The Birth of Our City Four years before the previous century closed, I began in June what would become a season-long love affair with a young woman who had not yet departed the final year of her teens. She lived with her estranged mother in a small Mount Baker home; I, who was about to enter the dead middle of my 20s, lived in a downtown studio apartment with a rather lazy cousin who wasted his days watching professional sports. The path to satisfying my and my lover’s sensual needs was repeatedly obstructed by two stubborn facts: one, with the exception of brief visits to a corner store to purchase what constituted his entire diet (candy and Coca-Cola), my cousin never left the apartment; two, my lover was immoral in all matters but one: she refused to stain her mother’s often-empty home with the sin of our sex.

Failing to find a reliable private interior, we hunted for, and became intimate in, emptied or obscured public places: closed city parks, ladies’ lavatories in downtown hotels, buildings with shadow-obscured recesses, rooftops that rose well above other roof tops, and forgotten back staircases in big apartments whose locked main doors were suddenly opened by a departing (and usually uneasy) tenant.

The Ruins of Nihonmachi. One June night, we were in the Japanese garden at the edge of what remained of Nihonmachi. Under the film of the full moon, there we stood before something that was once bright and becoming. The Interment Camps extinguished the lights of this mini city within our mid-sized city many years ago. All that remained of Little Tokyo (or better yet, Tiny Tokyo) was the still open (but always cold) Panama Hotel, with its cheapish rooms, spring-worn white beds, abrupt bathrooms, and Scandinavian landlady, who speaks fluent Italian. There’s also the Maneki Restaurant, whose small bar resembles one I have seen on an Ozu film—was it Tokyo Monogatari, or Tokyo Twilight? But, my dear, how did we find ourselves in that street-lit garden or form around ourselves that transparent bubble which, as if blown out of the park by the open mouth of a floating torii, carried us above the shady phantoms, the brick bulks, and the heavy breathing of this city’s Internal District?

After Being With You. Often after seeing you, kissing you, leaving you there in the night, I would go to my apartment, my room, my bed, and fall asleep. Six hours later, I’d wake up with the fresh phantom of your body pressed against me. It was the dub of you. Of your presence (standing on the busy corner, sitting next to me in the empty bar, your lips in the ladies room) there was now an auratic absence—a faintly breathing after-being absorbing like something made of glass the aureate light of a sun now fully in the window just beyond the foot of my sleigh-framed bed, which at that brilliant moment seemed to have just arrived from the nothingness that I had journeyed to minutes after seeing you, kissing you, leaving you there in the night.

My Lover’s Window. On another June night, we were underneath the monstrous Freeway Park, on a street called something like Bubble Place. The involved traffic roared around us. Not far from where we stood and kissed and groped, was a strange window (maybe the strangest window in all of Seattle) which, from the park’s artificial waterfall, one can see the traffic on I-5 rush by. Looking into this window is like watching your sleeping lover’s dream from a discovered window under her hair. The thing that dreams in Freeway Park’s window — which is yellow, cracked in certain parts, and situated in a small recess over which water flows like transparent waves of hair — is the city itself. The city dreams of traffic streams.

Maker’s Marxism. Right after the night we smooched and fumbled in the middle of a discovered park, I went to the Twilight Exit and read a very short book on Marx by Terry Eagleton, whose most popular book, Introduction to Literature, I had reread and re-enjoyed the week before (and also recommended to you after we fucked in the bushes of another park at the top of Queen Anne—or was that even a park? Was it someone’s property that had the big bush that sheltered our prone position—I on the ground holding your skirt-covered waist; you on top, with hot hands on my shirt and hips shifting and shafting?). The little book is simply called Marx and is part of Routledge’s excellent “The Great Philosopher’s Series.” It took me five Maker’s Marks to complete Eagleton’s pleasant and short study of the most sensual European philosopher of the 19th century.

The Olmstead Brothers. I still think about that warm August night. We were in the park, sitting on a picnic table, looking at the beginning and the end of the city: to the west of us were the phantom-large cargo ships heading toward or away from Harbor Island; to the east of us were the real and reflected lights of downtown. This park, which is on a dramatic bluff, is the most perfect park in Seattle—Magnolia Park. It was designed by John C. Olmstead, who was a senior partner in America’s first landscaping architecture firm, The Olmstead Brothers, and a stepson to the father of landscape architecture, Frederick Law. John C. Olmstead also designed many of the parks we met and made love in: the tiny Roanoke Park, the massive Seward Park, and the sempiternal Arboretum.

Close to the End. “It seems like I have spent something of a summer with you, Petra,” I said at the beginning of the end of our affair. We were on a night bus. We had just been together in ways that we had never been together before. It seemed strange to have a person I was so familiar with in the context of benches and bushes of local city parks, or the recesses of empty, exhausted bars, suddenly appear like a daily vision through the purple folds of your friend of a friend’s shower curtains, or sitting across from me drinking coffee in the morning, or sharing a heavy meal on a dinner table that had very stable legs. Imagine that! Drinking wine and whiskey with you in circumstances that were plausibly domestic, that were in the slow time of a marriage instead of the panicked minutes of a summer affair. If I had answered the knock of an unknown someone at the door, I would have been to them the man of the house. But there was not enough time for us; the moments quickly passed from day to night to day again, like the scenery on a stage set (except ours was framed by open windows), and in that space something else took shape, something that was even more wonderful than you had imagined. “Actually, Victor, I think I could love you for more than a year,” you said to me, impressed by the wholesome hum of our happiness.

All of these summer pleasures entered twilight the moment you walked toward me on the bus departing to downtown, which was bright and at the bottom of the hill we quickly descended. The home that was ours for two days was a block away from South King Restaurant.

The End of It All “Capitalist production collects the population together in great centers,” writes Marx in his love poem Das Kapital. In the way that heavy industry transformed the very structure and nature of the 19th century city, our heavy passions transformed the substance and character of the last city of the 20th century. After we split—you left Seattle on August 21 to study modern dancing in Denver—I found myself coming across, and feeling aroused by, some recess, shadowed area, or dense park we had romanced in. The total effect of this has been the eroticization of what was initially a desire-less city. Because of you Seattle is now for me a place that Prince in a purple haze of music described as the “erotic city”—a topography that was now disorganized by and gorged with our sun-soft caresses, sticky kisses, and always clumsy and partially-clothed groping.