By Mali Main
Winter 2012 Kaplan Award Winner
Like some beautiful and syphilitic old whore, Aurora’s blighted parts are also her most appealing. Past the bridge where hundreds satisfied their sadness in suicide, Aurora is shaped by damp concrete edges, smoothly worn sidewalks, almost level with the street. In gray daylight, Aurora looks her age. Brightly peeling rusty signs are overwhelming against the gray sadness, pawn shops and psychics and the Dancing Bare. Her Twin Teepees, drive-in movie theater and Bowlerama torn away, she looks commercial now, warred over by Home Depot and Lowe’s, Petco, Staples and Fred Meyer, but you can see some of her past clinging in places.
The Highway 99 mural, her history, is tattooed on a muffler shop at 105th. The decaying elephant still poses above the storefront of what once was the Big Elephant Flower Shop, but now rents snow cone machines spelled with a “k”. Her roadside attractions have devolved, those dilapidated auto-courts, once used by traveling families and optimistic wanderers in pursuit of opportunity, freedom or happiness, are now rooms rented for any denomination of time. Exhausted and sagging, she has become apathetic. Over the past thirty years she has become a comforting space for illegitimacy, offered refuge to rogues and runaways, vetted vulnerable victims for Ridgway. She can’t be trusted, especially at night.
After sundown the darkness fills in her ugliness, covers anything ragged and rusty. Shadows smooth over the littered curbs and subdue the signs. At night she is all pulsing tubes of light and dusky corners.
***
Aurora is not unique. She probably has a sister in every city. Euclid Avenue, the Aurora of Cleveland, tells endless tales of her intimate dealings with John D. Rockefeller, how she heard the whispers of his industrial espionage. But that was a long time ago, before she was just a wide convenient way to get from one point to another. She runs through downtown and cul-de-sacs at Public Square.
Like Aurora, there is spot on Euclid where two graveyards face each other across multiple lanes of traffic. My father used the newer one, Lakeview Cemetery, as a shortcut to get to work. It was also where he took every visiting relative, he shows off the lake where Eliot Ness’s ashes are scattered, and the sculptures made by art school students.
I didn’t know about the East Cleveland Cemetery until I was 17 and moved my things out of my parents’ home and into the little house tucked behind the boarded-over AC & DeeDee Beauty Salon. From the upstairs window I saw that the tiny backyard overlooked section 10, all overgrown babies´ graves, so old the engravings were unreadably mossy. That little house, with surprise baby spiders that appeared on the heads of my q-tips, or sometimes hanging from the ceiling over my bed by the dozens. I remember there was something else living in the house, it scratched inside the walls at night.
I was too naïve to be scared then, not like I would be now. There were a lot of late nights, waiting at bus stops with strangers. I learned that if I could not go unnoticed, I should be nice, but not too nice. It took me few years to make sure those conversations didn’t go to bad places. I learned how to make that invisible boundary, just enough eye contact, adding a firmness in the voice, not letting it trail up an octave, don’t ever sound like you are unsure or asking a question. Don’t ever need anything.
***
It was Eisenhower’s fault. He made her what she is today, because she wasn’t always like this. She used to be young and successful, desirable and wholesome, filled with happiness and hope. She just never seemed the same after 1962, after the Seattle World’s Fair. That wasn’t when it happened, but the Fair made it obvious that Aurora had come-of-age and gone.
Like so many born during the Great Depression, there was always a little bit of sadness etched inside her. Named for the Northern Lights, she was the last piece of the Pacific Highway, connecting Mexico to Canada. In 1932 she linked the George Washington Bridge to the vivid glow of hope in the horizon, as the Depression began to fade.
The bridge was built first. Cantilevered over the waters of the Ship Canal, it was haunted by a lonely shoe salesman, the first to successfully use the bridge as a springboard to death, beckoning sad travelers to join him. The bridge was unusually smooth, designed for the individual transit of the new world, without streetcar tracks marring its pavement.
