I'm On a Boat

How to show a Taurus a good time.

Coming up with a birthday adventure for TJ is hard, because he is a master at it. For my past birthdays he has: taken me on a Weetzie Bat tour of Los Angeles, with wieners at Oki Dog; brought me to the amazing, hoarder-y Sideshow Books (hoarder-y is a compliment when pertaining to bookshops) where the terribly sweet proprietor, Tony, served me an espresso and handed me a bag he had, with TJ’s help, curated especially for me. What was in it? Books about punk, acid, the Manson murders. Lurid, vintage magazines about sex and crime. Weird clippings from long-ago periodicals and matchbooks from defunct nightclubs. Not only was all of this fantastic, but now Sideshow is my favorite second-hand bookshop, and I’m friends with Tony, who is such a gem that when he got a copy of the Marjorie Cameron biography Wormwood Star, he dropped it off at my house. A bookseller who makes house calls?! Reader, I cannot promise you he does this for everyone. But he might!

Great book.

For my fiftieth birthday, spent, not in a villa in Tuscany with all my friends, as I had once fantasized, but in quarantine in Glendale, California, he baked me a multi-tier cake in the shape of a hot pink perfume bottle, and facilitated a video of birthday salutations from my friends. He whisked me away to the Roosevelt Hotel where we skulked around after hours, in search of Marilyn Monroe’s ghost. The pressure, come Taurus season, is on.

But this year I think I knocked it out of the park with an overnight at the Queen Mary. The Queen Mary, for those of you not in California and not viewers of ghost-hunting reality shows, is a permanently docked Cunard cruise liner that lives just a bit outside LA in Long Beach. It sailed from the late nineteenth century until the sixties, where it became a sort of floating hotel. The Queen Mary hit hard times a few years ago, going bankrupt. The city of Long Beach crunched the numbers and, realizing it cost the same amount to scrap it as it did to renovate it, decided to keep it. After the gloom of quarantine, when it was shuttered and its overhaul begun, The Queen Mary is back in a minor way, with some hotel rooms open for business and tours of the vessel running throughout the day. I snagged us a harborside room with a king bed and didn’t tell TJ where we were going when I loaded the destination into the phone. I was sure he would know! Long Beach? On Queens Boulevard or wherever? But TJ so believed the Queen Mary was still, and maybe forever, shuttered, that even when the boat’s charming red smokestacks came into view all he did was make a joke about us saying there.

“Yes!” I cried. “We are!” It legit took him a moment to believe it.

Mary!

Aside from necessary updates, the Queen Mary remains in its gleaming, wooden 1930s splendor, with art deco furniture and carpeted hallways – the end of which can’t be seen do to the banana-shaped curvature of the structure – that have a dim, crimson glow that immediately recalled The Shining. We stayed there a few days before their official opening, so it was a ghost town.  Our tiny room still held original fixtures, such as a wooden headboard with built-in shelves, a vanity with beveled, triptych mirrors, a brass clock that hasn’t worked for decades, and bathtub faucets for both fresh and salt water.

Once TJ realized where we were staying, he opted to cancel our dinner reservations and have a shitton of Taco Bell delivered to the ship (as well as a feast of 7-11 snacks we never got to, due to the Taco Bell). Waiting for our food to arrive, we began snooping around the hallways, pushing on locked doors and peering through cracks, mostly finding spots in the midst of renovation. A security guard came upon us and, once realizing we hadn’t wandered off from the nearby ghost tour, told us we weren’t allowed to walk around the ship! Apparently, there are too many dangerous spots due to the renovation, and people get lost and then she has to come find them.

“We have to stay in our hotel room?” I asked, incredulous, and she said yes, and I was immediately filled with a rage of injustice. How could you allow people to stay on a gorgeous, antique ship and not allow them to, like walk around? I was furious. But it turned out we could walk around other parts of the ship, like the lobby with the art deco piano and poster advertising an on-ship concert by Liberace, and the tucked-away salon with more gorgeous olde tyme furniture and big glass doors that looked out into the harbor. And TJ changed out of the Doc Martin loafers we’d gotten him for his birthday, and the hardware clinked and clanked, and replaced them with some beat-up vans to we could slink around sneakily a bit more.

