Today we're waiting for a man to die of AIDS while his mother sits beside his bed, holding his hand and singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," again and again. It was his favorite song when he was a boy, she says. Now he's just bones and body hair, curled on his side under a thin knit blanket. A pump injects him with morphine every few seconds. His face has the slack look, yellow and dried, that means this is our last trip to the hospital.
The Mom is from Minnesota—I think. Maybe Montana. It's been my experience that nobody dies like in the movies. No matter how sick they look, they're waiting for you to leave. Around midnight, when I finally take his mom back to her Travelodge on E Burnside Street, when he's alt alone, then her son will die.
For now she sings "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," over and over until it doesn't make any sense. Until the words turn into a mantra. A bird's song. Just sounds without meaning. I look at my watch.
It's then the yelling starts. The rant about spies and niggers and fags and cunts. It's a man's voice, huge and hoarse, shouting from some room nearby.
A nurse comes into the room to explain. The shouting man has taken a drug overdose, they really can't sedate him because they have no idea what drugs he's already taken. The nurse says the man's in restraints, down the hall, but we're all going to have to tolerate his shouting until he wears himself out.
Still, the man's shouting about gooks and kikes.
With each shout the dying son jerks a little, winces, and his mother stops singing. After a little while, a few automatic injections of morphine, the man's still shouting about demons and devils, and the Mom picks up her purse. She gets to her feet.
She goes to the door, and I follow.
She's giving up, I figure, heading back to the motel. To the airport. To Minnesota.
As we're going down the hospital hallway, the yelling gets louder, closer, until we're right outside the man's room. The door's half open, and inside is a curtain pulled shut around a hospital bed. The Mom goes in. She goes through the slit in the curtain.
The man's shouting, calling her a cunt. Telling her to get out.
I go to look, and the man's naked in bed, his hands and ankles buckled to the chrome bed rails with leather straps. He's huge, filling the whole mattress, and wrestles against the leather straps until every muscle pops up, huge with blood and veins, smooth with tattoos of snakes and women in bright red and blue. His face flush, he yells for the "fucking" nurse. She should "fucking get in here." His hands and ankles strapped down, he twists and fights. The way a fish arches and flops on hot sand. The inside of each arm is poked with IV needles. The skin scabbed from old injections.
The Mom sets her purse on the edge of his mattress. She says, "What pretty tattoos."
I remember that because it's the only thing she said. Then she takes a tissue out of her purse, an old, crumpled tissue.
You can't tell anyone about a naked man without getting to his penis and balls. They're the only part of him not fighting. And not covered with tattoos. His genitals are just red, wadded flesh in the nest of his black pubic hair.
At this point, I've been volunteering around hospitals since I was fourteen. Where I grew up, you had to perform several hundred hours of volunteer work to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. About the only place to do this was Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Fourteen years old and I was cleaning delivery rooms. No rubber gloves, and I'm tossing out afterbirths. Washing coagulated blood out of stainless steel pans, I loved it. My other job in the hospital was dusting shelves in the pharmacy. A few years down the road and this would've been my dream job—me alone with this smorgasbord of painkillers—but for now, it was beyond boring.
Me, I thought I'd seen everything.
Here and now, the Mom uses the tissue from her purse to lift the man's limp penis. It's about the size of a boneless thumb. She lifts it straight up and lets it flop back down. The man's balls are cupped between his hairy thighs. He squirms to get away from her, but he can't.
Both of us standing inside the closed curtain, I don't stop her. My job is just to drive her around. And wait. I look at my watch, again.
The man's red-faced and shouting about the fucking devils. The demons are touching him. He's screaming for help.
The Mom, her hand puts the tissue back into her purse. And when her hand comes out, it's holding a baby pin.
The man's screaming. He's screaming, "Fuck. Cunt. Nigger. Fag."
Again and again until it doesn't make any sense. Until the words turn into a mantra. A bird's song. Just sounds without meaning. I look at my watch.
