Death Confetti: Pickers, Punks, and Transit Ghosts in Portland, Oregon

by Jennifer Robin

With savage humor, Death Confetti features performance artist Jennifer Robin's autobiographical sketches of Portland, Oregon, from the grunge-era obscurity of the '90s to its current media-darling status. As an only child raised by reclusive grandparents in upstate New York, Jennifer recalls that she felt "anemic for the real." At seventeen she broke loose and made her way to the west coast. "Civilization is a nightmare-illusion," Jennifer writes, "a three-dimensional spreadsheet perpetuated by machines that hypnotize meat." In a city that's stranger than fiction, grocery-store checkers and meth-heads loom as lost gods. We're introduced to the lady tweaker "Chew Toy," who wears moon boots and sings hair metal songs all night as she collects recyclable bottles. Jennifer visits a bar where executives simulate doggie-style sex acts on the dance floor. Then there's all the tales of late-night life on the city's buses and light rail. Jennifer reflects on her early terror in Catholic school and phone calls with her far-out mother, who disclosed that her gynecologist was a murderer. In the all-too-true pages of Death Confetti , Robin remembers her life among noise musicians, junkies, and her escape from a boyfriend who insisted on reviving the lives of hundreds of deceased fruit flies. Death Confetti jolts the senses, and lingers like a mosquito bite to the Portland of everybody's soul.

Genres: Nonfiction, Humor, Poetry

225 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 7, 2016

About the author

I'm the author of Death Confetti (Feral House, 2016) Earthquakes in Candyland (Eraserhead/Fungasm, 2019) and You Only Bend Once With a Spoonful of Mercury (Far West, 2022). The first two feature non-fictional vignettes about encounters in transit malls, a gynecologist who murders his wife, an "Army Brat" on a Greyhound who claims to be a Gucci model and commences a seduction of every male passenger on board, and oh, so much more. Spoonful of Mercury is an illustrated book featuring transcription of some of my more ridiculous and apocalyptic dreams, most, for better or worse—involving celebrities.

DESTROY NOTHING: THE MOST IMPORTANT THING, coming on Future Tense (2023-24) is about having a mother who saves an empty jar that once contained fig jam because I touched it, her obsession with security cameras, my obsession with liminal space, random cokeheads, a stern Irish nun, the joyless chewing of Thanksgiving turkey, and the two times I met my father, including visits to his "best customers" chateau on the French Riviera, where I got to know a pair of Norwegian swingers and their associates.

More manuscripts, including ICONS FALTER, about a seventeen-year old nonbinary entity who knows she isn't quite human, joins a cult, eats death, and runs away from everything she knows, are forthcoming, being "shopped around" as I type this sad, strange promotional entry in a world of digital pain. And then there's the closet of stuff I wrote when no one knew I was a "writer" at all...do you dig all of these quotation marks?

I hosted and booked a live experimental music and performance show for ten years, have performed weekly at events in Portland, Oregon, for most of this century. I'm sometimes a journalist, labeled "gonzo." I sell vintage clothing and eat cheese. I used to have a life. Now I live to get things published. Oh yeah, and I used to be funny.

Reviews

[Danger · Rating 5 out of 5]

A manic memoir literally overflowing with ideas, both big and small, that come at you like machine-gun fire. Short vignettes and stories, jumping giddily around her life, the unfettered prose hearkens to the greats like Tom Robbins, the path from A to B zigzagging around and paved with gold. I can’t say it simpler than this: Jennifer Robin is a great writer.

[Jeremy Maddux · Rating 4 out of 5]

The great thing about Jennifer Robin is that she's not given to the same shrill hysterics as most female authors in the literary underground. I daresay she's outrage proof. As someone who has watched several of her performances in person, I feel justified in saying she is unrivaled in the live reading department for both her cat-like prowess and booming voiced theatrics.

Collected here for the first time are her many musings about life in Portland, trends and scenes constantly in flux, drug use, self actualization, ennui and what it means for us to call strangers 'them' instead of 'us.'

My only real criticism is that perhaps there was too much scatological humor, even for my tastes which may be unprecedented.

