Elise, Alyssa, Paulina & Simone

In September of 2019, I was sexually assaulted by another man on a group vacation. The women who had invited me sided with my assailant. Everyone has their theories as to why, but to me they did it out of some false sense of loyalty or obligation to the assailant, who happened to be their longtime friend from college.


It was this truly devastating moment on so many levels that I still have not really processed it fully even to this day. What has been even more fucked up, is the ensuing fallout of relationships in my then-immediate core group of friends. These people had my backs, and then they suddenly didn’t, very much so.



This is a brief story of the four of them.

Paulina Hudson,

Simone Auer,

Elise Daniel

& Alyssa Walker. 


Disclaimers and warnings regarding sexual assault/rape content are never for the other survivors who might be triggered by the content, in my opinion. It is just for the rest of the population who just don't want to read anything that grotesque.

I've been told by certain people that my experience either isn't valid or worth sharing. This is not about the assault, this is not about Rob, my assailant. This is about the former friends in my life who failed to show any sort of respect or compassion towards me as I was going through a very traumatic time in my life. So to all the other people who have endured such a terrible act perpetrated on them (and especially the ensuing fallout from their support systems), I send all of my love and solidarity.

I often wonder if I overreacted.  Did I deserve to feel invalidated for the night terrors, and the tears, and the extreme loneliness in the face of abandonment and rejection?  

Some guy I'd just met pinned me down when I was unconscious and fingered my asshole on the first night of a group vacation, maybe this was a bigger deal than it needed to be for me and I overreacted; I was frequently haunted by the notion that none of these feelings were valid, that I'm just a crazy person with a victim complex … I often wonder if getting sexually assaulted by a man was inferior to all other forms of assault, rape, nonconsensual coercion, whatever.  

These four women went out of their way to indicate to me very explicitly that my experience was in fact inferior, and that I was speaking out of turn.  If I needed support, it was not going to be from them in any way shape or form. People who spoke out of a place of anguish, trauma bonding, avoidance, and a sudden lapse of any sort of sympathy or patience.  

I would go so far as to say that the things that came out of their mouths were horrific, embarrassing, disgusting, and shameful.  And for the longest time, I was ashamed to share my story with anybody else.  

I have an entire collection of artwork that I produced immediately after I was assaulted, that I have been terrified to share, because of the awful things that these people said to me, be it deliberately or reflexively from places of their own defense mechanisms.  I plan on putting these in my show, proudly and on display, soon and often.

Elise Daniel & Alyssa Walker 

About a month after the assault, rumors had been swirling around the group that I had hooked up with Rob consensually.  This was agonizing to hear.  I was experiencing night terrors and panic attacks.  I was on the verge of losing everything in my life, including my job and my relationship with Bri.  From all the vicarious experiences of all the other stories I'd heard time and again from the women in my life,  I finally decided that coming forward to the group vacation friends was essential in moving forward.  

I started with Elise, who was the one who coordinated the entire group vacation with Alyssa.    She said all the right things up front. Straight off the woke cue card.

"I believe you." 

"I am here for you, and please let me know if you need anything." 

"I am sorry this happened to you." 

She even showed genuine shock and horror up front.  

A few weeks later, my plans to break the news to Alyssa were prematurely fucked, as Elise accidentally let slip that I had been assaulted.  She immediately freaked out, and called me.  In a move that I dont think even Elise expected, she also put Elise on the line in a threeway call.  

I'd never heard the word "alleged" as many times as she kept saying.  Every word that shrunken child spoke out of her mouth was a jagged dagger of disappointment, shock, anger, and betrayal.  I didn't even really understand what gaslighting was until I was literally experiencing it in realtime from a woman I thought was a really good friend of mine.  

By the time she was done, our friendship was done.  By the time she had defended my assailant's actions for the 38th time, by the time she insisted I was wrong and that there were no cameras in our hotel room, and by the time she demanded that we all get on the phone together to work all this out, I had fallen into a vortex of rage that I did not think could get any worse. 

Elise's last words she ever said to me are forever burnt into the back wall of my skull.

"#metoo has a lot of things wrong with it. And you're just going to have to do this on your own."  


It was the worst thing that had ever been said to me as a survivor at that point.  Until I came out to everyone else in my life about it.  I never thought I'd ever see two grown, liberal, well to do white adult women willfully side with a rapist simply based on grounds of legacy.  But there it was. It is rather astonishing to me how getting high together at college dorm parties could be such a solid framework for that sort of loyalty.  

Paulina & Monie

I still remember reading that first text that Paulina sent me as I was sharing tidbits of my recovery with her.  It was going pretty well at first.  I would text her anytime I felt really sad or horrible at work, and it really helped take the edge off the harder days.  And it made me feel like I finally had a place of asylum amongst the rapidly crumbling inner core of negative emotions that I had completely lost control of.  

"Jon, I appreciate you telling me your story but you're going to have to get your support from other friends."   

"Well look,"

I pleaded in response,

"I'm just looking for people who understand what it's like to have a  #metoo experience."

"#metoo is not for you, Jon.

It's for women only."  

