Richard Loranger insisted on making us dinner when Sweeney and I visited him in San Francisco. His apartment was built for large Irish families with no money in the late twenties, so there were benches that folded into the walls to save space. Richard pulled out a bench by his kitchen table and had us sit on the feathered magenta corduroy. He turned down the lights, made us burgers and broccoli, lit candles, uncapped painted bottle Mexican beer, took us to his favorite cheap Italian restaurant, sat with us at the top of Delores Park even though it was so windy we couldn’t feel our faces.

When we visited Maggie and Eric James on the mountain, I helped them garden and they fed us. They let us roam around, follow the foxes. We were enthused, followed their directions to the tops of hills. They hosted a housewarming party in their Airstream, serving Napa Valley wine milkshakes, and let everyone sit on cinder blocks. Everyone was noticed, treated, present for a reason that, if unspoken, was then at least felt.

A year ago, I remember my stepmother, exasperated, saying that she “was all about being laissez-faire in hospitality” but that it had somehow gone too far. We had just had guests. People have a responsibility to be received and to be present just as much as the host has to accommodate. She was back to demanding flowers, wine, bread & butter notes.

Culturally, I think we threw the [hospitable] baby out with the bathwater.

My friend asked me how it felt to be back in Brooklyn and I described it as, “Revelry, hospitality, deep willingness, bratwurst, and teamwork.” Even in times of sadness, there is Sweeney, Sweeney! on the stoop, waiting for my return, grabbing my hand to dance, dance, dancing, and then sitting under the streetlight to talk at length, no rush or expectation, about why I’m mourning, and then the world, people we know, Greek virtue, French, God, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the places we were raised. Greg and I planned to make a big bratwurst dinner one night. When I got back home, he’d bought everything he’d promised, and had started marinating the brats in beer and onions. We ate raw scallions, stewed sauerkraut in butter and pepper, sliced deli pickles and salted tomatoes. We filled everyone up, no scuffles or misplaced enthusiasm. What a family. We sat on the patio and debated–

At the new Gates apartment (the cellar now; a wide stone patio; tile floors) we’ve all been debating hospitality as a virtue that extends beyond just social grace. It is not specific to parties, dinners, guests. Hospitality is a family dynamic first and foremost. Just like in Maggie’s Airstream: Everyone was noticed, treated, present for a reason that, if unspoken, was then at least felt. I’ve always know that this role of the host or hosted is important to me, but I never knew why: it’s a family thing. Hospitality is a virtue. Hospitality builds community. Hospitality can save the world!

Can it? Maybe. Yes. Yes it can.

Sweeney said, “You know, Chris, Robi and I may not be skilled at a lot of regular human things like paying bills, ordering food in restaurants, generally assimilating into society–but we are great hosts! I mean, are we not? Think about how many chairs we have! Every other Thursday for four years we have said ‘Come to our place for a reading. Whether or not we know you. Bring beer if you want. Bring writing. If you don’t have beer we have some in the fridge. And by God, we have more than enough chairs.’ And we never kick anyone out. People stay as long as they want, and we bid everyone goodnight duly. I mean, we’ve had people who we thought were just going to come for the reading and ended up staying a week.”

Last night, he, Dave and I helped throw his sister’s graduation party upstate, cooked all day, took his sixteen-year-old brother and a couple of friends to a river on this steamy, thick hot night and went swimming in the dark waters. The summer air here has viscosity, anatomy, sometimes you can’t see through it.

Sweeney, his friend Carey, and I were sitting at the bar in Charlestons, on Bedford and 9th. For every beer you buy, they give you a free six-inch pizza for each person present. Sweeney pointed to an article in the paper about the city’s decision to squash the plans for a new library and replace them with blueprints for a “high-end business and luxury condominiums” complex.

I said to Carey, “They spent three years constructing this massive, eco-friendly building in my old neighborhood. I mean, it was loud and heavy, and there were men working on it every day since before my seventeenth birthday. And before they started constructing it, there was a huge, old house on that corner that they actually moved, foundation and all, with great trucks, about a quarter mile away to a different lot. So when I was back in Portland, they had just begun opening things up in this new eco-friendly building, that had taken so much time and energy–and what did they put there: another yoga shop, another chic bakery, and a roost of artist condominiums. Three blocks up the street there was a similar yoga shop and bakery, and four blocks the other direction there were three different kinds of bakeries, each with their own special vegan treats and condominiums to boot. What the fuck.”

Carey took my hand. He said, “Adrian, the economy is built on repetitive consumption. You may have thought that the Northwest was exempt from this, but not even they can hide: instead of Starbucks and American Eagle, it’s yoga shops and high-end bakeries. It’s the way all cities work.”

Six blocks up Bedford, there was another bar that gave free six-inch pizzas for every beer you bought. And a mile farther, another one. We toasted and ate our food and I was so happy to be back, repeatedly consuming or not.

Coming to Portland, I got a mouthful of canker sores and two stys, one at a time on my left eyelid. It rained and shined alternately, except for when Sweeney was here: it was just grey. In California it was sunny. We ran around naked on the lower half of Maggie’s mountain, and sat in a hot tub that looked out over the valley. There were wild turkeys, incredulous to how inept they looked bobbing around in the tall grass. And there were foxes and deer and snakes and mosquito eaters that made love all day long on the wall of the cabin we stayed in.

