From under the mannequins skirt, the nurse pulls a mass of pink gelatin smeared with tomato ketchup. She throws it at the tour and the dripping mess hits a screaming girl, sticking to her dress for a moment before it slides to the floor. The lights go out, and the rope pulls the tour group down another tunnel, around another corner.
There, a drunk woman in a housedress holds a glass of whiskey and yells, "But I'm a good mother! I love my baby! God, where is my baby?" Behind her a baby doll turns slowly inside a microwave oven.
Down tunnel after tunnel the rope pulls you past scenes of incest and torture until the last tunnel. There in the pitch dark, a crowd of strangers rush the tour group, groping their breasts and genitals.
The girl who got hit with the fake abortion, that was Ina from the previous chapter, and she's still bitter because the stain never came out. Me, I'm bitter because I didn't get groped.
Did I mention the big legal waiver everybody signed?
* * *
Miles more historically accurate—and scads less dramatic—the shanghai tunnel tour offered by Michael Jones won't leave you with so many stains and bruises. Currently operating through the basement of Hobo's bar and restaurant, 120 NW Third Avenue, Michael's tour has been more than forty years in the making. When he was seven years old, Michael used to visit a man called Dewey Kirkpatrick, the father of Michael's foster brother. Dewey lived in the Lenox Hotel on SW Third Avenue. There, Michael would hound the old men in the lobby for stories about the history of Portland.
One Sunday morning he was pestering the hotel residents with his relentless questions about Portland history. "I'd driven everyone out of the place with my questions except for one man who never, ever talked to me," Michael says. "I called him Captain Grump."
With his wrinkles and his scowl, Captain Grump looked at the little boy. Michael remembers, "He said, 'If you really want to know about the history of Portland, you have to go underground.'"
The old man led the boy down SW Third Avenue to the South Auditorium Urban Renewal District, where a building was being demolished with no barricades or chain-link fencing around it. Captain Grump led Michael down into the basement, to a trapdoor, then down a ladder to an old door. Michael remembers it as solid steel, heavy as the door to a bank vault. It's only now he realizes it was just an oak door covered in tin.
Behind the door was nothing but cold blackness. Michael says, "He said, 'You go through that door,' and he gave me a box of matches."
Captain Grump said, "You go straight and don't make any turns, and you'll get to the waterfront." Then he closed the door, saying, "See ya later, kid."
These were the first matches Michael had ever handled. One, then two, then three matches failed in the dark before he panicked and ran screaming out the door, crashing into Captain Grump.
Dewey Kirkpatrick was furious Michael had left the hotel with a stranger, and he agreed that if the boy would stay off the dangerous city streets, Dewey would help him explore the tunnel system. The tunnels were no longer contiguous, so to give Michael access to different sections, Dewey would move from hotel to hotel every week. "He'd sneak me past the desk clerk to get me into the underground," Michael says. But Dewey never explored the tunnels. "He had a bad leg and walked with a cane. He didn't go with me." Sometimes the hotel elevator went to the basement, sometimes they took the stairs, but they'd find some way into the tunnels that connected to each hotel. Michael went alone, and Dewey felt safe knowing the kid was off the streets.
According to Michael, the Broadway Theater, the Paramount, and the Orpheum all had connections to the tunnel system. "In the flood of 1996 and '97," he says, "a lot of places that thought they had no connections to the waterfront found out otherwise."
Since he was seven, Michael Jones has been exploring and excavating his five-mile network of shanghai tunnels. Now he leads tours to show them off. On a recent tour the Chinese Americans' Citizens Alliance sent eleven members through the tunnels and they told Jones, "Please don't change what you're doing—this is exactly the way it was."
Michael says other tourists did ask for a small modification. He says, "There were several of the old Chinese Americans who took the tour and said, 'I can feel the spirits. This place must be cleansed.'"
Michael has heard the voices of phantom men and women. He's seen only two spiders in the forty-plus years he's explored under Portland. And one cockroach, but it was a foot long, and he trapped it under a bucket because he knew no one would believe him. "It had to have come off a ship from overseas," he says. "No way was this thing locally grown."
He talks about shanghai prisoners who were locked in holding cells, left standing in water. The Ku Klux Klan met here. So did the immigrant Chinese they persecuted. Ask Michael about Nina, a prostitute who was killed for talking too much about the underground. Also ask him about cannibalism and the tunnel speakeasies of Prohibition.
During volunteer work parties every Wednesday night, members of Northwest Paranormal Investigations help Michael restore the tunnels, and they say the underground is the most haunted place in Oregon. Under the streets of Portland they say the spirit of a woman roams, searching for her kidnapped daughter. Other spirits still search for their beloved menfolk who were drugged and shanghaied onto sailing ships, never to be seen again. Still more wandering spirits died in the tunnel system and are still looking for their way out.
To see for yourself, put on some sturdy shoes and get ready to walk through the miles of low ceilings, broken furniture, and orphaned boots. You can contact Michael Jones at 503-622-4798, e-mail shanghaitunnels@onemain. com. Or write to the Cascade Geographic Society, P.O. Box 398, Rhododendron, OR 97049.