- Paulina Hudson

 I remember being at work and just collapsing to my knees, resting my head against a wall fletcher in the backroom of my construction office.  I could barely breathe from the weight of those words.  I was stunned, it felt like she had just punched me square in the gut.  And I remember texting Monie, her best friend about the whole situation.  And she said the same exact thing, doubling down on how #metoo just wasn't for men.  Monie was a papercut that wouldnt heal.  Bri was insistent at the time that these two hadn't done anything wrong, and that I was acting out of turn for holding these sort of resentful feelings over them.  She had struggled with friendship abandonment issues in her childhood, and was largely uninterested in showing me any sort of solidarity or callling them out as needed. 

I hid a lot of my anger and a lot of my resentment for the two of them, as we prepared to move into the Portland Oregon area together with my then-partner, Bri.  Bri even gave me an out, asking if I'd just wanted to look for a place independant of Paulina.  But I thought that maybe I could just smooth things over internally, as we began looking for a place together to save money on rent.  

I felt like I was always sleepwalking past these horrible things that they said to me as the years trickled by. As a result of Bri digging her proverbial heels into the ground and insisting that I was making a bigger deal out of the situation than it needed to be, we ended up at Monie's house parties. A LOT. We went to a lot of dinner parties, and holiday parties, and movie nights.  

 Lots of parties and get-togethers at Monie's place were spent hiding in other rooms, or sitting as far as I could from them.  I tried to ingratiate myself with Paulina as we became roommates, which turned out to be one of the biggest regrets I ever had.  As the months wore on, the wounds festered.  Bri even pointed out several times that my body language was getting increasingly more antagonistic towards Monie.  So I told her that I was no longer interested in ever going over there ever again.  

Even as I began my new life in Portland, I wanted to express my recovery.  I wanted people to know that I am a survivor, and that even though I felt alone a lot of the time, that I was hoping to share my experiences so that others did not feel the same way and suffer the same fatigue.  

Eventually this became too much for Paulina.  She repeated her demands for distance, as well as telling me that she was envious of my recovery and how much faster I had progressed than she had in her own trauma work.  Again, it felt like she had pushed me off of a cliff.  And again I felt myself spiraling into a pattern of resentment that began affecting everything else, up to and including my already strained relationship with Bri.

Eventually I brought up the whole situation and how I felt with Paulina.  I felt like I had to clear the air with her.  I told her how hurtful those words were in the moment, and what impact it has had on me as her friend and as her roommate.  And even then, she couldn't own up to her own responsibilities and mistakes.  The whole thing became an aural blur as I panned in an out of attention, hearing things come out of her mouth that were all reminiscent of so many gaslighting and intellectualization stories that I'd heard from so many other survivors who had confided in me.  

"That isn't something I would say.  I would never say something like that to anybody.  You have misheard me.  This is what I actually said about this." 

We had one big final blowout after things with me and Bri ended. 



"Women don't owe you fucking anything, Jon.  Black, white, brown, purple whatever.  You are acting entitled and selfish for thinking that we owe you any sort of support." 

-Paulina Hudson

When things eventually ended with me and Bri, I saw no reason to keep either her or Monie in my life ever again for any real reason.  Those friendships were dummies blowing in the wind.  The amount of resentment I had for the two of them just metastasized into a big, giant, cancerous mess that festered in me for years.  And now that I am free of all of those friendships, I am free to say whatever the fuck I want.  

Epilogue

Paulina, Monie, Elise and Alyssa are the end product of Spirit Halloween Liberalism hurriedly intellectualized on Pride flag beer banners and Instagram feeds.  I am unafraid of losing more friends.  I am unafraid of getting slaughtered or killed, because I am already fucking dead.  

These misandrist pieces of milktoast dickscum have had it coming for so long, and I will never rest while they are getting away with the things that they have said and done to me.

I am not looking for your pity.  I do not want your apologies for any of it.  This is my survivor journey and I don't give a flying fuck what anybody thinks of it.  What I DO want to do is share the story of the ensuing fallout with friends.  I am reaching out to all the survivors out there who have endured life changing losses from their own traumatic episodes of nonconsensual sex, particularly to all male sexual assault and rape survivors.  

I know that I am not alone.

To those out there who have been abandoned or left behind by close friends and loved ones, I hear you and I see you, and I can say without any shadow of a doubt that you are, in fact, also not alone.  


CONCLUSION

Thank you all for reading. The responses so far have been warm, supportive, bittersweet and touching. I am NOT looking for pitchforks, or a witch hunt. I want all of you to think about the men/AMABs in your life who have had similar experiences, and to tell them that you love them and that you care about them.

Here is a resource for men/AMAB survivors that I have found great comfort in.

https://1in6.org/

click here

If you know anybody who is hurting from a loss due to assault/rape/coercion, please direct them to this portal.




The Thaw

I call it The Thaw.  You know the feeling.  You are in the middle of a fit of nostalgia.  Or you are living in a very specific moment that you want to remember for a long time, possibly forever.  You feel that chill, like the water that pools at the base of an ice cube as it is melting slowly on a cool, wet stone.  

That cold, comfortable chill, the act of remembering and living in tandem.  I've often thought about personifying the act of remembering good times in my life.  I try and picture it in my head sometimes, as a quantifiable locale, a loving construct made of laughter and joy, interstitched with moments of pain for a needed level of realism and humanity. 

