Fugatives & Refugees

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Unless you want to see crowds of irritable people, do not come to the zoo in the hot summer months. Do not drive your car. Parking is limited and people will circle forever before they park, then buy a ticket and walk through the gate very cranky. Instead, take the westside MAX train. Park downtown, or park in the western suburb park-and-ride lots (in Beaverton or Hillsboro) along the MAX line. Get off at the zoo stop and ride the elevator up. For another good train ride, park at the Washington Park Rose Garden and walk to the hillside zoo train station. You can avoid the crowd and buy your ticket here, then ride the miniature Wild West steam train or the streamlined retro-aluminum Zoo Liner through the forest and into the center of the zoo.

  If you can't handle the morning, bring a picnic lunch and a blanket and come for a concert in the evening. After April 1 check out www.oregonzoo.org for each summer season of twenty-five concerts, including artists like Ray Charles, the Cowboy Junkies, and Los Lobos.

  Here are some animals you absolutely must meet.

  The Penguins: Look for Mochika, a Humbolt penguin who refuses to mate or build a nest despite the keepers' best efforts. Instead, he hangs out in the keepers' kitchen. The keepers wonder if it's because he has a feminine name, but instead of another penguin—male or female—Mochika loves men's black boots. "I mean he really likes boots," Krista says. "In the biblical sense, he knows boots. You can feed him a fish, but you always have to watch out for your shoes."

  The Sea Otters: Look for Thelma and Eddy. Like all southern sea otters from the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, they're named for characters in John Steinbeck novels. They live on an annual $25,000 diet of fresh mussels, clams, crab, and other shellfish. When they were placed in the new exhibit, keepers thought they were too young to mate. "Then Thelma turned up pregnant," says Krista. Thelma's pup is the first southern sea otter pup to be born and survive in captivity. Now zoos are hounding Portland. "It's a little embarrassing. They keep asking us what we did differently," Krista says. "The truth is, we don't know. We did it without even trying."

  The Black Rhinos: Pete and Miadi have been reintro-duced to each other after having a baby several years ago. Since then, Miadi flirts: She bumps and rubs against Pete, trying to make him "flamen" and smell her pheromones. "It's when animals, cats included, kind of lift their upper lip and sniff hard," Krista says. It's not until Miadi urinates in his face that Pete chases her. After that, Miadi plays coy and hard to get until Pete gives up. "It's like Miadi's saying, 'You're not going to pay any attention to me? Well, smell my pee!'" Krista says and laughs. "See," she says, still pretending to be Miadi, "I knew you wanted some."

  The Monkeys: In the Amazon Flooded Forest, look for J.P., a female howler monkey that jumps on everyone's head the moment they enter the exhibit. Keepers or volunteers, no one knows why, but J.P. has to sit on everyone's head.

  Also look for Sweet Tillie, a baby swamp monkey. "She seems to enjoy causing as much trouble as possible," Krista says. Especially when she swings from the tail of the rival colobus monkeys and expects her father to defend her.

  And don't miss Charlie the chimpanzee. "Charlies kind of famous for playing games with the people he likes," Krista says, "and throwing fecal matter at the people he doesn't." He knows a little sign language, and if he likes you, he'll introduce himself. He points at himself and signs the letter C with one hand against his chest. If Charlie points to the door that separates his inside and outside areas, he's challenging you to a race. Go ahead and run, but if you run and beat him to the next area, he screams and thrashes with rage.

  The Wolves: Look for Marcus, an almost completely black male wolf. But please, Krista says, don't call him by name and do not howl. "People go to the exhibit and howl," she says, "and it's really disruptive. This is how wolves communicate. People have no idea what they're saying."

  The Sea Lions: Look for Julius and Stella, both Stellers sea lions. You can call Julius. "If you call his name," Krista says, "Julius preens and poses. It's as if he knows you're praising him."

  The Peacocks: Due to an exploding population of free-roving pea fowl, plus complaints from the neighbors, all the peacocks got tiny vasectomies in 2001. The birds strut and fly, upstaging the concert artists. Krista says, "It was really getting out of control."

