Type to enter a caption. Lambert / SCAFFOLDING 1 SCAFFOLDING BY ANDREA LAMBERT Lambert / SCAFFOLDING 2 Previously Published Excerpts “You Said That Already,” Bedtime Stories for Trivial Teens #5, 1996 “Rotten Leaves; Thieves; Split-End Slipknots,” Curves: a collection of women in their twenty- somethings in san fran, 2000 “Spin-the-Bottle,” Warhookers, 2004 "Abortion Scene," Mother Should?, 2017 Lambert / SCAFFOLDING 3 PROLOGUE I'm Lena Cosentino. What you are about to read is true except when it’s not. I’m an unre- liable narrator. Some names have been changed but not all. Just to keep you guessing. The genre is autobiography/fantasy. This is a novel about a time and a place that doesn’t exist any more ex- cept in my mind. Memory is a slippery mirror. Things change. Through the haze of memory. The mistakes of things I may have altered or left out or changed to make more dramatic. I tell the sto- ry of my early twenties in nineties Portland contrasted with my life in Los Angeles pushing forty in the late twenty-teens. The story begins in the fall in my senior year of college: 1997. I was twenty-one. It was a different time, nineties Portland. So much has changed. So insidiously. Now I think I can't live without being plugged into the Internet and Twitter and Facebook almost all day. Back then that whole digital world just didn't exist. There was primitive DOS email that seemed more troublesome than it was worth. In a world free of screens, except the occasional TV but free of interactive screens, we were left to our own devices. I read a lot more books and zines than I do now but there was also so much IRL social time. We weren't hiding behind hashtags. We were having "You've been talking shit about me, bitch!" showdowns behind the Delta Café with arms waving. Eyeliner fierce. I'm not going to look through the fuzzy haze of an Instagram filter in telling these stories of the Dustbin. I‘m going to try and tell you what I remember. Being twenty-one: freshly minted, barely legal. Every experience was something explosive. I felt and saw for the first time. The sto- ry begins when I moved into twelve-person punk house called the Dustbin up the street from Lambert / SCAFFOLDING 4 Reed College while in attendance. Ready for adventure but at the same time scared of not being cool. Punks are a tough crowd. I guess you could call this a coming of age story. It is about my very early twenties. A time in my life that was difficult but magical and fun at the same time. This is what happens when you're young and unaware of how naïve you actually are. Then are thrown head first into a cauldron of dogmatic ideology. Emotions. Half-baked anarchist ideals. Class war. Condoms. Ne- gotiating things like boundaries. Everything slipping the opinion of that foxy unwashed girl or boy you just met. Read on. Let it explode around you. It is a novel of transformation. Lambert / SCAFFOLDING 5 Chapter 1 — BENT SCAFFOLDING AND ROBOTUSSIN Portland, Oregon. 1997. The clump of plastic hair steamed as I dabbled on more Super- glue. My fingers mottled with dry glue scabs. Mel squirmed between my knees. Blue and black twists hung ragged off her head threaded with silver wire and springs. They were supposed to be dreadlocks. Some scheme of artificial white girl dreadlocks that she'd enlisted me in making. I would have twisted railroad ties into braids if she had wanted it that way. Mel was my favorite housemate at the Dustbin. "No, no, down. There's a lot more to go." I stuck my fingers into her greasy scalp. Pushed down. The dreads lay like licorice twists. Unevenly glued to patches of her short hair. "This is going to take all night, you realize." “Fuck.” "Alright, can you cut me off a long piece of wire?" I asked. Mel handed me back a strip. I wound it tight over the glue node with dented thumbs. It was soothing. The room was dripping with kids, as we liked to call them. Late teen, early-twenty-something college kids. They milled around the living room with Old Milwaukee 32-oz clenched tight in their hands. Listening to the math-rock band spilling from a record player. Several conversations about welding bicycles and the intricacies of the latest Anthropology paper were hanging in the air. Anthropology was a pop- ular major at Reed, the college the Dustbin was up the street from. Conversations drifted around my head as I sat. Better to fiddle with my hands and look down than do what I usually did at parties: clutch the bottle to