Sometimes a cold wave of darkness will embalm me in the very moment that something wonderful in my life is happening.  It won't make me shiver physically.  But it hits me like a fit of drowsiness. And in those moments I surrender to the sweet cold mirth, as I go under I look for icons that I can draw with me into the most intimate recesses of my gray matter. 

The mole on her left clavicle, just above her breast.  The way her chin feels as I run my fingers over it, like a clumsy shaving kit brush. A pint of beer with the froth sticking to the inside, above the foam.  The smell of fresh blankets mixed with piping hot molé, the light glistening off of the sugar skull collection on the top shelf.  

I blink and I pass out, but am fully awake at the same time.  I try and go inside my mind and find what I want and sometimes I wish I had a better idea of what that place really is.  But the sensation can only be described as a soothing wave of ice gliding across my soul, hypnotic in nature and pacifying in strange and wonderful ways.  

I am able to see my brain working hard to remember my own humanity and I adore every single moment of it.  Sometimes it is so powerful and intense, it makes me cry on the inside, tears suspended in mid motion, flying through hallways filled with dimly lit rooms occupied by me in all parts of my life, bathed in burnt orange or technicolor®, or midnight turquoise, or dream haze charcoal.  I feel like being in love, and being kidnapped all at once.  

I sigh and can see my own breath, a deep longing sigh to conjure up these memories into reality, but every time I try the failure induces a grin, a prideful chuckle as I spin through my collection of kisses, smashed bottles, fistfuls of anger, boot prints in fresh snow, fireplaces ashed with glowing embers of a long night of conversations that faded naturally into a rhythmic see saw of lumpy mattresses and melting walls. 

Sometimes I hear the sound of the heater rumbling to life and I tune my mind to it.  I can see into deep space, but do I want to?  I feel her hair on the bridge of my nose, and I can smell her clear across the morning.  I see the frost on the grass as I slide across it, before the bell rings and the boys and girls have to line up for roll call.  I can feel the scrape of my knee as I score my first goal and catch a pebble in my rollerblade in the middle of the woods on a Sunday afternoon.  

I want to stay here forever, but I hate it here too.  The inky black likes to rubberband off of the things I care about the most.  But the shame makes a cameo once in a while too.  The rage, the shame, the anger, the sadness.  

Why did he beat me for getting a bad grade?  I wonder that aloud as I relive that moment.  Why was I so angry at him for trying to be honest with me about relapsing into heroin?  Into meth?  What was my agenda?  Why do I feel anxiety whenever I think about San Francisco?  Will I ever make it back there?  Why did she leave me for being the same skin tone as her?  Why did she hurt me so forcefully?  Why was I alone in my car, with three issues of Hustler Canada at 2:30am in an abandoned parking lot?  Do I always have to be this broke?  

I've found myself wandering the Avenues in the fog, and wondering why I didn't do that more often.  I wander them in my imagination just for fun, sometimes circling the same block multiple times.  There, in the olive bay window, is a view of the first time I saw my mom cry.  There, along the ivy fence next to the duplex full of strangers, is the golden retriever i fed an entire pizza to, somewhere in the desert on vacation.  At the end of the block outside the laundromat, is the corsage my dad helped me buy to give to my prom date, next to the first bottle of wine I split with Kathleen Kennedy's niece, on a stack of encyclopedias my mother bought me as a birthday gift one year.  

Do I dare fall asleep?  Do I dare dream?  I feel like I am already there. I feel like I already have what I came here for.  Do I need more?  My eyes are open but I am lying down on a soft pink bed in a room with a painting of a sailboat, wondering why I got to be so lucky.  I am in Bible class, listening to my classmates' prayer requests, as my bodybuilder teacher crosses his arms and grows his terrible mustache.  I shake my head in disbelief at the compendium of things in my life I used to care about so deeply and so desperately... and in many ways, wishing I still did.  

There's that cold again.  There's that chill that runs down my retinas and deep into my spine, finishing on the outside of my forearms and inside of my shins.  I look to my left and see the drunken threesome 3 years out.  I look to my right and see the 6 times I have seen Primus®.  I look up, and see the ceiling to the 38L, the rumble down Geary towards downtown in the middle of my tenure as a shitty art student with a bad attitude and ripped overwashed jeans.  

Jump.  Land on a picnic bench, reading liner notes to the latest Propagandhi album, wondering why I couldn't just go home on my free period.  Tumble into Yosemite, eating cold mac n cheese in my boxers and swimming in a murky lake.  Do I cheer for Will Clark? Or Matt Williams?  Or Barry Bonds?  I can't really tell because my dad keeps fiddling with the car radio at the bottom of the 7th to beat traffic out of Candlestick.  Nevermind, we are at the lighthouse now, far away from all of his problems alone with his sons. 

 

I want end credits, but fortunately for me I can't read backwards out the other side of the mirror.  I still have so much to live for.  

But it feels good to feel the pain of not having that feeling anymore, even though it is still there.  

 


 

Funhouse Mirror Mazes Of A Dying Spirit

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Excelsior, 9:31am

Studio sessions usually last about 11.5-12 hours a day.  This includes all three meals, so it's not as brutal as it sounds.  But come 7:30pm, I would take a few nights here and there to explore (and quietly observe) Portland.  I've been hanging out with friends here and there, but being by myself in the city is where the social litmus test comes out in its most primeval colors.  

