Portland, Part II

Carl and Ann, Jeremy and Sandy and Rachel and I started meeting up at the Hedge House every Tuesday night to take advantage of the weekly $2.50 pint special offered by all of the Lompoc Brewery destinations. I liked their Sockeye Cream Stout, especially on nitro, but their popular beer was C-Note IPA. The Hedge House was a small, clean place with a nice outdoor area in easy walking distance from where I was living.

Carl and I had met playing hacky-sack and then had been in a couple bands together back in the ‘90’s. The two of us had a great rapport and could riff together effortlessly for hours, both musically and comically. When Jeremy’s dry, understated observations were added to the mix, the shit got over-the-top. Carl would alternate between trying to make Ann laugh and gross her out. It was easy for anybody to make Sandy laugh. I was constantly trying to make Rachel laugh, and was usually successful. She had a boisterous, infectious cackle that softened the cloud of sadness that usually hung over her, especially when she was in Portland. She didn’t want to be in Portland. I think that’s why we went on camping trips as often as we could.

I enjoyed these regular social engagements precisely because I am not a sociable person. A major reason for, or perhaps result of this is that I’ve never gotten the hang of the unwritten rule that you’re generally supposed to do little more than amuse, indulge and placate others in group settings. Once I had a set of friends who understood that whatever I said was probably going to be inappropriate, I didn’t want to waver from them.

That is why it would be sometime before I went to “Tuna Tuesday,” which one of my co-workers, a genuinely quirky girl named Molly, persistently invited me to. Although I’ve heard her explain it several times, I don’t exactly recall the origins of Tuna Tuesday, but think it was a tradition Ted and Molly had inherited several years prior. Molly culled Portland’s art studios and super markets, looking for overly-educated, underpaid 20-somethings to invite over to this BYOB gathering, and Ted and Molly made and served Tuna sandwiches. That was pretty much it.

Neither Rachel nor I knew how to cook, so we worked together figuring it out. We made a lot of pasta dishes, which we paired with every red wine sold at Trader Joe’s. Then we started getting wines, breads and cheeses from a nearby Italian specialty shop, but that quickly got expensive, so we switched to sampling bourbons. Instead of finishing off one bourbon before moving on to the next, we saved the last few ounces until we had five or six that we would drink together with Rachel’s roommates in a blind tasting. On the second such tasting, we were surprised by the winner, so we tried the same bourbons again and a different one was the best- but it was in the same glass that had contained the winner the first time. (We were just using random shot glasses.) So finally, I put the same bourbon in both the winning glass and another, and was quite blown away by the difference the glass made.

Rachel had a roommate who worked as a bartender in a Peruvian restaurant. He spent his days sullying their kitchen with fruity rum-based cocktail combinations. They were too sweet for my palate, but he had several cocktail books lying around, and one day I read one in which each chapter explored both the life of an author and a beverage they are connected with, and it piqued my interest. I ordered a martini at a restaurant, since I’d never tried one before, and it was absolutely disgusting. I intuited that cocktail-making might be a lost art which had led to a public preference for drinks that tasted like Kool-Aid, and began buying and experimenting with cocktail-making ingredients, apparatus and glassware, reading cocktail books and seeking out competent bartenders to order drinks from.

In the autumn of 2007, Rachel and I moved into the Tuna Tuesday house with Molly, which was not far from both Carl and Ann and Jeremy and Sandy. But while Rachel and I now stayed home to be part of the household festivities on Tuesdays, they went to Fifth Quadrant, which was now the closest, but much less cozy, Lompoc location. Rachel and I began going out to eat every Friday evening.

On one summer Friday in 2008, Rachel didn’t return home from work. I called and asked if we were still planning on going out to eat that night, and she said, “No.” She stopped answering the phone after that. A few weeks later, I moved from the Tuna Tuesday home into my first ever solely occupied apartment, bought a pickup truck (with money granted from my mom) and switched from bourbon to Scotch. Looking back, I think the most important thing I lost when Rachel disappeared was an incentive to be funny.