Shock Totem 8: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  I nodded, retrieved the ball from the corner of the room, and brought it to him without question. He threw it to me, and I caught it deftly with one hand. I felt a bit giddy. We were playing ball in the house, something that my mother absolutely forbade. And we were doing it in front of her while she sat at the kitchen table.

  I turned to her, and her face was like stone.

  I tossed the ball back to my father. He caught it, spun quickly toward my mother, and shouted “Catch!” The baseball sailed through the air and fell heavy against the kitchen table, nearly hitting my mother in the face. The ball fell to the floor, hit the wall, and rolled back toward me.

  He pointed and howled with laughter, not apologizing for the close call. “You were supposed to catch it,” he barked.

  I picked the ball up and clutched it in both of my small hands, not wanting to give it back to my father. I didn’t want to play the game anymore.

  “Stop it, Steve.” My mother’s voice was low, almost threatening.

  “Why? We’re just having fun.”

  She gestured toward me. “Can’t you see that you’re scaring her?”

  My father frowned. “Am I scaring you?”

  I didn’t have to answer him. My mother's accusation felt like permission to break down. The question dissolved any scrap of strength I had left and I cried so hard that words would not visit my mouth, even to say “Yes” to my mother’s question, as she expectantly looked at me, as if she hoped my display of fear would somehow stop the progression of my father's behavior. I nodded, to both of them, affirming that I didn’t know what was going on and I was indeed scared.

  My father's shoulders drooped and he scooped me up into his arms, giving me a good hug, telling me not to be afraid. He pulled back and smiled, and then asked me if I wanted another song. I shook my head and pulled away, looking toward my mother for rescue.

  “Come on, Katie, we’re going to church,” she muttered, and stood from the table.

  She took my hand, and led me out. We got into the car, a boat of a Cadillac, and I tried to enjoy the infrequent pleasure of sitting in the front seat. I smoothed out my wrinkled dress and dried my eyes. Not wanting to ask my mother the questions that crashed in on me with dark, half-hidden faces, I instead pushed them away, tucked them in for later, and turned to gaze out the window.

  She dropped me off at the church with my brothers and aunt and went back home. I wandered alone through the gym that was decorated for Easter festivities, not caring about anyone seeing my dress, my joy at that small thing eclipsed by constant questions. I didn’t want to participate in the Easter egg hunt, or Sunday school. I left the gym and went upstairs to one of the empty classrooms and curled up on the carpet, tracing the beige braids of the piling with one index finger as I replayed what my father had said over and over again in my mind. I came downstairs only when I heard the sounds of adults milling about in the lobby, a sure sign that service was over and that my mother would be back to pick us up soon.

  But Mom never came. I rode in the front seat of my aunt’s sedan and we went to her apartment. I didn’t mention what had happened at the house earlier. I didn’t want to know what was going on now. Later, when my brothers and I arrived back home, they asked pointedly where was Dad and why hadn’t he been at church. My mother gathered us on the couch. We snuggled up, listening intently, while my youngest brother toddled on the floor at our feet.

  “Dad is at the VA.” I knew she meant the veteran’s hospital, a place I remembered seeing often enough, although I hadn’t made the connection as to why. “He’ll be gone for a little while, okay? We can go visit him, though.”

  I nodded, and then Joe, who was turning five in a couple of weeks, asked if Dad would be home for his birthday. Mom said no, and the disappointment was immediate and terrible on Joe's face.

  That night I knocked on my mother’s door and asked if I could sleep with her. She obliged, reminding me as I climbed underneath the cold sheets not to move around a lot.

  “Mom?”

  She yawned. “Yes?”

  “What happened to Dad?”

  There was silence. I heard her sigh and saw the silhouette of her hand massage the bridge of her nose. “Your father is really sick.” Then, a few moments later: “Katie, I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  I became lost in my own thoughts and didn’t ask any more questions. Dad was sick, he went to a hospital, and that was all I needed to know.

  Eventually, I slept.

  Eight years later, my parents would get divorced, an absence that went on far longer than the few months Dad was at the VA. I had the choice to see him every other weekend, but I was old enough to decline, and so I did.

  One day, when I was around eighteen, I received a phone call asking if I'd meet him at Dunkin' Donuts to talk things out. I pulled up in my beat-up Dodge Neon, expecting to see the raven-haired Lord I'd known as a child sitting in the dining room, sipping coffee. Instead, I saw an old man with silver hair and wrinkles. I saw a man with tattoos and a cane, clothes that had become too small and glasses that fell down his gaunt face. The change was startling from just a couple years earlier when he'd been removed, with police escort, from our home.

  I sat down in front of him and the silence between us was a living thing, breathing and present. After a few moments, he broached the topic of why I hadn't come to see him and we were again the only two in the room.

  “Because of what happened, while you were living with us,” I said, trying not to sound so incredulous that he would even ask that.

