by Brian Hodge
The similar man undid the buttons on his shirt in painful slowness. Would anybody care if Cassady did kill himself, like he knew the other man was going to do? He was sure his parents didn't even know he was living in Chicago. The last time he had written them, years before, he had told them he was working for the government. Would his face be in the paper? Pull a train, pull the cord tighter tighter honey honey sugar sugar yummy yummy. My brown-eyed girl.
Tying the knot was easier than he had expected, even with the skin peeling off his fingers in the pre-dawn cold.
The other man, now nothing more than a shadow, climbed on top of the salt box next to the stairwell. He waited for Cassady to decide. So, it was going to be a game of chicken! Cassady would show them all!
The other man, now just a mist, painstakingly tied one shirt sleeve around his tired neck.
And on a blustery night in early November, 1986, long after the Night Owl train was lost in the distance of the Loop skyline, Dennis Cassady watched with numb fascination as a crazy man hanged himself with the remains of a blood-splattered shirt. He was afraid to make a move.
Of course, there were no living witnesses.
On Amtrak: New York City to Chicago
15-16 DECEMBER 1985
Bleeding Between the Lines
"So, tell me why you're here?" the psychiatrist said. Needless to say, I was uncomfortable. She lit a cigarette, menthol, and waited for me to begin.
I felt like saying something dramatic, something like: I can't keep the blood off my hands; or, I can't stop the voice in my head; but what the hell kind of way is that to write, I mean, tell a story?
Instead, I started from the beginning.
I told the psychiatrist that I had started writing horror fiction during the spring of 1982, when I was a senior at the University of Illinois' Polk Street campus. I was majoring in English Literature, and had to write a story for a fiction workshop in order to get my degree.
The psychiatrist exhaled smoke in a tight line through the left side of her mouth, like the dealer in an all-night poker game might, and asked me why I decided to write a horror story. I guess that I was too uneasy at that moment to wonder if she were getting at something in particular. But I did notice that she hadn't yet begun to take notes.
I did give her a dramatic answer then; the same one I offered to Cathy Germaine in her interview with me for Desert Sun, a New Mexico magazine, a few months previously. I said to the psychiatrist: "I came home from work one night and watched some guy from Pennsylvania blow his brains out during a live news conference. The next story was about a serial killer's recent victims. After that kind of happy-crappy on the news, I'm supposed to sit down and write a story about spies or cowboys?"
The psychiatrist smiled then, a weird lopsided kind of sneer, actually. "You say this as if you envy writers who can tell macho western tales or undercover government agents who are out to get the public. Are you always this paranoid about your masculinity?"
"No," I said, clearly aware that she had flipped open a ringed notebook and began writing eagerly after saying the word paranoid. "I mean, sure, I'll read an Ellroy book every now and then, and sure I like the way the guy writes, but that doesn't make me paranoid!"
I was uncomfortable with the way I had begun gesticulating with my hands, only a few minutes and I was already on the defensive. I felt like a bad comedian desperately trying for a response from a crowd of blank faces.
My right temple began a slow throb. Outside the window, the El passed by over the lunch hour crowds on Wells Street. I thought about leaving.
"I've read your published work," the psychiatrist said.
Now that was a cold slap in the face. I wasn't that well-known. I guess I must have had a dumbfounded look on my face because she lit up another cigarette and continued.
"Don't seem so surprised; you look like you just swallowed a fish." Drag. Exhale. "You made this appointment three weeks ago. I took the opportunity of contacting the editor of Shudder Magazine in New York City. She has quite an extensive file on you. Tell me, do you always Xerox your face every time you cut yourself shaving?"
I didn't answer right away. I was starting to feel paranoid, thinking that maybe Rod Serling was lurking around the corner or something. I mean, the strength of my fiction comes in part from its autobiographical tone. But this was ridiculous...
"I—," I began, my jaw still slack.
"Time's up," the psychiatrist said, grinding her expired cigarette into a boomerang-shaped ashtray. It was a rapid, corkscrew movement. Well rehearsed. She flipped the toggle on her bone-white phone. "Miss Setab, please tell Mr. Speck to step in."