Maggie and her sweetie, Eric, fed us stewed greens and oats and vegan cheesecake, and wound us up the mountain curves at one o’clock in the morning when we finally landed in the ghost streets of Garberville. Northern California is essentially made of flaxen hills and cow towns, which we wound through with our hitched ride in the middle of the night, Sweeney gripping his seat. Two-way one-land highways with no guardrails and hairpin turns for sixty miles, listening to CocoRosie and trying to have a conversation about community but I can’t ever seem to get to the point. In the middle of the night. Rough roads.

I gardened with Maggie and Eric at the Ladies Farm. I walked around quietly with Maggie, ate chard, kept saying I’d help her clean her Airstream and then get distracted at the edge of a cliff on my way up the road. Oh, glory. Instead we made coconut milk ice cream shakes with Napa Valley wine with some of her friends in their new home: a narrow, armored trailer with a stove named Princess, a full bed, frogs in the shower and rainbow string lights wedged at the base of a sloping farm under a wide, starry sky.

“This is where Adam Trask’s farm was in East of Eden,” I said to Sweeney out the window on our way to San Francisco.

He pointed to the other side of the highway where the hills were barren: “And that’s where the Hamilton’s were.”

We played the “Dictionary Game” with my parents the second to the last night he was in town. We drove to the Columbia River, climbed into an abandoned house in an old saloon town, climbed onto each other in the foliage, stood on a high rock with our pants rolled up and stared into a narrow gorge glowing with lichen. We saw the sturgeon at the Bonneville Dam.

I’ve seen a lot of friends, though some say not enough. 

I just got Swedish breakfast with Mckenzie. I think the social womb we grew up with has morphed, faded, became strictly relationships between individuals. Groups hold you accountable. She brought me a little bouquet, and later, walking under the green sway of chestnut trees and idyllic blue, we were talking about how instead of learning to avoid divorce, we should really be focusing onw how to have good relationships. “That’s called a ‘truncated narrative,’” she said. “I learned that in my environmental studies class.”

I rode bikes around in the middle of the night, snuck out the back door with two girls I grew up with, looking for the annual city-wide nude bike ride. Didn’t find it, ended up at a house party playing ping-pong and wobbling up hills later, whispering as we got closer to her block.

And yes: I am ready to go home. And I appreciate New York for it’s survival eating, and it’s blue-skied winters. I appreciate my tribe, my writers and poets, the sloping floors, the fist-slamming, ther ferocity and madness and rigor. Returning to the place you were raised is no picnic. It’s full of tragedy, complicated dynamics, celebration. You have no control over these things. In the life that you create as an adult, you have a little more control: no one gives birth to you, for one thing.  

I’m always looking for thorough resources in resistance to hormonal birth control, if only for the sake of knowing how people did it without drugs before 1960. Also because I don’t like taking hormones, though millions of women are without beef. Millions of women love it. That’s fine. That’s great! The fact of the matter is that you can find exhorbitant amounts of information on various brands of The Pill, The Patch or The Nouva Ring because they are pedaled by pharmecudical companies and they have money to make. But because there is no money to make in educating young women in the Fertility Awareness Method, assessing how effective coitus interruptus is, copper IUDs, or how much sperm content is found it precum, there is often no information available for these gems of methods. 

But look! Check it out. VaginaPagina.com.

Sweeney got to Portland on the same day I apparently decided that I was ready to leave. We did French studies in the Lone Fir cemetary, went to Powell’s Books, had dinner with my family, made steak with Naomi and Brendan, slept soundly in the guest room next to my sister’s–and then we left for ten days, South. First to my dad and step-mom in Ashland, which was delightful and challenging and full of Shakespeare (boy! is growing up & coming home tricky) and then down to Humboldt County, the giant redwoods, up on the mountain with Maggie and then on down to the bay.

I emailed Michelle Tea, a writer in San Francisco, when Sweeney and I were trying to figure out what to do next.  

Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 9:28 PM
subject: In town
Michelle!

I’m on a wild ride down the California coast with my sweetie (no car, no clothes; he’s an Aquarius) and we’re blowing into San Francisco tomorrow afternoon. I just wanted to see what was up, whether or not you are in, or know of any cool events this weekend, or perhaps of bars that don’t card. It would be fun to catch up, get drinks, start smoking. Do you have time?

Truly,
Adrian

———-
Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 11:07 AM
subject: Re: In town

Hi Adrian!

I am so truly looking for a reason to start smoking again! Apparantly, heartache isn’t enough on it’s own. I’ll enable you if you enable me. Call me! Saturday night there is a terrifying ‘erotic’ reading at a BDSM store that my friend is reading at; she’ll be good even if everyone else is gross. I don’t know about bars that don’t card, but probably on a Saturday night you could stand with a flask outside the Lexington Club and feel like you’re on their patio. Love, Michelle

I started writing extensive summer ”to-do” lists in 9th grade, with checkboxes next to each item so that I could physically remind myself of its completion. It was a dark time, but that first list acted as a torch. And I carried the lists around with me until they were feathered and the pencil had eroded from the paper, and then I would slide them into notebooks for preservation at the end of the summer. That first list included, but was not limited to:

ride a ferris wheel
sit on a pile of tires
pick peaches
float down the Trinity River
sleep in a bath tub

A few from this summer’s list:

see an alligator
hone my mystic powers
practice French conversation
read Proust
fill one of Sweeney’s clawfoot patio bathtubs with cold water on a dead-hot day and sit under the sun 
learn to drive

Things the two lists share:

skinny dip
go to the Oregon Vortex
see sturgeon at Bonnveville Dam
sleep in the car

Home is where your tribe is.