At one particular instant I remember it occurring to me that the moon's watery light made my friends' faces look like those of drowned corpses, and I shuddered at the realization. That was when I suddenly felt the urge to go down to the beach.
We'd all had a few beers, but I want to emphasize that I was not drunk, just mildly buzzed. I had to relieve myself anyway and the beach was as good a place as any, so I stood up and skidded down the steep slope of the dune to the beach.
By the time I finished taking care of my business, I found I had a strong desire to go down to the water's edge, a desire so strong that I was still fumbling myself back into my pants as I turned and began walking toward the surf line.
I stopped just before the water and looked out to sea. The ocean floor dropped off quickly here, and the tired breakers rose and fell only fifty or so feet away from me. Beyond the rhythmically rising and subsiding of the surf line, he night ocean was a phosphorescent expanse spread out to the far horizon; glowing wavelets surged almost to my bare feet like a lazy tongue.
By now the impulse to enter the water had become an urge, a need to go out past the surf and into the deeper waters beyond.
And do what? I suddenly asked myself, my skin prickling as I dug my feet into the sand and refused to go any further. Why this sudden yen for a swim under the moon?
That was when the whispering call came from just beyond the lazy breakers.
"Come to me," the voice coaxed seductively, stealthy as sea foam.
It did not actually use words, it was silent - and yet it insinuated itself into my brain and conveyed itself as clearly as if it spoke out loud. I've had years to replay those moments in my head, and I can honestly say I believed then that this was real, that this was not my imagination – that something outside of me was speaking to me. Something other.
I was strangely unafraid; I just stood there for some reason.
"Why should I?" I asked the invisible source of the voice, truly curious. For some reason it didn't feel unnatural at all to be having a conversation with a patch of breaking surf.
"It will be good," the voice intoned soundlessly, as soft as wind blown sand. And then something started to bulge up within the curlers to my direct front, looming darkly within the surf as the source of the voice began to come into view. Almost I could see it . . .
My strange paralysis broke then, and I whirled and scrambled up the sheer crumbling face of the dune in panic terror, practically levitating as I climbed hysterically up and away from the beach. My friends pressed me with questions which I ignored, shaking my head.
I tried to convince them to leave the beach then, but they refused unless I was willing to explain. I wasn't about to tell them the truth, I had no desire to have them think me crazy. And, although I'm ashamed to admit it, I was afraid to cross the dark golf course all by myself just then.
So I sat there with them, downing beer after beer as fast as I could, letting the music of Styx and Gamma and Alice Cooper fill my brain to overflowing as it blared tinnily from Spale's boom box. I did my best not to look away from the land, but my eyes seemed drawn like a magnet to the moon curdled ocean beyond the green.
Hours passed. The beer was gone, and the sky was lightening into pre-dawn gloom when Opie called our attention to a couple of emergency vehicles racing toward us along the beach.
We hid, but they weren't interested in us. Instead, several men got out and began searching the beach on foot, while others launched a zodiac inflatable boat which began systematically criss-crossing the waters just off shore.
Burnt Out Baker went down and talked to one of several men combing the water's edge, and returned to tell us that they were looking for a man who had gone missing off that beach the night before; he man was a professional life guard and a powerful swimmer. He just went for a moonlight swim and never came back - his friends couldn't understand why he would go in the water alone like that, he knew better.
They never found his body, just printed his picture in the base newspaper a few days later with the caption 'Missing, Presumed Drowned.’
I never returned to our beach party place. When the others went out to the golf course at night after that, armed with beer cooler and boom box, I was getting drunk at the EM club and the off-base bars in nearby Kailua.
The silent call was coming back every night after that, you see, a furtive summons from the water that was increasingly harder to resist - something wanted me to go back to that beach.
In response to what increasingly felt like some sort of psychic siege, I would go to where the music was loud and the lights were bright, places where I didn't have to feel the voice in my head anymore, pounding down pitcher after pitcher in an effort to pickle that silent command. I’d stumble back to the transient barracks to pass out on my bunk, but even in my dreams, that horror from the surf haunted me.
In the dream, I'm back at that beach, only I'm standing waist deep in the water instead of ‘safe’ on dry land. It's night time, and the full moon is overhead. I look down to see the drowned life guard's bloated face rising up to break the water's surface and bob horribly in the waves.
'Come on in, the water's fine', he gargles, his voice always sounding like his mouth is full of grease. 'Come on in, you'll like it.’
But his eyes give away the lie: they are black pools of nothingness, as alien as the things that scuttle away when you lift a rock to peer beneath. He is no more than a puppet.
Then, exactly as if his puppet master has yanked him away by unseen strings, he is whisked from sight as a huge shadow darkens the waters from beneath and something prepares to bulge from the water.
I always wake before I have to see what it looks like. Always, when I attain full blessed wakefulness, I ask myself just what had it wanted with me? What exactly had it done to the life guard?
And it occurs to me that there are worse fates than being eaten.