So far, Portland is still distinct, slightly eccentric, sleepy and bizarre in the right context.  But it is certainly becoming a boomtown, FAST.  The usual overheard dialogue in bars and waffleshacks and greasy dollar mess halls has shifted from lax and cultural, and now shares verbal real estate with a simmering brew of fear and resentment:  gentrification, rent increase, the disappearance of said culture and laid back attitude, rich man rolling thunder from every corner of earth, particularly California.  The resentment towards Californians is laughable, to be honest.  Half the time I just snidely respond in kind.

 "If you're shitting on all the cool people who got kicked out of Cali, wait 'til all the billionaire assholes come rolling through!"

"Thank God you guys thought ahead and have the best rent control laws in the country.  RIght?  Hello?  Guys?"  

The Spirit of San Francisco The Spirit of the West Coast

From my skewed and clearly insulated perspective, everyone was coming to San Francisco in search of their own personal experiences with The Spirit of The City, as I called it.  People flocking from all over the country, from sexual and religious oppression, looking to go a little buck wild and free themselves of their former shells.  

What exactly is "The Spirit"?  It's probably a lot like the Spirit of the 90's®.  And I am sure everyone has a different name for it.  But The Spirit works for me. 


The Spirit is sitting down in a noisy bar, being warmly greeted by random strangers about half a nose down your glass of beer, and then watching that conversation expand and pull a few more strangers immediately surrounding you into a giant mutant social gathering of ridiculous proportions.  

The Spirit is wandering onto a desolate beach only to be greeted by a flock of nudists who all want to share a joint with you.  Or walking in on a couple having sex behind a decommissioned gun turret, and them inviting you to watch.  Or accidentally booking a hotel at a hippie retreat center and spending half the weekend naked in the pool with elderly lesbians and Santa Cruz neo-FlowerPower couples. 

The Spirit is being invited by your upstairs neighbor to a suspect strip club for his rapper boss's album release party, chickening out at the last minute, but ending up at a rooftop party across town after losing at dice to a couple of drunk riot girls who then "kidnap" you to try and find good acid in ANOTHER corner of town.  

The Spirit is random people showing up to your bonfire at 3am on a Tuesday night with a case of shitty beer and a good attitude.  (Check the CA Park Laws to see when they banned bonfires after 1030pm in San Francisco.  Yep, I'm old.)

The Spirit is going to your favorite record store, reading a book on a bench or drawing in your sketchbook in the park and then getting approached by a street teamster with a flier to a show, ending up AT that show, and then getting burritos afterward with the friends of the guy (or gal) who handed you that original flier.  

The Spirit is a celebration of rhythmic propinquity, of people yearning with all their hearts to try and find all the kindness in others, and inviting them to indulge in their senses of adventure.   And for the record, all of those examples that I just listed have, in actuality, happened to me.   

The Spirit is not dead, by a longshot.  If you do not want it to be.  But that Spirit as a whole, due to whatever reasons we all want to attribute it to: technology, changing of the guard, gentrification, etc.... is in a dormant, defeated stasis all over the West Coast.  

For a good while now I had come to believe that The Spirit of The City was exclusive to San Francisco.  I experienced it, however, in Seattle earlier in the 2000s, and definitely in Portland. And for this reason, I now call it The Spirit of the West Coast.  Genuine moments with genuine strangers who just want to invite you into the world of random and excitement.

Of all these cities, Portland's was easily the most genuine.  But in the two weeks I had been here, I was beginning to feel a creeping sensation that all those scary change factors were starting to mutate PDX into something else, something less friendly, less genuine and authentic.  In some places it was totally gone.  "Fuck, it's like I'm back in San Francisco", I would scowl, and move on.  

But in other places, The Spirit was back in small doses.  I was writing the last of the script one night at a bar blaring speed metal, a fair trade considering how "expensive" the beer was.  Before I knew it, the entire table was full of random strangers, a couple on a failing date, a lone Hawaiian gal with a prosthetic leg covered in beer stickers, and two older guys who just wanted to relax after a day of work.  

Turns out we were all Bay Area exiles.  And it was in that moment that I realized this "creeping sensation" I was talking about was a slightly modified variant of GUILT.  I coudn't quite put my finger on it at the moment.  

Clinton & SE 26th

9:45pm

I was told that Dot's Cafe was a good decent place for everything that I in particular am looking for in a bar... atmosphere, crowd, price, whatever.  It was all right on the Dot (Sorry, bad pun, had to do it).  So i decided to venture over to Clinton, armed with a sketchbook and new shoes. 

Never made it to Dot's.  On my way crossing the street, a voice beckoned me and there was a finger in my chest.  

"MELVINS!  See, now THERE's a good jump-off point. MELVINS." 

My uniform for going out usually (and almost always) consists of that two-headed dog Melvins shirt.  This was what I was wearing yesterday night.   People fucking LOVE that shirt.  I just don't even understand it, to be honest with you.  Doesn't matter if I am in Belltown Seattle, or Outer Sunset San Francisco.  It's always an enthusiastic guy (and occasional woman) who just bellows "MELVINS HELL YAH"  and then the conversation starts from there.  

