Shuffle off

Saturday night I slept curled in a little ball, preserving the scant warmth my body was emitting. Although frost licks the rooftops in Buffalo, and we were wearing scarves and hats that afternoon, Doug still hadn't turned his heat on. Eventually, the air under the quilt was heated by my body, and I felt warm.

Aside from that, I had a great time. I met Doug for breakfast early that morning. We walked down Elmwood Avenue, one of the last parts of the city that hasn't given in to decay and poverty. It's still thriving--the place where all the young people want to be. We headed into Allentown, where the Towne Restaurant is still serving up chicken souvlaki and oily coffee (bottomless cups--great for poor college students).

Later, we drove out to the lake, past the old grain elevators that sit where Lake Erie meets the Buffalo River. Their massive silos have been vacant for decades. The industrial decay gave way quickly to windy, country roads. It was a bright sunny day, and the autumn leaves were at the peak of their fall color.

Doug was caretaking for a friend's cottage. It was just down the street from Mickey Ratts, a place I spent many summers convincing my mother to take me to. It's a place where twenty-somethings come on summer nights to drink Bud Light, play beach volleyball and pick each other up. By day, families lumber down the dirty sand beach (trucked in from somewhere, I'm sure) with their beach chairs and heavy coolers. As a 12-year old, it was the closest I could get to a day at the beach.

Though the cottage was less than a mile away, it was in a different universe. The small, white building was tucked in at the end of a row of houses and looked right out onto the water. Doug's friend was a photographer who spends his summers working weddings and his winters travelling through places like Bolivia and Kenya, which was what he was currently doing. I poked around the house to find bookshelves lined with art books, good literature and weighty volumes on cultural studies. His house smelled clean. His linens were laundered. I thought briefly of meeting him, starting an affair...stormy...exciting...then remembered I am married. Funny. I don't even know what he looks like, but his home told me enough.

Doug checked the mail and then we climbed down the steep wooden stairs to the beach.

I never realized that underneath Lake Erie lies a massive bed of shale. It was everywhere, along with smooth, rounded sandstone rocks. The sharpness of the shale against the sandstones seemed impossible. How could two types of rock so different get in one place? I chose a egg-shaped stone that was white and heavy to carry home in my suitcase.

And we walked, which is always the most fun way to spend time with Doug, because he is not distracted by a million other things. In the city, he was checking his cellphone, saying hi to people on the street, stepping into stores. But on the beach with only the water, the rocks and me we talked about writing and making music, old friends, and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

The beach was infested with ladybugs. They gathered on rocks, driftwood, dead leaves. Thousands of them. Were they dying? Mating? Laying eggs to hatch in the spring? We also discovered an odd form of water plant, the size and shape of a grapefruit, but bright green and covered with seed pods. Doug joked it was corn on the cob meets seaweed (meets christmas ornament, I added).

We walked until the beach ended, turned around and headed back until we came to a divey beach bar. We decided Baileys and coffee would hit the spot on a cool fall day.

The bar smelled like that combination of beer and stale cigarette smoke. It's the way every pool hall and bowling alley in the country smell, no matter what state you're in. College football was on the big screen TV. Doug told me a story about S.D. I had never heard. It filled in a piece of a puzzle for me. Something I had wondered about for a long time. Something that confirmed that the decisions I made long ago, based on gut intuition, were the right decisions. (That's vague, I know. I'm being purposely so.)

Though I could have stayed at the beach all night with a bottle of good red wine and a toasty fire in the fireplace at the cottage, we drove back to Buffalo for dinner. We stopped for pizza (as only you can get in Buffalo) and an extraordinary treat for a former WNY-er gone vegetarian: veggie chicken wings! Wedges of eggplant, breaded and fried, and doused in wing sauce (Frank's Red Hot and butter, if you must know) and served with a side of blue cheese sauce, celery and carrot sticks. Divine!

That night, we ended up at a house party. His roommate's band was playing there. The house was packed with college students mostly dressed as zombies (the undead was a a popular Halloween theme this year). We were the oldest people there.

As I waited for the bathroom, a guy in a Chewbacca suit asked me, "Whose place is this?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Cool. YOu know it's a good party when total strangers show up." Maybe it was his house and he was messing with me.

Down a flight of stairs and into a dark cavern of a basement, pipes exposed, and bent nails stuck dangerously out of big support beams. This was the kind of house that could have been part of the underground railroad, You could imagine secret passageways that were bricked off long ago. But that night, three men in nothing but white body paint, wifebeater t-shirts and tightie-whities were playing death metal. Their faces were painted to look like skulls. We lucked out, since we arrived right at the end of their set. The band we were there to see was up next: Knife Crazy, and they were good. A drummer, bass player and guitarist dressed up as two bananas and a hot dog (phallic?)

The skull band had only made peoples' heads bob, but two songs into Knife Crazy's set we saw it happen. A guy in front of us simply let himself fall sideways--started movement--created space. The tension broke. The dancing started. I was on beer #4 at that point, and more than happy to join. A John Cusack look-alike slammed into me, and made me spill my beer all over my coat, but I quickly forgave him. When was the last time I had the chance to be drunk at a basement punk show?

"DO YOU LIKE LAB COATS? I LIKE LAB COATS! LET'S BE SCIENTISTS!" they screamed.

After that, on to another bar with a Neil Diamond cover band (bad) and then to yet another party with another band. But soon, the eggplant chicken wings in my stomach were rising up against me, in cooperation with the amazing amount of beer I had consumed, so soon I found myself back at Doug's place to settle in for a cold, cold night.

Buffalo. It really is a beautiful city. It's old and crumbling. There's poverty and crime. But...it's cheap for exactly those same reasons, and that means that real artists, making real art can afford to live there. I saw it everywhere. There's art happening in basements and garages. Out of the decay of Buffalo comes creation. It's as if the death of the city creates a blank canvas available for the imagining of a new life.

Portland is a town of crafters and would-be artists. But let's be honest...all the people who could devote their lives to art are busy working in ad agencies so they can pay those West coast bills. We set aside a sunday afternoon for handmaking, but only after we've decorated our homes with Pottery Barn. It's a smooth affluence that imitates art, as Rebecca Solnit says.

When I first moved here, I was so in love with this city. I've outgrown my passion for it. Somedays, I hardly feel like I live here, and especially returning to it after a day in a broken-down town where I felt so alive.