There was no hiding this, and make no mistake, a cancerous death is a dreadful death. The waiting room was cold and dark. It was the middle of the night. I had been coming in and out of sleep, a restless sleep. Every time someone would enter the room, I would wake up. How could anyone actually sleep when a loved one is dying at the end of the hall? I could feel the sorrow building in my chest. I lay there with my eyes closed. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run down that hall and grab him and run. Run as fast as I could and maybe, just maybe, we could escape all of the madness that lay before us, but you can’t outrun death. Death will catch up in the end. There was no escaping the inevitable. He was going to die.
That is when I heard it. It was soft at first, a soft sound. “Shhhhhh … ” I opened my eyes. I was trying to focus through the tears that I had been crying. “Shhhhh …” I turned my head to face the couch directly across from where I lay. No one else in the room was moving. Everyone else was asleep. “Shhhhhh …” It was my grandfather, sitting there with his one finger to his mouth, an action that I had caught him doing many times in early morning hours, when he thought he would sneak past everyone to sneak out of the house. Of course, I would put him back to bed and we would both giggle as I told him, “You are not going no place, old man.” There he sat, as if to tell me that he finally was getting to go. “SHHHHH …” My attention was distracted, and I was completely awakened by the sound of crying coming from down the hall. It was my grandmother. Grandpa Joe had died. He died while I was dreaming about him. I looked back to where I had seen him sitting in my dream and he was gone. “Goodbye, old man, I love you,” I whispered.
Autumn 2011
It was near the end of September 2011 when the supernatural activity began to get out of hand around our house once more. Michael had departed for college in St. Louis, and that left Matthew and me as struggling bachelors. We were left at home to fend for ourselves. We used to get a kick out of that idea, and the idea of the bachelor pad we were living in. It made us laugh when we would say it, and it really was a good time for both of us. There is that time in your child’s life, when your relationship turns into more of a friendship. Your children become your best friends and your relationship dynamic quickly changes. I found that I had finally reached that point in my life with my children. Lydia, who now had two daughters, was quickly gaining a new respect for me as a father. It is funny, but you cannot really understand the sacrifice and the depth of your parents’ love until you have children of your own.
I was getting daily phone calls from her now, asking for advice and just simply wanting to talk and share with me. I would often find myself laughing as she told me what kind of trouble one or both of the girls were getting into. Then, there were those times when she would just need some words of encouragement. I could usually tell when that was needed, and I would find myself remembering how difficult those days were when I was raising her and her two brothers. Those memories were strangely triggered by her present problems with my grandchildren. “Everything always comes full circle, baby,” I remember my grandmother telling me when she was still alive, and she was right. Everything does come full circle.
Life, for the most part, was good. Matthew and I were traveling the country, going from speaking engagement to speaking engagement, having tremendous adventures along the way. “What was that I just hit?” I asked Matthew in the hills of Pennsylvania, late one night while we were driving. I had hit some type of strange-looking animal in the road while I was talking to Marie on the cell.
“I think it was a mountain lion, Dad,” he said, trying to control his laughter. I would have expected to hit a deer, because for miles I had seen the road strewn with their dead carcasses.
“A mountain lion, you’re kidding, right?” I asked, hoping he would laugh or something to let me in on the joke.
“Nope, it was a mountain lion. I’m sure of it. Aren’t mountain lions an endangered species?” he asked, trying to hold back his laughter while I pulled the car into a gas station on the Pennsylvania turnpike. We had rented a car for the trip, and the only car they had available was a Versa. Not only was I facing the potential death of a mountain lion, I was going to get to explain to the rental company that I had the privilege of killing an endangered species the size of a mountain lion with a Versa. Matthew jumped out of the car to survey the damage. I sat firmly behind the wheel, refusing to get out.
“Come on, Dad, get out and look. It is not that bad.” He was trying to coax me out of the car, and I really was afraid I was going to see a horribly smashed-up front end. I got out of the car slowly and walked around to the front. “See, it’s not too bad, Dad.” And he was right; there were two large dents on the bumper, and for the most part that was it. Then I looked at the license plate. Was that blood on it? I looked closer, and when I bent down to get a better look, a huge chuck of lion meat fell to the parking lot at my feet. Oh boy, I not only hit a mountain lion, I had destroyed a mountain lion. The turnpike police were nice about the whole matter, and gave me a report number. It was true––we had hit a mountain lion. They found it on the far side of the road, back at mile marker 138. Then they asked us how it was possible for two men way over six feet tall, to fit into a Versa. They stood and watched, laughing at us, as we got back into the car. When we were on our adventurous road trips, there was always something happening and a story to tell when we got home. We were having the time of our life doing it.
I knew I was sick. I knew it was serious. I had been through enough with my heart over the past few years. It seemed like every six months or so I was getting stents put in, but nothing seemed to be slowing the heart disease down. I felt like a ticking time bomb, just waiting for the moment when the buzzer would sound and all would be over. I was waiting to die.
