A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  Here’s to your risk tolerance. Here’s to your helicopter ride.

  What is the probability a new moon implies an assignation, what is the chance the carousel will be open, what is the likelihood that anything can be assigned a number, what is the probability the young husband will be dead in the morning, what is the chance you’ll assume responsibility for the implications of your utterance, what are the odds you’ll go forth evasive, into fields with the grasses overgrown, what are the odds the word of the day will be visibility, what is the probability that the woman with the dog goes back to an empty home.

  We were scolding, we were being scolded, were we likening fast talkers to bites by annoying insects, were we telling the poison ivy off. Am I approaching senescence. Am I less than once upon a time. Whether or not we have been faithful to the cumulative words we have spoken, were we hoping we could be charitable, were we hoping our words would be statistical irritants when tossing associative logic around.

  Hide then go seek. Your body against my body. The success of poetic conversion is or is not equal to the entertainment quotient of the event x putting your money down.

  THE WOMAN CORRESPONDS TO A PROJECTIVE GEOMETRY, THE WOMAN CORRESPONDS TO THE KNOTS IN HER HAIR

  Sometimes in my dreams I descend four flights without ever touching a stair. Or on pavement I take one step and glide 406 feet, step, then glide again, a periodic walking on air. Outside the picture plane, the figure is moved to tears by a transformation of the object. What properties are invariant under projective mappings. If you put down “bleep” on paper, what part remains from the actual bleep. What parts are preserved if you shrink a heckler or a pear. In the reality plane, I had to scramble to write down a sigh word. At the last second my gamboling is curtailed. The power is out, so there’s no light pollution. Still, in the dark, pulling nine carrots from the earth is a bleeping experience. She learns to bleep by herself while studying knot theory. A bowline knot is like a throat knot, a panic knot is like matted hair. It’s no big deal, this putting two and two together, like transference, like equating a sight line with elephants or bears.

  NOTE. “Assume responsibility for the implications of your utterance” is borrowed from Stanley Cavell.

  (SHE FOR ONE) WORD PROBLEM

  If he pulls the red sled for two miles and she for one, how long will it take to get them home? For there are drifts and there are hills. Use just your words to solve, as the girl would do for birds in the air, birds on the ground. The wind is strong, the house talks back, with loud, such loud house sounds. Shake. Thud. Thud. Crack, shake. Groan. In back of the house, there is a cove. The cove is iced, with snow on top of that, in folds and folds the wind has sown. The ducks are gone, the gulls are gone, small stream where they would sleep or feed, the ice shut down. In cold like this, your breath feels blue. Or you could paint it blue, as you would to show the drifts that shape the snow. They reach a fence and turn. The snow still drifts, the drifts get deep, one hour’s passed. Child hands, child feet, they must be cold. Do you think the math that made this up will find a path to speed them home? Here is the bean soup I made for them. For at least two hours I have kept it warm. More than a bowl for each to eat. So tell me now: have they come back? Boy. Girl. Birds of the air, birds of the ground.

  BIRD AS ALMOST ALGORITHM

  Instead of calling something facile until it becomes facile: magnitude and direction; instead of calling something principled until it becomes principled: words that defy numb(ers); instead of dividing the present into its tense: occupy: breeze multiples; instead of the creed-spackled: a hummingbird; instead of your heartbeat: its heartbeat; instead of shortage narratives: share with the bird: nectar; instead of mistakes unforgivable, mistakes forgivable; instead of trash talk: tune managements; instead of disintegrating voiceprints: ghost feathers; instead of P beware Q: boo at: mutant statistics; instead of an updown wing beat: a figure eight wing beat: instead of jumping to solution (x): hover like the bird (y), siphoning backward to it; instead of “the winner is”: drag and lift measurements; instead of not Black Lives Matter: black lives matter; instead of what a number means to itself: mean like ghost-birds: they be: in ever widening: numbers.

  —For Michael S. Harper, in memoriam

  THE WOMAN FEINTS AT MATHEMATICAL NOTATION

  Let lambda stand for wavelengths of light, earth absorption. Let lambda stand for the way light changes direction, bounces off bodies or bends, in or around objects. Let theta represent the way the woman likes the sound of lambda, bending or bouncing. Let iota mean the way her eyes know numbers as a form of light insurance, underwriting lambda bending or bouncing, underwriting lambda being absorbed. It follows then, idylls of curiosity. It follows, her figuring in a coast equation, with variables signifying dearly departed soils. Convincing the administration to value light insurance feels like convincing the moon it must be proved. The cabinet secretary keeps insisting on a rider for curiosity liability. The woman doesn’t tell him curiosity liability is a fabulous tool.

