Stomping Ground was originally featured in the Fall 2008 issue of Northwest Review and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

 

I was nineteen in 1984 when I fell in love with a sprawling Victorian firetrap in Portland, Oregon. The address was 133 NW Eighteenth, near Davis, but it might as well have been 1313 Mockingbird Lane, home to the Munsters, it was that gorgeous and decrepit. The building had an ornate, cursive sign posted on the front porch: The Lawn. Housekeeping Rooms, Sitting Rooms, Furnished Apartments. I had no idea what a “housekeeping room” was. It sounded adorable. But the name, The Lawn, was either ironic or absurd. The building had no lawn. It took up most of a city block. It was painted an anemic yellow-green, the color of grass you’d find under a wading pool left in one spot too long. There were a few squares of dirt with daffodils bobbing near basement windows. Somebody had free-handed, in red paint on an old board, a more recent and less official sign, at knee level: Please leave the flowers so all may enjoy. Ohm, Peace, Shalom!

A basement window was boarded over. There was a missive written on the plywood in black marker, jagged lines: Knock Before Noon and I Kill You. The words trailed off like somebody’d passed out. There was an empty quart of Bohemian, cheapest beer in town, on the ground.

I loved it! I loved this outgoing, chatty, contrary Victorian manse. It looked fragile and weathered and like a piece of the Old West. It was the kind of building a person could romanticize the way people get dreamy about whole cities, New York or San Francisco. I heard a trumpet bleat three squeaky notes, slow and off-key, then stop and try again. I rang the manager’s bell. When a man came to the door, I asked him for an apartment. He said they were full. We got to talking, and he came up with a room. He offered a sweaty, sloped, short-ceilinged space on the third floor under the eaves.

At the time, I worked as the delivery girl for an art gallery, drove a van with the license plate ART4U. One trip in the van moved everything I owned into my room at The Lawn. It turns out that in 1883, almost exactly one hundred years before I got a key to that front door, The Lawn was designed as three upscale urban row houses. That’s where the glamour of the building comes from, the peaks in the roof, big windows, and high ceilings. In 1890, it was converted to a boarding house, “The Guilliaume.” According to the historian, John Michael O’Hara, this name comes from the name of the building manager at the time, Mrs. Rosa Guilliaume. In 1917, it was divided into smaller units— “housekeeping rooms”—and was given the name The Lawn, a bastardized Ellis Island-style mistranslation of “Guilliaume” perhaps?

Most of the spaces in The Lawn weren’t full apartments. They were single rooms for people who wouldn’t buy their own furniture. People who might not stay long, or sometimes even live very long. The rooms offered a place to sit, to lie down, to smoke and drink a bottle of hooch. That’s the way the building still was when I moved in:  thirty-two rooms for thirty-two tenants with three bathrooms shared between men, women, and children: drunks, drug users, artists and rockers. The Lawn was a flophouse and a painted lady. It was crowded and complicated, with rooms tucked under stairwells, hidden like family secrets.

Every handrail, wall, and fixture was textured through love and abuse. Each splintered floorboard creaked in its own voice. The ground floor, near the mailboxes, could get swampy with the steam off cooking pots of curry and black beans. A mother and her barefoot, five-year old daughter had a corner apartment there. Other areas smelled like sweat, cured meat, and red wine—the smell of a hard drunk, a liver turning to salami. The best air in the building was full of patchouli, Nag Champa incense, and pot. One stretch of the hall held a toxic cloud of spray paint fumes; a tenant had taken over an unused door as a canvas. Every night she layered on more spray paint until the door was slick and dark, a universe drawn in graffiti.

Walt Curtis, Portland’s unofficial “Street Poet Laureate,” lived at The Lawn just before I found it. His novel, Mala Noche, is set in the building. Gus Van Sant adapted Mala Noche as a break-through indie flick and filmed in The Lawn in the early 1980s. If you watch you’ll see a hint of the dark beauty that building was, the way lives went on there.

Mulugeta Seraw spent time in The Lawn. He was an Ethiopian immigrant, refugee of a civil war. I’ve heard that one Thanksgiving he cooked the holiday meal for friends as a tribute to his new homeland. Later, in 1988, when he was twenty-eight and after he’d moved over to Portland’s East Side, Seraw was beaten to death by Aryan Nation youth. His death formed the basis of the book A Hundred Tiny Hitlers, by Elinor Langer. John Smith, of the band Nu Shooz, also lived at the Lawn, and later made it big with the pop hit “I Can’t Wait.”

