Apt. 1: 17 Years and 9 Apartments in Portland
Taylor Place: 2005-2007
I moved into the Taylor Place apartment complex, site unseen, as summer was winding down in September of 2005. My friend Caitlin, her dad, me, and a family friend named Bruce, drove across the country from Alabama to Oregon, Caitlin and I taking turns driving her 1997 Toyota Camry while the adults drove the Uhaul. At 21 and 22, Caitlin and I were technically adults, but in retrospect, I think of us as kids.
This looks less chic than I remember.
Taylor Place was as unglamorous as you can get, a true beige apartment: beige carpet, beige aluminum blinds, linoleum floors in the kitchen and bathroom, ‘70s aluminum sliding windows with screens, coin-op laundry in the basement, and a single parking spot out front. The summer after we graduated from the University of South Alabama, we signed the rental agreement and faxed it over before we drove out. When we arrived, the landlord met us with the keys. It was around 800 square feet with two bedrooms and cost $680 a month. My $340 split was the most I’d ever paid for rent.
We occupied the second floor of a U-shaped, two-story building. From my bedroom window I could see the tops of trees as they dropped their leaves and revealed the peaks of craftsman houses lining the streets of Southeast Portland. Fall air wafted through the open windows–it was crisp and dry and felt like nothing I had experienced before. In Alabama we never left the windows open because the AC was always running and the air outside wasn’t refreshing. Here, we cooled ourselves from the outside, letting the fresh air drift through the apartment and remind us of the changing season, the ceaseless rain just around the corner.
Me and Chris at the apartment in 2005
I decorated my bedroom like a 1990s dorm room: boho pillows, scraps of memorabilia tacked to the wall, and a few vases I’d made in my college ceramics class. The rest of the apartment was surprisingly chic given the drab interiors we were working with. Caitlin was (and still is) a genius with interiors. When we lived together in college, the RA always asked to use our dorm for the school tours because it looked so nice. In exchange we got gift certificates to a chicken finger place called Guthrie’s that made us both sick to the stomach, their chicken strips floppy and dripping with grease, the fries slightly al dente yet somehow still limp. But I digress. With Caitlin’s touch, Taylor Place felt like a little artist’s refuge with a sofa full of plush pillows, oil paintings lining the walls, and antique furniture. We ate our cereal out of bright ceramic fiesta ware, and sat in 1960s dining room chairs that I’d painted lime green and recovered with brown and white fabric.
My bedroom right after moving in (check out that stack of CD-roms)
Our first months in the apartment were mostly spent together. We had moved to Portland without knowing anyone, save Caitlin’s boyfriend Chris, who had moved out a few months before us. Eventually though, we settled in and started to make friends in our new city. Caitlin started a graduate program in poetry; I started and dropped out of a graduate program in English; I got hired at Buffalo Exchange, a resale clothing store. I befriended a coworker named Christine who lived just up the street. We had both lived in the same small town in Colorado for a summer and both had religious upbringings. She was strikingly beautiful, with olive skin, dark brown hair, and a wide smile with a gap between her two front teeth. She looked kinda like Madonna in those black and white art school pictures of her before she was famous. Christine was tall and walked with a swagger, often wearing cowboy boots and low-rise jeans that revealed a tattoo of the word “Truth” just below her belly button. She was just getting into doing psychedelics when we met, and had had a bad trip that she described to me in such vivid detail that to this day, I’ve still never tried psychedelics; it was something about a decapitated talking boar's head that wouldn’t stop following her. I met her roommate, some guy she’d met on Craigslist, and while he seemed nice enough at first, eventually things went south. She told me that they had hooked up once, but things had soured and she didn't feel comfortable at her place anymore, so I invited her to come stay with us as long as she needed.