There are many tales that connect back to the stern lectures of her neurotic mother or ex boyfriends that didn't want to share their life with another human being, but merely desired an extension of their own miserable lives.

Whether Jennifer is celebrating the resolve of her elderly cat or lamenting the fact that her lover chose insects over her, she does it all with a committed perspicacity. The absolute apex of the book, for me, was the way she turned a lonely bus ride with a shellshocked war veteran into an almost out of body experience.

If you miss the Beat writers such as Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, or Snyder, this is the sort of book that comes closest to matching that measured intensity of the spontaneous prose alumni. If you can, check out her performances in person or look them up on youtube. A Jennifer Robin live performance is an experience.

[Monica Drake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, dreamy, at times grotesque-and I say that in a good way--this is a look at Portland from a late-night bus rider, a ghost on the margins, a high-times barfly, a brilliant mind, a visual charter, a connecter in the underground, a good time brainiac. I'm all for it.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did. I find I like Jennifer Robin’s writing best in very small doses. The author has an air of judgement that makes me uncomfortable somehow, like it seems a little mean the way she describes people. Maybe I’m just too sensitive or maybe I just read this at the wrong time.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I marveled from the first page to the last. It moves as much within as it does through the world, watching and wondering. I love the voice and the language too. Reading this, it seems like you'd have to remember a little more just how interesting the world really is, how much we tend to forget that, and how much our interconnections are part of that. Wonderful stuff.

[Diana Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

You only think you notice details. You only think you've figured out people and their ticks, their licks and their heroin kicks. Jennifer Robin's book is stunning definition of what it is to be flawed and alive fully of juice and bone. I can't get enough of her endless realizations.

[Smiley McGrouchpants Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jennifer Robin, who opened for Suckdog when there was a show at the Clinton St. Theater (led by the soul who was "Our Fearless Leader," what with the 5 shadows tramping around the moors, following her — basis for the "Helen Burns" character in Jane Eyre, in fact) had been around.

Escapee from the cultural-and-identity void that is Upstate NY (Pynchon's self-critical commentary about considering Long Island, in his youthful days, "as a giant and featureless sandbar, without history, someplace to get away from but not feel very connected to," is actually not off the mark for the whole of the entirety of the non-NYC areas of the state, overwhelmed and giving up, even by default). Robin's trekked around Europe and trekked around Portland, OR: resulting in this having-hoofed-it, sifted-for-gold travelogue about a city that doesn't impeded motion.

Still, what you get is a mishmash of archetypes, some chosen, some not, some worn as deliberately as clothes, some stridently not given up on, some jumped into, just for the hell of it. People.

The scraps of pieces-here-and-there method of storytelling is more effective than a travelogue, or, barring that, a week spent in town could be: she addresses the way things settle in the mind, junkshop-quality, ordered but still having an arranged quality that isn't quite what you'd have expected, priorities-wise. Why does that one damn incident linger? How is it that that combination of elements, who it was and what day and what they were wearing and said, sticks out more (perhaps) than boyfriends long come and gone?

We live in a country that honors parades, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope. Portland, OR is the upside-down response to that, and has been since the 60s crashed into the 70s at least. Robin feels as much like a participant as a spy and a reporter: to test the waters, one has to get one's feet wet.

Essential reading.

[Rodney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have had the pleasure of seeing one of the author’s readings in person and can tell you that the feral, enigmatic performances are without compare. After this and reading a mind blowing short piece from Clash Media’s “Clash Zine #1” entitled “Porno Joan,” I knew I had to experience more. While I wasn’t sure exactly what I was getting with Death Confetti, I knew that it would be non-fictional and somewhat autobiographical in nature. I can say I did not expect this one to be a straight forward as it was. This is not a bad thing however. While the prose is easy to read, there is still magic here. Jennifer Robin’s voyeuristic musings on life and the people around her are continually entertaining, engaging and often reminded me of how much of what goes on around us escapes our perception. We no longer value these interactions. I felt a nostalgic longing for a past that we have forgotten, one the next generation will never know. The book is a beauty, with some full color images included which help depict a slice of Portland’s character. A nice break from my fiction-dominated reading.