  Once More to the Beach

  Dave King

  For roughly twelve years in the 1960s and ’70s, a cruise ship rose from the banks of a wetland outside the town of Kodiak, Alaska. White and black and baby blue with orange accents, she might have washed ashore in the tsunami that followed the great Good Friday earthquake of 1964—though that wasn’t the case. Across Mission Road lay a slim arc of stony beach from which a single small deli and the mass of the ship were the only signs of habitation; all else was fir trees and mist, a small, wild promontory covered in conifers and the island coastline diminishing to the east.

  By day the gravel lot surrounding the boat was quiet, but at night it pulsed with the beat of rock music, audible even from the stony beach across the road. In the darkness around the boat’s awninged entrance, couples quarreled or threw up whatever they’d consumed or headed to the beach to neck, and all night long vehicles arrived and departed, parking every whichway. Headlights careened up the unpaved beach road; pickups got forsaken by drivers too blind to drive. And inside the place: patrons of live music on the topmost deck or of the women (plus one transvestite) who charged by the hour in staterooms a flight down, patrons of the dealers, who were never hard to find. Fishermen and cannery workers and God-fearing locals seeking out old friends. Seeking a buzz, seeking a warm body, a party, a blast of ecstatic bass, seeking a fight over something unknowable. Seeking a chance to show off, seeking another round after the town bars had shut. Seeking diversion after weeks at sea with a small crew in close quarters, seeking the sublime or whatever passed for it.

  This was the Beachcombers, one of Alaska’s notorious watering holes at a time when the exultant chaos of the era was compounded by a frontier sensibility not yet in air quotes. (Also by the flush of a boom time: oil and fish.) Down those dim and funky gangways—the Little Bar on the lower deck, staterooms in the middle, and the big boisterous joyous loud dance hall on the promenade deck above—the boat was a haven for wild guys and tough gals and various miscreants, including me. And in the fall of last year, decades after its closing, the Beachcombers held a reunion.

  Actually, the Beachcombers was three successive establishments, all at the same spot on Mission Road, alongside swampy Potatopatch Lake and just one convenient lot beyond Kodiak city limits. The first structure was a log cabin built in 1933 and operated as a whites-only joint until ’57, when Navy airman Legs LeGrue took it over, renaming it the Beachcombers and letting everyone in. The Beachcombers roadhouse featured cheap drinks and live music, grill food and recreational fistfights until Good Friday 1964, when that tsunami surged over much of southern Alaska, destroying whole towns and killing 139 people. Raymond LeGrue, Legs’s son, was fourteen at the time and remembers standing on Pillar Mountain, up above the town, watching the sea wash through the family’s new house while his dad spoke by radio to the crew of a fishing boat swept on a wave up East Rezanof Drive. The log cabin was borne into Potatopatch Lake and deemed unsalvageable.

&nbs
p; In the wake of the disaster, most Kodiak business owners tossed up the shed structures that characterize the town today, but Legs and his wife, Edie, had more glamorous plans. Spending $90,000 of Alaska relief funds, they purchased the sixty-two-stateroom Princess Norah, which had sailed the inland waterway for some thirty-five years. With the engines removed to lighten the load, the big boat was towed to Kodiak and, one night in December of ’64, a channel was dug across Mission Road and the steamship floated in on the year’s highest tide. It took two tugboats, three bulldozers, and a bunch of guys manning skiffs, but by morning a gravel lot had been filled in around the hull, and Mission Road had been restored. This is not mere gonzo legend; a state proclamation issued at Legs’s death confirms the details.

  Legs had done aircraft ordnance in the Pacific but drew galley duty for fighting and gambling, and after the war he convinced the navy to send him to cooking school, where he was an unexpected star. It was evidently his dream to own a nice restaurant, and when the boat opened in ’65, it was as the Beachcombers Bar and Hotel, a place with white tablecloths in the lower-deck restaurant and a menu that read Adventurous Dining Ahead ($4.00 crab, $7.00 filet mignon). Gentlemen diners wore sport coats to distinguish them from patrons headed upstairs, where the bar for a brief time was called the nightclub or cabaret. There was even a wine cellar down in the hold.

