A love letter to instability, church basements, and the city that keeps almost killing me.
In the minutes after walking out of my office job in Spokane, Washington, I panicked and weighed my decision.
It was a silent revolt; I shouldered my purse and calmly made my way to my car at what could have been mistaken for a lunch hour. I could turn around and everything would be the same. I’d still have a job. I’d still have a paycheck. I’d still be living in the Inland Northwest, which was supposed to have been temporary, but a year and a half of emotional recovery later after moving back in with my family thanks to a failed stint in the Bay, I was still there.
I could do all this, and I’d still be here, going nowhere.
Instead of turning my car around to undo my decision, I drove straight to the grocery store to purchase a package of pink sprinkled Valentine’s Day cookies and a bottle of cupcake wine, which I would begin chugging as soon as I got home at noon. For three days, that’s what I did: ate cookies and drank terrible-tasting wine (which did not at all taste like cupcakes; I had been monstrously deceived and, years later, intend to sue) out of a Wonder Woman mug while playing Xbox and ignoring my bills, reality, and impending financial ruin as a result from my irresponsible actions. The finality of what I had done finally set in with a panic attack on the fourth day of this negligent behavior, and I became horrified at where I found myself. Unemployed, living in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, with zero savings or prospects. Playing XBox. Despite my revolt, still going nowhere.
Temporary was in very real danger of becoming permanent. I felt sick at realizing how much time had passed; how vacuous I had become in the last year and a half. The only two career paths available to one residing in Coeur d’Alene were either horses, or meth; industries I either had an ashamed, secret interest in, or no interest whatsoever.
Walking out from my job had jolted me awake from a cloud of sleepy complacency, and I needed to leave immediately.
Since retreating back to my family’s home in Idaho, I had been taking a couple of trips each year to Portland. It was only a six hour drive, which was an easy distance to travel for concerts and events I wanted to attend over the weekend, or even just to escape to harsh inland summers to feel the ocean. My uncle lived there, and so did a childhood friend who was closely intertwined with our family while growing up, so much so that at one point my mother was made her legal guardian.
My friend and her husband had defected to Portland a couple of years beforehand, and were caretakers of a church they lived in on the east side of the city. She cleaned and curated the grounds, and her husband played piano for church ceremonies and gave music lessons to the congregation members. Neither of them had been religious for some time, but they had cobbled together a livable make-shift space in the basement of this establishment to serve as a home. They welcomed me freely, telling me that I owed them nothing and that I should come to Portland as soon as possible.
I spent that evening discarding everything I owned that wouldn’t fit into my car. The next morning, I packed the remainder of my belongings, along with my reluctant dog and my screeching cat, into my tiny Mazda 3, and drove six hours through the northwest tundra to our new home while my optimism amplified with every hour that passed. It was after dark when we finally arrived, and my friend welcomed me warmly while we chittered away catching up. Eventually, I unpacked what little I had before settling into my bed for a sleepless night in an unfamiliar space. It was just me and my pets on a mattress in a small, concrete church classroom floor with some books, a lamp, a bag of clothes, and a curtain-less window letting the glow of the streetlights in.
The day after I arrived to Portland, I began pumping out resumes and job applications to any place I suspected I could trick into hiring me. As interviews began trickling in, I raced around town to as many meetings I could manage, sometimes cramming six into my schedule in a single day, wastefully optimistic that one of them would hire me (they wouldn’t). I refreshed the Craigslist Jobs page obsessively, several times an hour. Finally, after two weeks of manic searching, a local optometrist decided to take a chance on me despite the fact that I had no business being anywhere near a medical office, and I breathed a sigh of relief into my hollow bank account. I began to relax a little, to explore my neighborhood, to get lost in side streets and rose gardens. I started frequenting places I insufferably began to claim as my own, such as, “my bar” or “my taco truck.” I replaced my time previously spent vigorously studying wanted ads with people-watching and reading at coffee shops instead. I began to feel more happy, and less stressed.