THIS particular guy, though, had other ideas.  

"Yeah, look I get why people like the Melvins, but you'd have to suck my dick and give me a free ticket to go see them again."  

This man instantly had my attention.  Nobody has ever talked smack about them before, especially not in a tacked-on lead-in manner to a conversation that was already ongoing.  The other end of the battery was a Hapa Japanese guy and what I thought was his girlfriend, and they greeted me.  

"Becca!  Hi!"  


"Kentaro!  Nice to meet you!" 


"MARSHALL.  HOW YOU DOIN, MAN!  Hey, cool shirt though, but yeah, Melvins aint my bag of tea."  

He had a glint in his eye and a swagger to his step.  His beer cap barely covered his enormous dome; he was dressed in all black and looked like if Isaac Hayes had skateboarded across town to his Black Flag audition.  Soon we were all awkwardly standing around as Marshall continued to ramble, dropping some knowledge about music.  So i decided to walk into the pub and order a beer.  

I figured that was the end of that interaction at that point.  I sat down and ordered randomly off a tap, and grimaced when it turned out to be a sour beer.  

"Fuck.  Goddamn millenials and your sour be---"  

Suddenly, that same finger that had been pressed into My Melvins logo was suddenly a paw on my shoulder. 

"Hey dude!  I am so sorry if I offended you.  I dig your swag man, I don't really like the Melvins but I think its cool that you're into that shit I was just talkin out of my ass."

"No worries man!" 

"You wanna come play pool with us [Kentaro and Becca]?  It's free." 

"Yes. Yes I do." 

Marshall reintroduced me and we all reintroduced ourselves.  Suddenly, The Spirit had hit me square in the jaw and I fucking loved it.  Suddenly I was in Drawing Flies (1996), Clerks (1994), Reality Bites (1994) and Singles (1992).  

After a couple of rounds, The Spirit was alive and well, and Marshall was leading the charge.  He smacked my phone away in between cue shots as I was trying to text my mom, telling her I'd be home late.  He dictated all the pooltable rules out of thin air, with some hilarious arguments occuring with Becca.  He would dole out cigarettes to whoever wanted one on the street, and talked trash at an Uber driver for parking in front of the bar and then wandering in.  
Through this "altercation", we come to discover that he works for the local cab company, and astonishingly, was a born-raised Portland native.  In the course of an hour I had come to know exactly who Marshall is.  He made it very plain and obvious that the facets of his personality were vehemently rooted in his origins, his vocation and his cultural palette.  He was proud of his rare breed status. Quite honestly, I would have been too.  

Marshall was a crazy cat and he owned it.  We smoked a tiny bowl around the corner, and he just had this edge that I hadn't seen or felt in a long, long time.  

"SNAPPERS. Fuck yeah." 

"Wut?"

"SNAPPER.  C'mon, you know what a fuckin snapper is.  You're from the Bay Area don't TELL me you don't know what a fuckin' snapper is." 

"I..." 

He points at the tiny bowl he had packed into his one-hitter.  

"Snapper!  Takes the edge right off!  Snaps ya BACK! Shit, man, I thought you were HIP, what with your fucking SOCKS."

It all felt familiar to me, though.  He would go around being super nice to people one minute, and then walking away talking a bunch of trash.  He would say something sarcastically, but then say that he meant it seriously.  And then double back and say he was just talking out of his ass and that he's a dirty old man with nothing left in his life to do except drive a cab and get fucked up and masturbate.  He was 60% Chill, 35% Dick, and about 5% "Miscellaneous".  He just carried himself in a way that was a proverbial neon arrow pointed straight at him that said "FOLLOW ME TO FUN AND ADVENTURE AND MAYBE SOMETHING FUCKED UP"..... I couldn't have asked for a better Spirit embodiment.  

We drank a round of shit beers in shiny cans and ran the pool table into the damn ground.  And THEN, he wrangled up me, Kentaro and Becca and convinced us to head to his favorite dive bar around the corner, where there was apparently a pool table that was superior in positioning (he was wrong).  And again, The Spirit did not disappoint.  Suddenly I am walking three blocks down with 3 complete strangers, tagging along on some lost expedition to find the next moment of entertainment.  The whole time Marshall is just being Marshall. One minute he'll be telling us we're the greatest, the next minute he'll be mocking us incessantly for being too serious or wound up, or too deliberate and stuffy.

He relished being a broken shard, an old guard, a joker card.  Underneath the attitude, though, was the blueprint of a really, really genuinely nice guy who just wanted to recapture that Spirit I keep talking about, even if it meant having to recruit a bunch of out of town douchebags like me and Becca and Kentaro (they had just bought a house around the corner, freshly moved in from Boise).  
 

Marshall's dive did not disappoint.  The Keno arcade machines were populated by some greasy looking neighorhood kids, the entire bar reeked of refried dough and stale beer (their kitchen was infamous for its fried chicken), and the bartenders had this old school attitude that was a cross between LunchLady Doris® and Tom Waits.  The rafters, made of old lumber, were covered in chalk graffiti.  Buncha swear words, thankfully no racial slurs. 
Eventually Becca and Kentaro tapped out.  Marshall, ever the Indiana Jones type,  implores me to take a cab with him over to Belmont. 

