CHAPTER 1

 

 

One o’clock in the morning in the big city is a betwixt and between zone.

It was betwixt and between gettin’ drunk at the local dive and getting that dreaded “last call for alcohol,” between 2 and 2:30 a.m.

At that half hour, the cross section of the male of the species was daunting. Pimps, whoremongers, drunkards, criminals, out-and-out freaks.

Linda Avery had seen them all.

As the cigarette girl at the Club Festival in Portland, Oregon, she knew her way around all sorts of drunken, foolish men.

The life of a cigarette girl.

Hawking cigarettes, breath mints and the occasional condom wasn’t actually the end-all and be-all job occupation for Linda.

But without a high school diploma, and a sincere lack of interest in what some would consider a career, she knew her options were limited in today’s society.

Oh, no, here at the Club Festival, ethics and morality were only gauged as highly as the limits of an individual’s cash in the wallet.

Money, honey, that made things move all about her.

Linda Avery was a city girl, born and bred.

She was born in the big city of Portland, Oregon, and although raised in a small town a few miles away, came to the big city for excitement. She came to the city both with her parents as a child and as an adolescent on her own. She remembered that back in the day, coming into Portland with her parents was a matter of finding the main drag, Burnside Street, that connected the west side with the east side; now there’s more than one freeway route through town.

As an adolescent, Linda was adept at hitchhiking back and forth between the big city and the small town. Her parents, for whatever reason, had no compunction about allowing her to hitchhike, as it was common in her day. Linda grew so adept at hitchhiking that she felt she could write a book on the subject. Her most unique technique was to point at a driver passing her by, feigning recognition; the technique worked on occasion, but usually it was a matter of sticking out the thumb and looking nonthreatening.

As an adult, she would move to the big city and make it her home.

She was in her element walking the concrete sidewalks, listening to the buzz of traffic and the hum of city life. One reason was because as a child she lived in the old downtown of the small town, where the movie theater, the bank, several restaurants and most of city’s government structure was located. As a child she’d seen empty wine bottles and empty snuff boxes littering the streets on Sunday morning.

In the big city, as an adult, one aspect she never tired of was listening to the homeless men chatter incoherently to themselves. Some of them were quiet and reserved, others loud and abrasive. It didn’t matter to her, it was harmless, and she pitied the men more than anything. She looked down on them, as an average citizen might, as the waste and refuse of human existence.

Linda felt as if some of the homeless were on the streets because of bad luck and no better choice, but she’d come to the conclusion over the years that a big percentage of the street folks are hardcore homeless, and are on the streets because that’s the lifestyle they’ve chosen.

“Spare a quarter for some food?” an out-of-doors person would ask.

“Sorry,” was all Linda would say. She knew you didn’t want to get into a conversation with any of them, and you certainly didn’t want to get confrontational. She also didn’t want to give any money to them for concern over what they’d do with the cash, like spend it on alcohol.

She tried getting confrontational with a homeless person one day, and she nearly paid the price. That price would have been bodily harm.

As she walked out of a supermarket in the middle of the city one day, a row of shabbily-dressed men lined the bench outside the entrance. One of them pleaded with her.

“Spare some change, lady?” a disheveled old bum asked her.

Instead of her usual, “Sorry,” she decided she’d give the old guy some backtalk.

“No, I can’t spare any change,” she barked back. “Why don’t you get a job?”

That snapped it for the old guy. He began yelling at her, incoherent gibberish, but at the top of his lungs.

“You bitch,” he yelled. “Fuck you!”

When she tried walking away, the old guy got up and started following, yelling as he pursued her.

She picked up the pace, and was nearly at a trot as she rounded the corner. A few quick steps and she was out of the vagrant’s sight.

Close call.

That rude encounter taught her a lesson, a lesson she already knew, but now was positively entrenched. The city offers challenges, but she’d been lucky to never have had a gun or knife pointed at her on the street.

She knew that much of the violence and insanity that occurs doesn’t happen between strangers. It happens between people who know each other. Violent, abusive partners seem to be the most prevalent combination. Violence and insanity between friends, lovers, relatives.

On the street, if you minded your own business, and didn’t mouth off to the beggars and panhandlers, you survived. Play it straight was the lesson learned.

In the main, Linda had enough self-esteem and enough confidence to be able to deal with the street people in a tactful manner. Her encounter with the angry homeless man taught her a lifelong lesson: Leave well enough alone.

But she truly enjoyed walking the streets, taking in the cityscape and all its blasé sameness or bright wonders. To her, the city was a place where the humans lived, loved and laughed, and to deny the city its inherent wonderment was to deny life. She knew the city had its share of “bad people,” but in her short, sweet life she’d learned no matter where you go, be it the middle of the city or the middle of nowhere, people were basically the same, either good or bad, or a combination of the two. You didn’t have to travel to a big city to get ripped off, beat up or killed.

She loved and respected the city and its inhabitants. She avoided trouble if she could, but when push came to shove, she felt she could give it as good as she got it.