Christine slept on our couch for probably a week before she disappeared. I remember that she took an apple and maybe left a note. She didn’t disappear in the sense that she went missing or anything like that, just that she took off with no notice. She was sleeping on our couch one day, her overnight bag and clothes strewn across the living room floor, and gone the next. She also stopped showing up for work. It was about a week later when I realized that she stole a bunch of clothes from me; I had looked everywhere for a few pieces, when it occurred to me that she had taken the clothing that she could most easily resell. I felt betrayed, but also perplexed. Why hadn’t she just asked if she needed money or help? In retrospect, I’m still not sure how to feel about Christine, whether I should have been more worried for her or more wary of her. Whether she was a grifter and I was a mark, or she was someone who really needed my help. While I can still picture her face, her smile, the weird little things we had in common, the details of this whole story elude me. Did we talk again after that? Did other people from work stay in touch with her? Was I worried about her safety or still too naive and sheltered to even imagine that she was in danger? We probably knew each other for less than a month. But when I think of Taylor Place, I think of her, our first house guest. I saw her years later when I was working at a coffee shop on the other side of town. She didn’t show any signs that she recognized me, but she was hard to miss–same swagger, same gap toothed smile. She looked good, and I sincerely hope she was.
It was while living at Taylor Place that I bought my first vintage dresses and started to think of style as a form of creative expression. I still have the very first one that I purchased from Buffalo exchange the week I was hired, a 1960s drop-waist polyester number, dark brown with a white peter pan collar and a pleated houndstooth skirt. It’s a little bit loud for my taste now, but I don't think I’ll ever get rid of it. At Buffalo Exchange, everyone dressed flamboyantly every day. Nothing was off limits. I quickly accumulated a closet full of vintage, and was soon in charge of the dress inventory at the shop. One day, when I was wearing a 1970s peasant style floral polyester dress with a wide western belt and red 1980s pumps, my neighbor at the apartment complex said hello and asked where I was headed. “Nowhere,” I replied, “just checking the mail.” “Oh” he said, looking a little uneasy, “you’re not going to a costume party or something?” “Nope” I said with a smile. I wasn’t fazed. It was my goal during that period to look like someone who might be going to a costume party at all times.
At the apartment in 2006. No, I’m not going to a costume party. These are my clothes.
Taylor place was also where I became a bike commuter. I sold my shitty Ford Explorer before I left Alabama for Portland. It caught on fire while I was driving home from the store where I’d just bought a “For Sale” sign. I was not sad to see it go. I bought a powder blue vintage cruiser off craigslist a few weeks after my move to Portland, and I rode it to work in my heels and vintage dresses. One day when I was leaving the apartment in a mini skirt and white knee-high boots, I turned out of the parking lot and hit a pug who was barking furiously at my front tire and diving in and out of my path. It happened in slow motion, my heel hooked into the bike pedal as I tried to swerve away from the yapping psychopath. The boot heel was my downfall as I tipped over and felt my ankle make a cracking sound. All the tendons in my foot were torn, and I was laid up in bed for two weeks, unable to bike, and unable to work.
At the time of my injury I had a crush on a boy named Victor whom I’d met at an ‘80s dance night. He was in a goth electronic band called Dot Matrix, styled himself like a blond Robert Smith (all eye liner and wild hair), and had a day job counting cars. His job, he told me, involved watching videos of a traffic intersection and tapping a button to record every car that came through. While doing this, he passed the time listening to audiobooks, and that summer he had raved about Frank Herbert’s Dune, which I picked up to pass the time while I was incapacitated. Caitlin said my situation was kind of romantic like in Pride and Prejudice when Jane catches a cold from riding in the rain to Netherfield and Mr. Bingley helps nurse her back to health until she is well. But Victor never came to visit. What can I say? He was no Mr. Bingley. Nonetheless, I finished Dune that summer, and I was back on my bike after a few weeks.
By our second year at Taylor Place, we’d made enough friends to host Thanksgiving dinner at the apartment. We invited everyone who was staying in town for the holiday. My friends Beth and Nicole came, along with Nicole’s mom and my friend Robbie. Caitlin and I were both vegetarians, and we made a big pot of soup and assigned everyone a different side dish. When I told Robbie to bring a salad he said “how do I make a salad?” Incredulous, I told him that it wasn’t that hard, just mix some things together in a bowl–use whatever you want. He showed up with a bowl of peanuts and m&ms mixed together, and we laughed till we cried. We ate our vegetarian meal, drank wine, and played Nintendo wii after the meal was over. I wore a 1970s orange chiffon dress, and we posted a sign on the door that read “No Turkeys here.”
That was the first holiday I had ever hosted, and I remember feeling especially grown up that year (despite the fact that we didn’t have a real salad). We may not quite have been adults, but we weren’t kids anymore either.