  The SS Princess Norah, circa 1967, after its transformation into the Beachcombers. Photograph courtesy of Ray LeGrue.

  For a few years, it seemed to work. Folks liked Legs, who’d pitched in heroically after the tsunami, serving eighteen hundred meals with a staff of high-school students and opening Princess Norah staterooms to locals caught without homes. Holidays especially, the place was a destination, tall in its gravel boat basin, lifeboats dangling cheerily on its decks. The Beachcombers was a cruise ship before Kodiak saw cruise ships, but swell though the boat was, it was hard to heat and keep filled, and financially the model may have been unsustainable. When Legs was disabled by MS, the Beachcombers was sold, but in 1970 the LeGrues repossessed it for failed payments. Ray LeGrue, fresh from college, took over as manager.

  By then the sixties, with their white-linen aspirations, had slouched toward the sweatier hedonism of a new decade. The interim owners had replaced the dining room with a daytime “Little Bar” containing dingy pool tables and a rotating cast of passed-out drunks, and the staterooms, managed by a sketchy guy called Diablo, rented out weekly, nightly, or hourly. The ship’s blue exterior was now the scab hue of weathered Rust-Oleum, and her lifeboats, wheelhouse, and stack had been removed, leaving the stump of a liner anchored in the gravel lot. But all sorts of counterculture types were flowing north to work the pipeline and fisheries, and this shaggy coterie was Ray’s generation. Drugs were plentiful, being high barely a secret. The sexual revolution was happening! Moreover, life in Alaska remained hard and intense. Work hard, play hard was the rule, and Ray knew how to throw a party. The Beachcombers bar stayed open until 5:00 a.m.

  That was when I lived there, first in stateroom 6A with my best friend, Amy, then alone in a tiny green cubicle at the bow. Before I moved out, the Beachcombers was sold again, and this time when the family repossessed they found most of the equipment stripped. The furnace had disappeared, and the boat had sat empty a full winter while mold crept over the carpets and walls. In 1977 Ray LeGrue built a new building on the gravel lot, jettisoning the rooming-house element. The new Beachcombers was a place of strong drinks and live music; Bachman-Turner Overdrive played there once, drawn, so Ray said, by his grand-a-day offer. The scene lasted till ’92, when he took space in town and opened Henry’s Great Alaskan, using his dad’s given name and decorating it with Beachcombers/Princess Norah memorabilia. The Beachcombers building was bought by the Salvation Army, which owns it today. The boat went for scrap.

  That final brick-and-mortar incarnation had a stainless-steel dance floor and a certifiably rough crowd; a killing outside the place has never been solved. But the gold standard, as everyone knows, was the silhouette above the swamp, the great hull dark and resonant like some emulsion of dream and joke. It’s the decade of the boat that makes the Beachcombers notorious, that draws the good stories and ignites something vital to Alaska’s self-image. That’s the passage that warrants reunion, and at the gathering, held over a long weekend at the Kodiak Convention Center, I asked Ray if it was more than the boatiness. Was there some other magic?

  I expected some boilerplate on sex/drugs/rock ’n’ roll, but Ray surprised me by growing wistful. And my question wasn’t really about why the brain magnifies one memory, diminishing others, nor how we create nostalgia and wallow in reminiscence, but what was there in the first place. What combo of sparks, amounting to magic? “The boat was a city,” he said.

  By chance, Ray LeGrue was the first person I spoke to when Amy and I entered the Beachcombers in April of ’74. We were eighteen and had dropped out of freshman year in the hope of something more engaging, and in Tokyo—so we’d heard—even clueless suburban kids were getting hired as English tutors, so Tokyo was our goal. But we wound up in Kodiak, working at a cannery and seeking cheap housing because the employee bunkhouse took only men. On the crab line an authoritarian local woman told Amy, “Well, cheapest would be the Beachcombers, but, dear, that’s the last place I’d send a nice couple!” so we headed there right after work, and in the Little Bar two guys were passed out on tall stools. A big fellow with a mop of brown hair and a bushy mustache was washing glasses, and this was Ray, still in his midtwenties.