  The Bears: Every year the zoo hosts a "Bear Fair," where people can bring their stuffed teddy bears. Krista says, "At first I thought, What a stupid idea! That's not the mission of a zoo." Since then, she's warmed up to the idea because it does teach people specifically about bears. "Did you know sun bears have sticky tongues?" she says. "It's so they can eat ants." The stuffed bears, she tolerates. "Adults with no children show up with their stuffed animals—it's just their excuse to carry around their teddy bears in public."

  It used to be tradition for the Rose Festival princesses to enter the bear habitat and, well... mingle. "In the archives," Krista says, "we have all these pictures of the princesses in the 1940s in the bear grotto. They're all in their high-heeled shoes and tailored suits, hugging and patting the bears on the head." She says the zoo no longer puts the teenaged beauty queens into the exhibit with live grizzlies. "Well," she says, "not unless we really don't like them."

  Feral Cat Races

  On the opening day of the Portland Beavers baseball season, come check out the Feral Cat Alley at PGE Park, at SW Morrison Street at Eighteenth Avenue.

  Cardboard cat-shaped cutouts, each one representing a section of the grandstand, race each other the length of the left field wall. Whatever section cheers loudest, their cat wins and someone in that section gets a prize. It's a regular event at the season opener and occurs more and more frequently during other events. The race course is only about a hundred yards, but that's far enough.

  Chris Metz, manager of communications for Portland Family Entertainment, says, "You're talking about four overweight, out-of-shape ticket sellers carrying those big cardboard cats."

  Ken Puckett, director of operations for PGE Park— who isn't above stopping the race with a cardboard Dober-man—tells the story of the real cats gone wild in the stadium.

  The nature of a "seating bowl" always attracts vermin, Chris says. People drop food. The rats come. The cats follow. No doubt they've been in the stadium since the first grandstand was built in 1893, back when Tanner Creek used to flood the playing field. The cats were here in 1909 when President Taft spoke, and in 1923 when Warren G. Harding spoke. When the current twenty-thousand-seat stadium was built in 1926, they were here. For the years 1933 through 1955, when this was a dog-racing track, the cats were here. The cats watched Jack Dempsey fight here. They heard concerts by Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Van Halen. The weeklong Billy Graham revival—the Bob Hope comedy routines— the cats have seen it all from under the grandstands.

  "These aren't cats you'd pet," Ken says. "They're mean. A lot of people think they're cuddly, but these are almost like bobcats."

  During renovation in 2000 a construction worker killed a resident feral cat, and word got out about the accident. The neighborhood feral cat coalition protested and worked with the stadium to trap the remaining twenty-two feral cats. Of those, Ken says, two were killed because they were too sick. The others got their shots. They got spayed or neutered and spent the next seven months living on a farm outside the city, at a cost of some $1,700 per pussy.

  "This is not part of the Christian feral cat coalition," Ken says. "There are two coalitions. This is the other one."

  With the renovation complete, the cats were released back into the stadium, now equipped with the "Feral Cat Alley," installed under the Fred Meyer Family Deck. At the rate of a pallet per month, Ken says, an automatic feeding station doles out "senior cat blend" cat food. Because so many of the cats are old, he's built a ramp to ADA standards that leads the cats up to their food.

  In return, the cats do what cats have always done.

  Since 2000 the stadium's eighty-five traps have caught only two field mice. For the price of cat food, the whole
place is rat-free. In comparison, Ken says, places like the Rose Garden coliseum pay up to $100,000 a year to control their rats—and fail. "You wait until everyone's gone. Sit in your car in their parking structure," he says, "and you won't believe what you see crawling out of the ivy over there."

  As the cats die off, new cats from the Northwest Portland neighborhood migrate to the stadium. Right now, the population is about fifteen, including "Sylvester."

  "He's black and white," Ken says, "like Sylvester in the cartoon." Sylvester is there to meet the first people at every ball game. He follows you around. "He was probably somebody's house cat," Ken says, "and he misses people."

