Fugatives & Refugees

(a postcard from 1989)

It's August in the Swan Island shipyards, and I'm exploring the inside of an old cruise ship while it sits in dry dock.

The ship is the S.S. Monterey, a forgotten passenger liner. She's been mothballed in the Alameda section of San Francisco Bay since the 1960s, until the Matson Lines towed her to Portland for hull work. They'll do just enough work in the United States to allow her to be registered here, then tow her around the world to Finland, where she'll be gutted and refitted for luxury cruises to Hawaii.

The man showing me around is a marine architect named Mark. I met him at a potluck, and Mark told me about living aboard the ship while it was moored at the seawall along NW Front Avenue, waiting for its turn in dry dock. Without fuel or passengers, he says, the ship rides high in the water—so high that when anything from a barge to a canoe goes past, the towering ship will rock from side to side. The white hull is streaked with rust and bird shit, and the staterooms inside are hot and dusty.

As the ship rocks, Mark says, doors swing open and shut. When she was mothballed, china was left on tables in the dining room. Pots and pans were left on the stoves. Now, these things slip and fall to the floor in the middle of the night when Mark's the only person aboard. He sleeps in the ship's old nursery, where murals of Babar the Elephant dance around the walls. He keeps the nursery doors locked. There's no power aboard the ship, so he uses a flashlight to get down the pitch-black passageways to shit outside, in a chemical toilet installed near the faded shuffleboard outlines on deck.

By August this massive hulk of iron and steel has been soaking up heat all summer. She never cools down, and the temperature inside bakes a crust of dried sweat and dust on your skin.

The marine architect, Mark, he thinks I love old ships enough to sleep with him. This is capital-NOT going to happen, but Mark leads me through the security gates and into the huge floating dry dock. He tells me about his viral load, the amount of HIV in his bloodstream, and says how he's nicknamed his last two white blood cells "Huey and Dewey." He's twenty-something. He looks healthy.

We crouch underneath the ship, next to the wooden keel blocks that balance the gigantic baking-hot hull above us. Mark winks and asks if I want to see the "ship's balls."

Instead of an answer, I ask about the huge fans and sheets of plastic that hang inside the ship. Mark says it's asbestos containment and removal. The air is hazy with floating strands. The gray dust coats portholes and stairway railings.

In the ship's ballroom little tables and chairs stand around the edges of a wooden dance floor, warped and buckled into waves from the heat. Planters around the room hold the papery dried stalks and leaves of a tropical jungle, real plants mummified by decades of California summers and rooted dead in potting soil dry as talcum powder. The floor is crunchy with broken china and wine glasses. In the ship's big stainless steel kitchens, the saucepans are streaked with food at least thirty years old. With flashlights we explore the ship's theater and find an upright piano lying on its back.

Up on the bridge Mark shows me the ship's balls. These are two spheres of cast iron that flank the compass. They counteract the magnetic pull of the ship's mass, forward and aft.

In an empty stateroom Mark says that when the ship gets to Finland everything inside will be trashed. The china and furniture and carpet and framed hotelish paintings. The bedspreads and sheets and towels. Mark with his two white blood cells flops down on a dusty bed. The stateroom baking hot, it's the honeymoon suite. The dust is asbestos. In a couple days, Mark will ride his huge dead ship around the world. A rusted hulk getting towed by a tugboat. Without power or fresh water. Alone with just Huey and Dewey.

Flopped there on the honeymoon bed, Mark says if I want anything I should just, you know, take it.

Instead of Mark, I take a shower curtain and a wool blanket, both of them decorated with the Monterey's crest: seven stars circling the letter M.

I slept with that blanket for years.