Knocking off after a slow weekday night at the Club Festival, cigarette girl Linda Avery headed home to her apartment in the same quadrant of the city. Not owning an automobile or motorcycle made it more of a challenge to get around, but she could easily navigate the city by foot, by bicycle and by mass transit. Portland’s vast mass transit system covered three counties, with Portland in the middle. Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties are covered by TriMet, and although the cost of traveling on the bus and light rail system was increasing year by year, it was still one of the best systems in the nation.

Linda didn’t mind paying for the cost of traveling the mass transit system, and felt that those who use the system must pay their way. She also knew that many citizens felt entitled to cheap transportation, entitled to the many benefits that had been increasing in American society over the decades. She didn’t feel the same way; she felt that the benefits accrued by citizens were a gift not automatically endowed. She had some sort of crazy idea that benefits needed to be earned by citizens, not given out like free candy. That was her opinion, of course, and not the opinion of all.

It was cold outside, but not raining. She’d dressed appropriately, preparing earlier in the day for whatever may come her way. She always carried an umbrella, and wore shoes practical for walking. She kept a dressier pair of shoes, with supportive soles, at the workplace. She was a practical, pragmatic woman raised by parents who had lived through the Great Depression, so there was a hint of that mindset in everything she did. She was frugal to the maximum, and hated to see anything go to waste.

What she learned from her parents, survivors of the Great Depression, was that you adapted to live without those items you could, well, live without. You learned not to waste food. You learned to eat good food, certainly, but nothing extravagant. You learned to buy only what you needed, and to make sure you didn’t pay too much for it. It was almost a game to her parents to see how much they could save on any particular item. At the same time, you made sure what you bought were of good, decent quality. You also learned to repair something if it could be repaired, like an article of clothing or a piece of furniture. You didn’t live like a pauper, but you didn’t live like a king. You lived within your means.

As she walked the city streets on the way to her apartment, she noticed as the years went on more and more waste on the sidewalks of her city. People too lazy either to take reusable furniture, clothing and household items to a charity or to have a charity organization pick them up would place those items on the sidewalks in front of their apartments, condos and homes for others to rifle. Linda herself had found a few good items, but stayed away from furniture and clothing, for fear of bringing vermin and virus into her apartment. Unfortunately, all it took was an overnight rain to soak any usable items on the street and make them generally worthless.

Walking home after midnight, in the first few hours of the day, was possibly a risky thing to do, but Linda knew the city, knew her limits and knew how to handle the usual rabble that populated the streets. But she also wished she knew more about self defense, maybe some martial art. She didn’t believe in carrying a gun, figuring that’s a good way to get the damned thing taken away from you and used on you, or some other person in the future.

As she approached her apartment building, she noticed a man loitering at the outside entrance to the three-story brick complex. Built in the early 1900s, it was known in the commercial rental business as a secure entry facility. Renters needed one key to get into the bottom-floor entrance, which opened into a lobby; those same renters needed another key to open their own individual apartments.

Typical of all such buildings, there was also a dedicated telephone system located at the entrance to allow visitors access to the inside. Visitors would ring to an apartment, and would be allowed access by the apartment dweller inside pushing a button that remotely unlocked the front door.

Instead of heading right to the entrance, Linda decided to diffuse a possibly risky situation by walking around the block once. She figured if the fellow knew someone inside, and had used the access system, he’d be inside by the time she came back around the block. City blocks in Portland were smaller in size than in larger cities like New York and Chicago, so it wouldn’t necessarily take that long to go around the block. If the person wasn’t home, the visitor would hopefully wander away. Any other person hanging around the outside of a secure building gave rise to suspicion best noticed.

Linda walked around the block, and when she returned to near the front of the building, the person, a medium-height, medium-build white man, remained at the entrance. Linda did not like to be confrontational, but if she needed to be assertive, she could be.

Not willing to avoid the situation, and wanting to get into her apartment, she approached the front entrance cautiously.

“Excuse me,” Linda said as she walked up the three steps to the entrance and to the front security door.

“Oh, sorry,” the man said.

As Linda put the key in the front door lock, the man made a move to follow her inside. Linda hesitated with the door open only two or three inches.

“Excuse me,” Linda said, “but do you live here?”

It was then that Linda noticed the man’s breath smelled of alcohol. He didn’t appear homeless, and was dressed in the mode of the day.

“No,” he said, sounding somewhat indignant that Linda was questioning him. “I’m visiting a friend.”

“Well,” Linda said, “you have to get let in by your friend.” Linda positioned herself between the stranger and the slightly opened door, barring his entrance.

“Can’t you let me in?” he asked, now sounding both indignant and put off by the whole scene.

“No, I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She opened the door enough to begin sliding inside, using her body to fill the gap between the door and the door jam.

“Come on,” he pleaded, sounding more childish than anything else, “let me in.”

“No,” she said, firmly yet politely, trying to keep the conversation civil. “You’ll have to wait for your friend to let you in.” Linda knew the score. If he was lying, she didn’t need him wandering the halls of her apartment complex, and neither did the management or the residents. She had a keen sense of civic responsibility for her fellow apartment renters.