My sister Amanda followed my move about a month later, leaving her emotionally and financially abusive husband in Las Vegas and fleeing to the Pacific Northwest for her own new life to live in the church with us. As we settled into our church basement life once more, we reminisced about how this had not been the first time we had found ourselves in such a situation; the earlier time in our lives being when all six members of our family and our three cats lived together within a single room in the basement of the Franciscan Catholic church my grandmother was conducting both theater performances and financial scams out of. This new situation was an improvement in that at least this time we had our own rooms to ourselves.
But this church came with its own eccentricities. Water would pool on the concrete floor of the basement when it rained, which was often, and wearing shoes everywhere was recommended. Seemingly every week, a quinceañera or other loud celebratory event would take place in the main hall directly above our heads, making it impossible to sleep or to make meals until well into the night when you could finally sneak up the stairs after starving since arriving home from work eight hours earlier. The church housed a rotation of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, needle exchanges in the parking lot, and hospitable safehouse nights for women who were homeless or sex workers in the neighborhood (an organization I now volunteer my time with, four years later). Our friends had fashioned a tub out of a church pew, a giant plastic container, and a hose with a temperature-controlled gauge to make the water hot or cold so we could bathe. Being former classrooms, there was no way to secure the doors to our private living spaces, so every day was an non-consensual exercise in trust with whoever was coming in and out of the building. Homeless people could often be heard taking refuge in the stairwell next to our rooms or outside our windows, which did not have curtains on them. (This concept in and of itself didn’t frighten me, but being awoken by the sound of a being you weren’t aware of within your close proximity can be jarring when you’re half-asleep.) Despite our grounds-keeping efforts, orange needle caps littered the lot in an explosion of residual debris we would find each morning, like a neon sprinkling of irradiated snow.
A ghost lived in the children’s play area upstairs, a place which I made a point to avoid. Once, I entered the religious hall in the dark looking for a pen and felt every single pair of eyes from the saint effigies fixed on me, then left without a pen and instead a vow to not ever go back inside. Another time after a particularly nasty storm, the electricity went out, and not for a million dollars would I enter the stairwell that led to the boiler room and electrical panels, for fear of discovering a room directly out of the Silent Hill franchise below. This left me shivering alone under a pile of blankets in the basement without heat for several hours until my friend came home to flip the breaker. Once in the dead of night, I had gone upstairs to the kitchen and was interrupted by a man rapping on the back door demanding to be let in at the exact moment my bagel was ejected from the toaster, giving me the closest thing to a heart attack I have ever had.
My family had known poverty my entire life, and we often had to find creative solutions to otherwise simple living circumstances. Thus, I thrived in the chaos of slinking around a haunted church located in a destitute neighborhood while waiting a half hour for my church pew plastic container to fill with bathwater, hoping it would still be even a little warm by the time I got in. I don’t think that any other situation could have encapsulated my initial time in Portland better. The church was a perfect, weird aggravation to my peculiar life as I settled into my new city. It was a place straight out of a filthy, chaotic, borderline-unsafe Boxcar Children fairy tale, and I relished it.
But my time eventually came to leave the church. After saving some money from my job and staying at the church for a few months, its flaws began to grate on me. Among a plethora of reasons, I couldn’t be kept awake all night and still go to work the next morning, I couldn’t rely on fast food mostly due to the kitchen being unavailable until late in the night, I couldn’t keep my pets in a 10×10 concrete room all day, and so on. So I packed up the belongings from my tiny room and moved in with a girl I had found on Craigslist who had a shaved head and a misbehaving pomeranian named Yuna to an apartment in Hillsboro, or the opposite end of the universe, as far as anyone in the city is concerned. Months later, I moved from there to Southeast Portland with a friend I had known for over a decade, which started off well and quickly unraveled into an abusive unthinkable hell-house nightmare situation. After making it clear I wouldn’t sleep with them, my friend — who was prone to violent physical outbursts when frustrated, as I had the misfortune of discovering in living with them — turned hostile and contentious, leaving me feeling unsafe in his presence. My suspicions about my safety and livelihood were affirmed when they stole almost a thousand dollars from me in an effort to keep me from moving out in pursuit of a situation where I didn’t need to fear that I might come home to my pets mysteriously “missing” with no explanation, something I suspected and feared he was quite capable of doing.
