In the mid-nineties, I had the good fortune to live in Überhaus, the last bandit loft in downtown Portland. It was on Southwest Thirteenth above The Great Northwest Bookstore, a Powell’s offshoot born of an argument between Michael Powell and his rare books guy, Phil Wikelund. Phil went down the block and opened his own place, a terrific jumble of every kind of book imaginable stored in no particular order, great sliding piles stacked in the crowded aisles. The place was a hangout for the underground Portland arts and letter luminaries like Walt Curtis and Tom Hardy, so the store counter was a marvelous place to eavesdrop on conversations. I once heard Walt and Gus Van Sant arguing about which hotel would be the best location for the interiors in My Own Private Idaho.
The entire city of Portland hummed with an aura of secret, undiscovered greatness, and Überhaus (named one night where we were all speaking in hammy fake German accents) was one of the great places nobody knew about.
We had an anti-art event called Last Thursday that started as a protest against Portland’s famous First Thursday gallery walk and soon became its own thing. We would feature artwork curated by Sugar from the Bone, an east side gallery representing artists who didn’t have a prayer of getting hung anywhere trendy. We would feature a different artist every month. One of them was Matthew Poindexter, a painter of tremendous ability and humor.
There was live jazz provided by the superlative guitarist Jason Seed and his trio/quartet (depending on who showed up.) Jason, now a noted composer and performer in Chicago, worked at the GNW bookstore and moonlighted as a gigging musician. He was and is an astonishing player who would range from Wes Montgomery to Jimmy Page without moving his hands all that much. His combo was always top-notch and played their asses off for tips and free drinks. Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Monk and other standards, but also jazz arrangements of artists like Nirvana and Radiohead. Sometimes we had a Tom Waits cover band called Freight Train Casanova. Once a posse of hiphop DJs hauled up turntables and the party went on for two days, the guys passing blunts that smelled different from any weed I smoked before or since. The Last Last Thursday, The Human Sculpture performed a suspension event where the dancers hung themselves from hooks that pierced their skin, dangling from the beams at the end of steel cables while blood ran down their bodies and the crowd of sixty people watched in rapt silence.
For this party the drinks were on the State of Oregon. I had a day job as a liquor salesman who was legally unable to sell liquor. Oregon is a control state where all the booze is state-owned, sold directly to the consumer through state-owned stores. I guess compared to prohibition it seems pretty liberal, but stacked against a wide-open market like California the rules were draconian, the entire multi-million dollar market tightly regulated by a twelve-member commission made up of geriatric conservative men and women largely from rural Oregon.
The giant liquor companies needed representation with these geezers in order to sell their brands, so Oregon employed brokers who would arrange for the sale of, say, several thousand cases of Jack Daniel’s at such-and-such a price.
These brokers knew the commissioners by first name and would wheedle and deal until they had an agreement. Then they’d bring in the regional brand manager. This guy would walk in wearing a three-thousand dollar suit to make his case to the panel of sour old people that Jack Daniel’s Watermelon Pucker was a product Oregon consumers deserved to drink. If the commission said yes, it was a huge victory with thousands of cases sold in an instant. The broker would lop off his cut and they’d go away smiling.
When the commission said no, it was egg on the face for everybody. The broker and the brand manager would scheme and plan about how to get their awful liquors into the state stores. I imagine that money changed hands since products like CC Citrus, which looked like a bum’s urine and tasted like whiskey sprayed with Lemon Pledge, made it onto the shelf.
I was the low man on the totem pole of this organization, a peon sales rep forbidden to sell. That left promotion, but it was almost impossible to promote booze. The OLCC had many rules (no Jäger girls, no shot machines, no big displays in liquor stores, etc). My job was reduced to building case displays in stores and taking polaroids of them as proof, since we received small bonuses for doing this work.
It was a boring job, but it took me out into the glorious Oregon countryside with no supervision whatsoever. I became familiar with Tualitin, Wilsonville, Hillsdale, Forest Grove, Yamhill and a hundred other whistle stops. At one point or other, I visited every bar in half the state, from Elks and Eagles to strip joints to Jake’s and Huber’s downtown.
And it turned out that the meat of my job was to take the corporate guys from Barcardi, Jack Daniel’s, and Remy Martin around to the bars to “check on accounts.” That meant I had to show them the town and stay drink for drink with them. We would start at ten in the morning and finish up at last call, then be back in the office at 8AM.
It was a dangerous job for a nascent alcoholic, all the more because of distillery claims.
What are distillery claims? Remember that the state owned all the liquor, so when a bottle was damaged in some way as to make it unsalable––cracked caps, peeling labels, breakage––the state could claim a refund from the manufacturer for defective material.
The liquor companies were happy to comply since it often bought them goodwill with the agents who ran the stores by giving them free booze. “Take this home with you, Al.”
I would always offer any damaged product to the people at the store first. Most of the claims were half-gallons of bottom shelf gin, rum and vodka but occasionally there would be something expensive.
