Everett Scarborough, however, elected to take the long route. He slept in a Motor Court Lodge in Elizabeth, New Jersey, catching up on his rest. Then rising late in the morning, he took side roads down the rest of way, stopping in Wilmington, Delaware, to call directory assistance, and then Mrs. Elaine Strazinski.
Mrs. Strazinski took some convincing, but he finally convinced her he was a legitimate UFO researcher, driving through Baltimore. Could he interview her this evening?
Yes, she’d said. That would be fine.
Scarborough arrived in Baltimore at seven o’clock. His appointment was at eight, so he had time to find a hotel for the night and pick up Mrs. Strazinski’s order. He found just the sort of motel he was looking for in Dundalk, near the Maryland Port Administration. Shabby. Cash only. Quiet and indifferent. Then he found a liquor store, purchased a case of National Bohemian beer, and drove the remaining miles to the portion of Baltimore called Highlandtown.
Baltimore is, generally speaking, a working-class town, with many working-class neighborhoods. When Mayor Schaefer dredged the harbor and created touristy Harbor Place, the “Renaissance” he erected, although impressive, did little to change the working-class sections like Highlandtown. The area was famous for its Polish population and infamous for the sexual profligacy of its young unmarried women.
The neighborhood itself was a series of modest, tacky looking row houses. One of the things that always impressed Scarborough about Baltimore was the lack of trees, along with the general, depressing external feel of neighborhoods like Highlandtown. They had a dull and shrunken look, few trees, and the general air if not of poverty, then certainly nothing near affluence, either.
Scarborough found a parking spot for his car easily enough on Mrs. Strazinski’s street; 9427 Lombard was the address. The smell of tangy tomato sauce, cheese, and spices drifted from a pizza shop on the comer, making Scarborough realize that he was hungry. He would have gone in for a slice, but he remembered that Mrs. Strazinski had offered him a sandwich. It was best, he found, on such interviews to accept food. Maybe it made the interviewer feel more like family, Scarborough wasn’t sure—but it certainly seemed to make the interviewees more comfortable. Scarborough found 9427 easily enough, and walked up creaky wooden steps. The button he pushed by the door failed to ring a buzzer or a bell—so he knocked. He held the case of cold bottles by his side.
A young boy answered. “Hullo?”
“Hi there. I’m here to see Mrs. Elaine Strazinski? My name is Ted Anderson.”
“I’m Billy.”
“Hi, Billy.”
“You bring anything for me?” said the boy, eyeing the case of beer. Scarborough figured he was eight or nine years old.
“No—wait a minute. How about a quarter!”
“Geez! You can’t buy shit for a quarter these days.”
Scarborough smiled. “No. Inflation and all that. How about a dollar bill.”
The boy grinned. “Sure.” He turned and hollered back into the house. Mommmmmmmmmmm! There’s a guy here to see you.”
“Just a minute ...” called a voice. “Tell him to come in!”
“Come on in, mister.” The boy held the screen door back for Scarborough, allowing him to step in.
Inside, the house smelled of cabbage, cats, dirty laundry, and Airwick. Billy accepted the dollar bill that Scarborough dredged out of his pocket, and then led him into the living room. An overweight man sat in a tattered Lay-Z-Boy recliner, a twenty-five-inch RCA television flickering and chattering a baseball game at him. The man seemed semi-comatose, holding a National Bohemian can in a Styrofoam cooler marked Ocean City, a battered Lay’s potato chip bag in his lap. The man wore a sleeveless T-shirt and no shoes.
“Hello;” said Scarborough. “You must be Mr. Strazinski.”
The man grunted and glanced at the TV screen. “O’s;” he said. He belched, and brought the can of beer to his lips. Sipped.
“Yes, of course. The Orioles. Hope they’re doing better this year than last.”
The burly man glared at Scarborough a moment, then turned back to the TV set. He reached down and scratched his crotch, then returned his attention to the game.
“Would you like a beer?” asked Scarborough. “Your wife said to bring along a case. I’m Ted Anderson, by the way. I’m here to talk to her.”
From upstairs, there came the screech of a young child, followed by motherly cursing. Mr. Strazinski did not seem to notice. He sloshed his beer for a moment, found it wanting, put it down, and accepted a bottle from Scarborough.
