After decades of political activism and influencing Portland’s art scene, Anne Hughes has died.
Hughes passed away on the morning of Aug. 26 at the age of 76.
“You could show her no greater respect, nor honor her memory more truly, than by treating others with love and kindness, by helping someone in need, and by comporting yourself with decency and grace,” he wrote. “Anne would have wanted it that way.”
Hughes suffered from dementia and, leading up to her death, stopped eating and drinking.
“I like to think that was her last act of agency,” Joe Hughes told Willamette Week.
If you were an impecunious scribe, she seemed an angel. And her café was an oasis.
An “At Large” column dated November 30, 1988.
Bukowskied All Over Again And Again.
Bracketed by antique kitchen aprons and Tom Cramer totems, there’s a quote from Carson McCuller’s “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” hanging on the west wall of the Anne Hughes’ Coffee Room: “… for the atmosphere of a proper cafe implies these qualities – fellowship, the satisfaction of the belly, and a certain gaiety and grace of behavior.”
Recently, sixty-two people sat below those words in just that atmosphere to listen to the stained poetry of Charles Bukowski. As part of a continuing series of Monday night gatherings. Portland actor Ted Roisum spent an hour reading from “The Roominghouse Madrigals,” in a performance he calls “Chronicles From The Curb.”
These are the early poems, the ones Bukowski has said are more lyrical than what he is writing today. Today he’s more direct. He hits a target dead on, then gets off. Bukowski, the brawling barfly, recalls those early days with a certain fondness. As an introduction, Roisum reads the following:
Coming in from the factory or warehouse, tired enough, there seemed little use for the night except to eat, sleep and then return to the menial job. But there was the typewriter waiting for me in those many old rooms with torn shades and worn rugs, the tub and toilet down the hall, and the feeling in the air of all the losers who had preceded me. Sometimes the typewriter was there when the job wasn’t and the food wasn’t and the rent wasn’t…
In another life, those rooms were well known to me. As far as I am concerned, this man has something to say. Something I hear. Something that makes sense. Roisum clearly agrees. Why Bukowski?’, I asked. Of course, I already knew the answer. I just wanted someone else to say it.
“He’s an original voice,” Roisum began. “I lived that way years ago. Sorta. Not to that degree, but on the edge of that existence… My Bohemian years. You know.” He paused. “The whole American folklore that goes into it.”
Yes, there is the romance of the Bukowski legend, if not quite the lifestyle. There’s the myth of self he’s created, the product he’s marketing. And then again it might be pure; he might just be who he says he is. There is the notion here is a man who managed to live his life without compromise, without the ties that mind. Like a cowboy of the Old West. Like an artist.
“Then there’s the other side of Bukowski,” says Roisum. “The strong sense of compassion that he shows runs the whole way through his work. He’s funny… he’s a good poet.”
Roisum is a good actor. Lean, balding, he has the coiled intensity that reminds me of Snoopy doing his vulture impersonation. The reading is not exactly entertainment, and the text is hardly comforting.
Just a few feet from my table, it’s raining cold and the cars splash two directions on four lanes of hard road. A transient is pushing – uphill – with one hand his grocery cart piled high with rags and papers and everything he owns. With the other hand, in a glove with the fingers cut off, he holds an harmonica and he blows the same seven notes over and over and over. First faint, the tune grows louder, then grows faint again and disappears. The same seven notes.
Roisum’s voice, first faint, brings me back into the room. Bukowski’s words demand attention. This is not a man who grew up watching “I Love Lucy.” He suggests, in a poem entitled “The Genius of The Crowd,” that we “beware the preachers, beware the knowers… Not being able to create art, they will not understand art.”
More Bukowski. The dead do not need aspirin. People run from the rain yet sit in bathtubs full of water. Pretty words like pretty ladies crinkle up and die. It’s terrible to be a human being, terrible, there’s so much going on. You get so alone at times that it just makes sense. The days run away like wild horses over the hills. Eat a good pear today so tomorrow you can remember it.
Roisum reads some twenty-eight poems, and I feel like the loser in a snowball fight. I’ve been pelted with as much Bukowski as I can healthfully absorb in one hour. At first I sympathize with him. Poor guy, he’s so angry. Feeling as he does – or did in those early, more lyrical days – he should probably go mad, but doesn’t quite know how. But Bukowski is not asking for our sympathy. After all, there’s a crowd in the Northwest that’s paid two dollars a head to listen to work he wrote some twenty years ago.
So, I start to feel sorry for myself. Poor me, I think I know where he is trying to go with this, and I’m not ready for that. And then I remember those seven notes fading into the dark, and I realize just how good Bukowski really is. He’s awfully good. He understands art.
After Roisum stops reading, I can still hear the words of Bukowski. There is too much truth here. Too much truth. Too many questions asked, questions I’m not quite prepared to answer. Now is not a good time. I am drained, as if someone left me parked outside work with my high beams on. I need a jumpstart.
Of course, there are few better places to get recharged. The rest of this entire city block is the perfect answer, the precise antidote, the nearly perfect bookstore – Powell’s.
Pardon me while I chortle in rhapsody, but… what better place to escape?
Tired of Portland, you can travel to Cuba with Papa Hemingway. Tired of home, visit the great castles of medieval Europe. Chastised by the concrete laser-vision of Bukowski, you can warm yourself by the friendly hearths of one thousand storytellers or dozens of religious leaders or scores of cartoonists.
Every time I walk into this building, and it never seems often enough, I have a near-death experience. Add some sunshine, a few beautiful women, perhaps a big screen monitor with VCR, and a good bottle of wine, and this is my idea of heaven. (Sounds like a Charles Deemer play.)
Powell’s doesn’t have every book in the world, it just seems that way. One of the largest bookstores on this planet – a map is available- this creation by Michael Powell should not be taken for granted. It should be cherished. It should be celebrated. Portland, we are blessed.
Really, where else are you going to find such tomes as “Margarine Modeling” or L. Ron Hubbard’s “How To Live Though An Executive?” I saw those two books displayed in a window at the front door of 1005 W. Burnside St. I was headed home to a domicile already besieged by The Unread. I was carrying a plastic bag full of books I just had to have.
I drove away thinking about molding a mound of oleo into a life size replica of Lee Iacocca.
Soon, Bukowski was back, sounding like Ted Roisum. The boys and Anne Hughes had succeeded. They had Windexed the glaze off my mind. I could see more clearly.
It’s not the small room that’s important, not even the grocery cart. It’s the typewriter and the harmonica.
It’s the same seven notes.
Skeptical Rick Rubin starts slide under table to escape.