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| Nancy Rommelmann |
My husband and I went on Friday to see a friend's band play at Slabtown. For those who do not know the bar, it's a box, with a floor-level stage and acoustics so loud the only way you know the singer is singing is because you see his mouth moving.
There wasn’t much of a crowd, and only one person dancing; a dude in his 40s who’d squeezed his snowman physique into jeans with acid-washed skulls on the back pockets. He shouted the band’s songs back at them. He spread his arms and soared like a plane. He did that guitar-god jump-kick, and I recognized in him the sort of lonely boy who thirty years ago found a place to alight in punk rock.
When the band took a break, we stepped outside. Twenty feet down the block there was a house party going on. The house was typical enough, an old Portland with a big porch. But who were the people on it, the twenty or thirty people clustered in the yard and on the sidewalk? It was hard to tell. From a distance, the girls looked like hookers, which didn’t make much sense for a house party in Northwest Portland.
“I’m going to take a closer look,” I told my husband.
“Careful,” he said.
I walked up to the party and stood with my back against a tree. The partiers, I could now see, were college-aged, and they partied like college kids, drinking beers and shouting at each other. But where one might have expected green sweatshirts with gold Os, or skinny jeans and 80s T-shirts, there were girls in diaper-shorts as tight as a layer of paint and six-inch stripper sandals. The boys wore ribbed white tops, gold chains, their hair shorn on the sides and spiked on top.
“Can I tawk to youse fa minute?” a girl said to a boy, who did not break from throwing signs and busting into the dance moves that he and his friends performed for what seemed to be an invisible camera.
Even from six feet away, I had no idea what was going on. It was theater of a kind I had not seen in Portland. Among the cugine I grew up around in Brooklyn, sure, but here? Never. The scene was evidently curious to a couple walking past, gals wearing sensible fleece at 1 a.m. on a rainy night. One smiled at the partiers, but I could see she had as little clue as what was going on as I did.
I wanted to stand there an hour and figure it out, and would have, except I sensed more than saw a ripple. Someone had broken character. One of the dudes I’d been drinking in was walking toward me, palms up. He was going to ask me to leave, I thought, or what the hell I was doing here.
"Yo,” he said, moving in so close I had to press my back against the tree. “You want some of The Sit-u-A-tion?"
I tried to think quickly: situation meaning… the party? Meaning: being told to mind my own business? Meaning…
"I said, you want some of The Sit-u-A-tion?" he asked again, which is when I saw he’d pulled up his shirt up and was gyrating his naked torso at me. I started to laugh.
"Yeah, you want some,” he said, and backed away so I might admire his tan and, maybe, that he’d had himself waxed from navel to neck. I introduced myself.
"I'm Will," he said, shaking my hand. So, Will, what was up with the party?
"You know Jersey Shore?" he asked. I haven’t seen the MTV show about rowdy kids from, well, the Jersey Shore, but yes, I told him; I knew it. Oh… this was a Jersey Shore dress-up party!
"No, we are Jersey Shore,” he said. “We are Portland Shore!”
Portland… what? What shore? The shore is ninety miles away, a comment Will apparently found irrelevant, as he moved in close again and said….
“You want some of The Situation?" Up again went the shirt, Will doing his man-hula as if to say, I was very welcome to touch him; that this, in a way I was just starting to figure out, was the answer to all my questions.
I thanked Will; I told him I was married, and could he tell me who these people were and where they came from?
Will lowered his shirt. "You know Beaverton?” he asked. “A lot of them go to school out there.” No, he wasn’t in school anymore; he had an MBA. The house was his.
I told Will I was sorry I’d crashed his party, but I just found it so fascinating. I could see it pleased him that someone thought so. That like The Situation, the character on Jersey Shore whose self-anointed screen name Will had appropriated -- a one-time exotic dancer who, I recall reading, had earned $5 million in the past year -- that Will, too, was a hot commodity. He could, I thought, as easily have affected Mad Men’s Don Draper, and perhaps next year, he would. I thought of my own trying on of identities, the year of wanting to be a tough Puerto Rican chick giving way to gypsy scarves and Gitanes. How one outgrows the costumes but not the emulating. How long ago was it that I wrote Didion in my notes, to remind myself how a chapter must be structured? Oh, that was today.
"Give me your hand,” said Will, and led me through a multi-part handshake that ended with our fingertips tapping. And then we broke, Will back to his party, me back to Slabtown, where the Snowman was still performing for an invisible camera of his own.
Nancy Rommelmann is the author, most recently, of the novel The Bad Mother. Her book of essays and journalism about Los Angeles, "Forty Bucks and a Dream," will be released in November (Dymaxicon). Rommelmann will be a featured author and read from her work at Wordstock 2011.
I met Nancy two years ago when a mutual acquaintance recommended her to me as a talented freelancer who might be interested in writing for the Sunday Opinion section I was then editing. We worked together on a handful of essays, including a superb piece on the city's twentysomethings, "Is Portland the new Neverland?"
Tomorrow: Motherhood: the battle inside my brain | Heather Lalley
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