(a postcard from 1991)

When I first got beat up, Gina asked if any of the attackers was named David. She was blaming everything on what she called "the Curse of the Davids."

Gina had met her latest in a long series of men named David through a personals ad. They'd met for coffee, and he seemed sweet, sweet enough that she invited him to her apartment for dinner a few days later. Gina lived on the top floor of the Hadley House Apartments at SW Salmon Street and Twentieth Avenue, and I lived on the second floor. The walls were so thin that on any night I could hear at least three different television shows in the apartments around mine.

The writer Katherine Dunn is right about every corner having a story. I was attacked at the corner of SW Alder Street and Fifth Avenue—it's the Red Star Grill now. I was leaving a gym on a Friday night, just at dusk, and coming around that corner I was jumped by a group of young men. They were black and wore black-hooded sweatshirts, and the first one slammed a fist into the side of my jaw so hard I fell sideways and bounced my head off the sidewalk.

Someone shouted, "Twenty-five points."

After that, every time anyone kicked me in the head or the back, someone shouted, "Ten points." Or they shouted, "Twenty points," if they kicked extra hard or their shoe landed in my face. This all lasted about the length of a traffic light. Then they were running away, and I got up and shouted after them. Then they were chasing me, and I ran for the lights and traffic of W Burnside Street.

That same night Gina's plan was to cook dinner for her tatest David. He came over and sat on her sofa, and she gave him a glass of wine to drink while she finished in the kitchen. Her apartment had a kitchen-living room layout where you could still talk to each other but not see from room to room.

When I called the police after my attack, the officer on the phone said I'd screwed up by not going to a hospital for treatment. Something to always keep in mind, walking in downtown Portland. He called it a "wilding incident" and offered to send me a form I could fill out and mail back.

Instead of going to a hospital, I'd called Gina from the telephone booth at NW Fourth Avenue and Davis Street, the little one shaped like a Chinese pagoda.

That same night, it wasn't more than a glass of wine later when Gina had come out of her kitchen. She wore a frilly apron and quilted oven mitts and carried a steaming glass dish of lasagna. Her hair all sprayed in place, her lipstick perfect, she said, "Dinner's ready."

The door from her apartment to the hallway was standing open. It was open, and her latest David was gone. The glass of wine was empty, sitting on the glass coffee table. On the sofa was a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine, open to an illustrated article about vaginas. Outside in the hallway stood some old-lady neighbor still holding a sack of garbage and peering in at Gina.

Sprayed across Gina's new sofa were big gobs of fresh sperm.

Gina stood there, smelling her own hairspray and steaming homemade lasagna.

And the old-lady neighbor in the hallway said, "Gina, honey, are you all right?"

It was right then her telephone rang.

That's why I never made it to the hospital. For the next few weeks I couldn't chew with my back teeth. The inside of my cheeks were so bruised and split that I ate everything in nibbles with just my incisors. But that night in the fake pagoda phone booth, when Gina told me her story, her theory about "the Curse of the Davids," the cum still soaking into the sofa beside her, no matter how much it would hurt later, I had to laugh.

Getting Off:

How to Knock Off a Piece in Portland

"The jig's up—people are having sex in Portland," says Teresa Dulce. An advocate for Portlands sex workers and the publisher of the internationally famous magazine Danzine, Teresa says, "Instead of fighting the inevitable, let's try to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease."

Teresa sits in the Bread and Ink Cafe on SE Hawthorne Boulevard, eating a salad of asparagus. Her eyes are either brown or green, depending on her mood. Since her car broke down outside of town in 1994, she's been here, writing, editing, and performing as a way to improve working conditions in the sex industry.

With her pale, heart-shaped face, her thick, dark hair tied back, she could be a ballet dancer wearing a long-sleeved, tight black top. With her full Italian lips, Teresa says, "The sky has not fallen when there's been trade before. There are plenty of guys who just want to knock off a piece and are grateful for sex. If there were as many of us getting raped and killed as people say, there wouldn't be a woman left standing on the street."

Ordering a glass of white wine, she adds, "Sex work does exist. It's going to exist with or without our permission. I'd just like to make it as safe and informed as possible."

According to history, Teresa's right. Sex work has always existed here in Stumptown. In 1912, Portland s Vice Commission investigated the city's 547 hotels, apartment buildings, and rooming houses and found 431 of them to be "Wholly Immoral." Another eighteen of them were iffy. The investigation consisted of sending undercover female agents to each business to look around and interview the managers. The resulting vice report reads like a soft-porn romance novel: scenes of naked young women wandering the halls in fluttering silk kimonos. Described as "voluptuous blondes," they strut around in "lace nightgowns, embroidered Japanese slippers and diamonds." Their workplace—called a bawdy house or parlor house— always seems to be paneled in "Circassian walnut and mirrors" and crammed with Battenberg lace, Victrolas, and cut-glass vases and chandeliers. The famous 1912 report refers to these women by their first names: Mazie, Kather-ine, Ethel, Edith... and says they each served twenty-five to thirty different men every night.

These were famous houses like the Louvre at SW Fifth Avenue and Stark Street. Or the Paris House on the south side of NW Davis Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, a brothel that boasted "a girl from every nation on Earth." Or the Mansion of Sin run by Madam Lida Fanshaw at SW Broadway and Morrison Street, now the site of the Abercrombie & Fitch clothing store.

Richard Engeman, Public Historian for the Oregon Historical Society, says few of those brothels were documented, but the proof is hidden in official records like the census. "When you find forty women living at the same address, and they're all seamstresses, it's a brothel." He adds, "Sure, they're popping off a lot of buttons, but that doesn't make them seamstresses."

In hot weather street bands used to march through the city, leading men back to the bars near the river, thus "drumming up business." Along their routes working women would lean from windows, advertising what was available.

In the vaudeville theaters the actresses and singers would roam the curtained boxes between their acts onstage. Called "box rustlers," they sold beer and sex.

Portland police officer Lola Greene Baldwin, the first policewoman in the nation, attacked Portlands venerable department stores, including Meier & Frank, Lippman-Wolfe's, and Olds & King's, on the accusation that easy credit forced many young girls into debt and trading sex for money. She fought to keep young women from being displayed in parades during the Rose Festival and had the touring comedienne Sophie Tucker arrested for public indecency.

In 1912 an estimated three thousand local women worked as prostitutes, so many that Portland mayor Allan