The human rug
Stopped for coffee at Mojo’s and ran into Portland’s own Rug Aplin, named by Willamette Week as Best Balloon Artist Who Doubles As A Human Rug. He had a stylish new rug outfit that he was showing off. He repeatedly refused a chair, insisting that he belongs on the floor, and let me feel the new outfit, although at first I made the faux pas of touching him with my hand, when you are actually supposed to touch him with your feet. (He is a rug, after all!) Apparently this guy legally had his name changed to “Rug” a few years back. I had seen him walking around in my neighborhood a few times, but this was the first time I had met him. One of the guys we were sitting with outside said that they were teasing him the other day about getting a girlfriend and making a couple of throw rugs or bath mats. :^)
I’m a minor fan of the Rug (though my nose isn’t). I’ve known about him since 1990, back when he was Ron the Magician, performing rudimentary slight-of-hand that even children would mock. Back then, he always wore a battered tux and top hat. Last I saw him, he’d moved into a group home near 28th and Stark in PDX, and was moonlighting as a hideous clown and balloon sculptor at Saturday Market. I’ve seen him there with a cigarette dangling between his teeth, trying to produce a rabbit out of inflated rubber. He yells BALLOONS! and kids leap right out of their skin. Occasionally the whole Human Rug thing gets a little creepy around the pretty ladies. He’s got a foot fetish. Anyway, I live in LA now and I kind of miss him. There’s a lot of freaks here, but they seem manufactured, not genuine.