And the Mom clicks the pin open.
The door to the room is half closed. It's hospital policy not to close the door to a patient's room all the way. Everyone on the third floor can hear the man, but no one's listening.
The Mom drives the needle into the man's thigh.
She sticks the needle in, and the man bellows. He squeals until his screams break into sobs. She stabs again, and he's sobbing and begging her to stop. He's sobbing until he's quiet.
By then I'm standing at the edge of the bed. I'm leaning in, holding my breath. We don't know this yet, but in that other room the mother's son is already dead.
Haunts: Where to Rub Elbows with the Dead
From ghost stories to cold spots, the dead seem to linger among the living in Portland. Here are sixteen local opportunities to look up old friends.
1. Northwest Paranormal Investigations
Bob and Renee Chamberlain have been bitten, spit on, bruised, and flipped off—all by ghosts.
As the founders of Northwest Paranormal Investigations, that's just part of their job while videotaping and audio recording, documenting and protecting the spirits and cemeteries around the Portland area.
"Ten years ago," Bob says, "we'd never given the paranormal a second thought—never." Back then, they'd just built a new house and cared for Renee's mother as she died of cancer. But after she died, they'd still hear her cough in the house. They'd hear the dead woman stacking pans in the kitchen. They'd smell her cigarettes. Lights started turning on and off. Their pit bull, Titan, would sit, staring at her photo on the wall.
"We're sane people," Renee says. "But at first I didn't think I was. I thought I was just grieving over my mom."
The toilet tissue would unroll in a heap on the floor. The toilet lid would slam shut, and the toilet would flush. A small statue of a rocking horse would move around the living room. Their two kids heard it all, but no one in the family mentioned it to each other until Renee met with two visiting writers, in town on a book tour, who specialized in the paranormal.
Now they know the difference between a "partial apparition" and a "full apparition." They've put together a group of ghost hunters with chapters in Portland, Saint Helens, and Oregon City. They spend their evenings in places like the Klondike, a haunted hotel and restaurant in downtown Saint Helens, where Bob videotaped a stream of flying "spirit orbs," glowing balls of light that hover and veer down the hallways and around the camera like a "glowing school of fish." On a recent trip they led a film crew from the Fox network to the site of Wellington, Washington, where the whole town was wiped out in a 1920s landslide. There, spirit orbs are visible to the naked eye, and a woman's voice calls to you in broad daylight.
"They came out of there blubbering idiots," Bob says. "They were so in awe."
Bob is a big man, handsome with a square jaw. Renee is pretty, with blond hair piled on her head. Locally, they've found proof of hauntings at the Pittock Mansion in Portland's West Hills. The John McLoughlin House in Oregon City. And in the downtown tunnel system. The Little Church in Sellwood, near the entrance to Oakes Amusement Park, has a "steady flow of orbs going inside every evening," according to Bob. Renee and Bob say that something very basic about the Portland area, something organic, possibly the soil, allows spirits to manifest there more easily.
Before joining the Chamberlains for a meeting or outing with Northwest Paranormal Investigations, here are a few th
ings to know:
"Spirits are always here for a reason," Bob says. "Either they have unfinished business. Or they don't know they're dead. Or they're pranksters."
He adds, "Those spirits feed off of you. If you're an angry person, that's what you'll get. If you're happy-go-lucky, you'll get that."
The more open-minded you are, the more emotionally sensitive, the more you'll experience. Spirit activity is more likely during a full or new moon, or two to three days before an electrical storm.
Membership dues are $2.50 per month, and the Chamberlains hate the term ghostbusters. To contact them, go to www.northwestparanormal.freehomepage.com.
"We meet more people who believe than skeptics," Bob says, "but even the most intelligent people have seen things they can't explain."
The group also locates and maintains historic cemeteries and patrols them on Halloween to prevent vandalism.
