The Wreck of the S.S. Wheeler: An Introduction

     The S.S. Wheeler was a large, green residential hotel that operated until the mid-1980s, I guess, right on the oceanfront about halfway between Main Street and the Wedge here on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach, CA. I never went inside the place, but I walked and rode past it for a decade or more heading to and from the house our family moved into when I was 9 years old, the house that I still live in with my father to this very day.

     That last point becomes important later, so kindly make a note of it.

     Five or six years after we moved into the house—I was in high school by then, at any rate—my younger brother Tom, then in middle school, came home with a classmate, a short, solid girl with stringy, brownish-blond hair and a deadpan expression that seemed to vary only between a scowl and a faint, rueful smile. She and Tom had started talking on the bus ride home, and it had turned out that she was as much of a comic book geek as we were.

     This was Traci Briery.

     Over the next forty-five years, we wove in and out of each other's lives. She did most of the weaving. The illustration on this page, for instance, is a drawing she did of me as "The Authority Figure" in the storyboarded application essay that got her into UCLA's film school as an undergraduate. She also spent several years living in Massachusetts, and she convinced me to escort her to England at one point when she was "guest of honor" at a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan-organized convention in Birmingham, still the only time I've ever left the North American continent.

     During those forty-five years, she published a couple vampire novels and a couple werewolf novels, winding up at last in south Orange County, CA, doing quality assurance work: each time I asked her what exactly that entailed, she would tell me something different. We did a whole slew of radio programs, both live and recorded, over KUCI in Irvine, some with just the two of us, others with a whole cast of folks. We drove down to the San Diego Comic-Con enough times to watch it grow from a small get-together sharing the downtown convention center with bridal exhibitions into a behemoth filling that gigantic convention center along the harbor. Somewhere in there, too, I told her I was in love with her, and she introduced me to the phrase "aromantic asexual."

     For the past ten years or so, we kept in contact mostly via e-mail and Facebook: the last time I saw her face to face, I think, was at a party my brother put together during a vist here before the pandemic. And in the middle of June, 2025, Traci died somewhat suddenly.

     She'd had a number of chronic conditions since the beginning of our acquaintance—I remember her informing me early on that she had to take multiple pills every day to keep herself from turning into a monster—and other health issues cropped up with annoying regularity—she was hit with Bell's Palsy at the start of this year, freezing half her face. At the beginning of June, she caught what she called "the worst f-ing cold" of her life, something that saw her driving herself to the emergency room at least twice.

     Then, on Thursday, June 19th, I got a call at the library where I work from Traci's mother. She asked if we accepted donations of Blu-rays and DVDs because Traci had died the previous Sunday and they had to clear out her apartment.

     Over that next weekend, Traci's mother and one of her sisters began bringing bag after bag and box after box of Traci's personal effects into the library. And I, starting on June 24th, began writing a poem a day in an effort to get this all straight in my figurative donkey head. The process wrapped up a month and a day later on July 25th, leaving me with a 4,700 word short story told over thirty-two pieces in a variety of forms and meters.

     We all mourn in our own ways, right?

     So I'll be posting those pieces here, again at a rate of one a day, beginning tomorrow, Aug. 1st, and wrapping up on Labor Day, Sept. 1st. I suppose I could add a double handful more and carry the whole thing through to Traci's birthday in mid-September, but I'm sure she would've hated me doing that even more than she would've hated me doing this. Feel free to insert a ruefully smiling emoji here. I'll also include a link to the Table of Contents for the whole thing and present the dedication: "for Traci Briery who, even if was still alive, I'm sure wouldn't be caught dead reading it"

     Oh, and the S.S. Wheeler? The building itself has nothing to do with any of this. But when they tore it down forty years ago to put up a trio of multi-million dollar homes, I decided that someday I would write something called "The Wreck of the S.S. Wheeler." And now I have.

                                                                 Mike