It was in September 2011. We had been hitting the road hard that year. It seemed as if we would get home, and then it would be time to head out once again. I was so tired and nothing I did could help. Matthew would often have to coax me out of the house, and in the end he was even packing for us. I no longer had the energy to do much of anything, and I was trying to hide it as best as I could because I knew what the end result was leading to. I was popping nitro like candy. I could actually feel my heart gurgling in my chest, trying so damn hard to push the blood through the hardening and closing arteries. I made my promised appearances and then, when I got home, I would be completely wiped out for a week or more. I knew something was seriously wrong. But how do you tell the people you love that you think you are dying? How do you tell them that you want to live so badly, but your heart just won’t let you? How do you lay your head on your pillow at night, terrified you might not wake up the next morning? Even worse, what if someone I loved found me dead? Can you imagine the type of damage that it would do to them?
I wanted to keep it quiet. I did not want to go through what I knew was coming. I wanted to make sure I had everything in order before I even stepped into the doctor’s office, because I knew there would be one more cath done, and I knew, without a doubt this time, it would show I was in big trouble.
The activity in the house began to quickly gain in momentum during this time. There was banging on the walls day and night. At night, a shadow figure would be outside the front door and you could see it turning the doorknob, trying to get in. Matthew, at first, did not believe me about the shadow figure. I woke up early one morning and walked into the living room to find him wide awake and frightened. He had seen the shadow figure. He saw the doorknob turn. He saw the figure stand at the front door for two hours and then, when he thought it was gone, it began to knock on the kitchen window, which was in the back of the apartment. When he went to look, there was no one there. The nightmares for both of us were almost on a nightly basis, and we got to the point where neither one of us was sleeping very much. Then the cabinet doors in the kitchen began to open and close on their own. One night, Matthew walked into the kitchen, and I saw him stop; he had the stran
gest look upon his face. “What’s wrong?” I asked him, and he just said it was nothing. I could see he was trying to hide something from me, behind his back. I walked into the kitchen, and every single cabinet door was standing wide open. Then I saw what Matthew was holding in his hand. It was a butcher knife. “What are you doing with that knife in your hand?” I asked.
“I found it lying on the kitchen floor,” he said, with a frightened look on his face.
“You found it on the floor?” I asked again, not fully understanding what he was trying to tell me.
“I came in here and I saw everything open and when I looked on the floor the knife was lying neatly there. Pops, I think it was leaving us a present or something. I don’t know, maybe a sign or something?”
From that night on, we would walk into the kitchen to find all of the doors open and knives on the floor. Sometimes neatly in a row, and sometimes scattered about. The strangest part of it was you would never hear it happen. I could walk out of the kitchen and turn off the light and go back just a few moments later to find the same scene repeating, doors open and knives on the floor. Shannon Lusk, who is my editor, came to stay one weekend to work on this very book with me, and the activity escalated even more. Electronics began turning off and on without anyone touching them, or even being in the same room. One night, Shannon walked into the bathroom in the middle of the night. When she was finished, she washed her hands and turned off the light. Before she could get the door open, loud pounding traveled down the bathroom walls. She swung the door open in panic, and yelled out to Matthew and me. The sound of the banging on the walls was incredible. It was on an inside wall, so I knew it was not one of the neighbors. It happened shortly after three in the morning. Needless to say, no one slept any more that night.
I began to think that maybe I needed to call John Zaffis and tell him what was going on, but there was one thing that kept me from doing it. I knew he would not be happy with me if he found out where I was living. Where was I living? I was living down the street from the Screaming House. For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to put myself where I could keep an eye on it. I felt it had come after me when I lived clear across town, so it was not going to matter if I lived any closer, or not.
There was one more thing. I was also living in the exact apartment where Tommy was injected with the lethal dose of heroin. I understand it was total and absolute defiance on my part. I wanted to show it I was no longer afraid. I wanted to show it that it could no longer touch me or hurt me, because I wasn’t going to let it. It was a stupid move. But stupid or not, there was a strange sort of security it gave me, living so close. I don’t expect anyone to understand it and I am not going to try to justify my actions. I was living near the house, and that was that. I was living in the apartment where Tommy was given his death sentence, and that was that. Was it an obsession? No. I was no longer obsessed with the house. I just wanted to be safe, and if you think about it, the best way to deal with an enemy is to stay just close enough to observe it. There was no false sense of security. I was living on the frontline and I knew it.
I completed all of my Christmas shopping the first week of November of that year. Once I had it all done and ready to go, I called the doctor to make an appointment for my heart. My cardiologist wanted to see me right away. The routine was exactly what I expected. The appointment was made for the cardio cath. You know, I can remember walking into the hospital that morning for the test. I can remember thinking, “When I walk out of here, my life will be changed forever.” I knew there would be bad news, and I knew where it all was heading. My cardiologist stood over me while I was still on the table. He had this serious look on his face. I can remember looking at him and saying, “I am in trouble, aren’t I?” He looked at me and smiled a serious, but comforting smile. “It is time for an operation. There is just nothing more we can do with stents. Your heart is strong, and I’m afraid if we wait much longer, you might have a heart attack that would weaken the muscle, and that is not where we would want to be. You need a bypass.”