Every week I stacked cases of these into my car. We jokingly said we needed to “destroy it in the field,” dump it out and write a list. These boxes became the rocket fuel for our monthly party.
Generic liquor is wretched, but I had been a barman for more than a decade and knew how to make cocktails. What’s more, this was the age of the infusion jar, a three gallon jug designed to sit on the back of a bar where the booze would soak up lemons or chiles or even bacon. I created Mojitos (a new thing then), Gimlets, and even rusty nails. I took to dying the cocktails with food coloring, bright primary colors more suited to jello than libation. We had a strict policy that no food could be served, and beer and wine were discouraged. The party served hard liquor only, and people got drunk.
It was a pretty amazing time, and though the debauchery occasionally got out of hand it generally stayed pretty civilized. We walked a fine line with promotion, and were careful to try to keep it out of the Willamette Week so we wouldn’t be mobbed. However, I did write a blog post for the Überhaus website (its own thing, an open form blog for poetry and photography) after talking to a young woman at one of the parties. She was with a guy named Seth but she was so drunk that it came out “Siff,” so that’s the name I used in the story.
So here you go, Überhaus Diary from May 10th, 1998, a couple months before we called it quits on Last Thursday.
Siff called to let me know about this party on the last Thursday of the month. “Party?” I said, which is for me an action verb. I am a party maniac, known to hit multiple parties on any given night, especially drinkin’ holidays. I’ve been to all kinds: Bar Mitzvahs (lame usually, but sometimes with gorgeous men), Greek Orthodox weddings (fun, but too long and way too much bizarre alcohol…Ouzo, Metaxa and plum wine make a girl very pale in the morning) and good ol’ fashioned keggers (a lot of guys in ball caps standing around the keg as though it might go away), so I know a lame party by the way the door looks on the way in. Not looks so much as feels…you get a good vibe from some parties.
It takes experience, but that’s easy to come by.
I figured what the hell, I’ll go. Thursday is practically Friday where I work, and the last Friday of the month is a dead loss anyway because usually it’s payday and you’re mentally in a bar by noon. Siff told me to doll up because these were real people and this was a real party. I took heed and was glad I did.
First off, we couldn’t find the place.
Siff had an invitation with the address, so I’m clanking around behind him in my Ferragamos and tight skirt trying to read numbers off the sidewalk. Turns out we were on the wrong street because when we hit 13th there was this icky spray-painted door with “Uber Haus” scrawled across it. Music was blaring from upstairs, so we made our way up. The place was packed and the band was blasting out a Monk tune. Then I noticed the building.
I’m not easily impressed because I was raised in a big city, but this place was cool…a real Soho-style art loft right in the heart of downtown’s glamour district (you might call it “boys’ town,” if you get me). High ceilings, fans and pillars. On the walls were giant disturbing paintings.
Best of all, on a table in the middle of the room were jars of colored liquid and a stack of cocktail glasses (which you hardly ever see at parties these days). I went over. The drinks were unnaturally colored and nobody seemed to know what they were. I tried one which was a hideous red color. It tasted like a gimlet. Delicious. I tried the blue next. It was a kamikaze and went down so smoothly I had another. Then onto the green, which turned out to be a mojito, a sort of a rum julep. That was great.
I was feeling good by this point. Siff was nowhere to be seen, so I started talking to some of the beautiful people. Amazingly enough, they were interesting. I talked about why Faulkner was a drunk with a young guy who asserted, “Faulkner is a piece of shit and I’ll take that to my grave.” I talked with this absolute babe of a chick about girls who have ugly tits. I met the director of Uberhaus and complimented him on the cocktails. I listened to the band and looked at the art. I stayed and stayed.
The dynamic of the party would surge like a tide as people would come, leave and come again. The band played on…
At this party there was an element of the grotesque that made it all the more memorable. All of our tongues and lips were stained with the dye from the cocktails. Everyone there had a black tongue as though suffering from some hideous affliction. Death, maybe.
I hear that this party goes on every month. You can bet your sweet ass I’ll be there.
it might have been. we all started off in albina and moved downtown when we could. the gallery was a huge driver for it because they could not afford to throw parties. I definitely help put my own stamp on it with the performances and so forth because I was always influenced by the sort of stuff that was going on in New York in the 1950s and 60s. having a big urban space where you can do things without fear of repercussion is a huge part of it, and it has to be cheap for the young to afford it. it's definitely a young people's thing, too, since it requires so much free work. I used to draw comics for PDXS and Snipehunt, so I knew a bunch of the old school hipster crowd who helped give the party some anti-establishment legitimacy.
Interesting. I lived in the Last Thursday house in NW in 1990-1991. One had to be a working artist to live there, and there were 13 of us. I think Mark Lakeman, whose dad owned the house, was the originator of the whole Last Thursday thing. The description here of it being anti-first Thursday gallery was was his exact concept. I don't remember when he moved out of that house; maybe the party at Uberhaus was a continuation of Mark's thing.