#theuglymug

...never ever let me go

The Ugly Mug Cafe

The rumbling woke me up at 5 am. It was present in my dreams but unlike the images and characters and sounds of the dream it didn’t fade as I woke, it just got louder. I cracked my eyes and squinted against the headlights shining in through the shower curtain covering the window. Suddenly the reality hit like cold water in a shower, the loud rumbling, the semi lights shining on me. They were about to tow the van. I drew up off the bed,  pulling out of their lights and cocking my neck so I could see them. “What do I do?” I thought. “Jump into the drivers’ seat and pull off before they can pull me up? I looked to the left and saw another vehicle pulling towards me. It became apparent this was the source of all the rumbling, not the semi. I crawled back forward to get a better look at it. It was dark all except the semi’s bright beams and the spot directly beneath the parking lot lights. But it became clear as my eyes adjusted that nothing was moving, except the other vehicle. The semi was parked, and while its lights were aimed directly at me it was not threatening, just a resting beast of the night. The other vehicle, I slowly understood, was just a street sweeper, and it rumbled loudly like the motor of a tow truck because it was spinning brushes, sweeping up the bags and the trash and the glass from my windows. I slowly laid back down, feeling the adrenaline spike falling. Feeling my heart, beating fast, then slower, then slower.

I woke again around 8 and walked through the rain into Walmart to use the bathroom. I pulled the van around to the garage and sat in the cab to answer questions and signed the electronic pad the head mechanic offered. I sat inside the Walmart for ten, then twenty, then thirty-five minutes. I walked back to the automotive section, paid for the work done and pushed open the door. I stood there blank faced until a mechanic asked what was up. I asked where they would’ve parked my van, turning my head right to left, looking at either side of a large parking lot. They pointed right and I stepped back out into the rain. This was the first time the Pacific-Northwest showed me its true colors in weather, not pouring, but just a consistent muggy falling and gray skies. As soon as I hit 40 mph the shower curtain caught air and lifted like a cape, tearing away my duct tape.

I put in the ugly mug coffee shop, a place I had heard about in one of Donald Miller’s books. All I know about Portland comes straight from his books. I was listening to a million miles in a thousand years on my phone, for the third time or so. He mentioned the ugly mug in that, and maybe others. So I drove. Portland entered the skyline subtly, not like Seattle, jutting out with skyscrapers and the bay, but slowly as I rounded a hill. I looked down on her from above, the construction equipment, then the industrial buildings and brick factory buildings, and finally the city. It didn’t look scary like Seattle. I drove through the city, noticing but not being intimidated by the lack of parking and big buildings, and came to the other side of the river over a bridge, and out further into the suburbs. I drove past the ugly mug and didn’t spot it until after I parked. I had an hour to stay there, not wanting to add a parking ticket to my bills. I grabbed my laptop and my wallet and crossed the street to the coffee shop. It wasn’t rainy anymore, and had cooled down.

I walked up to the counter and ordered the house coffee for here, and they handed me the Jamaica mug. I half-filled it from the jug on the counter, exhausting what was left of the house blend. She said she would make more and I could come get a refill when I wanted. I added cream and sugar and sat on a couch to write the last of my SeattleBound posts. The house blend was different than any coffee I had ever had. It was richer, the coffee itself wasn’t clear like most coffee, but a sweet brown cloud. I thought it had to have chocolate or something in it as well but I remembered the French pressed coffee I had had at Tristin’s cousins house and realized that was the difference.

After about an hour of writing, the other authors sitting to my right, tapping away on their macbooks, the old piano that served as the cream/sugar/flavor area across from me, the internet page I was writing on crashed. I lost all of my writing. I cursed under my breath and decided that I should write offline then post, so as to save grief. I went and climbed in the car and opened my map, thinking I would find a place to park and explore the city a bit. I slid the screen left and right and suddenly stopped, my thumb hovering over my destination. I fired up the engine and drove ten minutes before pulling into Reed College.

To me, Reed was the infamous anti-religious, incredibly intellectual, liberal arts college Donald had audited at and written about in his best-seller Blue Like Jazz. I had no idea what to expect but I parked the van by a hedge and walked onto the campus through the performing arts building. I kept looking around, half expecting some kind of security to jump out of bushes and tackle me, yelling intruder into their vest mounted walkie-talkies. Instead, I sat at a picnic table and called the college admissions office about their tours. There was one that started at one, in about an hour and a half. The woman on the phone, Kate, told me to go to the admissions office and for information. I asked a man sitting at a table where the office was, and he jumped to his feet and walked me to the office, making friendly conversation, asking about my trip and telling me he was a student and then introducing me at the front desk. He then said goodbye and walked back out of the building and another student introduced himself as Jake and told me I could go eat lunch, writing me a meal voucher, and that the tour would leave from the office at one.