"You're a cool-ass dude, man.  You up for some fun?  I'll show you the best fuckin' parts of town man.  C'mon man, I'll spot your cab.  Let's GO let's GO!"  

I saw two ways this night would play out.  I could hop in this cab with this dude, go tear a hole in the space fucking time continuum across all of Portland and end up on some fucking stranger's couch clear across town, with a pocket full of coasters and phone numbers and maybe a bunch of dirt clods.... OR, I could go to Plaid Pantry across the street, buy a couple of hero sandwiches, soak up the 1.5 pints of beer I had, and go home.  
 

"Thanks so much for showing us around, man.  But I really should go home." 

"....It's fucking 1145 dude.  The fuck you gotta do tomorrow?" 

"....Fly back to SF."

A look of anger, disappointment, resentment and then apathy flashed across Marshall's rugged face.  I will never forget that fucking look.  I will never forget that fucking look on his sad, angry face.  Because that is the EXACT SAME LOOK I have made millions and millions of times in the last few years, when I come to discover that the Spirit had faded.  The Spirit was gone, the Spirit was dead, and the whole world has let me down.  THAT look.  The way he acted after that, was one where I might as well have robbed him and then smacked him across the lips. 

Suddenly that pang of guilt I had felt earlier in the week with all those Bay Area exiles made sense to me.  


San Francisco was once FULL of guys like Marshall.  It can be said, then, that there is a massive population of Marshalls right here in PDX as well.  Seattle too, but I'll get to Seattle later.  You are a Marshall if you are weathered, if you are bold.  If you are crazy, subterranean, hospitable to a fault and ready to show everyone who came through a grand ol' time.  Good, old fashioned, random hilarious fun.  I will say it loud, and I will say it proud.  I know this, because I was one of those guys.  Just like Marshall, wanting the profane and random, seeker of urban safaris.  Bar hopping across the universe on a $20 stipend written by The Devil, resentful of the life ahead and only wanting to turn the volume down by cranking it all the way up...

And deeply heartbroken whenever the people around you fail to live up to your expectations, to the great splendor and potential that was once the human spirit.  

I saw the light of the Spirit fade from his eyes in that moment, because he had put himself out there, only to be let down by some outsider asshole in brand new shoes that his dad bought him, wearing the shirt of a band he fucking hates. 

I walked away into the night, letting that guilt sink in.  And I apologized to him as I went to sleep.  I apologized because I am not him anymore, because I am not staying in the town I thought I would die in.  I apologized to him because I am evolving, and as I watch the entire coast become consumed by the new boom, I no longer fear the change and I no longer hate it, as the Marshalls of the world still do.  The Spirit is still alive, but it too, needs to evolve.  It too, needs to wake up and adapt to the way that humans now socialize.  Nonconformity and cultural preservation still have their place, but it is up to us to figure out how.  

If guys like Marshall are the old souls, the ones who cannot evolve quickly enough, the ones who fade away into irrelevance, then there must be some equilibrium that is attainable, some sweet spot on the pendulum where I do not have to be just another cumstain with wireless headphones and a Snapchat account.  

I walked away into the night, and on the sidewalk, walking in the opposite direction, I saw a flock of 20something women, happily strolling home, with smiles that shone in the dark, waiting for eye contact. 


"Good evening!  How was your night?"  I asked them, as gently and as sweetly as I could. 

As they crossed over, their eyes twinkled in the midnight blue, over their shoulders and they responded in kind. 

"We had a great time!  Thank you!  Have a good night!"  





 

Life Lessons From Sex Workers, III

Lesson #1:  You Are Who You Are.

 

2000:  

Death, Taxes, Republican GloryHoles, Race Relations

For whatever reason, I was raised in an environment where racial discrimination was largely a non-issue.... As in, I never got beaten, harassed, insulted (maliciously) for being a darker shade of something.   Growing up as a First Generation Taiwanese American in the San Francisco Bay Area was complicated in different ways.  For one, I never felt any sense of connection to the Asian youth community when I came of age.  All the Asian kids I ever ran into, particularly in Suck-A-Con Valley, were these pompous rich kids who all dressed super preppy, drove "rice rockets", and listened to two things:  Rap and R&B.  Oh!  Sorry wait.  I forgot J Pop and K Pop.  This is of course a gross exaggeration, but for the purposes of creating fringe contrasts, my blog will focus on the groups that made me feel the most ostracized.  

[by the way, race is a thing in this entry, so if you don't have the stomach for it I'd strap in or move on.]

I always felt out of step, being middle class but not "upper" middle class enough with these other kids.  

So I went the other way.  I decided to fit in with "the rest".  I went to punk shows, did half-assed ollies on a skateboard I didn't own, watched movies that weren't just full of hip hop and martial arts stars, and  I hung out with an enormous range of people of all races and colors, although my friends, even to this day, are largely white.  

One day, while at lunch somewhere in high school, someone made a pretty racist (albeit slightly funny) Asian joke.  To which I tersely said "HEY", and pointed at myself. 

"Whatever Jon, you're basically white."  