During my time at the hell-house, I had begun writing jokes and attending open mics, eventually fully immersing myself in the Portland comedy scene. My calendar started filling up with booking dates somewhat often, and I eventually joined a weekly comedy show with three other hosts at the bar which espoused the Real World Portland cast, a particular point of caustic pride for our dumb little show. The drinks were cheap, the decor was racist, and the floor was always sticky, but it was home to us and a slew of comics every Thursday night. Months later, I started a bi-annual comedy and story-telling show centered around escaping religious cults with another former Mormon friend. Between working at a job that actively wanted me gone to living in a place I increasingly felt more uncomfortable at, comedy became my escape, and I leaned into it, attending friends’ shows and hosting writer’s workshops in cafes for my friends and I to constructively write and discuss feedback in.
From the hell-house, I moved in with one of the first people I befriended via comedy, who graciously opened her doors to me. We drank pink wine (“pour me some of the foot wine, please,” she’d ask if I got up to pour my own) and smoke cigarettes in her garage, bouncing jokes off of each other and coming up with tags for each other’s punchlines. Cartoons were usually playing on TV for her daughter, and no one was ever in a rush or a bad mood. We lived together briefly, but it was a peaceful, fun environment that served as the emotional pallet cleanser I needed to move forward.
From there, I moved in with a person from within the scene I had been dating, and after a year, I moved back out. By this time, I had all but stepped away from performing. Several ugly things happened in quick succession that left a distaste in my mouth that nearly two years later, I’m not sure I have recovered from; the revelation of abuse from several people shattered the scene into splintering factions of what it had once been, turning the community into a bleeding apocalyptic free-for-all war between sides we each supported. The long-timers, the big dogs, the graduating class were all moving to LA, leaving a pack of mid-range comics who had no business running the town to do just that. My break-up with the person in the scene left me feeling unsure of how my peers felt about me, and this coupled with the the emotional turmoil that loomed within my circle based on the truths and lies of the abuse enacted by the people around us made it feel like the right time to step away.
The partner and co-former Mormon I ran my religious cult show with invited me to move in after my break-up, and it seemed like a good fit — she was an excitable, loud lesbian who lived in an old home tucked away in a Northeast neighborhood with stray cats and chickens who lived in the backyard, and a rooster who I wanted to murder every single day that I lived there. Our next-door neighbors curated a secret pot farm obscured from the road by a fortress of thick pines, which my window just happened to be right next to. That summer, the smell of marijuana was so intoxicating that despite the heat radiating within my room, I’d have to close my window to sleep without being suffocated from weed fumes (what a problem to have).
Once the plants had grown and after our neighbors harvested their stock, they generously invited us to take what we wanted from the farm. I came away with three paper grocery bags full of sticky green sprouts, which I taught myself to dehydrate and cure, and still to this day have in a jar next to my bed. (This weed will last me until I die. My teen self would be outraged that I leisurely partake of it once a quarter with no rush whatsoever.) We put on our cult comedy shows, we had summer BBQs with neighborhood queer folks, we started a class favoring women and queer people to help guide students into the terrifying and rewarding artforms of comedy and storytelling with what little knowledge we ourselves had procured. We had a magical summer that I was so grateful for. When the days started to grow a bit longer, she told me she wanted her girlfriend to move in, and I took the hint that I needed to move on. I started looking for more rooms to rent when it dawned on me that I might have the means enough to find an apartment to myself instead.
