There’s something miniature about Portland, from its tiny streets and blocks to its baby skyscrapers and oh so iconic but mostly boring bridges, especially the new mini Calatrava-esque one. Add to that it’s truly giant trees (can’t see the forest for them) a taco bar or groovy junk store sticking out of every garage on Hawthorne, Voodoo Doughnuts and the effect is like being on some kind of off-scaled game board (Portlandia the Home Version).

This past weekend of family reunioning and dad’s ash spreading was—as I knew it would be—a trip into unresolved adolescent issues that seem to haunt specific places, and I visited most of them in two short days. I guess that’s what happens when you leave your childhood home behind and then go back years later where no new memories have had a chance to form scabs over the old ones. Leaving aside for now the ashes, the countryside around Corbett where I grew up, and of course my family (they are on Facebook after all) this time the focus is on the city (not The City). That way I only tackle a narrow age window (THE coming of age window?) ages 18-25. That period really involves no blood family on any regular basis, so I’m safe here, hopefully. These were coming out years. As cliché as it sounds it’s universal—few of us are raised by gay parents and so it is a required process. I didn’t actually ever come out directly to my own parents—my brother did that for me, which was a relief. As I’m told the response was something like “tell me something I don’t know.” Was it the piano? Drawing? The horses? Lifeguarding?

On my way to PDX this past Sunday (the actual airport, not the slang designation) I decided to visit as many of the places that I’d lived during those years. It wasn’t hard—it’s a very small place Portland. While the skyline hasn’t changed much, I was worried that the first real home of my own (after the kennels at Menucha) a fleabag apartment on 11th and Clay would be gone. However, like the resilient flea, the building is still standing. Smoked a lot of pot there, occasionally went to class at PSU and met a beautiful redhead in Italian class. I only knew him as Patrizio, and on our first date—at least I think that’s what it was—he took me to his parent’s house in one of Portland’s few high rise residential buildings by the Forecourt Fountain (Ira’s now). That was very Will & Grace of him for 1978. I on the other hand was intimidated nearly beyond speech by his educated well-off parents—and I still wasn’t sure it was a date. I was dirt poor then and had trouble coming up with the $140 a month rent, terrified of going out to “the bars” even though I could pass for 21 at 16, but desperate to explore Portland’s gay scene—of which there was a hell of a lot more then than there is now from what I can see. That is not unique to Portland of course, but driving around with my mother on Sunday morning we somehow ended up on 12th between Stark and Burnside where I couldn’t help but blurt out: “you’ll never guess what that building used to be.” Pretty sure she didn’t grasp the explanation.

House 2, which wasn’t really house 2 but part of a much longer chapter during a very special relationship with my first true love, is on SE 47th near Lincoln. Now tragically hip, in the early eighties it was just tired, funnily though it doesn’t look much different. The relationship and homeownership pretty much fell apart there in a flurry of bad luck, bad economy and bad will culminating in a law suit—something I still vow never to repeat. Only one person has to lie on the stand, and poof. Dale and I were on the same side here, this was a real estate thing not a relationship thing—though even that was a topic of off-handed ridicule by opposing council. In liberal Portland in 1983 you say?

House 3 was a mansion—to me—at 39th and Glisan in the heart of tawny Laurelhurst. A three-story brick pile that filled up its entire lot. Still really poor, often walking miles to work at Lloyds Center in the rain, there was fun to be had and I was finally old enough to drink. I wonder sometimes if that is as big a milestone to today’s gay youth or if the interweb replaced it with… god knows what. I had a massive long running crush on a gorgeous blond who was, or played at being, completely unattainable (I don’t mean sexually of course—it was the early eighties) and anyway as the lyrics go in 1984’s number 1 pop hit “what’s love got to do with it?” We may have even been listening to that song when the guy’s daughter who owned the house happened to see us being “intimate” on the balcony one summer morning. He later relayed the story to me of his daughter approaching him in the kitchen to ask who the pretty blond was “kissing on Steve.” The homeowner was of the generation 20 years older than me who played at the game of marriage, fathered babies only to come out as gay in their early forties. It was a common beast back then, one that my post-hippy generation had little tolerance for. At any rate he had been waiting for a reason to come out to his daughter and thanked me. No problem, any time that particular boy and I can help out…

House 4; the final days in PDX. (I think it’s actually 6 or 7 but stories don’t work that way.) I almost didn’t find this house on Sunday, it’s in Ladd’s Addition, enough said. Now whenever I work with planners who draw “big move” town plans based on circles and radial streets I think they’re nuts. I found it though by going outside the neighborhood and coming back in from the edge of the grid, again the lovely Hawthorne. There were as many as six of us in that house in 1984, all young except the owner who was a PGE executive and now all dead but me. It was hard to recognize at first. Beige asbestos siding has been replaced with a very happy paint scheme. I pulled up in front just as the current thirty-something occupant arrived home whistling happily, inspecting his fussy landscaping, then throwing open the door and calling out to an unseen and unheard lover inside. I couldn’t help but think that this guy had no idea the fall from joyful freedom and true camaraderie to death and heartache that swirled around that house with its half a dozen ghosts. It’s just a house on Maple.