As Linda said the last few words, she let the door close between her on the inside and the stranger on the outside.

“Well, that’s fucked!” he yelled at her through the door. The front door had a large plate glass window, and she could see the stranger’s face turn instantly red, his countenance full of anger.

“Sorry,” was all she could say as she turned her back on the man and proceeded to her apartment. She’d done the right thing by not letting the man inside and she knew it was very possible she’d prevented a burglary or a rape.

“You never can be too careful,” she thought to herself as she entered her own apartment.

The Club Festival was no Cheers bar. In fact, it was a place where no one knew your name, and that was just as well. Regulars kept their lives to themselves, and waitresses understood that unless someone was forthcoming with an identity, they didn’t ask customers for names, dates and locations.

It wasn’t a private club, and as a matter of course tourists and unknowing Portlanders wandered in off the dirty street to become part of the huddled masses in the club. The club didn’t advertise in the local media. It didn’t have to advertise.

Club Festival was one of those places where only insiders knew the score. Tourists, military and conventioneers who had the guts could ask a cab driver where to go in town for excitement. At first the wise cabby would feign ignorance. You’d have to press the driver for the right information, know somebody or provide a little cash incentive to get the scoop on where to find the action.

The club was exclusive among the cadre of other seedy dives in the City of Roses. It dealt in one line of excitement and made damned sure it stuck to that vein.

“Where’s a fella gotta go to get laid in this town?” asked one of the three sailors jammed into the backseat of the Radio Cab as it zoomed out of Portland International Airport one dark and rainy Saturday evening.

“Sir, I do not know what you are talking about,” said the cabbie, a black man who recently moved to the United States from Angola.

“Come on, dude,” the young man said, “you know, wine, women, song, where’s the best hangout in this berg?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the man politely replied in a heavy Angolan accent, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

There was an uncomfortable silence for a few seconds. The three sailors whispered among themselves in the backseat.

“Where can I take you fellows?” the cabbie asked.

“Downtown,” another said. “Just take us the fuck downtown.”

Once in downtown Portland, near the old and new hotels, strangers wouldn’t be in much better shape to find out where “the action” was located. Portlanders are an unusually friendly lot, for certain, unlike bigger cities. Need directions to an address? No problem. Need a recommendation for a good restaurant? Ask anyone on the street, man or woman, and for the most part you’ll get a straight answer. But try to find out where to go if you want to run the whores or snort a decent line of cocaine, and lips are sealed. You’ve got to know somebody. Even those “somebody” types won’t necessarily know about the half dozen truly wicked bars and clubs. Sure, places with throngs of people, bass-thumping music and crazy-drunk women are everywhere. Anybody can see them, hear them, find them.

But to the regulars at the Club Festival, it was OK to them that the bar wasn’t jammed with tony young men and women, gang bangers and hep young people. The kind of people that hung out at the Club Festival kept to themselves.

This atmosphere of secrecy and the hidden agenda kept the club’s clientele anonymous, but the tension created by such covert activity made for an odd mix of alcoholics, stoned-out potheads and introverted weirdoes. That couldn’t be helped. It also couldn’t be helped that the continued repression tended to cause more than the usual altercations and fistfights. It went with the territory.

Maybe calling the Club Festival a dive would be a bit harsh, but right away the name of the place was deceiving. It wasn’t as if the place had some sort of tropical motif to the interior, or that there was a truly festive feeling about it. Because the club was so purposely hard to describe as having any sort of look or feel to it, anyone who wandered off the street usually didn’t return for a second helping of the hospitality. It was off-putting enough to deter the uninitiated, and that was fine with the staff and management.

Probably the only thing unusual about the club was the old-fashioned accouterments, like having a coat checkroom and employing a cigarette girl. There were no couches and no drinks with umbrellas. Again, as in the demeanor of all Oregonians, the waitresses were friendly enough, on the outside. But ask about hooking up with a hooker or scoring some weed, you’d get the cold shoulder on the first go around.

Linda Avery, cigarette girl, was the bastion of propriety at the club. Ask her for anything she’s carrying in her tray and you received a pleasant response. Ask for something you didn’t see, something you couldn’t get at home or at the store, and it was a different matter.

“Hey, baby, tell me a story,” the customer said as Linda walked by him.

“What sort of story, sir?”

“Oh, come on, loosen up,” he said. “I’m in the mood for a story.”

“How about a story,” she piped up, looking over the head of the customer, “about a man named Jed?”

“Funny girl,” he said back.

“You know,” she continued, “he was a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed.”

“OK, OK, cut the bullshit,” the man replied, instantly tired of her feint humor. It was fortunate for him that he asked her to halt her dissembling line of claptrap. Linda knew pretty much the entire words to the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies, and would have continued if not stopped.

“I got a different story in mind,” he continued to press.

“What might that be, sir?” she said in her best aloof tone.

“How about you get the hell out of my face?”

“Fine,” she responded curtly, and slinked away to help other customers.