I’m reading at Powell’s City of Books on November 11 to celebrate the release of my essay collection, Everything We Don’t Know. The thought makes my head spin. I worked at this store from 2000 to 2006. I hosted author events there, and before that, I was a customer.
The first time I shopped at Powell’s, I was on a summer road trip with my best friend, Dean, in 1995. We drove up to Portland from Phoenix, camping and hiking and sleeping in our van along the way. A friend put us up in Oregon for a few nights, and her soon-to-be brother-in-law Paul worked at Powell’s. Paul could get us a big employee discount if we wanted it, she said. I definitely wanted it. So one day Dean and I parked our van next to Powell’s downtown, on Couch Street right north of Burnside.
Back then, everything north of Burnside was a no man’s land. Downtown was south of Burnside. North was still an industrial area filled with working warehouses, squatters, and a few industrial lofts. Drug dealers and prostitutes used the area, and trains delivered stuff in the middle of the night on tracks that lined the rutted asphalt. This is where Gus Van Zandt filmed parts of Drugstore Cowboy. The area was later rebranded The Pearl District. When Dean and I visited, that pearl was still just dirt inside the shell. We stood beside our van and assessed the risk. Our car was filled floor to ceiling with clothes, food, and camping equipment, as well as the bedding we used when we slept inside of it. Anyone could see through the large untinted windows. As nervous as parking there made us, we had no choice.
And what’s funny, looking back, is how we just pulled right up and parked, no problem. Who would have guessed that less than a decade later, many of us hate driving here not because it’s seedy, but because parking is so tight? Even if the Mayor himself had told me, “One day this will be an affluent district of condominiums, boutiques, and craft breweries,” I could not have pictured it. It was scuzzy and quiet. One of Portland’s biggest charms back then was that it was neglected. The world’s eyes had been on Seattle since the early ’90s Grunge boom, and few paid Seattle’s “sister city” much mind, except for us bohemians and artist types. We came to Portland to live cheaply, make music, and write while working easy day jobs, and to be ignored.
Powell’s wasn’t ignored. After the Rose Garden, Powell’s was supposedly Portland’s biggest tourist attraction, but the city itself was certainly no attraction. Dean and I parked and went inside. As a big reader, I’d heard of the place. It was legendary. I didn’t expect the store to be as overwhelming as it was. It was dank and loaded with books. Exposed pipes threaded the ceiling. Stuff was stacked everywhere. Employees seemed to come out of the walls, slipping in from little hidden doorways in an exciting, confusing way. Paul came out of some back work area and introduced himself. He had a shaved head, dark jeans and intense eyes.
I handed him a stack of books I’d gathered from the Nature Studies and Pacific Northwest sections. “You’re sure you don’t mind getting me a discount?” I said.
He cradled the stack and let the spines rest against this chest. No, he said, he didn’t mind.
He shuffled off to the register with my cash, then returned with change and bags full of my books. He got fifty percent off all used titles, so I bought all used titles. I wanted to hug him I was so happy. The store was so massive we never even made it off the first floor.
Five years later, I moved to Portland after college and worked with Paul at this same store. In fact, I spent the bulk of my six Powell’s years just feet from where I handed Paul all those books: down the stairs in the Nature Studies section in the Rose Room. My work station was right on Couch, facing the exact spot where Dean and I had parked. For years, when I looked outside that window or went outside to smoke, I stood where our younger selves had stood, wide-eyed with wonder and drunk on our freedom. Life is crazy that way. As a writer, my mind relishes milestones and circularities like this, some place and event that gives time structure and can mark the course of my life. Powell’s is that benchmark.
I knew I wanted to be a writer when I started at Powell’s at age twenty-five. That’s one of the main reasons I applied there and moved to Portland. Cheap rent, tons of bookstores, and working with books during the week ─ Portland supplied everything a young writer needed. On my Powell’s lunch breaks, I did research. After work, I photocopied passages and chapters I needed for projects. On our upstairs printer outside the managers’ offices, I printed short stories to submit to literary magazines, then I walked them to the post office on my lunch break. After work, I combed the store’s literature section for books to read, and educated myself on the classics and cult classics, as well as the modern literary landscape. I did this during my shift, too, on the clock, which the store called time theft. I never got caught. There was just so much to read I couldn’t stop.
I worked my way through the Blue Room’s essay anthologies and shelves of old literary magazines, which taught me a little about commercial publishing and where to send my writing, because I was always writing. Every morning before work, I woke early enough to write for an hour or two in my little apartment, then I’d guzzle some tea and walk as fast as I could to work so I wouldn’t be late ─ again. I was late a lot. And on my weekends, I wrote near Powell’s in a few different coffee shops. Powell’s was the center of it all, the embodiment of my literary ambitions, the facilitator of my goals, my vision of the good life, supplier of paper goods and services, and my de facto graduate education. That’s why I’m so thrilled and scared to read from my debut book there in November. The event is deeply personal. I left Powell’s employ in 2006, so it’s numerically convenient that I’m set to read there exactly ten years later.
There’s an essay in my collection about that 1995 summer road trip. Powell’s doesn’t appear in the essay, but it takes place during that summer in the Northwest. It feels like someone else’s dream now. I always envisioned writing books. It was one of the few dreams I had about my adulthood. Never in a million years did I imagine that while Dean and I were rolling through the Northwest on the trip, we were living something that I’d try to immortalize in a book.
Clearly I need to keep practicing writing. I shouldn’t use clichés like “never in a million years.”