I’d barely moved in before an older man I hadn’t met died of the drink in his little corner. There was a quick apartment shuffle over the vacancy. I took a second floor room, near the toxic spray-painted door, a space with a high ceiling and a row of windows. For $135 a month, I moved into what had once been Walt Curtis’s place, the site of Mala Noche. That’s where I met Joan of Arc, outside the second floor window.

One morning I pushed my curtain back, though it wasn’t really a curtain. It was a queen-sized flowered sheet I’d tie in a knot and hold back with a tack in the wall. When I pushed back the sheet, there was a man standing on the flat patch of tar-covered roof we called a porch. He seemed more like a boy really, though my age. He wore a light blue dress that trailed loose threads. He had pale, scarred legs and dingy tube socks. His hair was tangled curls. His face was round. His eyes were big. He was scared.

He’d climbed up the fire escape.

A neighbor, Coni Jo, knocked on my door. Later Coni Jo would be The Lawn’s longest-running resident, the Lady of the Lawn. On this day, she and I had plans to walk together to an Art History class at Portland State University. I showed her the guy on the roof. She nodded and said, “Joan of Arc.”

Another neighbor, passing in the hall, said Joan of Arc used to live in the building. Somebody else said no, he only hung around. They all knew him, but nobody quite knew his story. What Joan of Arc wanted, he said, was a cigarette. He spoke in a whisper.

I didn’t smoke.

Looking back, I’d say using the name “Joan of Arc” is shorthand. It’s code for troubled by voices. It’s a schizophrenic’s way to make sense of the world, to identify with somebody, to have a community of sorts.

That much, I get. Community is the reason I moved into The Lawn. Sure, the building was beautiful, but the beauty was in the way people lived there. Everything was in process, rich with ideas. Nobody worked all day then holed up in front of a T.V. until some self-imposed bedtime. When I saw that building spilling over with scrawled signs, half-finished paintings, wide open windows and music, it was a mess. It was inviting. It called to me like home. 

It was faulty as Hell, and in that way, it seemed so forgiving.

Once when I was a kid in the seventies, in a grade school surrounded by cornfields, a teacher asked us to write an in-class paragraph:  Who would you most like to spend a day with and why? This was third, maybe fourth grade. I wrote, on the wide-lined paper, My Aunt Janey. Then I was stumped. Our teacher bent down at the small round table where I chewed my pencil. She adjusted her pantyhose so she could crouch, in her tan pumps and tight wool skirt. She offered prompts. “Does Janey have a big house? A swimming pool? A nice car?”

My aunt Janey had no car. She rented a room in a lopsided building in Northwest Portland. Ivy climbed into her windows, so thick that none of the windows shut. When my sister and I stayed with her during a heat wave, it was too hot to sleep and so, at midnight, the three of us walked down Northwest Twenty-third past dive bars to a Sambo’s, in what’s now the Coldwell Banker Seal real estate office. We ate ice cream and watched rock-and-roll hopefuls and halfway-house residents nod off at the counter. In the day, we walked to a cheap theater and saw a grainy, scratched run of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, dark and gilded. A friend of my aunt’s bought a box of high heeled shoes at the Goodwill, put candles in them and spray painted them gold in a tribute to the film. I wanted to live in Cocteau’s world. My aunt’s world. A place where everything was textured and work was barely a question. I wanted to live downtown.

The teacher read our papers out loud. Other kids wrote about Michael Jackson, O.J. Simpson, and Donny Osmond. “Because they have lots of money,” they wrote. When I heard that, it seemed so obvious!  I was an idiot. Slap to the friggin’ forehead. What I learned from that lesson was, maybe I didn’t fit in.

But when I found The Lawn, I found Cocteau’s world. I found that texture.

Living alone anywhere else, I might’ve been scared by a man outside my window. In The Lawn, I was alone in the single room I called an apartment, but there was always somebody awake, walking the hall, then someone else playing late-night poker down in the lobby. A man on the roof, a soft-spoken, nervous boy of a man in a worn out dress, didn’t seem like a threat to me. He was, in his way, both Beauty and the Beast. He was crazy, but he was okay. He kept his eyes on us and hovered near the fire escape, ready to run, about as threatening as a campground deer.