[Cat Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This author makes my head spin, makes my eyes water, swells my heart. Her words are more than words, she's a linguist. She spills herself out on a table, filleted for all to see, her world, a lengthy glimpse through her eyes. The things we dismiss like the lonely junkie with the 80's hair, Jennifer Robin breathes life into a being that would normally be ignored. She makes nobodies feel like somebodies. And if that isn't a welcome addition to this complex world, I dunno what is. Brilliant read. Beautiful mind. Death Confetti.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jennifer Robin is a freak magnet and she attracts the oddest, saddest, most enigmatic freaks around. That may be because she’s a freak herself—a beautiful freak with big city and back country wisdom leaking out of her brain onto every page of Death Confetti. There’s a lot of high energy and brave living going on in this book. It observes the world (specifically Portland, Oregon) getting weirder and darker, but somehow Robin steadies it in the palm of her writing hand and makes everything seem like it’ll be okay—maybe even more than okay. Hell, it might even be the funnest time you’ve ever had with a book.

[Bryan Hovey · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many of us walk through life with our heads down on our way to who-knows-where; afraid to make eye contact with a stranger or even observe the world around us. Jennifer Robin is an unapologetic voyeur who drinks in life and regurgitates it back in masterful prose. I wish I had her courage.

[Frankie]

I’ve finished it! I wish the individual vignettes were longer because they were easy to get into but most were just a few pages so it was a pretty disjointed reading experience.

But I enjoyed reading another persons writings about riding the bus.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a sweet and raucous and strange little nugget. I spotted it on the "local authors" shelf of my local library and the title caught my attention. When I opened it to a random page, the memoir-story-critter on that page happened to be titled "Slurpee Cum-Shot"...and that is distinctly a story I've never read before, which was more than enough reason to check it out and bring it home with me.

But now, how to describe this reading experience? I've been so steeped in fiction lately that it took me some pages to settle into these as flash memoir rather than fiction, and even then I was looking for broader story arcs, some sense of bigger-picture movement in how this peppering of moments is organized. I'm not sure that desire was ever satisfied, although there were several pieces that felt connected, parts of the same small puzzle at least.

Things that kept me moving on to the next snippet of story in this collection:
--the possibility of threads intertwining to become something bigger than its individual strings
--lovely, creative, playful flashes of language (at its best, the description in these pages is original, insightful, clever, funny)
--personal connections with these settings in this time and the familiarity of the people this narrator watches so intently. It was a treat to spot familiar places that are either much different now than they were twenty years ago or else no longer exist at all, and an even bigger treat to get to see these places through an unfamiliar set of eyes that experienced them differently than I did

Things that kept this from getting below skin level for me:
--many of these are the kinds of observations and moments I would expect to find in a personal journal, with the author as intended audience. But then there is also editorializing, asides, direct questions to the reader, references back to previous details from previous stories (as I was writing earlier...), which leaves me unsure about audience. I'm never quite sure I'm who is supposed to be reading this.
--the people this narrator interacts with...actually, maybe that's the thing. There aren't many interactions here. Lots of observation and contemplation and memories of previous interactions and possibility of interaction, but the narrator's ultimate distance from the people around her also makes me feel distant from her and from them.
--randomly capitalized words and phrases are sprinkled heavily throughout for emphasis, and these tend to make for a bumpy read for me. I always have to go back and read the sentence again, putting extra heavy emphasis on the capitalized word(s), and if it's not clear why they merit the all-caps treatment, I'll find myself trying again or going back another sentence to see if I emphasized the wrong thing in my head when reading that one and then I'm spinning emphasis circles and no longer just enjoying a sweet or sad or funny or distressing tale...all caught up in the head rather than the heart of it, maybe.

So, ultimately this truly was a collection of tidbits I had never read before and am glad to have found, but I wish I'd been able to connect with it and the narrative voice of it more fully.

A few quotes that struck me while reading seems a worthwhile note to end on and gives the flavor of the book better than I can:

"When I was in the airport a couple weeks ago I saw many things of wonder and grace. I saw teenaged girls the height of hot air balloons with waists in black denim as thin as threads of licorice rope."

