After the ceremony you were forced to carry a huge sign around the block, dragging tin cans and telling the whole world you were hitched. All of downtown was in on the joke, and people would honk at you, wave and shout. You looked like an idiot, but everyone smiled and waved and loved you.
The Church of Elvis is no more. But no sweat. Enter Reverend Charles Edward Linville and his Our Lady of Eternal Combustion Church, at 1737 SE Miller Street in the Sellwood neighborhood. Phone: 503-232-3504.
There, the Reverend Chuck runs "Jiffy-Marr." With the promise: "Get legally married in ten minutes or less or your money back!"
You can't miss the place. In 1996 several hundred Santa Clauses stood in line, waiting to pass through the metal detector and drink shots of whiskey for breakfast. Above the front door is a painting of Reverend Bill, the resident black Labrador retriever, who's also a registered Universal Life Minister who can perform your marriage.
Parked in the driveway are Reverend Chuck's cars. They include a 1973 Ford Torino, covered in a zillion things that suggest danger and painted with yellow and black warning stripes. There're rifle shells. Busted eyeglasses. A time clock. Broken pieces of mirror. Danger and warning signs. Plus there are dead fish and deer skeletons dug up by Reverend Bill. And there's countless rubber nipples from baby bottles. "People can't resist these," Reverend Chuck says. "You'll see guys in business suits sneak over just to tweak a nipple when nobody's looking." The car's theme is "Things That Can Get You in Trouble." The seats are covered in bobcat fur, with the taxidermied heads still attached.
The Reverend's second car, his "Jesus Chrysler," is a Chrysler Newport Royale, crusted with a bah-zillion rusted doorknobs. Shotgun shells. Clocks. A rusted metal model of the Golden Gate Bridge runs the length of the roof. Next to it is a turbine vent painted and mosaicked with jewels and mirrors until it's a huge crown. The hood's covered with elegant gold-flocked wallpaper. The windshield is topped with a flashing back-lit acrylic sculpture of Christ's face. "People describe it as a nightmare. I wanted to use a lot of sharp pointy things so if people tried to steal parts, they'd bleed for it." Up front, he's hung sleigh bells.
His first art car was a 1967 Chevy Bel Air that he bought for $200 after moving to Portland from Los Angeles in 1983. One of his first jobs here was at the Oregon Humane Society on NE Columbia Boulevard. "I never had to kill anything," he says. But on swing shift he did have to load the incinerator. "At first, you'd handle the animals very reverently, very gently and tenderly, but eventually you end up hard-balling the kittens against the back wall of the incinerator. Summer was the worst. It was cat season, and we'd always have a big stack of more cats than we could burn."
At the same time, Reverend Chuck was sneaking cats and kittens home to his apartment that didn't allow pets. He was running his own ads and finding owners for animals past their sell-by expiration dates. Even the French poodles with bad haircuts. He says, "I brought home a lot of dogs I was too embarrassed to walk in the daylight."
Like everybody, one day he accidentally left a sack lunch on top of his car when he drove to work. That whole commute, people laughed and pointed. After that, he glued a coffee cup to the car roof. And always, people pointed and waved and laughed, trying to get his attention. After that, he glued a coffeemaker, then a waffle iron, then a whole breakfast to his car.
"You've heard of Continental Kits?" he says. "I call this a 'Continental Breakfast Kit.'"
Eventually, the breakfast included real Hostess Twinkies, still wrapped but glued to the car. "I've found a Twinkie will last up to a year if the package isn't breached. And when our neighborhood has an ant problem, they're almost never on the Twinkies."
Since then, he says, "Me? I just love to stick crap on cars."
He uses only 100 percent silicone glue. GE and Dap brands are good. Sometimes he drills the car body and bolts things, but in Oregon that means leaks and mildew. "I've caulked the hell out of it, and I still get that delightful basement smell." When it comes to cleaning all those toys and appliances and bones and whatnot, well... "If you look close enough, you see—I don't. This is Oregon," he says. "Let the sky wash them!" Besides, he loves the different "mutations" each kind of plastic baby head or rubber nipple or crucifix goes through—oozing white crud or cracking—when exposed to years of auto exhaust and weather.
The upside is, "Most people I've talked to with art cars agree: You can get away with more with these cars than you can with a normal car. You can run stoplights. You can park across an intersection. When you reach a four-way stop, hardly anyone ever goes before you."
The downside includes: "Everybody wants to touch and wiggle things." They break off the trophy figures of little gold and silver people bowling, playing baseball, shooting, golfing. "Ninety-nine percent of the reactions are positive, but every once in a while you get a screamer who says, 'I bet that car has AIDS!'" He says, "You can't have a thin skin if you're going to drive these things. You have to expect some vandalism."
Another issue is the bees and hornets attracted to the colors and shiny mirrors so bright they might be a flower garden.
And crows. Chuck has a selection of wild animal lure tapes he got from a hunting store—wild pigs mating, coyotes, crows fighting, bobcats in heat—and he plays them over loudspeakers mounted outside each car. When he plays the crows tape, a flock of crows appears and follows the car like a noisy dark cloud. "I love the speakers," he says, "because you're mutating the environment from two blocks away." If you play the tape called "Red Fox in Distress," every dog in the area barks.
Living in Portland, this sort of acting out just seems natural. The whole city, he says, has a "small man complex."
Adding, "Portland makes up for its small size with its loud and obnoxious behavior."
Instead of animal tapes, he'll play bedwetting hypnosis records from the 1950s: ear-splitting recorded voices that tell every car in the parking lot or freeway, "We love you. We need you. If you wake up and have to go to the bathroom, you'll get up and come back to a nice, clean bed— and then we'll love you even more..."
At Christmas he blares mixes of bad Christmas music and calls it "drive-by caroling." Still, all this fucks with Chuck's own sense of reality. "Now when I hear crows, I think: 'Are those real crows?' When I hear a siren, I think: 'Is that a real cop or just someone like me?'"
Petroliana
Glenn Zirkle meant well. His idea was to find one old-time gasoline pump and restore it as a gift for his boss, Dick Dyke, at WSCO Petroleum. In 1982 he found Ins pump. In 1985 he found another. Since then, his collection of "Petroliana" has pretty much taken over the corporate offices at 2929 NW Twenty-ninth Avenue.
Now called the Historical Museum of Early Oil Days, it has at least one of everything you could possibly remember.
Glenn walks you through the earliest pumps, the "blind fuelers" of the 1910s, then the "visibles" of the 1910s through the 1920s. The earliest visible is a Wayne Pump model 492 "Roman or Greek Column pump" built to look like a fluted white column. It's fancy as hell, but any repairs meant rebuilding the whole thing—including the leather gaskets.