On my homeward flight to the mainland I remember looking out the airliner window at the haze covered blue sea below. I thought about how the land was really just an afterthought, jutting cluelessly out of the dark waters into the light of day. But at the drowned foot of the land, far down in the sunless depths of Ocean, who knows what cold intelligences may exist?
I still have the dream from time to time, in fact it's cost me a couple of girlfriends along the way who got tired of me waking up asweat and screaming. But thankfully, with the passing of years it comes less and less.
I am older now, and supposedly wiser. I try to tell myself that it was all no more than coincidence coupled with the over-active imagination of a high-strung young man.
There are no submarine horrors gliding through the depths, occasionally creeping up onto the ledge of the land to entice humans into their clutches. I tell myself that we live in a world ruled by logic and rationality, and that Man is the master of this Earth. But whenever the dream revisits me after a long absence, and I sleeplessly pace the floor at 2 AM, I realize I know nothing at all.
The Storm Giants
I’ve been in enough hospitals and emergency rooms to know most people find it preferable not to be there. Pain and fear seem to hang in the air like a cloud, almost overwhelming the reek of medicine – I always imagine illness glued to the walls by the industrial paint, or hovering invisible in the air waiting for prey. There’s usually blood too, but I haven’t let that bother me much in a long time.
As I quietly sit here beside Mom’s death bed – my back to the wall and my hands folded in my lap – she lays festooned by the garlands of tubes and wires that are probably about all that was keeping her alive any more. I search her sleeping face as I simultaneously track the hospital’s background noises for threat: the stigmata of her terminal illness obscure the clear youthful features I remember from childhood, though blurred hints of her old beauty still remain.
For she had been a great beauty in her youth, a woman that all the men had hovered over when she was performing on the pole. Bambi, that had been her stage nam
e in the clubs. But I put the knowledge of ‘Bambi’ away, and focus instead on the long ago day when Mom saved me from the Storm Giants:
It happened when I was very little, while we were living in Hayward in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood. Dad made a habit of moving us around a lot, usually to hoods where we were pretty much the only white family on the block.
We were what some might call ‘white trash,’ though I never heard that term until I was a teenager. I hurt the guy who first directed that phrase in my direction, hurt him pretty bad actually. That was one of the first times the world learned about just how much rage I was shouldering around – the guy was much bigger, it should have been a blowout for him to put me to the ground and monkey stomp me on the face multiple times instead of the other way around.
I’d never have fucked the guy up for saying something like that now, of course. I’ve heard much worse since – I supposed the worst was ‘white nigger,’ if only because it was disrespectful to the black race to be lumping the likes of me in with them.
Still, it didn’t matter what people thought after all. It seemed to make them more harmless, to have a position to occupy. Silence was the best response, until something better could be planned and executed.
But as a kid, I stood out from all those black and brown childhood play-mates in Hayward like a little Nordic thumb, being the only one around with blue eyes and a head-full of thick corn-silk white hair.
We kids were too small to have been indoctrinated by the racism our elders would later so effectively inculcate in most of us, and all the little ones had run in one screaming pack from dawn til dusk, hitting up one mom after another for food between bouts of mischief. I discovered early on that PB & J tasted pretty good on home-made corn tortillas, and still have a hankering for it that way when I remember to eat anything at all.
The day the Storm Giants came, I was playing alone in a vacant lot down the street from the house, rolling a beat-up old toy Tonka tanker truck in the dirt. Where had that rusted-out little plaything come from? I really can’t recall.
At the time, I didn’t notice the storm clouds rolling in until there was a scalding thermite flash of lightning that lit up the whole block like napalm smacking a jungle ridgeline. It was followed immediately by the sound of thunder, a boom so close I felt it as much as heard it as it washed over me.
The San Francisco Bay Area has relatively mild weather, and I was three, young enough I’d never been in a real thunderstorm before. As I looked up, the midday sky was suddenly roiling with black clouds so thick that even by the light of day the world looked as if it was underwater.
Two bigger boys were walking by just as another bolt of lightning lit up the whole sky to split the world wide open. Thunder cracked once more, but by that time I was on my feet. I remember shivering as the sun’s light steadily dimmed – but in memory the shivering was like watching a movie starring someone else, like some random little boy that no one remembers but myself.
“What was that?” I asked the Big Boys.
“That’s the Storm Giants,” the bigger one with the rounder face said.
“Yeah, the Storm Giants,” his friend echoed, one missing front tooth showing as he grinned.
I’d never heard of such a thing. “What are Storm Giants?” I asked, even at that tender age trying to figure out the situation, to understand the opposition. Trying to see the line through.
“The Storm Giants live up in the sky behind the clouds,” the bigger boy explained. “Sometimes they like to bowl up there. Then you hear the thunder from their bowling balls hitting the pins.”
He leaned closer, and his eyes seemed to be glowing like the lightning, as if the Storm Giants were inside of him. “Sometimes they look down and see a little kid playing alone. Then they throw one of their lightning bolts, and smash ‘im.”
“Yeah, smash ‘im,” his tooth-deprived friend gleefully copied him again, bobbing up and down in excitement like a poppet valve in an overworked car engine.