"It happened so quickly that it was like a dream; the building, a vast hive of humming machinery; the sort of density that makes ears ring."

"It feels like a party-bus full of women with emery-board skin and light dustings of freckles over sweatpants, ponytails, long hours as nurses, caregivers, strippers, gluing furniture together with foul epoxy in factories which no one understands. These sweatpant women lazily press buttons on phones, and smile as if they are on their way to meet boyfriends, or controversially affectionate Dobermans, or vodka tonics."

"These candies can plug the holes where her soul leaks out, one man at a time, one car, one sofa cushion. Clouds and blue sky shine out of her holes. I see vistas where there was once a child."

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a funny, fascinating and enlightening look at the city of Portland, Oregon, through a series of autobiographical sketches. As a lifelong resident, I've seen plenty of Portland's weirdness but Jennifer Robin presents it from angles I've never considered before. What's more, she writes in a high-energy voice that she sustains throughout and conveys the people and places in colorful detail. The sketches are highly readable and I really got a sense of a city within the city by the time I finished the book. Any city has its weirdness though, and these stories might help you see some of that weirdness wherever you happen to call home.

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

How had I not heard about her or this book before? It's wild, it's manic, it's gorgeous and gritty. It's a spiritual sequel to The Least Cricket of the Evening, but with shorter passages and more drugs. I think it goes on about 20% too long (at least) and could use a bit less of the Trimet/MAX/bus observations, but after being in Portland for two days I understand the city and her writings a lot more. People on buses here are freaky. Anyway, this is a 9/10. This is an amazing book, but should be read in many sittings and returned to with time to rest.

[Alec Rigdon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected this book to be a lot more quirky and bizarre but it actually spun into a list of repetitious drug addicts that the author simply watches, sometimes with amusement. While there were moments of poetic narration, most of the stories here were full of pretentious sounding philosophies that might be trying a bit hard.

[Linda Rand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes. This book. It is so compulsively readable that I was transfixed for 150 pages before life insisted that I move about in the world, to do the things that one must do in a day. But even while I was driving, I found myself furtively reading snippets at red lights...that is how mesmerizing it is to float in the cerebral world of Jennifer Robin. She sees those who most people do not want to see, bears witness to life uncensored, and while immersed in those pages I felt an absence of loneliness and wore a giddy grin.

[Isabella · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I understand the author’s need to describe people and experiences, it comes off as rude and judgmental. It seemed like all they wanted to do was stare at people and thoroughly describe at how these “tweakers” and “junkies” look like. The author dehumanizes these people through their vivid descriptions. I also thought her metaphors were hard to follow and seemed unnecessary. At some points I thought they were trying too hard and it turned me off from the story. I appreciate the honesty and stories but it was more sad than anything.

[Doug Brunell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to enjoy this book. Feral House puts out some great reads, and I was thinking this would be one of them. However, it just did not do much for me. Jennifer Robin's observations of people primarily in Portland are at times amusing, but overall it just amounts to surface revelations about these people and her life . . . and those revelations are either surmised or uninteresting. Perhaps I would have liked this if I were 20, or still wishing I were.

[Karim · Rating 2 out of 5]

A menagerie of (short) stories told by a hippie-turned goth writer detailing her life and experiences in 90s Portland. Its a formula that doesn't really capture my attention. Not the book for me, most of the stories about coke heads abs tweakers kinda feels forced.

Not a fan of this one.

[Rita Daley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have read this book several times---I live in the Portland, OR area and take public transit so I related to her transit stories-----a talented writer and I'll read anything that she writes! She has certainly led an interesting life, which is a Chinese curse, for some reason . . . !

[Kevin McCabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve always been fond of first person present racing for immediacy. I also like humane portraits drawn from life. Like the Beats, this book mixes the two and infuses the flying prose with poetry. But, unlike the misogyny that characterized the Beats, this is a vibrant female voice.

[Stephen Melkanos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true showcase of the author's tremendous gift for description. Even at her most esoteric, puts you right in the moment.