To me: "Tomorrow, then."
As I rode the elevator to the lobby, I fancied that the shrink was really Linda Fiorentino, who I had seen recently on cable TV. She had pretended to be an East German spy working for the CIA. I couldn't help but wonder if her breasts were as firm, but I couldn't tell from the blouse she was wearing.
"So, tell me about this fixation you have with always comparing women in your stories to actresses," the psychiatrist said the next afternoon. "I suppose you want to know if my tits are as firm as hers, too."
Oh, man, I thought. The hell with Serling; today I expected to see Hitchock and Lugosi waiting in the wings.
"I was talking to a colleague after you woke up last night..." the psychiatrist's voice faded as if hers were a radio voice and I were driving underneath a bridge. A pipe smoldered in the ashtray today. The El rushed by again.
"I said, I was talking with a friend after you left yesterday. I didn't know you wrote poetry."
"Who—" was all I could get to come out of my mouth. Again.
She ignored me. "At any rate, we were talking about your published works. Your prose is quite good— not the least bit cramped or inhibited." She fingered the top button on her peach-colored blouse.
"It's no wonder you have a cult following." The headache paid another visit.
"Your characters are all loners who seem to be traumatized by their inability to cope with the opposite sex. Dayton can't find a date for Valentine's Day; Downs can only find sexual gratification at a strip-joint in one story, in another he can't find a date for his high school reunion and brings a retarded boy instead; Morrow can't escape the parasitic ties of his mother; and Dennis Cassady (one of the few main characters you give a full name to, incidentally) can't act to save a woman's life."
So the bitch... that is, the psychiatrist.., had read "Heartless," "The Touch," "Corky's Quickies," "Parasite Momma," and my trilogy of El killer stories. (Writing the third story of the trilogy is what got me going to this damn shrink in the first place).
"I also notice that you mention Cassady in ‘The Touch’ by having his name written on a bathroom wall," the psychiatrist brought the pen to the corner of her mouth. "Can't seem to let the little guy go, is that right?"
I bristled then, and she saw it, damn her.
"Well..."
I moved my hands from my lap, letting the right one explore the contours of the chair's padded arms, the left occupying itself with the plastic frame of my glasses.
"All right, all right," I said, my pulse starting to race.
"Dennis Cassady is the dark side of my soul. The name has no secret meaning, either: I can see the sign for Cassidy Tires from my apartment window and just changed the spelling to be unique."
I paused, expecting some kind of snide remark on god-knew-what, but she didn't say anything.
"I wrote 'Rapid Transit' in 1982, after... are you sure you want me to go into this?"
Again, I received no response. Of course. I heard muted footsteps in the hallway, an ominous gurgle of a water cooler.
"Back in '82," I continued, after clearing my throat, “there was a series of rape murders by two brothers who were Satan worshippers. I wrote a poem that spring called ‘A Field Near Grayslake,’ which dealt with the findings of the bodies. Of their... heads. Six years. I still can't get the image out of my mind."
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For the millionth time, I wished I smoked.
"I started thinking about this girl's death, all of their deaths, their murders... living in this city, the whole shitty mess. I mean, how could anybody ever glorify Jack the Ripper?"
"Isn't that what you were trying to do with Dennis Cassady?" She spoke in a clinical tone, smiling slightly as if she were a dog and I her favorite hydrant.
"No, dammit." The look in her eyes said she believed me; a clever ploy to let me play out my hand. Spit it all out.
I hated this woman.
"No," I continued in a level voice. "I started questioning my own masculinity as well as my anonymous role as a citizen of Chicago. I asked myself, what if I were witness to this unspeakable act? Would I be like those people in New York who watched from their windows the murder of Kitty Genovese during the commercials on Johnny Carson? Or would I lose my life over someone I didn't know, be it a black man in a Brooks Brother suit and Rolex watch or the dirtiest bag lady on North Avenue?"