There. It was said. Finally, they were giving me a bypass. I knew what that meant. They were going to crack open my chest because of where the blockages were in my heart. They were going to have to take my heart completely out of my chest to get to the troubled areas. There were going to be multiple bypasses. I was not shocked at the news, because I already knew it was coming.
The operation was scheduled for the Monday before Thanksgiving. No one had to tell me what the routine was going to be. I had already done enough reading on my own. The night before the operation, I did not sleep at all. Earlier that night I had made a phone call to my good friend and brother, Keith Age. We talked for a while, and I knew I could reach out to him, because I knew if anyone out there was going to understand, he would. He knew the score. He knew exactly where I was headed. “Would you take care of Matthew if something happens to me?” I asked him.
“Nothing is going to happen to you. You are too stubborn for that shit,” he said, trying to get me to lighten up.
“I know, but if something goes wrong, will you make sure Matthew is okay?” I asked again, a little more seriously.
“You know I would, but nothing is going to happen. You are going to be all right,” he said again, with a little more confidence in his voice. I was making a mental checklist of everything I needed to do and everyone I needed to talk to.
I think out of all my friends, Dakota Lawrence took the news the worst. Dakota had always been like an adopted son to me. “You are going to be all right, Dad. Aren’t you?” he asked, and I could hear the fear in his voice and the fact he was trying to fight back tears.
“Of course I’m going to be all right. You know me. Of all the things I have been through, this is not going to take me out. Trust me, I will be fine,” I said, and I held my breath because I felt like I might be lying to him. The truth was, I didn’t know if I was going to be all right, but the thing is, I was being given the time to say my goodbyes, and time to put things straight. If I was going to die, I was going to be ready for it. The one person who knew everything would be fine was Ms. Pittman. Ms. Pittman was the person who was always there for me, whenever I needed words of wisdom. She was very psychic and she was also Dakota’s grandmother.
“Everything is going to be just fine. Don’t you worry about this. It is going to be all right,” she said to me on the phone while silently holding a fist up to let Dakota and his mother know they had better pull their shit together. Ms. Pittman could, at times, be a woman of very few words, but you always knew to listen closely when she spoke because she was trying to tell you something important. Her wisdom was always there, whenever I needed guidance or a kind word, and on this day I needed both.
The morning of the surgery came. The hardest part of the whole thing was having to tell my family goodbye before being taken away. How do you appear to be strong in the face of it all? How do you look in their eyes and say goodbye, knowing that it could be the last time? I forced myself to keep smiling when all I wanted was to tell them not to go. It was too early to go. We had not said everything or done everything. But I knew, if this was our last moment, I did not want them to see me crying. I did not want to leave that picture for them to remember. So when it came time, I smiled and told them I loved them.
I was dead for a total of 38 seconds on the table. There is that point in the surgery when they remove the life support and basically restart your heart. At that point, for all intents and purposes, you are dead. Now, I know you want me to tell you that there was a white light that came down from the heavens. You want me to tell you that I saw my sister and all of those I have loved who have passed. I saw none of that. The only thing I can remember is this sharp pain shooting throughout my entire body. A feeling like my whole body was being slammed down upon a hard surface, and I had the instantaneous thought, “I know why babies cry when they are born. It hurts.”
I then opene
d my eyes and I was in the ICU with Matthew looking down at me. When Lydia came to see me, I asked her to come closer to talk to her. “I didn’t see her. I didn’t see my sister,” I said to her, with tears in my eyes. Secretly, I was hoping that if anyone was going to be there, it would be my sister. I felt like I had missed my chance to see her, talk to her, tell her how much I missed her, and I missed the chance to tell her I loved her. It just didn’t happen. I was not given the chance.
I was in the hospital for nine days due to complications. My right lung had collapsed during the surgery and I was not able to go home until it was better. On Thanksgiving morning, they put in a pump for my lung by inserting a tube into my right side. My older brother watched from the hall, and I can remember keeping my eyes locked on his while it was going on. I tried to keep it all out of my mind by watching him. The truth is, though, I felt like I was falling apart. I had never fully understood what it was like to have your body completely give out on you, until that moment. When you cannot breathe—that changes the game completely. There is a panic that is biological, telling you that something is terribly wrong. But I got through it. I came home. I had survived something else in my life, and when I got home, the supernatural activity had completely halted. No more banging, open cabinets, or knives. For the first time in years, I could say my life was normal. It felt like all the supernatural activity was over.
I cannot explain it to you any clearer than that. All of the activity was gone, and for the first time in a very long time, I felt normal. I felt like I had before we moved into that damned house. I felt alive again, very much alive. I felt like a storm had passed and the skies seemed clearer and the atmosphere was lighter around me. And for the first time in many years, I could sleep once again. No more nightmares, no more fear, only good, sound, and peaceful sleep was ahead in my future.
Blessed Are the Wicked Page 21