Whether or not that was racist (it kind of was, in retrospect)... His point was that I had so seamlessly fit in with "white" culture that people had forgotten what color I was.  At the time I remember taking that as a compliment.  I had drawn the EPITAPH RECORDS® logo on enough surfaces,  quoted Simpsons and Jay + Silent Bob, and re-enacted Jackass enough times to fool these guys into thinking I was one of them!  Huzzah!!!  I would NEVER be caught dead as one of those Polo Sport Ralph Lauren dip shits hangin out in their Honda Accords with the 40" spoilers! 

It wasn't until I started dating a Chinese American girl that I became ACUTELY aware of the color of my skin.   She, too, was playing the "I'm white enough to not be Asian" game.  It was rare to see two "Twinkies®" (Bananas®, WhiteWashed®) dating each other back then.  It still kind of is now, probably. I wouldn't know. She hit me square in the face with my race.... a 1st Gen HK girl who was stuck in the 'burbs of Sunnyvale, telling me, another Asian guy, that he will never be good enough for her based solely on the grounds that he did not, and WILL NEVER, look like Brad Pitt, or Colin Farell, or Freddie Prinze Junior, or Matt Damon, or whoever the fuck other white guys were big at the time.
  She dumped me on the grounds of "not being white", despite "having all the qualities of a white guy".  Who could blame her, really?  You watch Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You and Never Been Kissed and Sixteen Candles 100 times each of COURSE you're going to want a tall dopey blue eyed white guy to go to prom with!!  Of COURSE you would want an "All American" high school experience! 

What happened after that was pretty tragic.  As a natural and definitely unfair reaction, I swore off Asian women altogether for years.  I mean YEARS.  A projection of self loathing, self hatred and roiling in something I was born into, something I could not ever change, no matter how hard I tried.  Some people out there are just always running away from something.  
 

Imagine trying to run away from the color of your own skin for 10 years.

Brad

San Francisco, 2011

Brad grew up in Los Angeles to a Purple Heart Navy pilot father and a stern Jewish mother.  He came out to his parents immediately after his oldest sister came out also, and in an era where homosexuality was considered an abomination by just about everyone everywhere, Adam's parents were surprisingly open minded and supportive.  It probably helped that his youngest brother carried the gene pool forward and took in a wife, but I digress.  

Brad was a happy, healthy, strapping young gay man living a happy, healthy strapping gay lifestyle.  Throughout the 80's and 90's, he did just about everything with everybody.  So he says, at least.  

And then one day, he woke up (and went to the doctor and got a blood test) to find that he was HIV+.  He was devastated at first. Oh no, he thought initially, his world was coming to an end life as he knew it was over.  He, like so many during the height of the AIDS crisis, was now stuck with this bug, uncurable and draconian in nature.  It had almost taken on this mythical slant to it.

I learned a lot from just living with him.  I asked him if he ever felt suicidal.  

"All the time, back then.  I cried rivers worth of tears.  But at the end of the day, why cry over spilled milk?  It's a part of me now.  It's who I am, even when a cure comes around and I get to exit that stage of my life."  It gave me a very brief moment of reflection on my own struggles with identity and with feeling "trapped" by things that were beyond my control: Race, Age, the Economic crash, etc.    

He wore his status with an ownership that was humbling and inspiring at the same time.  I mean, of course, when he wasn't being a total pain in the ass about leaving dishes in the sink and whatnot.  But he carried on in his life, living his days the best he could, the happiest he could be.  Partners and lovers came and went; I am sure there is a brotherhood of solidarity out there for stuff like that.  

2016:  

Soft Patches, Steeples And Lost Shephards

Portland, OR

"You know, Jon, I often feel like I was a lousy mother to you." 

Ever since I moved in with my folks to finish the book, my mother and I have been having some very wistful and super fucking intense conversations about our past nuclear family history.  She and Dad became Christians when they were in grad school.  Imagine that, right?  Two college educated, extremely hard working and intelligent adults, successfully proselytized by some dopey blue eyed kid jockeying a burger patty Bible in some college town in Taiwan.  

"Well, you were and are definitely not a lousy mother.  I've been around long enough in the dregs of reality to know that there are some really fucking shitty parents out there.  And you definitely do not qualify as a lousy mother. Not even close."  

"I just sincerely regret all the things that happened to you in your experiences with Christianity.  Half of the things you told me about I did not even know.  I wish I could have helped you." 

"Look, I get it.  You guys grew up in Cold War Era Taiwan, when poverty and famine were probably a bad dream away from becoming reality at any given moment... you had Chiang Kai Shak running a leaking ship that was slowly being plugged up, and electricity and running water were considered luxury items.  

And gee, guess what?  All those old idols you used to worship just weren't cutting it for you.  So when someone offers you a new Brand of spiritual detergent, of course you would buy into it 100%." 

There are some really fucked up things that have happened to me in my experiences with Christianity that I cannot really share at this point in time with anybody in the general public.  Don't worry I didn't get touched by a priest.  But I've seen enough hypocrisy from just about every corner that a church has to offer for me to just look at the proverbial Kool-Aid® and realize that it's been cut with piss.  

My mom knows that I had been in therapy for the last year, and that I was able to resolve a lot of those anger and rage issues, most of which were largely rooted in Christianity.  Even still to this day, she will go into spats of profuse apologizing to me, for "screwing up" really bad.  