“Thanks.” He nodded toward a seat, and Scarborough sat down, propping the case of beer on his knees.
He opened a bottle of beer for himself and watched the game. The beer, though cold, was thin and bland, with a nasty aftertaste. But he was thirsty, so he drank it.
The place looked as though the Strazinskis attempted to keep it neat, but were failing, due to the rapid entropic effects of too little money and too many children. Above the sofa, displayed proudly, were two large portraits of large-eyed, sad children, each holding out flowers. On a shelf by a record player was a small statuette of Elvis Presley in his Vegas years, marked The King Lives! Scarborough noticed that the tatty chair he sat in was covered with white cat-hairs. He took a few more gulps of beer, praying that his allergies would not act up too badly.
He had almost finished the beer, when a woman walked into the living room. “Mr. Anderson! Well, hell-o! I’m Elaine Strazinski! Pleased to make your acquaintance.” She held out a hand for him to shake and Scarborough shook it.
Elaine Strazinski wore a bright yellow and red dress with flounces on the sleeve. Her hair looked newly permed, and she had on an abundance of makeup. Neither the dress nor the makeup hid the painful fact that she was a fat woman in her mid-thirties who had perhaps been pretty once, but now looked mostly used up in a way that lower-middle-class women with three or more children tended toward.
“Thank you for letting me come over on such short notice, Mrs. Strazinski. I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you.”
“No, hon, of course not. I was wondering when one of you investigators would get a sniff at that story and hightail it on down here to Baltimore!” (She pronounced it “Bulmer,” in the classic local fashion.) “Say, I see you got that case of Boh, and you’ve already helped yourself to one. Well, good. And bottles. You see, Earl, this is a man who knows his beer. Bottles always taste better than cans!”
Earl grunted.
“Don’t mind Earl. He’s just put in a long day at the muffler shop. Hell, if I had to get up under cars all day I guess I wouldn’t be much good at night, either. Why don’t you just carry it on back here to the kitchen and put it in the fridge and we’ll just sit down awhile and talk.”
Scarborough picked up the case of beer and carried it back through the long, narrow railroad-car house. He had to avoid a skateboard and a batch of marbles and a cat rubbing up against his legs as he walked through the dining room, but finally he made it safely back to the kitchen.
“Right in here, Mr. Anderson,” said Elaine Strazinski, holding open the door of a late-model Frigidaire. “Bottom shelf. Pick out one for me, and get yourself another. I got a plate of crab cake sandwiches fixed up for you. Figured you come to Bulmer, you might as well eat a local delicacy.”
“Thanks very much, Mrs. Strazinski.”
“Elaine. Just call me Elaine, hon. And I’ll call you Ted.”
Scarborough took another beer and sat down on a chair by a sparkling Formica table. He could see why Elaine Strazinski had brought him back here. It was the nicest room in the house, equipped with new cabinets, bright linoleum floors kept spotlessly clean. Large, it had all the trimmings of a modem House Beautiful, from dishwasher to microwave oven. Its window looked out onto a narrow but long backyard filled with kids’ toys and bikes, and a leaning barbecue cooker. The backyard was shadowed with dusk.
“I figure this is the place I spend most of my time vertical in this house. Might a
s well be the place I put that money I got from that book that mentioned me,” Mrs. Strazinski said.
“Ah. That would be Hijacked by the Stars, wouldn’t it?”
“You bet.” Elaine Strazinski pulled out a plate of cold crab cakes, a jar of Gulden’s mustard, and a loaf of Wonder Bread. “That Mr. Abe Dickens, he gave me a little cut of the royalties for talking to him so long. My story took up half the book!”
Abraham Dickens was the chief competition to Budd Hopkins for third-person UFO-abduction books. The only thing that held the books together was Dickens’s extraordinary gift for sincerity even as he feverishly described the most frightening and unlikely situation, creating a far more spiritual but just as scary overview of the phenomenon. In one of his own books, Scarborough had described him as “the George Adamski of the paranoid eighties and nineties.” It was Whitley Strieber who had suggested that if the alien-abduction archetype was not. ‘real” in terms of everyday reality, then it could be the beginning of a new religion. If this was so, then Abraham Dickens was the John the Baptist of that religion.