  Ray took the measure of us—feckless, untested—and told us to find Diablo, who turned out to look like the guy in Munch’s The Scream. He said his threshold was nineteen, legal for drinking in Alaska in those days, so we lied about our ages, and in response Diablo adopted the third person: “No one fucks with Diablo!” But for twenty a week we got stateroom 6A, no bigger than a camper van, with stucco walls painted dark blue and Potatopatch Lake seething beyond a porthole. Linens were extra, the communal bathroom down a gangway. We set our travel alarm and spread our sleeping bags on the bunk beds and were awakened by the woman next door working the midnight shift, then the 3:00 a.m. shift too.

  What the hell type of reunion is suitable to such a place? Kodiak as I knew it was a town barely larger than a game of tic-tac-toe, but still Alaska’s fifth largest city. It was blue-collarly proud of its last-frontier cred, yet stratified in familiar ways, and beyond a nucleus of the righteous and bossy lay a fringe element with less at stake. That’s what was great about the Beachcombers in my day: the outpost of badness two miles from a civic center. Localized in that vessel, the private badness of longing. Of bad folks slipping out of church, bad husbands and bad wives slipping off from each other and sailors and factory workers slipping into altered states. A man in a stateroom, slipping on women’s clothes; teenagers slipping away from college. The badness of being on our own at eighteen, of daring to live in a bad place among interestingly bad people, of harboring bad desires in the years before I came out and met my husband and built a life that—as with the very idea of reunion—is more like a convention center than a roadhouse. The special badness of the era, heedless and analog, like the seventies themselves.

  I told Ray that after Amy and I moved to the Beachcombers the female workers stopped speaking to her. We never imagined, I said, that someday they’d throw a party, and he laughed and said, “Yeah, this started as a joke.” He and a couple of his wives and his sister and some of their children and grandkids had gone to the boat site for a photo, and someone said they really ought to include the freaks who’d hung out at the place, since they were there in spirit anyway. For a while, that was the riff: what if crazy Diablo showed up, offering once again to let Ray shoot a beer bottle from his fingertips for two cases of Oly? (Diablo, who now has been gone for some time. But in the seventies Ray took him up on the offer, and no one got hurt.) And what of the women who’d worked by the clock? All of them something over seventy by now, but wouldn�
�t they have the tales!

  Yet as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the closing neared, Ray wondered if something might come of the old joke. He called a friend who owned clubs in Anchorage but had once been the bassist for LA Network, a cover band—virtually the Beachcombers’ house band for a while. Gee, the guy said, it was thirty-one years, but he thought they’d be game. Ray called Sam Moon, an eccentric Newfoundland singer who’d had long runs on the boat. Once, when the funnels were being removed from the top deck, either to stanch leaks or pay bills with the scrap, a welder’s spark had set a stateroom afire, and Sam lost all his clothes—good times! But Sam was in. Then Ray wondered if the event should be broader; the boat was a city, after all. He called Toby Sullivan, former Beachcombers resident and founder of both the Kodiak Maritime Museum and Fishermen Out Loud, an outgrowth of a Lower 48 event, the FisherPoets Gathering. A poetry series was added, benefiting the museum. The Humane Society got on board, and a Cute Pets Film Fest was tacked on for Saturday. A local artists’ group hung a show in the downstairs gallery, and the Alutiiq Museum displayed artifacts from five eras. Ray said yes to everything, reserving only one wall for blueprints of the Princess Norah and one for a poster with the names of the dead. At a table at the foot of the stairs, the poets sold books, zines, and CDs.

  And what the hell do we seek, picking the scab of the past? Anyone over a certain age will idealize the reckless playtime of youth, but when nostalgia gets institutionalized we call it by other names: gentrification, appropriation. Or maybe, alternatively: accommodation, even progress. Ray’s now in his late sixties, still tall and good-looking but clean-shaven, his white hair thickest above his ears. As the owner of a successful restaurant employing lots of cheerful young people, he’s the town father his dad also became, and at the reunion, dressed in a Beachcombers Reunion T-shirt (available for sale, long-sleeved, short-sleeved, and hoodie versions), he brought the skills of a tavern keeper to the role of a mayor, cheering performers, making introductions, overseeing food and drink and talking a Kodiak Daily Mirror reporter through those blueprints. Toggling nimbly between a shined-up civic-centered event and the rose-colored debauchery of its raison d’être.