Before Renee's mother died, Bob had become so obsessed about death that he couldn't sleep. Now that fear is gone, for the whole family. "There's something out there other than just dying and staying where you're put," he says. "It may sound morbid, but I actually look forward to what I'll see on the other side."
The Chamberlains have moved several times, but Renee's mother is still with them. "People think spiritual entities are confined to one area," Renee says, "but they're wrong."
Now, when the rocking horse statue moves, Renee just moves it back, saying, "Mom, I like the rocking horse right here. Now, don't move it again!"
2. The Portland Memorial
It looks like an apartment building rising above SE Bybee Street, just before Bybee curves to merge with SE Thirteenth Avenue. A combination of towering and sprawling wings, built in Victorian, Art Deco, and Spanish styles, it houses more than 58,000 residents with room for another 120,000. It's a 3.5-acre city within the city. A city of the dead. Started in 1901, the Portland Memorial has expanded into a chilly, carpeted maze of marble, concrete, bronze, and brass. You'll find Tiffany stained-glass windows, Carrara marble statues and fountains. Overstuffed sofas and chairs sit in little groupings. Stairways wind up and down. The long vaults link together to make vistas that seem to stretch forever.
Within ten minutes you'll be confused and lost. After fifteen minutes you'll panic. But while you're hunting for the way out, look for the crypt of Mayo Methot, Humphrey Bogart's first wife. After she died in 1951, a dozen roses arrived here every week for decades. Also, look for the Rae Room, the memorial's biggest crypt. Lined with stained glass, the vault holds two freestanding sar-cophaguses and is opened only one day each year. The story is, George Rae married his maid, Elizabeth, twenty-six years his junior, so no family members will visit except on Memorial Day.
And, yes, this is the mausoleum I used as the basis for my second novel, Survivor. Part of the book I even wrote here, but the air is freezing and your fingers get stiff, fast. The Portland Cacophony Society (portland. cacophony, org) occasionally hosts outings to explore the labyrinth. On a rainy day it's a good place to walk, tracing the history of Portland's pioneer families. Or maybe just sit and read a spooky book, surrounded by the dead, in a huge window that looks over the black swamp of Oakes Bottom, toward the spinning colored lights of the amusement park.
The Portland Memorial is at SE Fourteenth Avenue and Bybee Street. For hours, call 503-236-4141.
3. Mount Gleall Castle
In 1892 pioneer Charles H. Piggott set out to build a castle "in which no two rooms would be alike and in which there would be no angles or straight lines." To name it, he combined the first two letters of each of his children's first names: Gladys, Earl, and Lloyd. Using bricks from the brickyard he owned on Sandy Boulevard, he built his castle at 2591 SW Buckingham Avenue, on the hillside south of Portland State University. A year later, in 1893, Piggott lost his fortune and had to sell his dream home.
In the hundred-plus years since then, the castle has had almost as many residents. In the 1960s it was available as a fantasy rental, and Portland natives say the Grateful Dead crashed there long enough to give Piggott s castle the nickname "the Dead Castle." People also say Piggott's ghost has never left the turreted, brick castle, now painted white, with a sauna installed in the tower.
One explanation is the system of tin tubes that Piggott installed as an intercom system throughout the house. Supposedly, the system picks up noise from downtown and voices from far rooms, amplifies them, and carries them around the house. The intercom was removed in the 1920s, but the reports of strange noises and voices continue.
4. Hoodoo Antiques
Nobody was more surprised than Mike Eadie, owner of Hoodoo Antiques, when people told him that a woman was lurking inside his shop late at night. When it was closed and locked, the alarms were set, and Mike was home with his wife, you could look in through the big display windows and see a woman in a long dress and a bonnet standing near the back of the shop.
Years ago, Eadie's mother-in-law, Ellen Wellborn, had an artist's studio in the Erickson s Saloon building nearby,
once a major combination of gambling hall, beer parlor, and whorehouse, boasting the longest bar in the world. In what was once a prostitutes crib, Ellen found a lovely pencil portrait tucked between the clapboards of the wall. The picture is oval, about six by four inches, and shows a young woman wearing a bonnet and a typical 1860s dark dress.
