Renee: A Tattoo, Parrot And Talent

The parrot's name is Yalo and he rides around on the shoulder of a lady named Renee, and taken together they are as much a part of Pioneer Square as the underground tours.

The parrot is a salmon-pink cockatoo. The lady used to be a blond knockout, a one-time model and weight lifter.

Of the two, I much prefer the company of Renee Haxby, because she's at least civil.

Yalo, who is Renee's self-appointed protector, hates all men. He is insanely jealous of Renee, extremely possessive.

There are very few secrets in Pioneer Square. For example, it is no secret that Renee Haxby, the weight-lifter/model, has the perfect likeness of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle tattooed on her bottom.

She had it done when she was smitten by a biker from Texas. She sent the biker packing, but the tattoo remained, inescapably engraved on her right buttock. She is very proud of that tattoo, and you don't even have to know her very well if you want a viewing.

Renee is pleasant, upbeat and fun, but she has a darker side. Not long ago she got bounced out of the J & M Cafe when she raised some kind of ruckus. This is no secret, either.

It is also no secret that Renee is one of the hottest ad salespeople in town. She's an independent contractor who concentrates mainly on the Pioneer Square Star.

Because of saleslady Renee's force, drive, cheeriness, vigor and total gregariousness, the Pioneer Square Star had to jump from 12 pages to 20 pages this month. Renee, you see, sold all those ads.

There are few secrets in Pioneer Square (cont.): The way Renee got connected with the Pioneer Square Star is that she had to use the ladies' room in the New Orleans Restaurant, on First Ave.

Two other ladies came in. One stuck out her hand to Renee and said, "My name is Susan Stanley, and I have just bought a newspaper. Would you like to work for me?"

Call it intuitive, whatever, but Stanley's instincts were right on.

Now Renee makes her rounds, sometimes with Yalo on her shoulder, selling ads all over the place. When she started with the Star last fall, it contained 15 ads. Today it is up to 60 ads and climbing. Circulation is 10,000 and about to go to 15,000.

"I went to Thomas Jefferson High School in Kent," Renee was telling me. "I was wild as a kid. I wanted to be a zoologist. My bedroom was always full of snakes, lizards, rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, mice. I also had a pony in my backyard.

"I was a tomboy, too fat, too unruly. It wasn't until the seventh grade that I realized that girls shaved their legs and wore makeup."

Renee went over the wall when she was 17. She said she was tired of being abused by her father. "He started beating me when I was 3," she recalled.

With her bicycle and a tote bag, she took off for Los Angeles. The first thing she did in L.A. was get hit by a car.

She said, "The guy who hit me was so concerned he let me move in with him. I slept on his couch for six months."

By then, she was a beauty, of course, and she had gotten into bodybuilding. She hung out with the Barbarian Brothers, Peter and David Paul, who were big bodybuilders and acted in films.

At one time, she said, she lived platonically with five bodybuilders in L.A. There were film offers. She hung around the muscle beaches.

Actually, she got into bodybuilding in Seattle before she went to L.A. She was into drugs at 16, "because I had to numb myself to be around my family."

Renee finished third in the Northwest Bodybuilding Championships of 1979. She also finished third in the Miss Washington Bodybuilding Championships. She got her picture in local papers, in People magazine, on the covers of bodybuilding magazines and even in the London Daily Telegraph.

"My picture went all over Europe," she said. "Pretty soon I'm being chased by Arabian sheiks, diplomats, teachers, rich people. Crazy!"

She got disgusted with the L.A. scene and came back to enroll at Seattle Community College. "I graduated in law-enforcement courses, and then I gave it up. I didn't want to be a cop."

Still a beauty, she did TV commercials for Fred Meyer, Pay 'n Pak, MTV and Pepsi-Cola. Yalo appeared in one of them.

Because of the weight-lifting epoch, she got into steroids. These did her beauty no good. Her face filled out and her figure suffered. "I got into running a lot," she said with a laugh. "Then I found out I was taking the steroids they give race horses."

Drugs were inevitable. She got in deeper and deeper but, she said, it was Yalo who got her out. When she took drugs, Yalo would register outraged disapproval, flapping his wings, talking, making crying sounds.

Whenever Renee laid out a line of cocaine, Yalo would try to scatter it with his feet or blow it away with his wings. "At one low point, I didn't know if I was going to wake up in the morning," Renee said. "But then I saw Yalo there. And I thought, `If something happens to me, what will happen to Yalo?' "

She began to take long walks in Seattle parks with Yalo on her shoulder. This took quite a while. But Renee quit drugs on her own - cold turkey.

Now she's an ad salesperson. She has a natural knack for it.

"The future?" she said. "I want my agency to keep growing. I want to sell to magazines, and I want the Pioneer Square Star to be something big, something very successful."

Then she was off to sell another ad. She is 29 years old. tattootattoo

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.