That’s when I saw an even bigger lightning bolt pour zigzag-wise across the sky in a river of light so bright it hurt my eyes. Then the inevitable thunder again, danger close: Krack-a-BOOM.
I ran for home, and for Mommy.
The lightning kept up for my entire endless slow motion progress down the block, lighting up the sky and crashing down again and again as if in pursuit. I kept expecting the very next lightning bolt to hit me, the expectation so strong it made my back hurt. But they kept missing.
As bad as the lightning got, each following thunder crash was even worse. It roared so loud and hard, each time the noise felt like it was going to knock me off my feet. And, as I’d had already learned in this short life, once you were on the ground you were done, for then there was no more running. The Storm Giants laughed and shouted every time the thunder boomed.
It seemed it would never end, and that I’d never reach the front door. But finally I did, and my hand slapped against the knob and sent the door crashing inward against the entryway wall.
Mom stood up from the couch, where she’d been watching the soaps and having a smoke in her robe.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked.
“Storm Giants, Mom. There’s Storm Giants out there. You got to close the door before they get us.”
“Storm Giants?” she asked as she carefully ground out her butt and shut the door after him.
“Yeah, Mom, Storm Giants.” There was a lump in my throat as I told Mom what the older boys had said, and of how the Storm Giants had chased me home with thunder and lightning.
Finally, I began to wail, the tears pouring hot down my cheeks. Mom kneeled down and took me in her arms.
Her cheek was pressed against mine, and I slowly stopped sobbing as she crooned: “Hush, baby – hush. Mom knows how to deal with Storm Giants.”
I pulled back and looked at her. “How?”
At the time, despite all, the sun rose and set on Mom. If she said it, I knew it for true.
“Just watch,” Mom said. Then she took my hand and led the way to the kitchen table.
First Mom took a piece of newspaper and folded it into an admiral’s hat as I watched closely. “This is a magical hat,” she explained in a solemn voice as she placed it carefully on my head.
Then she waggled her fingers over me as she intoned in a loud, spooky voice: “Hocus pocus, Abracadabra, the Storm Giants cannot hurt us, now and forever.
She smiled and touched my cheek with cool fingers. “Now you’re safe, baby. The Storm Giants can’t touch you.”
I laughed and clapped my hands. Mom made hot chocolate, and we played Chutes & Ladders together as the storm went on outside. The thunder kept crashing out there and the lightning kept pulsing at the windows, but I was safe inside the magic circle with Mom.
Eventually the storm ended, as all storms do. Its death was as mystical as that whole day had proved to be: a strange, beautiful golden glow filled the sky outside, backlighting all the storm clouds until they shone from within, as if pregnant with the seeds of their own destruction.
Then the clouds slowly broke apart as they began a slow cringing run toward the horizon, and I could see blue sky again. Mom had beaten the Storm Giants, and I thought at the time that I’d never be afraid of them again.
It was unusual that I’d needed rescuing actually – I hadn’t been a scaredy-cat as a boy. I was never afraid of the dark or of being alone as a little kid. In the dark no one could see you to get at you. When you were alone there was no one there to hurt you.
Before the Storm Giants, I hadn’t wasted time being scared of ghosts or the monsters under the bed, either. My bogeymen were worldlier, and were always there even in the daylight.
I saw his first knifing there in Hayward; the same day that Mom saved me from the Storm Giants actually:
After the storm I was playing with friend Carlos, another neighborhood boy, showing off Mom’s new paper admiral’s hat for Carlos’s admiring envy. These two Chicano guys came up out o
f nowhere and started rousting me and little Carlos, looking for Carlos’s older brother Silent. In memory, I reflect that I should’ve been doing a better job of scanning the surroundings – but I was only three after all.
Even as a little boy, I could tell these two were serious guys, they were obviously in targeting mode – at the time I saw them as grownups, but they had to have only been teenagers.
Carlos’s big brother Silent had suddenly come out of his house, strolled up to these two guys without a word, and cut them both through their white wife-beater tank-tops and into their guts with his foldie right there in front of me and Silent’s baby brother Carlos – SNIK-SNIK – the first time I heard the bell-like whir cold steel makes cutting through living flesh (though not the last of course).
The blood flow was immediate, profuse, and right at my little-boy eye level. It soaked the two guys’ tank-tops and their starched pressed khakis; at the time, I thought they’d peed themselves at first, and perhaps they did as well.
The blood dripped onto the sidewalk in spatters and puddles. Some of it even squirted onto my admiral hat to soak the newsprint and wilt Mom’s creation, although I didn’t notice the magic hat’s ruination until somewhat later.
It was like a window between two worlds had shattered and all that blood was pouring through the crack. The blood was redder than red, seeming to stand out from the background more real than anything else in the whole wide world.
The two would-be bullies stood there, hunched over and dripping as they pressed both hands to their respective wounds holding their guts in, apologizing and begging Silent not to cut them anymore with tears and snot pouring down their faces.
Always a classy guy, Silent showed mercy and let them go, and I never saw them again. I didn’t bother telling his parents about it – it never even occurred to him to do so.
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