“I can’t help but be curious, Elaine—why isn’t Mr. Dickens taking this story?”
“Oh, he’ll get it all right. You think I’m stupid? Shoot, who knows, maybe I’ll get in another book. No, Abe’s off in Australia, doing a book called Dreamtime Abductions. Real metter—metter... “
“Metaphysical.”
“Yeah. That’s the word. Anyway, he’s a nice, sincere guy, and we don’t have no exclusive contract or anything.”
“You know, I can only pay maybe a couple hundred dollars ...”
“Don’t worry, mister. I figure if I charge, people’ll think I’m making this up. And I swear to God, I ain’t! Abe didn’t give me nothing for my story at first. No, mister ... I just gotta tell my story. I consider it a public service! You know, I been on Oprah and Donahue and Geraldo and even Sally’s little show ... and I’ll do more if I can. People gotta be warned about what’s goin’ on.”
“Yes, of course.” Scarborough found himself biting his tongue to prevent the usual phrases of disbelief, sarcasm, and witty derision from escaping reflexively. Actually, he had an entirely different opinion now about the alien-abduction phenomenon. Now, he was at least open to listening.
“So you’re the first one who wanted an in-depth interview on the story I sent in.”
Elaine Strazinski made him a crab cake sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and mustard. She cut it in half, put it on her best china, and placed it in front of him like an offering it pleased her to make. In fact, it was delicious, and Scarborough said so.
She beamed. “Thank you. Say, you know, I was just thinking ... you look kinda familiar. Ain’t I seen you somewhere before?”
Scarborough cringed. Oh God, he thought. He hoped she didn’t have any of his books. Especially the hardbacks, the ones with his picture on it.
“That fella that was in those shark movies ... Yeah, Jaws!”
“You mean, Roy Scheider?”
“Yeah. You look a little bit like him, only you’re scruffier.”
Scarborough shrugged, relieved. “Some people say that, yes. No, I guess you’d called me a freelancer. I do pieces for lots of magazines and newspapers. I like to travel you see-it’s a very free kind of life.”
“Well, good for you. I always wanted to travel when I was a girl. See the world.” The woman sighed, looking a little wistful. “Course you can’t do that when you’ve got a husband and four kids. Little darlins are tucked away in their beds now, all ‘cept Billy. You met him. Took hell and high water to get ‘em in there this early, but I did.”
Scarborough took the clipping from his pocket and smoothed it out on the table. He took out a pair of glasses, put them on—and then opened a notebook to a blank page, adding an extra weight of professionalism to every movement.
“Now then ... Elaine. You of course have told your story in the Dickens book—and on TV. Let me see if I’ve got the basic facts correct. Camping trips to Pennsylvania. Abductions from your tent. Confrontation with aliens. Examination. Experimentation. And later, they actually came here, to your house. At that time, several years after the first abduction, they displayed a hybrid child they said was yours. Now, this is similar to other women’s experiences, especially to that described in Intruders, by Budd Hopkins. The difference being, as I understand, that on the flying saucer you met Jesus Christ, the Buddha, and Mohammed, all of whom reassured you, promising that your lost child would be a member of some new star race.” Scarborough spoke in a monotone, without a trace of judgment in his tone.
Elaine Strazinski grabbed a handful of tissues from a daisy-covered Kleenex box and dabbed at her eyes melodramatically. “Yes, yes. God that still hurts ... losing my baby. I’ve got four here and one in the stars, Ted. I love ‘em all. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, yearnin’ for Zeta ... That’s his name. Zeta. Such a golden little boy. He shone, Ted, like there was this halo, all around his body. What they do to you, Ted ... it ain’t right. Only way I figure, they just don’t understand, those aliens.”
“No. It’s not right.”
“Still and all, my Lord Jesus told me it was okay. I don’t know what those other heathen were doin’ there on that saucer, but maybe that’s just God’s way of saying to me, Elaine ... you oughta be more economical!”
“Uhmm—you mean, ecumenical, don’t you?”
“Yeah, like that ...”
“Have your husband and your kids seen these aliens?”