"Yet you made the woman beautiful?"
"Well, yes," I replied, my voice low. I was back at the Western Avenue platform, staring at the empty Jergens lotion bottle in the window. It seemed to wink at me. "I mean, the women being killed by the Satanists were all young and beautiful."
"I see." She jotted a few more lines down on her canary pad.
"I wanted to tell others, and more importantly, myself, what it would be like, what kind of terror would be involved in being an unwitting participant to a rape or murder. If I ever found myself in such an intimate situation, all I'd need to do is waste one precious second recalling Dennis Cassady's cowardice, and then I'd act.
"It was Cassady's grief over his indecision that made him think he was the El killer, and again thinking he had killed his girlfriend Sarah Dunleavy, and this smothering guilt eventually led him to his suicide at the climax of ‘Take The “A” Train.’"
"Very commendable," the psychiatrist said. "Do you always write to teach yourself lessons? Perhaps a type of communion?"
"Well, not just to myself, but to anyone who reads my work. I think that many of the people who wrote Nadia Pegsster after ‘Rapid Transit’ appeared in Shudder were really upset because they just maybe had seen a little bit of Cassady in the dark part of their soul, the part that Fitzgerald called 'eternally 3 a.m.’—
I was starting to feel more relaxed. Finally. I was getting a weight off my shoulders talking about this.
"But my style is a certain form of, for lack of a better word, self-gratification. A writer is his own disciple, I say."
At this point, my hour was up.
"Go home and write," the psychiatrist said. "I'll see you tomorrow."
I did. Later that night, I dreamt quite vividly, as I usually do. Sometimes to the point of sensory overload; my senses heightened so much that I can actually remember smells when I awaken. Many times a certain scent of odor will trigger a week-old dream, much like a song on the radio might do for others. I was certain that the psych-lady would have a field day with my dream journal.
The psychiatrist sat with her hands steepled in front of her. She was wearing a tan outfit.
"So how did you dream last night?"
I knew she was going to ask me that.
I told her I couldn't remember, which was a lie; I had dreamt I was mauled apart by werewolves on a CTA bus, while in the skies overhead, I saw a flying billboard with Brian Keith selling a brand of tampons called "The Monthly Curse." Then she picked up on our conversation from the day before.
"You were talking about learning from your writings."
"Yes; and another thing. I have cerebral palsy. Eldridge Cleaver was a quote unquote Black Writer, Emily Dickinson a ditto-ditto Woman Writer. I try to tell the handicapped experience. You've obviously read more of my work than what Nadia published in Shudder. There's the deformed kids of Perdition, my poem ‘A Rural Truth As Ugly’..."
"Yes, 'The Threshold' was set in Perdition. Then there's Mad Rica, the aMerican DReam. Do you—" she paused for a second to light another cigarette. Faintly, I heard Manfred Mann's "Quinn The Eskimo" playing on the radio in the reception area. "—feel as if all handicapped people, or say, yourself, end up having psychotic delusions because of the average person's inability to understand their pain and suffering?"
"Now, wait a minute, lady," I said, maybe a bit too loudly. "Just because the aMerican DReam fancies himself a vigilante and kills two gang members who laugh at his outfit..."
"...and what of the Painkiller character in your novel The Holy Terror, or the young boy in ‘Lover Doll’, or Dennis Cassady with the `deadspace' in his arm? None of these characters were threatened by what you call 'us normals.’"
"All I'm saying," I replied, an invisible conga line moving down my spine, "is that there are a group of people out there who need someone to speak out for them."
"Do you think Hinckley should be released from prison?"
"Jesus, lady."
"Just asking. Proceed."
Jesus.
"Is that why you're here?"
"Excuse me."
"Because of your guilt over being healthier than, what is your friend in the wheelchair's name over by the ConEd building? Charles? By being 'stuck with an invisible disease' to quote from the jacket of your last book."
"What is it about guilt with you shrinks?" I yelled, slamming my fist down on my healthy leg. "Yeah, I feel bad because I don't drool or piss in my pants! Is that what you want to hear?"
