Track Mangoes

A Short Portrait

No matter what time of year, Job always wore cutoffs. Even in the gelid months, when his Addidas got soaked to the sole, he stood on the sidewalk, underneath the glowing sign that read “The Escape Nighclub” and chatted with the people waiting to get to get in.

In addition to his booty shorts, Job wore a black tank top, bedizened with plastic rhinestones, and a string of fake pearls that hung limply around his neck. His face had been elaborately painted with MAC producs and craft glitter from Micheal’s. He smelled sickly sweet, like potpourri. He shared a cigarette with a short girl in a black leather miniskirt.

The Escape Nightclub opened its doors in on New Years Eve of 2003 under somewhat woolly circumstances. The venue itself, situated a few hundred feet from Portland’s Park blocks, had undergone eight changes in management in the past twenty-eight years. Mildred’s Palace, Metropolis, The City Nightclub, Evolution, The Rage, Misifit’s Café, The Edge and Klub-Z were The Escape’s former manifestations. All failed; all were unprofitable.

“It’s just easier to call it ‘the club’ since it keeps changing,” Job said. “I’ve been going here since it was The Edge. The Edge never served alcohol at the bar, The Rage might have; the license was too expensive, you know.” I told him that the crowd seemed bibulous nonetheless, pointing out a group of girls who were attempting to hide an Aquafina bottles filled with whiskey in their purses. “It’s a cruel joke: they surround you with insecure people and then ask you not to get drunk before you come.” He leaned in closer. “Hell. I’m a little smashed.” The short girl in the miniskirt laughed and snatched the cigarette from his fingers. “The club has definitely gone downhill,” he continued. “It’s not like Klub-Z. Klub-Z was where it was at. That was kind of the hay day.”

“Fuck yes it was,” the girl said.

“We had a pole back then.”

“Fuck yes we did.”

“Way more fags came to Klub-Z.” The way he used the word, fag, I could tell he meant it endearingly.

“Remember the floor back then?” the girl asked.

“Oh. Oh. And the pole.”

“You already…”

“Oh. Oh. And remember those hot guys that would come down from Seattle every other week.” Job fanned himself with limp wrists. “It was sexy back then. And. And. And everyone was fucking everything. And every weekend it was like a maze, and everyone was connected to everyone else by some body part.” Job sighed. “Everyone looked forward to the weekend. It was an excuse to get fucked and fabulous.”

“But then Ziggy got caught,” the girl said, stamping the cigarette out on the sidewalk.

Zig Tognetti founded Klub-Z in the summer of 2000. He was the club’s eighth owner. From the venue’s founding as Midlred’s Palace in 1980, shortly preceding the American AIDS crisis, the club had offered what some might call a ‘safe haven’ for gay boys and lesbians, generally from the surrounding suburbs. The club came out from the underground when the owner of The City Nightclub purchased the rights to the “Rosebud and Thorn Pageant,” a regionally famous drag competition, today the oldest running teen drag competition in the world. Tognetti’s performance manager, Thomas Christiansen, insisted that “If you need a place to be who you truly are, whether it is gay, straight or somewhere in between, Klub Z provides a dance floor where you can be anything you want.” Others, and perhaps Job was one of them, used less saccharine adjectives when describing that ‘haven’.

“Oh, don’t you know what happened to Ziggy?” Job asked. The girl had disappeared. It began to rain softly, a slight drizzle. “I thought he was pedophile. I knew that he was having sex with the club kids, and I heard something about kiddy porn a few years back too. They arrested him for peddling E and cocaine, though. It would have been funnier if they bagged him for the pedophile thing. Well, I think it would have been funnier. He would hit on the kids too, I remember, this one time, I think I was sixteen or seventeen, I was standing outside the club, and he came up makin’ some comment about how I would be hot in a threesome with him and his boy toy of the moment.” Job looked up at the sign, buzzing above us. He exhaled deeply. His breath fogged and curled upwards. I looked down and noticed his forearms were covered in goose bumps.

Shortly before Tognetti’s arrest, and subsequent closure of Klub-Z, he had fired his DJ, Scooter, over an altercation. Veteran club-goers such as Christensen, Job, and the club’s current performance manager, Jerrick Hoffer, have canonized the content of the bout as part of the establishment’s behind-the-scenes arcana. Job insists, however, the bout was about “doing coke in the office,” while Hoffer claims Scooter left, frustrated by the fact that “half the staff would be gacked out and not doing their jobs.”

After Klub-Z was shut down the venue remained empty for several months. It was not the only venue have it’s windows boarded up either. All along the Stark Street, an avenue lovingly referred to as “The Gay Villa” by some, working class dance halls were beginning to close. The Fish Grotto handed management over to The Red Star Brewing company, Scandal’s nixed its primary watering hole, and two blocks away Panorama, a 21+ techno hall was shut down (later to be renovated as an upscale cinema/bar, playing the finest in independent films, serving the finest of Oregon’s wines). Klub-Z had apparently met a similar fate until Scooter, along with the club’s former doorman, Robby, took out the building’s lease at a price higher than what Tognetti had paid for it.