I always just tell her the same thing, that I forgive her, and that even though there is a giant hole where my spiritual identity once stood, that I am content with letting that giant vacancy stand for a little bit longer before I even attempt at filling it with anything else.  If anything, I will tell her on those occasions, I am grateful.  Because of my experiences in religion, I simply do not feel the need to fill some gap or void, because it has largely been closed off.  Imagine a summer lake that is celebrated as a childhood vacation spot, suddenly polluted by the local Coca Cola® plant, and condemned forever with diabetic fish and radioactive time travelling bears.  Free story idea, go ahead and steal it. 

And that's just it. Religion is a giant identity medallion for some.  It certainly was (and definitely still is) for my parents.  I would go so far as to say that in my youth, my parents were not really parents.

 They were Christians who happened to be parents.

 They saw everything through that filter and it was largely irrelevant to many of the psychological problems that were slowly brewing within both me and my brother from childhood to adolescence.  Anger, rage, depression, these things that were very clearly problems Tim and I had that neither of my parents ever wanted to actually address with actual help... PHYSIOLOGICAL problems, part of our inevitable traits relating to brain chemistry and physical health, put to the wayside because Church and God And Jesus and the Holy Spirit were sufficient enough solutions, via lots of prayer and group Bible studies.  


As it currently applies to my life nowadays, Adam was a salient checkpoint. He became a segue into some very important identity and emotional ownership exercises that would I would come to learn further down the line.  These lessons are starting to come full circle, particularly in constant unearthing and realization excavations conducted with my parents.

 I have made some decisions in my career that are now yielding consequences I need to own.  It's one thing to act on a feeling, or jump when an impulse tells you to jump.  But it is accepting where you land and where to go next is what is key. 

 

 

  

Life Lessons From Sex Workers, II

Lesson #9: Be Open To Learning Things In Unusual Ways

Previous Sex Worker Life Lessons here

2002

I came home from work one day to find Lynette wrapped in a blanket and smoking a large spliff.  Standard Operations.  The joint was passed to me for a hit, which I gladly took.  She involuntarily massaged her rugose neckline.  Offput by her uncharacteristically somber silence, I decided to unthaw the air a bit and start filling out the roommate dynamic a little. 
 

“What’s up? You alright?”

She let out an annoyed but relieved sigh.   Clearly she'd wanted to get this off her chest.  

“Shit ain’t great. My homie’s comin’ over. You get to meet Rhee-Rhee.”
“Yeah? What’d she do?” ”

 I took my second hit off her BlueBerries® and waved, indicating a finished session, and waited on her to elaborate.

“ She wanted to talk to me today about somethin’ but wouldn’t say what over the phone. ”
“Is she.....”
“Yeah. A whore, like me. ”

I opted not to press her in favor of letting this bit of theater played out.  So I stepped out onto the balcony, smoked a couple of cigarettes, lazily wandered back in and did the XBOX® thing.  Lynette normally liked to poke fun at me for "being such a boy" with my video games.  Not a peep in that moment.  Man, I thought, this MUST be serious if she's not even going out of her way to recycle her usual swipes at me. 

About a quarterway back to sober, a knock finally rapped on our front door.  Entered Rhee, in a bare mid riffed top and acid washed booty shorts.  She couldn't have been older than 25, and had beautiful ebony skin that wrapped her features in this glow I had rarely seen in any woman ever.  Just a pretty, brown eyed black woman with a sweet and sour attitude. 

“Rhee, this is Jon. ”
“Hi! ‘Nette told me you were a sweetheart. Nice to meet you.”

Hookers are always so nice and cordial and polite.  I assume it's probably due to the fact that they kind of have to be given their profession.  If you think about it, prostitution is the purest form of customer service there is.  I paused Halo® to engage with them.  As she sat up, she gave Rhee a look that I will never be able to replicate as hard as I try.  She yanked Rhee by the belt loops in a downward and lurching motion, essentially exposing her entire lower abdomen and mons pubis.  She began feeling her belly.  

I wasn’t sure if she was about to beat the shit out of her or start eating her pussy, but either way my fascination had piqued.  

“PLEASE tell me you ain’t about to tell me what you about to tell me.”

 

Rhee had "hand caught in the cookie jar" tattooed on her lower lip and the bridge of her nose.  Lynette repeated her line.  

Rhee finally eeked out hers. 

 

“I’m late.”
“COME OOOOOO-ON, RHEE. COME OOOOOO-ON. ”

Listening to a prostitute lecture a colleague on the importance of keeping on top of her birth control game is easily in the Top 10 weirdest fly on the wall moments I think have ever had.  Isabel's stoner personality was pretty catatonic, so the whole thing just sounded like yelling in slow motion.  Eventually Rhee had felt she was properly admonished, so she cut to the chase and asked to borrow a couple hundred bucks for an abortion.  

This then lead her down another slo-mo shoutfest.  They were threesome partners, which always paid more, and with her "out of commission", Lynette was pretty pissed off that her orgy slots were all of a sudden empty. Never in my life had I considered the loss and opportunity costs of terminating a pregnancy.  

The whole time I am listening to this go down, I just drooped my upper lip and nodded here and there.  I was miles away from Sunday School and Youth Group Bible Studies of yesteryear, stuck on a couch getting a free lesson in Prostitute Politics 101.