Ellen gave it to Mike, who's hung the small picture in his store, just inside the front door, but not so you can see it from the street. Even inside, unless you know where to look, you'd never notice it.
Since then, night after night, walking tours pass the shop and see someone inside. They insist she's not a reflection, the woman in a long dress and bonnet, standing in the shadows near the back of the store. Still, the motion detectors don't trip. And nothing is ever taken.
Hoodoo Antiques is at 122 NW Couch Street.
5. Bagdad Theater
There are parts of the Bagdad Theater at 3702 SE Hawthorne Boulevard that the employees just don't go into.
Built by Universal Studios as a movie palace in 1927, the theater offered live vaudeville acts until the 1940s. Today it's a combination beer pub and movie theater. Behind the huge movie screen is a separate theater, closed since the 1970s, that may someday become condominiums and a rooftop bar. But right now, it's supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a movie projectionist who hanged himself behind the screen on Christmas Eve decades ago.
That story is decades old. Whenever the auditorium's cantankerous lighting system acts up, they've always blamed the suicide.
According to theater manager Jason McEllrath, someone hung a cardiopulmonary resuscitation dummy behind the screen. They hung it years ago, and the dusty, spooky thing still dangles back there, ready to scare the uninitiated.
The theater basements are another story. The front one, along SE Hawthorne, is pretty ordinary. However, the back basements under the stage and backstage... "That's just plain scary," Jason says. "There's no lights, and it's full of creepy junk. Doors that go nowhere. We just don't go down there."
Besides the unexplained lights flickering off and on, employees also report cold spots and chilly drafts in rooms with no ventilation.
6. North Portland Library
A few years ago, this former Carnegie library at 512 N Killingsworth Street was renovated and security cameras were installed throughout. Every few seconds the view from a different one of the cameras appears on the video monitor behind the front desk. Soon after renovation, librarians watching the monitor saw an old man seated alone in the enormous second-floor meeting hall. The image only appears for a few seconds before the system cycles to the view from the next camera, but it shows enough to panic the staff. Still, every time they stampede upstairs to find the trespasser, they find the meeting room locked and empty.
Supposedly, the camera still shows the old man upstairs, but only occasionally, despite an increased effort to keep the room locked.
7. Cathedral Park
This pa
rk gets its name from the towering gothic arches that carry the Saint John's Bridge overhead. These arches march through the park, creating a sort-of cathedral effect. It's a wide-open park of lawns and play equipment, but not long ago it was a wasteland of briar thickets and hobo jungles, warehouses, and old wharves.
For most of the twentieth century local kids earned summer money by picking strawberries, raspberries, and boysenberries on outlying farms. These kids would wait, early in the morning, on street corners where the "Berry Buses" would pick them up. The buses took them to work and brought them home.
In the 1930s a young girl was kidnapped while waiting for the Berry Bus in North Portland. According to local legend, she was taken to the bushes below the north end of the Saint John's Bridge, tortured, and killed. Even now that Cathedral Park is a nice garden and hosts a summer jazz festival, nearby residents say you can still hear that one girl screaming in the park on warm summer nights.
8. Sauvie Island
Once called Wappato Island, this island between the Columbia River, the Willamette River, and the Multnomah Channel was home to a village of some fifty thousand members of the Multnomah tribe. Even before Portland was founded, smallpox brought by early explorers had left the island a deserted ruin of rotting huts and scarred survivors.
Today you can still find arrowheads scattered along the Columbia River beaches. Early morning joggers and late-evening walkers also report almost identical encounters with a naked Multnomah youth. The adolescent boy walks along the waterline and doesn't seem aware of anything except the river and the sand.
More recently, so many cremated nudists have been spread on "clothing optional" Collins Beach that most level areas above the tide line are layered in the telltale crunchy white grit of crushed bone.
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