"Not exactly; but for today, it will do."
On Thursday, we talked about trains and pens and bleeding between the lines.
"That girl I wrote the poem about back in '82," I began. The psychiatrist made a quick note on her pad.
I continued, clearing my throat. "Her killer is in the news; not the two brothers, but another one, the one I named David Spellman in 'Rapid Transit.’" In actuality, he was tame compared to the Ripper: he'd only stab his victims in the chest. In the story, I incorporated the Ripper brothers' sickness into the actual killing scene. I think... that this has a bearing on why I'm here, the news of the killer's suicide."
I wrung my hands together. "After I began writing full-time around the autumn of 1985, about the same time I moved into my Rogers Park apartment, my work became increasingly more autobiographical. That is, many things that I wrote about were 'real world' happenings. Louden's choking on his vomit in 'The Body Shop.' McCallum's house burning down, oh there are others.
"But then it got out of control. Man, this still sounds crazy to me when I think about it. Certain things started happening because I wanted to incorporate them into my stories.”
The psychiatrist leaned forward.
I gave her my best example. "When I got the idea for `The Touch,' I went along with my friend Dan to a strip joint in Fallon Ridge, and I was inwardly hoping that something worth writing about would happen. Now the incident of the guy being thrown into the quarry was old news; I had my ending to the story, now I needed filler.
“Then Crystal the hooker came along. As if her name alone weren't enough, she goes and makes the comparison of my mentioning having cerebral palsy to her epileptic dog!"
The psychiatrist was the first person who didn't smile at that story; I figured then that a smile from her would look like nothing more than a crack in a window pane.
"Then there was the chance meeting with the artistic bum in 'Face Value,' and the legless girl in 'Eye of the Zombie.'"
"And the girl hit by the car in 'Winnings,’—" the psychiatrist finished for me.
"And you're having trouble finishing the third story in your Cassady trilogy. Nadia sent me a copy of your rough draft for 'Bleeding Between The Lines’—“
"That's right. I had an idea that the killer would be paroled and hunt the writer of 'Rapid Transit' down for exposing him in the story. I guess that sounds ridiculous, but at least now I don't have to worry. He's dead."
"Speaking of the El," the psychiatrist said. "Why does
so much of your recurring imagery involve elevated trains and subway tunnels?"
"I take the train to and from work; accomplishing much of my writing on the El. The train conjures so many images: the train of thought; pulling a train; the light at the end of the subway tunnel; downtown Chicago is called the Loop because the El tracks encircle it, snakes eating their tails, perhaps. The tracks can be a type of altar to worship on." I took a deep breath.
"In January, after I found out that the second Cassady story, 'Take the "A" Train' was chosen for Year's Best Horror, as 'Rapid Transit' was, the pressure was on me to write the final chapter, 'Bleeding Between The Lines’—
"And like I said, I was originally going to have the killer released in 1987 on a technicality and have him hunt me down for writing about him. Then I realized exactly how much verisimilitude was going into my stories and that scared me."
Silence. Four heartbeats.
"So I decided that the title would be derived from lines on a notepad, like the one you're writing on. And the pen symbolizes the knife."
"What stopped you from continuing with that idea?" the psychiatrist asked. "I think that if we can get past your block, we could consider this to be our last session."
"Well..." I was afraid to admit this. "I had an inspiration for having ‘Bleeding Between the Lines‘ be about me seeing a psychiatrist and then going home and slashing my wrists open with a pen. And that frightens me."
"Okay, one more session, then. That will be fifty dollars as usual."
I stood, fumbling for a pen, wondering what I'd be typing when I got home. I couldn't find my damn pen.
"Do you have a p—?" I asked the psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist reached to an inside breast pocket, brushing herself as she did so. Pulling out a ten-inch stiletto, she flicked the blade open. Blue ink dripped from the sterile blade.
"Here," she said. "Use mine."
Chicago:
16 APRIL 1987