(a postcard from 2000)
Ten days before the end of the millennium, nobody I know has plans to celebrate. We've all stockpiled bottled water and canned tuna. As Y2K and the threat of global chaos gets closer—all those computers crashing—it seems a shame that everybody's staying home to guard their Sterno for New Year's Eve.
That day, an ad in the newspaper says the Bagdad Theater is still available. The Bagdad is an Arabian-style movie palace leftover from the 1920s. The theater has a print of the movie Fight Club. This is too much to resist.
Our idea is to hire a staging company to build a dance floor below the movie screen. The Bagdad is huge inside, with balconies and red-velvet seats, spooky alcoves, and fountains in the lobby. It's been restored and converted into a theater-slash-restaurant. We can hire a lighting company. Turn the place into a night club. Make it a costume party with everyone coming as their favorite person from the past century. Serve dinner to some five hundred people and have a special showing of the movie. We'd leave dozens of disposable cameras on every table so people could document the night. Dinner, dancing, prizes, it seems perfect.
We buy several thousand glowsticks to hand out, just in case. We blow up thousands of balloons, including thirty-five silver monsters, big as small cars. The staging company installs bubble-blowing machines. Special-effects lighting. The DJ is booked. The invitations go out, and we're set.
On the last day of the twentieth century, I'm on the sidewalk with a long pole, changing the marquee to read "Special Secret Party Here Tonight," and an old woman in a cloth coat asks if Fight Club has ended its run.
And I'm thinking, In your dreams. I'm thinking, Not your cup of tea, lady?
She's tiny in her coat and old-lady low heels, and she says, "I've heard very good things about it. I was really wanting to see it."
This won't be my last surprise of the century.
Some things you can't anticipate. When the huge silver balloons bounce out of the balcony, they land in everyone's dinner. From then on, they're lasagna and salad-covered blimps, bouncing against everyone, picking up and smearing food on everything they touch. Bottles and wineglasses fall and break, and the moment a six-foot silver balloon covered with food lands in the broken glass—boom—chicken and tomato sauce fly everywhere.
My relatives leave, quickly
and politely, before midnight. This is about the same time a group of airline flight attendants rip off their uniforms on the dance floor and starting licking each other's bare chests.
A few minutes before midnight, our special clock for the occasion, it stops.
All of this I find out secondhand. All evening, I'm in the lobby welcoming people or saying good night. Famous people get drunk and fight. Gandhi is stalking Ava Gardner. Hirohito is French-kissing Chairman Mao. There's a three-way between Hugh Hefner and Judy Garland and Albert Einstein happening somewhere in the balcony. Somewhere else, Emma Goldman is smoking dope. Then Ray Bolger leaves, weeping her eyes out. Rosie the Riveter is dancing on a table. People appear and disappear, spattered with tomato sauce and laughing. Every wineglass the restaurant owns gets broken. Every votive candle in a glass holder gets broken. On top of all this mayhem, the bubble machines just keep blowing down bubbles. People dance. The movie plays.
After midnight, my first task for the new millennium is to apologize to the restaurant staff. But they say, it's not a problem. They say this is the kind of party they've always hoped someone would throw at the Bagdad.
Instead of regrets, we have tons of good stories and canned tuna. But the dozens of disposable cameras, they've all disappeared. We're left with memories and not a single picture.
Photo Ops: Get Your Picture Snapped at These Landmarks
Just so you have proof you were in Portland... here are some swell local places to use as a backdrop when you say "cheese."
The Bomber
Yes, a World War II B-17 bomber. It's Lacey's Bomber at 13515 SE McLoughlin Boulevard.
The Castle
At the corner of Glen Echo Avenue and SE River Road stand the crumbling ruins of a very swank medieval-style nightclub, complete with towers and battlements.
Giant Candle
As if you could miss it... the world's largest candle is on the north side of Highway 30, at the east end of Scappoose.
Dedicated in 1971, it was renovated in 1997 and its neon flame "burns" night and day.
Harvey the Giant Rabbit
The towering rabbit at Harvey Marine, at 21250 SW Tualatin Valley Highway, started life as a giant gas jockey standing outside a service station until the Columbus Day storm of 1962 blew him over. An expert at fiberglass boat building, Ed Harvey created the rabbit's new head, and according to Portland superstition, waving at the rabbit will save you from a flat tire.
The Naked Bike Race
As if those narrow bike seats don't hurt enough ... At the end of the local bicycle-racing season at the Portland International Raceway, the competitors take a final victory lap—naked. Okay, okay, they do wear shoes and helmets.
Paul Bunyan
He's a giant concrete statue at the intersection of NE Interstate Avenue and N Denver Avenue.