Some considered Aurora an unnecessary extension of the bridge, an offensive convenience, disfiguring the woodlands with her fresh asphalt. She was made for the automobile, the fast cult of the car, built for the body of the machine.
In the summers, she brought travelers to Playland. The neon sign at the entrance of the amusement park between Aurora and Greenwood Avenue, pronounced it “fun for all.” Children rode the carousel and the 85-foot roller coaster, played arcade games, competed in marathon dance contests, tiptoed through the Hall of Mirrors, and sometimes stole pieces from the mummified Viking exhibit.
Adults danced to Buddy Rich and Tommy Dorsey for $1.50 at the Palladium Ballroom. They placed bets at the Aurora Speedway and watched Shorty Templeman, One-Armed Allen Heath and Lovely Logan Harter race the circular track.
But even in her earliest years Aurora was dangerous. Her broad, smooth surface made everyone want to race. Automobile drivers were reckless. The worst ones were called Death Drivers. On Aurora, pedestrians were like little unshelled turtles, soft-bodied and vulnerable, too easy to kill.
Pedestrians were supposed to be protected by the safety islands that lined the center of Aurora’s 8-lane traffic. But it was as if these concrete altars and blinking lamps were flecked with magnet, drawing in Death Drivers with such frequency they were nicknamed the “sacrificial pillars.” By 1937, the safety islands were implicated in almost 40 Aurora auto deaths. The safety islands weren’t improved until 1944, after Miss Lulu Goodwin, a young widow, drove herself to death against an island near the Aurora Bridge. The crash was so violent it sounded like an explosion as her automobile rolled through the air, landed upside-down and spun to face the opposite direction.
The papers showed photographs. The blood of dead pedestrians, bits of smashed glass, and hot, rumpled metal were like a demonic exchange for economic vitality. Auto shop owners profited from the multiple collisions, beckoning car owners from the wreckage with promises to service their machines. When the cars were too heavily damaged to repair, they swept up after the crashes, repurposing the broken parts. Aurora was a salvage of refuse. Before the war ended, she earned the reputation as the best place to buy, fix, or sell your car.
The relationship with the automobile re-interpreted the tale of the hero’s journey. The car became the protagonist of road genre, its presence latent with the restlessness of national identity. It kept company the GIs, who returned from war in search of a place where they could belong, and the Silent Generation on their treacherous quests of escape and opportunity.
Automobiles helped a new generation create a modern-day machinated Oregon Trail. They carried wanderers from state to state. Aurora offered them hope and homes-for-the-moment. The names of her motels were encoded with encouragement. El Dorado Motel, named for the lost city of gold, the tale of the Gilded One. A man so blessed with fortune he dressed himself in gold dust. When he bathed in sacred water, the dust came off his body and the lake and surrounding land were transformed to gold. The Marco Polo Motel conjured images of the 13th century Venetian’s journey along the Silk Road. His descriptions of Xanadu inspired
Coleridge to write a poem about the secret paradise. Hidden behind walls was a land of ancient forests, fertile ground, and pleasure-domes. And the Way West Motel, hinting at Manifest Destiny, urging travelers to pursue, pursue, pursue.
More motels were built in anticipation of the Seattle World’s Fair. The Century 21 exhibit displayed “The World of Tomorrow.” The clean white lines, jets and missiles and space-age technology declared to the world that Seattle’s identity as a wilderness frontier had ended.
A few years later, the Seattle portion of I-5 was installed, part of Eisenhower’s National System of Defense and Highways Act. It was Eisenhower who created the interstate and decided Aurora was unfit to serve. Her failure to comply with federal regulations of progress and efficiency disgusted everyone around her. They called her “an eyesore”, “messy”, and “inconvenient.” I-5 deflected traffic and commerce from Aurora, people stopped looking and caring. Even as they continued to use her, they were repulsed by her.