“Billy has. But the others ... they know something funny’s goin’ on. Earl, he tried to just ignore it. It’s too much for him. He calls it my little hobby, and he doesn’t like to talk about it. Maybe that’s why I like to talk about it to other people. Get it off my chest, you know.”
“Yes, of course. But now, this very short piece appeared a few days ago. And all it says is that you were taken again. Only this time, you saw a human being on board the saucer. A very beautiful woman, you say. Quite mortal. Definitely not the Virgin Mary.” It took every fiber of concentration in Scarborough not to sound ironic. “This, as far as I can tell, is the first case of an individual seeing another human aboard one of these craft. The usual situation involves a single human and a number of aliens. As I recall, your reports of the physical descriptions of these aliens are quite similar to other reports—short creatures, triangular faces, almond-shaped eyes almost glittering ... But this episode is quite unusual. Could you tell me about it in more detail? I think that a more extensive article might be called for.”
Clearly he’d said the right thing. Plainly, this kind of attention was exactly what Elaine Strazinski was looking for. Her whole aspect changed. Suddenly she was “on”—as though she were speaking in front of an audience or on the Oprah Winfrey show again. Her gestures grew broader, her. eyes became wider-her breathing quickened.
Scarborough could not help but feel a sudden despondency fall on him. Everything so far had about Elaine Strazinski was exactly conforming to the outline of the “Typical Saucer Slut” in Above Us Only Sky, a particularly controversial chapter that he’d regretted slightly, and was thinking of taking out of the book (“Or at least tone down the sexism some, huh, Dad?” Diane had suggested.) for the. paperback edition. Neglected middle-class housewives looking for sexual, spiritual, and certainly psychological relief, brewing up hypnotic-induced delusions and fantasies based on suggested dreams. Attention was what they most lusted for ... attention, and excitement that, before their experience, their dreary and troubled lives so lacked. You only had to take a ten-minute listen to the chubby, distressed women that Budd Hopkins trotted around on the talk shows to publicize Intruders to see that they weren’t quite right in the head, and chances were their psychological difficulties dated back way before any run-ins with the saucer-folks.
Nonetheless, Scarborough listened, trying to rid his mind of prejudice as best he could.
“You know, since the book came out, they simply stopped coming to g
et me. I mean, we even went camping once ‘cos I wanted to see if they’d pick me up. And the bastards didn’t! I thought maybe they were peeved that I’d told the story and lots of people knew it, even though they told me that it was okay to do that; and the time I saw Jesus, he said to spread the Gospel. Gospel means ‘good news,’ so I guess He wanted me to tell about the saucer people, so I did. So this is why all this comes out of the blue.”
“Were you camping when this incident happened?”
“Nope. Little too cold at nights in the Poconos for that. No, I’d just fallen asleep on the couch down here. Next thing I know, there they are. The saucer people. They start to cart me away, and then I went out like a light. I wake up again—and I’m in the saucer. Well, I say it’s a saucer, ‘cos of what I seen in the Poconos, that sighting I made before all this happened.”
“Yes. I remember.” Not the truth, but Scarborough could pretty much guess what it was supposed to be. UFOs and saucers came in all shapes and sizes, but they basically either floated or zipped about above the ground, glowing with different lights.
“Okay. So I think—hey! Homecoming! Maybe I’ll see my son again. That’s not so bad. Like, I ain’t saying that getting carted off by these bozos is a load of laughs. It’s pretty damned scary. But I was almost starting to miss the change of pace. The ‘Lay-Z-Boy’ that belches out there isn’t exactly Mr. Excitement. This was kinda different though ... I could tell almost from the very start.”
“Why was it different, Elaine?”
“The inside of the saucer. For one thing, it looked a little different. Had a different feel to it. Hell, I felt different. Like, I was on a different prescription or something.”
“Drugged. You think you were drugged all these times.”
“Well, of course. Or, like Abe says, the equivalent. The mess with the neero-chemicals, that’s what Abe says. Could be like an electro-magneto spectrum gun or something ... Anyway, it’s alien, and it puts you out. How come you think Earl and the kids stay out while little creatures float me out of the tent—or out of my own house, for God’s sake.”
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 54