I drove to the beach house on Saturday, which took nearly half an hour longer than anticipated, owing to a crawl through Long Beach proper due to a city-wide garage sale. I suppose that city council members have the very best of intentions when planning these events: “It will draw people into our community! Perhaps they will spend additional money at local businesses!” but in reality it means that everyone puts out a cardboard and sharpie or plywood and spraypaint misspelled sign* every few feet, a nouveau shanty-town facade indicating that perhaps the townspeople believe you might like to pay for the privilege to paw through their filthy offcast items, grubbing to the bottom of a bin for a moth-eaten t-shirt or a warped record that’s “only a quarter!”, eyes shining like you’re a modern-day Columbus, scouring the seas for a new world of bargains. One of these signs even indicated they sold guns, the subtext being that they could shoot out your tires if you did not stop and rummage properly through decaying cardboard boxes of clips and rusty tractor parts. When I finally arrived, the plan was to load into a few vehicles and drive to Astoria to visit the brand-new Goonies museum located inside the Heritage Museum, so we dutifully packed in and made the drive, only to be informed by a bemused and patient woman behind the counter that not only was the Goonies museum NOT located inside the Heritage Museum but it was also not yet open; the grand opening was set for the following weekend. She then gave us a map and indicated on it where the museum would be opening, the location of the Goonies house, and other notable filming locations in the area, and we decided to check those out, after we checked out what the Heritage Museum had to offer, since we had to wait for the rest of the group to show up, regardless. In many, many cities, museums dedicated to local history are soul-crushing book reports of boring, with hand-lettered placards wobbling and trailing off as even the writer passed out through tedium and disinterest. History only ever comes alive when you focus on people’s pettiness, their foibles and jealousies and greed-based motivations, their lusts and passions, to the point where you marvel that anyone accomplished anything whatsoever. My high school history teacher, Mr. Burmeister, knew this, as he whispered to the class about cocaine addictions and powerful whores, and passed around bayonets with a thrust that indicated that he knew precisely how to disembowel an enemy combatant or a bubblegum-popping girl at the back of the classroom. The Astoria Heritage Museum knows this as well, not only focusing on the seedier elements of their town’s history, calling themselves ‘The Most Wicked Place on Earth’ but actually offering up a role-playing game so you could picture yourself as the bar-fighting, prostitute-visiting, bootlegging, opium-smoking, born-again Christian who gets sucked right back into bar-fighting and visiting prostitutes you know you would have been in those less-lawful days. Each player decides what job they might have had in those days (cannery worker, traveling merchant, etc), and that job determined the starting amount of chips the player had, representing the amount of money you had for shenanigans and sundries. You then spun a wheel to determine your destination/fate; you could be off to visit the prostitutes first thing or perhaps chat with a policeman on his beat. We played the game rather half-heartedly until Rachel shouted from another room “I JUST *DIED*. My body was washed away in the river, never to be seen again!” Our collective eyebrows shot up; our interest was piqued. “You can DIE in this game?” Some of us became opium addicts. Some of us were hung by our necks until dead. Some of us were beaten to death with our own brass knuckles, or shot with our own guns. Some of us tried to live the honest life of a policeman only to be killed by bootleggers. Some of us were shanghaied and sold into slavery. Some of us made infamous friends in prison who led us into yet more trouble. Soon, we were skipping around, spinning the wheels and having more fun in a history museum than anyone has a right to have.   Should your journey lead you to the church, they had a pulpit from which you could preach fire and brimstone…

^{Holy shit, I’m going to make an amazing benevolent dictator!}

…before getting sucked right back into sin.  

After a while, we had all died in pretty much every way possible, so we made our way back downstairs to see whatever else there was to see. As we thundered down the stairs, the woman at the front desk laughed and said it certainly sounded as if we had enjoyed ourselves, and we chorused back that we absolutely had an excellent time. Could a museum that housed the Death Game possibly hold any more treasures? By law of averages, isn’t one supremely fun thing more than most museums have? This museum also contained a tiny fort. Clearly intended for children, we wedged our way through the hole in the wall and claimed it in the name of immature adults everywhere.   Inside, there was a lighted campfire, a few bunk beds, the bottoms of which were coated in hay, and an animal skin of one sort or another. Now that I reflect upon it, it actually is entirely possible that NO ONE was supposed to go inside, that it was intended as a peepshow display instead of as an interactive playground. Regardless, we had our fun.

^{How DARE you awaken She Who Has Hair Full of Hay?}

  I know what you’re thinking. Surely, surely a museum of this caliber could not possibly have three fun things, right? WRONG.

After we finished our coloring pages/word searches, we realized the others did not intend to join us, so we decided to traipse around Astoria ourselves, coins in pocket, as if we hadn’t just learned about the dangers of the town. To be continued… *Seriously, if you can’t spell ‘garage’, why not try for ‘car hole’?

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