I took the ticket, thanked him, and walked back to the courtyard. Where a girl directed me to the cafeteria. I walked in and ordered a cheeseburger with curly fries, got some butterscotch pudding, and an orange soda. They took my voucher and I went out and sat at the same picnic table I had taken when I first arrived.  I had to rush through the meal to finish by one, and then asked Jake, who was sitting at a table across the yard, where I could return the dishes. He told me back in the Cafeteria there was a machine and I walked back and placed the tray on a slowly moving rack, holding hundreds of trays, slowly moving in a loop, dropping them off behind a wall.

I joined about twenty people in the admissions office for the tour, and after being escorted into a classroom we sat through an hour long information session about reed, including information on the grading scale, the thesis, and the factual existence of unicorns. I also discovered that it cost about sixty thousand dollars to attend Reed. After the info session, we went on a walking tour of the campus. We were shown the buildings for Physics and Chemistry, a scale model of Reed’s nuclear reactor, which produces enough energy to power a small toaster. We saw the library and the thesis tower, where all the thesis papers of the graduates had been stored since great depression. We were taken over a bridge that bounced when you stood in the middle of it. As we passed a rugby field the guide told us about Ren Fair, the yearly party that started with a Renaissance Fair many years ago, the one I had read about in Blue Like Jazz. It was crazy to think that there in that courtyard Donald and his friends had erected a booth and confessed the flaws of the church and past Christians to their classmates at reed and had really made a difference.

After the tour I rode my bike from the van to the library with my laptop and rewrote the post I had made that morning. I started to realize how bad I smelled and wished I could take a shower. I thought I should ask the girl working next to me. Her hair was up in two buns on top of her head, like Minnie mouse ears. She wore a sleeveless shirt cut off about halfway down her ribcage, and high waisted short shorts. Her boots were unlaced and sat on the floor, leaving her feet in their tall green-grey socks. She was very attractive and looked very focused on what she was writing so I decided to wait until she was leaving to ask, I had a lot left to write myself. While I was still looking at her she raised her arm and scratched her head or something, and I was somewhat shocked to see her unshaved underarms. “It is Portland I guess” I thought to myself.

When she rose to leave I asked if she knew where I could shower, like an athletic facility on campus or something. She told me there wasn’t one and that maybe a truck stop or a hostel. Then she was gone. I wondered if I wasn’t supposed to be attracted to her because she didn’t shave her armpits. I was… at least I think I was. It made me wonder if things like that were just shallow in reality and if that’s how girls felt when they saw my beard. Like, “doesn’t he know that isn’t ok?” and it made me wonder why it shouldn’t be ok for a girl to not shave. It didn’t really lessen her beauty, I still thought she was attractive… did that mean I wasn’t shallow, or did it mean that I was attracted to what that said about her? That she didn’t care what people thought and didn’t like the shallow social rules put on her. I never finished thinking about it because I had finished posting my blog and was packing up to leave the library. I dropped my laptop off at the van, took only my headphones and phone and keys and the bike and took off for Portland’s downtown.

I rode on the sidewalks and the edge of the roads, getting weird looks from the other cyclists. They took the middle of the road, not paying attention to passing traffic or not caring. They looked at me on the sidewalk like I was a fool and rode past. I realized Portland gave cyclists the right of way, but being from Florida where they seem to try to hit pedestrians I kept my distance from the road. I made it to the river and stopped. It was breathtaking. At least half a dozen bridges spanned the gap in the space I could see, the river below glinting with the early evening sun, the beautiful city on the other side. I rode along the river, stopping to look at an old submarine, then at the underside of the bridges, and finally started the climb to one of the bridges. I rode across the river on a raised platform, the traffic about a foot and a half lower on a steel grate. I kept looking down and left and right and forward and back, taking in beauty at every possible angle. I looked ahead and saw a park on the other side of the bridge, a huge fountain spraying water. I coasted down off the bridge on a roundabout exit like that of a freeway.

I pulled up to the fountain, Salmon Street Springs, according to a sign by the street, stopping by a light pole and looking on as people took off their clothes, wearing swimsuits and jumping into the fountain. I thought about how I had desperately wanted a shower and considered jumping in the water myself. Then I got off the bike, chained to a rack, and pulled off my shirt. I wrapped my phone and keys in the shirt and put it on my shoes and ran into the fountain in my basketball shorts. The water was cold, and it shot inward from large pipes hidden in the ground. All of it converged on me and blinded me, rushing over my body, grabbing my shorts. I caught them to keep them from falling down and used my other hand to scrub at my armpits. I stepped back out and sat on the bench. My phone rang and I put the headphones back in. “Hey, My name is John, I am calling about the rideshare you posted?” I had posted a rideshare from Portland to Michigan on craigslist in the library to get help with gas. “Hey man whats up?”