I was miraculously approved for my first ever apartment under my own name. This was a mistake, I was certain, much like the name mix-up of the Eleanor Shellstrops in The Good Place. Despite not having the exact number on hand, I knew without a doubt that my credit score reflected the responsibility of an unemployed ghost. All the same, I signed my name away to documents on a unit I technically couldn’t afford with the exhilaration I can only imagine jewel thieves experience in their line of profession. I was twenty-nine years old and, after moving several times a year for the past several years and over thirty times in my life, I would finally be living in my own space, without another person to share it with.
Through this time, I had been dating George, who suspiciously chose to dump me one week before I was supposed to move into my new apartment. (I remain convinced over a year later that that this was so he wouldn’t have to help me move.) This unexpected emotional blow crippled me, but after calling in sick to work for three days with the break-up flu, I slowly and painfully managed to crawl out of bed and begin packing my things to start my new life, solo in both love and living.
In settling into my apartment and simultaneously recovering from being dumped by someone who I thought I’d end up with, I fully retreated into isolation. I all but cut off all contact with my friends from comedy except via social media. In order to afford my apartment and basic necessities for life, I began driving for a ride-share company, as my executive assistant salary was just not enough to support myself if I wanted to live alone, a lifestyle I was now hopelessly addicted to and convinced that it had solved most of my problems. In working a full-time and now part-time job and making time to care for my pets did not leave me much time for socializing, which I was fine with. Since I was thirteen, most of my social life had taken place online with internet friends I had collected together on a virtual island of misfit toys. They provided most of the social stimulation I needed, but I still tried my hand at dating in Portland as often as I could. In the years I have been single, this has proven to be a miserable failure, and I have since stepped back from the dating scene, part in an effort to work on myself, part in exhaustion at the trash that litters this town under the veneer of polyamorous vegan jags who could frankly use a sprinkle of common sense and a busload of humility, along with a decent fucking straight razor shave.
Being a part of the comedy scene in Portland has shaken my life in unexpected ways. Before ever even setting foot on stage, I had gone to a show at Helium Comedy Club and watched Bri Pruett jovially shriek on stage about body positivity and being a woman in comedy, and it made me realize that I could make people uncomfortable doing this just like she was. She mesmerized me, and planted the idea in my head that I might have what it took. In volunteering for our many comedy festivals here between attending open mics and shows I was booked on as an amateur comic myself, I met wonderful people like Jackie Kashian, Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, Janeane Garofalo, and so many more people I am grateful to have assisted as a starry-eyed volunteer for the night. I had nights of high highs where I felt like I swept the entire crowd and with each joke I told, I became more and more powerful. I had sets that flopped, bumbled, and broke me emotionally, the lows that came with it were low enough that I would feel like quitting. Then the next night, I’d get that high of roiling a room with laughter again, and I’d think, “It’s okay, I can keep doing this.”
Our cult show was short-lived, and I think we still have tentative plans for the future, but I was so proud of what Mel Heywood and I created. Our first performance was more magical than I ever could have hoped it would be, leaving us with standing room only at the 125-seat Siren Theater in Downtown Portland. I remember bits and pieces and flashes from the night in how I imagine people process their wedding days; it passed like a very slow explosion. In between comics and storytellers, we played guessing games where audience members were called on stage with a chance to win a silly treat bag if they could win an answer at, “Who Said It: Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard?”. We played church hymns between sets and had people from Catholic, Southern Baptist, Evangelist, other Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witness backgrounds; even a comic who was a part of the founding of the First Church Of The Juggalos share their stories about growing up or participating in whatever cult they had been roped into. The best — and worst — part about our show was the fact that most of our performers were brand new, and had never performed before. As a somewhat seasoned local-scale comic, this shook me with fear about their abilities and audience reception. Mel assured me that they would do wonderfully, and each and every one of them rose to the occasion.