Back in our room with our chalupas and whatnot we binged and binge-watched a show called Autopsy: The Last Hours of… in which an esteemed medical examiner turns a forensic eye on the death paperwork of deceased celebs, snooping into the last years of their life to suss out what vices caused their demise. We watched Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, three men I could give a fuck about. I mean, okay for Sammy Davis, for his place in history as a Black man, which is important, but fuck Frank Sinatra, who raped Zsa Zsa Gabor and other women, and like who cares about Dean Martin. However, I cannot resist stories about addiction, and these dudes were all addicts – two Sagittarians (Sammy Davis and Frank Sinatra, who famously could never, ever let a party end) and Dean Martin was a Gemini. I really love watching a documentary about a person and getting to the point where I’m like, Wait, I have to know this person’s chart! This happened, chillingly, when I was watching The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin, and was driven to eventual madness by her hair and needed to know where in her chart the Leo was, only to learn we have the exact same birthday, and the same Mercury and Venus. Her time of death is not known but, like me, I do believe she has a Leo Rising. For many days I mused on the various ways that me and Gwen Shamblin are alike, and how my life could have taken a deeply sinister turn!

Anyway, TJ and I were of course supposed to have sex in the 1930s cabin of the haunted ship, but after a week of parenting and a Mexican Pizza, hard taco, bean and cheese burrito and those weird Taco Bell potatoes, I fell asleep just as Dean Martin was succumbing to his Percocet addiction. In the morning we went on a ghost tour. The Queen Mary is apparently wicked haunted, and has been on all the ghost hunting shows. Apparently, they lose many employees each year due to ghosts, workers who see things and get too creeped out and take off. Of course the ghosts are more of a boon to the ship than a hazard, as they have taken their most haunted cabin and raised the price to one night in it to a thousand dollars, which is a bummer, because of course I was totes planning our next trip and thinking I’ll try to snag that spot.

Of course on a ghost tour you never know if your tour guide is full of shit. I of course want to believe or else I wouldn’t be there, though the stories, just as stories, are pretty great. There was the captain who accidentally drank and bunch of poison thinking it was gin, and was like, Welp, I think I’ve poisoned myself, and proceeded to go for dinner and have his evening, and then the next day woke up feeling a little yucky, and when they docked was taken to the hospital and died. He tends to haunt the women’s bathroom, which used to be the men’s bathroom, and will helpfully escort you to your destination should you be lost, as he did to a fairly recent bride who’d gotten turned around and couldn’t find her reception.

Another ghost haunts the fire station (even though the fire station on the boat isn’t the original fire station, so why would the ghost be there – see, I’m a skeptic!). There are all these hydraulic doors on the ship, installed after what happened to the Titanic, that can withstand hundreds of thousands of tons of pressure, and the captain closes them if they think the ship might take on water. Supposedly the bored doofuses working the ship would play chicken with the doors after the alarm warning sounds, seeing how many times they can hop through the threshold in the seven seconds before they slam shut. This may be how the guy our guide was discussing wound up jammed to death in such a door, a perfectly horrendous way to die. There is a chance he wasn’t a chicken-playing doofus, and had run back to the room to grab a wrench and met his sad fate, as evidenced by folks who overheard the ghostly whispers, Where’s my wrench?

Taking a tour is currently the only way you can get access to a lot of The Queen Mary, and we got to walk out onto a - what? A deck? A Bridge? I don’t know ships, but we were outside and everything was very nautical and handsome. The guide directed our attention to a rather moldy-looking Russian submarine parked in the water right beside us; it’s actually for sale, but they can’t find the owner, who abandoned his relic during Covid and has not been heard from since. It has become infested with raccoons. Learning this was my favorite part of the tour – which I enjoyed very much, in spite of my suspicion that I was being played like a child throughout! I especially enjoyed her discussion of various types of hauntings; like, not all ghosts are undead spirits who can’t leave the spot where they died. For starters, you don’t have to pick the spot you died in to haunt; if you’re a ghost, you’re free to choose any place you had a fun connection with and hang out there for eternity. There are also a type of apparition that isn’t actually there in the way we presume ghosts are there, if we believe such things. It more that the event leaves a sort of spectral fingerprint on the place, and every now and then time and space get funky and the past shows through. This was said to have happened in one of the event rooms, where workers in the 80s tried to get some lady in 40s garb off the dance floor so they could set up, and she seemed not to see or hear them, and then shimmered away.

Because I have actually seen a ghost once, I do feel like I know such things are real, and exist, but they seem to be quite rare because I only saw one the one time, and he was lingering over the sleeping form of my friend Heather, a spooky person who sees ghosts a lot. Perhaps there are two kinds of people – ghost-seers and not-ghost-seers and, being the latter, I should spend more time with the former. Although, the time I did see the ghost it scared me half to death and I wondered why I ever thought I’d want to witness such a thing. That night, in the 90s, feels very far behind me, so much so that I have forgotten how scared I was and am back to wanting to see ghosts again, loitering in the hallways of antique ships trying to give myself a thrill.