I didn’t mind the times after that when Joan of Arc showed up on the roof. I’d close my curtain if he were there. The flowered sheet drew a line between my space, inside, and Joan of Arc’s space, out on the roof over the alley. He didn’t sleep there. He wasn’t there often. He used the roof the way I used my apartment, as respite.

Life at The Lawn was all about compromise. Living on minimum wage, part-time work in the Reagan era, it could’ve been hard, but there were ways people made life easier for each other. A tavern half a block away sold pitchers of beer for a dollar, gyros for two dollars, and gave out popcorn for free. In the winter, we could go to the Community Center, one block over, and collect “heat rebates” to cover the cost of heating a drafty, low-income building. All a person had to say was, “I live at The Lawn,” and point toward the building. Somebody would issue a check.

There was a church across the street from The Lawn, St. Marks Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. When the church administration, and maybe the congregation too, grew tired of seeing in through the bare windows of The Lawn, they bought blinds for each apartment that faced their way.

At night it was a quick walk, a straight line down Everett through the dark warehouses of Industrial Northwest to Satyricon, Portland’s punk club. In the early hours of the morning on the stumble home, the Henry Weinhard Brewery spit the yellow foam of beer run-off into Portland streets the same way it had most days since 1862. The foam was like the stiff, small clusters of sallow bubbles that litter a beach at low tide. The brewery filled the air with a sour, inescapable cloud of hops, like a steaming bowl of Malt-O-Meal.

The basement of The Lawn had an old wooden pool table by the washer and dryer. There was a free box as a clothing exchange. The single basement-level apartment housed junkies for a while. They’d nod off on the pool table. The top-floor apartment had a man who played the organ. Between the junkies in the basement and the organ booming down from above, my mid-level room felt halfway between Heaven and Hell.

I shared a telephone with guys in a band. It was set up as though we were one big house with multiple extensions. My monthly bill was a few bucks. I’d have to run downstairs to tell Alf, or the sax player named Christian, when the phone was for one of them. After a while I quit answering the phone at all but still the set-up was a bargain and took the edge off all of our finances. I liked to think about things other than making money, to live in the world of people and ideas instead of the world of cash or credit. I drove the delivery van, ART4U, a few days a week. Mostly, I started writing.

I wrote about The Lawn.

One night somebody showed up with a step van full of packaged frozen food. A grocery store had gone out of business. It was summer, the food was thawing fast, there was a problem with the timing of distribution to homeless shelters and so two women, the drivers, knocked on doors in our building and said we should help ourselves. My neighbors and I went down and loaded up cardboard boxes. It was the kind of food I never ate growing up, things I still don’t buy. There were frozen pizzas and tubes of cookie dough, pie crusts, biscuits and meat. Rooms in our building had tiny freezers set inside the top half of short refrigerators. The freezers were small with loose doors, made smaller by clumps of ice. Nothing fit in those freezers. We cooked all the thawing food at once.

That night was a party out on the patch of roof with red wine, el cheapo mini-egg rolls, and pizzas. We had chocolate chip cookies and a leg of lamb. We climbed in and out each other’s windows, walked the halls, left doors open. Every room was warm with the mix of a mild summer night and the flame of a hot gas stove.

I wrote a short story about the free food. In the story, I described Joan of Arc in the alley, looking up. Maybe he really was there that night. I don’t know anymore. Facts get jumbled when they’re mixed with fiction, but I still see his face in the dark, round and open as the man in the moon. At Portland State, my teacher wrote, “A convincing glimpse of low-life from a higher point of view.”

I left The Lawn for Washington, D.C. and a three-month internship with the Smithsonian. I didn’t know anybody in D.C. The first person I met was another intern from Portland named Mark. We were both in the Scholars Program at Portland State. That meant our grades were high, our minds fine-tuned. Mark was a clean-cut guy. He favored chinos and button-down Oxford shirts. We got to know each other. One day I told him about Joan of Arc, the man in the dress outside my window. I told him about The Lawn. Mark looked at me without laughing. His eyes were round, his cheeks soft. He said quietly, “That’s my brother.” Right away, I saw it was true. Their faces were the same.

“What happened to him?” I asked. “What’s his story?”