Stonehenge
Built by the railroad tycoon Sam Hill as a memorial to World War I casualties, this is a full-sized concrete replica of the original. Take Interstate 84 east from Portland for about two hours to exit 104. Then turn left, going over the Columbia River to Highway 14. Follow the signs to Stonehenge, a lively place for local pagans during the solstice or eclipses of any kind.
Windmill House
Screw the planning board, the building codes, zoning, and "design review"—it's good to know somebody got to build this giant windmill on their house at SE Ninety-second Avenue and Mill Street.
World's Largest Ten Commandments
It's on SW Dosch Road, just off the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway.
preserving the fringe (a postcard from 2002)
The trouble with the fringe is, it does tend to unravel. By the time you read this, small parts of it will already be obsolete. People don't live forever. Even places disappear.
My first week living in Portland, in 1980,I called my grandmother for her birthday. This is from a pay phone at the Fred Meyer supermarket on Barbur Boulevard, just downhill from my two-bedroom apartment and stoner roommates. My grandmother and I talk until I have no quarters left, and the operator cuts the line. This is midsentence, and I have no money to call and tell her what's happened.
Instead, I go home and fire up the bong. The big party bowl smokes like a bonfire of dope, and my roommates are in the kitchen, cutting up a little block of hash.
There's a knock on the door, and it's the police.
My grandmother has panicked. Portland's the Big City, and she thinks I was mugged on the pay phone. She's called the police and begged them to make sure I'm okay.
It's impossible the cops don't smell our dope, but all they do is tell me to call home. After a scare like that, the party's over.
This spring, twenty-two years later, I'm writing a check for my grandmother's tombstone. A few stomach pains and she's gone. Like the Church of Elvis and the Van Calvin Mannequin Museum, eventually all we have left are the stories.
Any book is just a collection of short stories, and writing this book, I listened to so many people as they revealed their three lives. Mail carrier—anarchist—minister. Dancer— writer—political organizer. Writer—father—elephant keeper.
As Katherine Dunn says, every corner does have a story.
At the corner of NW Vaughn Street and Twenty-eighth Avenue used to stand the world's largest log cabin, built out of old-growth logs, eight feet in diameter. The size of an airplane hangar, it was built for the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905. In 1964 it burned in a mysterious fire. According to Portland architect Bing Sheldon, the 405 freeway was supposed to extend out along the route of Saint Helens Road. The only things stopping it were neighborhood protests and the historic log cabin. "The only reason they didn't move it was that it was so bloody big," Bing says. "The rumor is it was more than likely burned down by the Oregon Department of Transportation."
He says, "That's a bit of urban lore, but there are plenty of people who believe that if ODOT didn't burn it down, then they hired someone to."
At the comer of SW Eighteenth Avenue and Taylor—directly behind the PGE Park Scoreboard—video director Gray Mayo says you can kayak through the storm sewers downtown. By lowering your kayak through a manhole at that spot, you can navigate now buried Tanner Creek all the way to the Willamette River. Looking at the manhole covers, he warns, "The S means human waste. The W means storm water. I'm pretty sure ..."
The most I can ever do is to write things down. To remember them. The details. To honor them in some way. This book is not Portland, Oregon. At best, it's a series of moments with interesting people. This year will take me to England, Scotland, France, Italy, and Spain, plus forty American and Canadian cities, but I always come home to Portland.
If this is love or inertia, I don't know, but my friends are here. All my stuff is here. I moved to Portland in 1980 because it rains a lot. I moved from a desert town called Burbank, Washington, where my grandparents had a small farm. I moved
to Portland because it's dark and wet, and all my friends from high school moved to Seattle. Because I wanted to meet new people. To hear new stories. That's my job now, to assemble and reassemble the stories I hear until I can call them mine.
I got my wish. What I traded my tonsils for.
It only seems right to end this book with one of my favorite stories:
Lady Elaine Peacock was elected the twenty-ninth empress of the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court in 1987.
As beautiful as Dionne Warwick in her prime, Lady Elaine (aka Elwood Johnson) founded "Peacock in the Park," an annual drag show in the Washington Park Amphitheater. It's still held the last Sunday in June, supposedly the driest day of the year in Portland, and attracts a sellout crowd of thousands.
In 1988, when Lady Elaine was to relinquish her crown to a new empress, she and her mother, Audria M. Edwards, did a mother-and-son, song-and-dance production number in matching gowns.
According to Walter Cole (aka Darcelle XV), this was onstage in the Egyptian Ballroom of the Masonic Temple, now part of the art museum at 1219 SW Park Avenue. Ther
e, Walter says Audria collapsed at the end of the number and was rushed to the hospital. She died of a heart attack, while her son was still performing. "It was overwhelming," Walter says. "The atmosphere was totally heavy. We knew she was dead, but Peacock was determined to go on. She lasted right through to the end."
So much of this book isn't part of Portland's official history, but it should be.
Elwood Johnson died of AIDS in 1993, but the Audria M. Edwards Scholarship Fund that he established is still supported by his other legacy, the annual "Peacock in the Park" show. The last Sunday each June, the show still starts at 3:30 p.m.
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