Despite his infamous reputation as a lecherous anathema the way Job spoke of Tognetti and his club seemed to voice a melancholic nostalgia.

Eventually, Job announced that he was “fuckin’ freezin’ his fuckin’ guddam nips off.” So he lead me inside the club. I followed him to the bar where he sat down and ordered two cans of Red Bull. The music was so loud, so percussive, that I missed his interaction with the bartender altogether. With the music nearly deafening, I attempted to listen Job’s persiflage about the price of purses at Sak’s Fifth Avenue. Half way into a rant about how “the Louis Vuitton cherry thing was gross” my attention wandered to the multifarious collage on the wall behind the bar. A paper fish. Lava lamp. A plastic clock. Spray painted records with the faces of famous drag queens and slogans like “Nobody Listens to Techno.” It was metro pastiche.

Job and I sat at the bar, sipping Red Bull, watching the crowd dance atop a light-up floor. I asked Job why the girls outnumbered the boys. He took a swig, setting his can down on the bar and sighed. He flipped his blonde hair out of his eyes and turned to face me.

“That’s what I’m talking about. That’s why I liked Klub-Z. Klub-Z was a gay club. When the fag-hags learned that they could come on their own, when they learned they didn’t have to bring their gay friends, they went…I don’t know, they went nuts or something I guess. I don’t know!” The bartender came by and picked up Job’s empty can. “And then, then,” he continued. “When the jocks from Lincoln High School figured out that the club was full of desperate straight girls accompanying repressed gay boys, well, well. I don’t know. I guess they…” He stopped and rubbed his forehead. “Look. Look: I don’t know.” Job got up off he bar stool and headed outside, saying “I’m hot,” as I followed in his wake.

Several underage clubs popped up on the Portland club circuit from the early nineties to the early 2000’s. Among them was The Quest, a hip-hop disco; The Metro, a hookah bar gone pizza parlor; Backspace, a café for live Indie music; and the Meow Meow, a teenage punk palace. Most of these venues either careened sideways, away from their original mission statement, or shut down altogether. (Today Backspace is a cyber café, boasting interactive x-box dens and a plethora of arcade machines, while The Quest has fallen off the map and out of the memory of the kids from my generation). Strangely, The Escape, Klub-Z, The Edge, or, if you prefer, “The Club,” has strolled down a steady path in providing gay teenagers with a place to dance for the past twenty-five years.

But, sometimes, when Job speaks of the club there is a trembling in his voice. He becomes visibly frustrated when describing the new crowd of déclassé degenerates who flooded the floor of The Escape. They’re loud, they’re drunk, but perhaps most disturbingly for Job, they’re straight.

It was raining harder outside. Most of the people who were in line had either ran to cafés down the street or had been admitted inside. Before exiting the club, Job had grabbed a grey garment bag from the coat check. He held it close to his chest. Inside was a wool business suit, an overcoat and a pair of women’s underwear.
“Do you ever get harassed standing out here?” I asked Job. He flipped his hair again and laughed, rearranging the bag in his arms.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Duh.” Job started rattling off the litany of injustices he had experienced standing underneath the buzzing Escape sign. He seemed oddly nonchalant about the incidences, as if they were practical jokes a frat brother might play on his housemates. “A few weeks ago,” he told me, “I was standing out here waiting, and a bunch of white fucks in an SUV pelted me with an egg. Left a fuck ugly bruise and got egg poo up and down the back of my leg. It was gross. Really fucking gross.”

It was about one A.M. when the cab arrived to pick Job up. I bid him farewell and watched as he tossed his garment bag into the back of the cab. He hopped in, waved goodbye, and as he shut the door, he sank into the seat, faineant in repose. For a moment my impression of him, the slack posture, the “aw-hell-nah” mannerisms and catty rejoinders, the club kid clout, the pomposity and rodomontade, seemed to melt away. Collapsed in the backseat of the cab, he reminded me of some of the young men I knew going to high school. Sincere. Cute. Optimistic.

And then the cab sped off: down the road to a hotel where Job would meet a client of his, a regular.

Earlier that night I had asked about the contents of Job’s garment bag. He informed me it was for his job. It was “part the deal.” “It’s really kind of easy,” he had said. “Like. Ridiculously easy. He sends me these thongs and I have to wear them under the suit. I go to the hotel. He takes me out sometimes and plays footsie with me under the table. I make 3000 dollars a night. So, it’s pretty good.”
“What do you spend the money on?” I had asked.

“Purses,” he said matter-of-fact’ly. "Gucci purses."

Job assured me that there were other boys in his line of work who hung around the club. But, when I asked him to point them out, he shied away, blaming their poor attendance on the rain.