Heat in a double boiler until the cheese is melted and smooth.