  So while the Portland Beavers play baseball April through September, while the Portland Timbers play soccer and the Vikings play football, the cats will still be here.

  "The cats were here first," Chris says. "They've always been here. This was just the right thing to do."

  Doggy Dancing

  Kristine Gunter has blond hair tied back in a ponytail, she has pale blue eyes and freckles, and her voice is slightly garbled because she speaks with one cheek full of wiener chunks. "My joke is," she says, "I could never get my husband to dance with me—so I got a dog instead."

  Kristine and her five-year-old corgi, Rugby, dance to a rockabilly song called "We Really Shouldn't Be Doing This." Her command "between" sends the dog through her legs in one direction. The command "through" sends him through in the other direction. Commands like "spin" and "go by" make the dog pass or circle the handler. "Dance" brings the dog up on its hind legs. "Jump" makes it jump and slap its front paws against the handler's hands.

  After each successful step, Kristine spits out a chunk of hot dog as a reward.

  The official name is "Canine Musical Freestyle," and Portland dogs haven't stopped dancing since 2001 when Kristine starting giving lessons.

  Unlike regular obedience training—where the dog stays to the handler's left—doggy dancing handlers have to prove they can work the dog from every angle or direction. They dance to everything from Strauss waltzes to disco to country-western music. One handler is training her dog to dance to opera. "Ultimately, the goal in freestyle is you want them to cue off a word or a small body motion," Kristine says. "You don't want someone out there shouting commands or doing really obvious body motions."

  She and Leah Atwood demonstrate dancing with their dogs. Leah dances with her two-year-old Australian shepherd, Flare, to the song "I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)." In their show routine Flare wears a black bib and silver sheriff's badge. Leah wears a prisoners striped uniform. As they dance, each time she shoots Flare with her finger, he falls down dead. At the end of the routine Flare takes Leah away in handcuffs.

  To find out about pet activities in the Portland area, Kristine recommends checking the NWDogActivities group within Yahoo!Groups on the Internet. The site lists upcoming pet activities and links to a calendar so you can plan your pet's vacation with yours.

  To cut a rug with your dog, call Kristine Gunter at 503-788-3152.

  With her cheek still stuffed with wieners, she says, "I'm the only dog-dancing teacher in town."

  Pug Crawl

  Beer and dogs make such a great combination. Now throw in a costume contest for pugs, a pug dog kissing booth, and a mob of pug owners with their dogs, and you have the annual Pug Crawl. Look for it around the third week in May, at the Rogue Ales Public House, 1339 NW Flanders Street. Phone 503-222-5910.

  Pug Play Day

  The last Sunday of each month, a sea of small dogs takes over Irving Park at NE Fremont Drive and Seventh Avenue. Starting around 2:00 p.m., several hundred pug dogs waddle in with their owners. Also welcome are similar small breeds, including chihuahuas, French bulldogs, and Boston terriers. Among the regulars look for Portland author Jim Goad, who wrote The White Trash Manifesto and Shit Magnet, there with his pug, Cookie.

  (a postcard from 1999)

  In July of 1995,I sat down with a group of friends and showed them a type-written manuscript called Fight Club. We were drinking beer, and I asked everyone to make a wish on the manuscript. Everyone there had said something, done something that went into the story, and it just seemed right they should get a reward.

  Nobody made a wish except my friend Ina. She said, "I want to meet Brad Pitt."

  A year later, in 1996, the manuscript was a book. That Saturday night I was with friends at the annual falling-star-watching party thrown by Dennis and Linni Stovall, up on Dixie Mountain Road. Someone brought a copy of the local newspaper with an article about the book. My friends Greg and Sara were reading it in the Stovalls' kitchen and started to laugh.

  When I asked, "What was so funny?"

  They said, "He's following us."

  In the article it said how a Fight Club movie might be made, starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. It turns out my friend Sara dated Brad in high school and went to the prom with him. Her husband, Greg, had been his college roommate.