Mark hesitated, shook his head. He didn’t know. He looked away, looked back. Then he said, “Acid, maybe? Something…” He said it like a guess without enough clues, a cautionary tale he couldn’t decipher.

Mark Chasse was the intern. James Chasse was his brother, Joan of Arc.

James Chasse. Jim Jim. Jay. After I heard that name, I knew I’d met James Chasse even before he showed up on the roof at The Lawn. I met him when he called himself Jay, about the time he’d been hit by a bus, when he tied a red bandana around his head and walked first with a crutch then later a cane, after a breakdown. In those days he looked like an urban explorer. He’d changed, between then and his time in the blue dress on the roof. He looked more scared.

Turns out that other people wrote about James Chasse too. I didn’t know that over the years he figured in my stories. Greg Sage of the The Wipers wrote a song called “Alien Boy,” about Chasse in the early days of Portland punk. They were friends. Sage wrote, “Go and grab your gun/Got him on the run/Cause he’s an alien…”

About the same time, an all-female garage band, The Neo Boys, wrote a song for Chasse called “Nothing to Fear.” Chasse himself had a zine, The Oregon Organism.

Recently on-line, a woman named Ani wrote down a memory. “Sometimes he told me that he talked to Saint Francis—he wanted to be like him, gentle to all beings. One day [in high school] he gave me a piece of white crayon; it had some thread tied around it. He told me that it was purity, and I should keep it, because there were a lot of things in the world that were corrupted, and the crayon would help me in the struggle…Twenty-four years later, I still have the crayon.”

In 1999, the Lawn was converted to ten condominiums. The same year, the Henry Weinhard Brewery closed. For 130-plus years, the brewery had spit its run-off and crowded the air but now it was done. Closing the brewery changed the face of the neighborhood. It set the stage for increased gentrification. Industrial Northwest is now “The Pearl District,” a precious thing built on a seed of irritation, a grain of sand. The Pearl is mixed-use residential, thick with high-rise condos, art galleries, coffee shops, and retail. Northwest Industrial was grunge and punk, blue collar work and beer. The Pearl is calculated and luxe.

When The Lawn was converted to condominiums, developers renamed it “The George H. Williams Townhouse,” after the man who owned it initially, a historic Portland mayor, a senator, a U.S. Attorney General, former “Chief Justice of the Territorial Court of Oregon,” and an early developer of sorts. This is the same man whose name was bestowed on Williams Street in North Portland. The name change on the building seems an effort to tie in the end of the story with the beginning, to anchor the story in a founding father and erase the middle, the decades of The Lawn and every nameless rebel who passed through.

A brochure describes the new condominiums as having “Cherry, travertine and concrete floors; cherry kitchen cabinetry; Jennair ‘dual fuel’ ranges; Bosch dishwashers; granite tile kitchen counters; travertine tiled baths…”

Lovely things.

They call the basement “Garden Level,” not Junkie Level anymore. The pool table, that slab of ancient wood, was quartered with a chain saw. One-bedroom condos have one-and-a-half to two bathrooms. That’s the mark of a fine home: bathroom to bedroom ratio, one or more toilet for every ass.

To share a bathroom the way we did, you have to tolerate each other. You have to practice patience. Sometimes, when I mention the shared bathrooms, a friend will ask, Were the bathrooms disgusting? Were they filthy? The thing is, they were clean.

In 1998, the last generation of tenants at The Lawn wrote a letter to the press: “Numerous musicians, starving artists, writers, cartoonists, poets, cinematographers, performers, students, etc. have lived as neighbors at The Lawn in what is truly a very unique and culturally important Bohemia.” They said, “The expansive and character-imbued nature of our studio lofts with their high ceilings, large windows, antique fixtures, and rich history, is [sic] a source of priceless inspiration.”

And that love of high ceilings? It’s not just aesthetic. A study from the University of British Columbia, published much later, in 2007, confirmed the sense that the height of a ceiling is linked to one’s ideas: “…high ceilings activated abstract thinking and thoughts of freedom, whereas low ceilings activated concrete thinking and thoughts of confinement.”

So much for free thinking in relative poverty. The artists were evicted, the building remodeled. Ten units in the George H. Williams Townhouse each sold for an average price of close to $300,000.

Joan of Arc, a wandering visionary, a crazy man plagued with the work of managing his own mind, his three-pound universe spun out of control, a Portland landmark in his own right, he lost a corner of his habitat.