my kidneys and nod attentively when I didn't really give a shit, or swagger and tell the same stories I told at every party about fistfights and drug drama on the Canadian border. One girl talked about being a crazy cat lady Lambert / SCAFFOLDING 6 when she got old. Her bold voice made it seem like it would never happen. It happened. A guy ranted about seeing someone talking on a cell phone in public. The ostentatious horror of it all. It was 1997. None of us had cell phones. Lucky, Mel's current fling, was trading train-hopping stories from the opposite side of the couch. I could catch little drifts of words. Piggybacks and boxcars. Cities passing fast. I stuck the sharp ends of the wire in Mel’s hair under the rest. Started twisting the blue plastic hair counter- clockwise. Wound it at the same time clockwise. I followed Mel's eyes as they bored into Lucky's back. Bulging with muscle under a red St. Ides shirt. Lucky strung up a bunch of National Enquirer and Herald Star features about Robert Mitchum above the compost pile in the kitchen. The swarming fruit-flies danced in and out over movie stills. Lucky was obsessed with Robert Mitchum. It seemed like every wall said some- thing about Robert Mitchum, Robert Mitchum, Robert Mitchum, in his messy scrawl. The two men Lucky was talking to, Bud and Eddy, wore leather hells angels jackets over sweatpants. Stood with legs wide. They came over every night around six, bearing cases of beer and Jim Beam. "Oh, come on. Lena! I'm sick of sitting around here." Mel pulled a black twist. "This is scratching the shit out of my scalp." "Wait a sec! I'm almost done." Eddy came over to us. Smirked under his mustache. "Hello ladies. You playing beauty parlor?" "You could say that." I said. "You wanna PBR?" Lambert / SCAFFOLDING 7 My secret shame: I actually hated PBR. I thought it tasted like the fermented piss of a fat man shot in a bottle and thrown in my face. This sentiment I knew would get me excommunicat- ed from my new house and my new friends. I took the can. Opened it, gingerly. Let the whoosh of the foam drift over my thumb. 'You're Lena, right?” “Yeah.” I was semi-new to the Dustbin. Lived here for a year. This felt like an initiation. I was anxious to prove myself. Mel's dewy shoulders touched the inside of my thighs. I shivered. Hoped it was just the booze. "Okay,” Mel said. “Let's take a walk? How about that?" We crept out between smirks. The yellow of the porch light followed us outside. We blundered through the stench of rotting compost vegetables and vomit hanging around the mildewed steps to the street. Black plastic draped the streetlight. Piles of dirt reared up hemmed in with caution tape. Striding fast over the intersection on a red light. I saw that it was scattered with cut glass like spangles on a stripper's bra. Shining as we walked over it. Mel was a stripper. She wondered out loud what accident took place while we were sleeping. It could have happened that night. In the house we were so distracted with each other. Everyone was swinging between one part-time cof- fee shop or piecework job. One day to night shift on the pole. One food stamp re-up cycle. One semester or another. Swung between point A and point B and lurching. Swung between cracks in the dirty wood floor. Lambert / SCAFFOLDING 8 We were all jumbled together in that big house. Students or not. Unified in our hatred of the new construction that was trying to turn the home-like, dingy Reed College Student Union into some terrible white sterile thing. The Sharpie-scrawled ethos claimed the space for us in our minds. The messy expanse of the porch. Big dogs humping each other on the patchy lawn. Stu- dents streaming across the porch with intrigues and breakdowns. The Student Union was one of the things that had made Reed so viscerally real to me, beyond the stifling quiet of some lecture hall. Past the gouged out grass, fluttering plastic hung over scaffolding. Where the Student Union had been, there were metal webs over scraped wood. I smelled gasoline and fresh lumber. We stood there. Our noses a foot from a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. "What the fuck? I used to hang out here every day with Lucky. You know, right after school ended." A sign read "Caution, Hard Hats Only, All Visitors Must Check in at Office." "Yeah, I don't know – we should check it out anyway. There's got be something cool un- derneath all this shit.” I slid my hand along the fence.