  Two years later the movie was filming in Los Angeles, and I went to watch with some friends. My friend Ina met Brad. Most mornings, we ate breakfast at a place called Eat Well in Santa Monica. Our last morning in town, our waiter came to the table. He'd shaved his head the night before, he told us, so he could work as an extra in a movie they were shooting in San Pedro. A movie called, well, you guess.

  A year later, in 1999, a friend and I were flying down to Los Angeles to see a rough cut of the film. In the gate area, in Portland, we were waiting to board our flight. Near us was a man wearing a fifties-style brimmed hat, a sort-of fedora with a feather in the hatband. I joked to my friend Mike that he should get a hat just like it. A few minutes later, we end up sitting next to this man in the plane. During the two-hour flight I pull out an emergency pocket card and tell Mike how the director, David Fincher, is having parody pocket cards made for the film. The parody cards would show people fighting for oxygen masks and panicking as their plane crashed.

  The man next to us, in the hat, we never talked to him.

  Two days later, in Los Angeles, David Fincher is driving me around to the ad agencies that are promoting the film's release. At an agency called Paper, Rock, Scissors, David says I've got to meet the man who designed the movie poster.

  They bring him in—and it's the man from the plane, the man in the hat. He and I, we just stand there open-mouthed, staring at each other. Sitting next to me on the flight, he'd overheard me talking about the pocket card but didn't speak up. He thought maybe he'd misunderstood, he didn't think it was possible we'd meet in such a random way.

  The Shanghai Tunnels: Go Back in Time by Going Underground

  You can't come to Portland and not hear stories about the downtown tunnel system.

  Michael Culbertson, the concierge at the Benson Hotel, will tell you how kids used to get into the tunnels through an abandoned building a block off the waterfront in Old Town. Remembering his childhood in the 1940s, he says, "There used to be a whole culture down there. Our favorite place was an old, abandoned Chinese restaurant with beautiful ceramic murals. We fixed it up, and that became our clubhouse."

  Adam Knobeloch, an engineer at the Freightliner Corporation on Swan Island, will tell you about a trapdoor in the basement of the old Broadway Theater, and how he'd wander lost underground.

  Mark Roe, a local archaeologist, talks about the elaborate ivory opium pipes and tiny carved figures found in the tunnels during downtown urban renewal. The tunnels are littered with single shoes and broken glass, he says. Possibly because the local "crimps" shanghaied sailors and kept them prisoner underground by leaving them with only one shoe so they couldn't escape over the layer of broken bottles.

  The term crimp was originally British slang for "agent." Men like Joseph "Bunco" Kelly, Billy Smith, and Larry Sullivan ran boardinghouses where sailors could eat and sleep between voyages. In return, the crimp had the right to book the sailors next job and get a fee from the new ship's captain. When the boardinghouse was empty, these crimps weren't
above drugging loggers, cowboys, and miners with knockout drops and selling them as sailors. When no one was around to drug, legend has it, the crimps might sell dead men or even wooden cigar store Indians, wrapped in burlap, to desperate ship captains. To get these "sailors" to the waterfront, crimps dragged them through the tunnels.

  Rumored to stretch from the West Hills to the river, the tunnels are also supposed to be the hiding place for hoards of Alaskan gold dust—and the tomb of an occasional treasure hunter who opened the wrong door, looking for that gold, and was instantly buried alive by the loose dirt behind that door.

  Local historians even talk about a proposed law from the 1920s that would've required all deformed or sick people to travel about downtown using only the tunnels.

  On a recent tunnel tour that started in the basement of the Matador, a bar at 1967 W Burnside Street, several men and women gripped a thick rope after signing a long legal liability waiver. Using the rope, a tour guide wearing a cowboy hat pulled them into the underground dark. Down one tunnel, around a corner, the tour found a nurse in a short-skirted white uniform. Kneeling on the stone floor, she shoved a vacuum cleaner hose between the legs of a mannequin. The vacuum roaring, the nurse screamed, "So, you slut, will you use some birth control the next time? You whore!"