While the audience was being seated, Mel thought it would be funny to play some old Scientology admission videos from the 70’s or 80’s. After the show, we were mingling with the audience and a man came up to me to ask about the video we had shown before the show started. “Oh, did you like it?” I responded cheerfully while waving to other people who were waiting to speak to me. “Well,” he said, “I’m the one who made it.” That stopped me in my tracks, and it was then that I gave him my full attention. His name was Jefferson Hawkins, and he has written a book and been interviewed on Leah Remini’s documentary series about escaping the organization. Mel and I met with him several times after the show, eventually developing an unlikely friendship with him, and invited him to partake of our next cult experience show. He had never performed before, and I was deeply worried that his set wouldn’t go well or that it would be too depressing for our audience, since much of his life in Scientology was deeply involved with abuse. Instead, the audience ate it up and couldn’t have loved him more; they gasped and laughed, they cooed, they shrieked, and lost their damn minds with applause when he had finished. That moment peeking at him from behind the curtain between his silhouette on stage and my watch timing his set taught me to have faith, to let go of control, and to enjoy the moment I was in and the things I had a hand in creating. Jefferson remains a friend even today, and I hope that one day again Mel and I can give him a platform to tell more of his story.
Being part of the comedy community also led me to opportunities I otherwise never would have had presented to me, such as being an extra in a movie with Steve Buscemi (who I very nearly accidentally ran into in between trailers), which led to being an extra on Portlandia, which led to a role as both an extra and a stand-in for Aidy Bryant in her series enactment of Lindy West’s memoir Shrill.
I think about returning to comedy often, and feel like the time is near since both myself and the scene have had time to heal. In a city of weirdos, Portland’s comedy community has managed to find the weirdest of us all and shove us together under a spotlight to fight it out on stage with our demons, our talents, our colleagues and our friends. And with that, somehow we have managed to weave magic out of our mania and to cultivate a pocket of unique talent; a pocket I hope to be a part of again someday.
Since I was seventeen, I’ve moved from Utah to Coeur d’Alene, to Phoenix, to San Francisco, back to Coeur d’Alene, and where I’ve finally landed for the time being in Portland. I spent the longest time in Phoenix, a place I loathe with a grudge as if it killed my dog, in the duration of a five year stint that ended with me telling my then-partner that I was moving to San Francisco and he could come if he wanted to. (This, unsurprisingly, ended in disaster.)
Last week marked my fourth year in Portland, which is soon to rival my time spent in Arizona, and my time here has been nothing if not challenging. Since my arrival, I have felt like I have been arrested in a perpetual state of transitioning — between jobs, between places to live, between lovers, between wellness and mania, between paychecks. But in my course of always seeking higher ground when it comes to extracurricular endeavors, romance, and basic survival, I no longer feel like I am going nowhere. I couldn’t say where exactly I am headed, but it’s not to my couch in a god-forbidden meth town in Idaho with a mug full of bad wine after a long day of playing XBox while unemployed, and that in and of itself feels satisfactory. All in all, my four-year anniversary here has only confirmed my mother’s worst fears about this city turning me a vegetarian democratic socialist with a brief sojourn as a failed comedian; and though they are few, there are indeed worse things one could turn out to be.
I’ve come to realize that Portland has treated me in the same way that people I usually fall hard for: I’m enamored with Portland and its vibe and its beauty, and Portland politely tolerates me. It doesn’t like me like that, but it likes having me around. It’ll be nice to me, but it’s not here for a long-term commitment. And I’m okay with that for now. Maybe one day it’ll change its mind, and suddenly I’ll feel at home. Maybe one day we’ll each be what we are both looking for.
Or maybe part ways eventually, both a little older and wiser, having shared a moment in time together that felt like it was haphazardly written in the stars with a sip of a Spanish coffee and the best of intentions. But for now, I’m content to keep making my way in this weird, wonderful city that I’m enamored with as it changes the course of my life every single day that I wake up here.