And just like that, it seemed, the glory of Aurora was over. She was no longer unclosed Western frontier that offered the pursuit of individual bliss or escape from persecution, conformity or minutiae. Even then it was clear that Aurora was the brighter tomorrow of so many yesterdays ago.
All those motels built for “The World of Tomorrow” became the pleasure-domes where hookers turned their tricks with convenience and efficiency. And the motel owners, desperate for business, looked the other way. The first Seattle Times article that linked Aurora Avenue with prostitution was published in 1969. An undercover vice cop tried to arrest a woman in an Aurora motel. She kicked him, she bit him and jumped out a third story window to escape.
Aurora, like traditional road genre, is identified by a lack of resolution, an adventure that transforms hope to disappointment. Where the women are peripheral and objectified and the dream never materializes. The lost city of gold stays lost, and Xanadu is never reached. The Aurora Borealis, if ever you do see it, cannot be held or captured. You cannot be enveloped by it, it wrinkles and waves 8 miles above your head, vivid swaying photon drapes of unexcited atoms, teasing you with their incorporeality.
So it didn’t matter when the economy picked up in the 80s. Aurora was already lost. Her apathy rampant, she became a hunting ground. Girls stepped outside their motel rooms, or neighborhood bars and simply disappeared. Sometimes their bodies were found hidden beneath the trees along the banks of the Green River.
***
“Only girls?” I asked my father. “He only kills girls?”
We were in the car, listening to the radio. I don’t remember where we were going or why we weren’t with the rest of my family. I wasn’t quite ten years old so it must have been the late 80s, before my family left Seattle. Before everyone knew Gary Ridgway was the Green River Killer.
Papa is distracted, he nods. Then looks at me. “Not all girls, just… prostitutes.” I think I mostly understood what that meant. I don’t know why I didn’t ask my other questions: “Why just prostitutes? Is everyone else safe? How does he know? How does he know which ones to kill?”
In my mind he was somehow made of the river. Wet, green skin, and muddy algae for hair, clutching a kelp-covered knife. I could see him, slinking against the concrete walls of industrial buildings, leaving moist, sticky marks.
***
Traveling home from an evening class, I switch buses on 85th and Aurora in the dark. The #358 bus stop smells like Jack-in-the-Box and gas fumes, but mostly I smell urine coming from the rolled up bedding strapped to the back of man waiting with me at the bus stop. There are three of us: me, the one with the bedroll and a former Marine with ruined teeth. The Bedroll Man is arguing, in cracked-out vernacular, with someone only he can see or maybe with himself, but the Marine gets involved, inserts himself into the conversation. He says something too quiet for me to hear and startles the Bedroll Man who seems appalled by his entitlement. “You think just cuz you got teeth the devil owes you a fork?!” Then it’s quiet until the #358 arrives and the three of us get on the bus.
I find a window seat so I can look out the black window and watch the disappearing rows of motels, restaurants, convenience stores. I watch the girl across the aisle, her reflection superimposed over the moving scenery like some giant, still ghost.
Aurora reminds me of being 17, 18, 19 years old. But she does more than evoke a memory. Perhaps she has acquired mystical properties from the years of sadness, death and ruined hope inscribed in her layers of asphalt and brick; the patina of death – the litter of bodies, the 230 suicides off the bridge, the cemeteries, the dead pedestrians. Aurora has the ability to intertwine time and space, confusing and terrifying travelers, trapping them for milliseconds at a time.
It happens to me while the bus is paused to let passengers on and off or hesitates at a red light. It happens as I come out of a daydream, as my eyes refocus and just before my present reality occurs to me entirely. What happens in that narrow fraction of time is that I forget where I am. Something about the arrangement of the buildings, the colors of the signs, the smoothly worn edges of sidewalk. They mimic some other corner in some other city I’ve lived, maybe Cleveland or Cincinnati, maybe Providence, Boston, Jefferson City, Missouri or Eureka, California. It is just in this little divot of time where I think, with panic, “Where am I?”