When I asked, "What was so funny?"
They said, "He's following us."
In the article it said how a Fight Club movie might be made, starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. It turns out my friend Sara dated Brad in high school and went to the prom with him. Her husband, Greg, had been his college roommate.
Two years later the movie was filming in Los Angeles, and I went to watch with some friends. My friend Ina met Brad. Most mornings, we ate breakfast at a place called Eat Well in Santa Monica. Our last morning in town, our waiter came to the table. He'd shaved his head the night before, he told us, so he could work as an extra in a movie they were shooting in San Pedro. A movie called, well, you guess.
A year later, in 1999, a friend and I were flying down to Los Angeles to see a rough cut of the film. In the gate area, in Portland, we were waiting to board our flight. Near us was a man wearing a fifties-style brimmed hat, a sort-of fedora with a feather in the hatband. I joked to my friend Mike that he should get a hat just like it. A few minutes later, we end up sitting next to this man in the plane. During the two-hour flight I pull out an emergency pocket card and tell Mike how the director, David Fincher, is having parody pocket cards made for the film. The parody cards would show people fighting for oxygen masks and panicking as their plane crashed.
The man next to us, in the hat, we never talked to him.
Two days later, in Los Angeles, David Fincher is driving me around to the ad agencies that are promoting the film's release. At an agency called Paper, Rock, Scissors, David says I've got to meet the man who designed the movie poster.
They bring him in—and it's the man from the plane, the man in the hat. He and I, we just stand there open-mouthed, staring at each other. Sitting next to me on the flight, he'd overheard me talking about the pocket card but didn't speak up. He thought maybe he'd misunderstood, he didn't think it was possible we'd meet in such a random way.
The Shanghai Tunnels: Go Back in Time by Going Underground
You can't come to Portland and not hear stories about the downtown tunnel system.
Michael Culbertson, the concierge at the Benson Hotel, will tell you how kids used to get into the tunnels through an abandoned building a block off the waterfront in Old Town. Remembering his childhood in the 1940s, he says, "There used to be a whole culture down there. Our favorite place was an old, abandoned Chinese restaurant with beautiful ceramic murals. We fixed it up, and that became our clubhouse."
Adam Knobeloch, an engineer at the Freightliner Corporation on Swan Island, will tell you about a trapdoor in the basement of the old Broadway Theater, and how he'd wander lost underground.
Mark Roe, a local archaeologist, talks about the elaborate ivory opium pipes and tiny carved figures found in the tunnels during downtown urban renewal. The tunnels are littered with single shoes and broken glass, he says. Possibly because the local "crimps" shanghaied sailors and kept them prisoner underground by leaving them with only one shoe so they couldn't escape over the layer of broken bottles.
The term crimp was originally British slang for "agent." Men like Joseph "Bunco" Kelly, Billy Smith, and Larry Sullivan ran boardinghouses where sailors could eat and sleep between voyages. In return, the crimp had the right to book the sailors next job and get a fee from the new ship's captain. When the boardinghouse was empty, these crimps weren't above drugging loggers, cowboys, and miners with knockout drops and selling them as sailors. When no one was around to drug, legend has it, the crimps might sell dead men or even wooden cigar store Indians, wrapped in burlap, to desperate ship captains. To get these "sailors" to the waterfront, crimps dragged them through the tunnels.
Rumored to stretch from the West Hills to the river, the tunnels are also supposed to be the hiding place for hoards of Alaskan gold dust—and the tomb of an occasional treasure hunter who opened the wrong door, looking for that gold, and was instantly buried alive by the loose dirt behind that door.
Local historians even talk about a proposed law from the 1920s that would've required all deformed or sick people to travel about downtown using only the tunnels.
On a recent tunnel tour that started in the basement of the Matador, a bar at 1967 W Burnside Street, several men and women gripped a thick rope after signing a long legal liability waiver. Using the rope, a tour guide wearing a cowboy hat pulled them into the underground dark. Down one tunnel, around a corner, the tour found a nurse in a short-skirted white uniform. Kneeling on the stone floor, she shoved a vacuum cleaner hose between the legs of a mannequin. The vacuum roaring, the nurse screamed, "So, you slut, will you use some birth control the next time? You whore!"
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.