  He took a gulp of coffee—black, because that's how they had to drink it in Vietnam. No cream and sugar there. I remembered when he was living with us, bringing it to him by the gallon while he sat on his throne in the living room, just a beat-up computer chair with burns in the seat from when he fell asleep with a lit Pall Mall in his hand. He would do nothing but watch television for hours, or chat online with other “guitar players.”

  “Your mother poisoned you against me,” he said. He was on lots of meds at that point: Oxycontin for the pain and a cocktail of anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs. They kept him from cycling badly, but that was about it. “What did your mother tell you?”

  I tried to look into his eyes and not to let the familiar mixture of love and resentment boil to the surface. I wanted to be calm for this. I looked into my cup instead and I remembered back to that Easter, when the reality of how mentally ill he was had crashed in to my little world. I repeated the mantra: Dad is sick. I need to show understanding. I tried to find that empathy within myself and scraped bottom.

  “I don't need Mom to tell me anything,” I said. “I was there. I heard the things you said and did.”

  I reminded him of a few examples. He didn't want to hear anymore.

  Even after he shut down the conversation, I told him I'd come to the apartment on Thursdays, but I never did. I left Dunkin Donuts, and it would be the last time I'd see him. His phone calls went unanswered, and eventually I heard from my brothers that I'd been “cut off.”

  Three years later, I answered the phone call that my brothers and I had only the week prior speculated about receiving someday. The police were on the other line, asking for Mrs. Grant.

  “I'm the only Mrs. Grant here,” I said.

  The officer hesitated. “I think I need to speak with your mother.”

  I knew what happened before she even came down the stairs, her expression full of the same conflictions I'd felt since I was a child—love and resentment, relief and guilt, peace and mourning. Dad had died. Because none of us were speaking to him at that time, he was alone and hadn't been found for three days. A friend who spoke to him regularly had suspected something was wrong and dialed the police. I called his friend before the funeral, to thank him.

  “I came to visit your father about a month ago,” he said. “We went to the movies and Outback. He bought a steak. It was like watching a king eat his last meal.”

  I visualized it, and wished
I'd been there to say goodbye, even if I couldn't get the closure I wanted from him. I thanked his friend, the only person that had been left standing with my Dad in the end.

  The funeral was in the morning, a modest event at the veteran's cemetery that my mother could barely afford. There was no funeral procession, no pomp or fanfare, no lengthy service. I read “Footprints in the Sand,” the words choking in my throat halfway through. My Aunt Linda stepped forward to finish for me when it became obvious I couldn't move on. Afterward, she told me I was brave, a notion that I wanted to laugh at as my hands shook and I held in another round of sobs. The undertaker lowered my Dad's body into the ground among all the other soldiers, his grave marked by a white stone etched with his rank and title. It was not a funeral for a Highland Lord.

  The family went to a restaurant after the service. I drank beer after beer until a numbness set in and I no longer wanted to cry. I tipped each glass skyward, sending a prayer to my father, hoping that wherever he was, he was finally at peace. I wished for that comfort as well.

  I wanted peace for the twenty-one-year-old woman that was struggling with adulthood and all the choices that seemed insurmountable at times.

  Most of all, I wished for reassurance for the seven-year-old girl in her Easter dress, twirling in the mirror and wanting nothing more than to show off her dress to her daddy. It was a simple love, one that I would do anything to get back again.

  Catherine Grant lives in Connecticut with her cat/office assistant Miss Mau. She is an office monkey for a Connecticut mental health and addictions non-profit, freelance journalist, bibliophile, gamer and connoisseur of caffeine-laden beverages.

  SWEARING AT THE DINNER TABLE

  A Conversation with Cody Goodfellow

  by John Boden

  There is bizarro...then there is what Cody Goodfellow does. His material is just as brazen and off-kilter as the wildest of Bizarros, but there is an arcane logic to his proceedings. A slithering and cold calculation to the goings-on and characters that populate his tales. It isn’t just Hey, this guy wakes up with a hamster head and has to save his girlfriend from alien blender maniacs. His is a style shrewd and steeped in science and dark arts. But rest assured there is no shortage of gore and goo.

  Cody was kind enough to stop by the manor and sit for a fine brunch of stale cheetos and lemonade.

  • • •

  JB: I first heard of you through the notorious John Skipp interview I conducted for Shock Totem #1. The result of nearly four hours of phone chat with the excitable man. You were mentioned as a new voice he was excited about and as the current collaborative partner he had. So I noted the books he spoke of and tracked them down. I have to say, I have never read anything quite like your work. It’s like 80s splatter punk with a strange Cronenbergian body-horror element thrown in. That and just a lot of weird. I loved it. Did you find it difficult finding a home for your work before the burgeoning acceptance of bizarro? I’d think “traditional” markets would have pissed their pants at the thought.

  CG: Bizarro is burgeoning, but I wouldn’t say there’s been a lot of acceptance... It still gets disrespected pretty much throughout the rest of the horror ghetto, and the sci-fi and fantasy people are like the squares in Caddyshack when the Bizarros jump in the pool. I’ve seen more “mature” writers who are always sloshy drunk in the daytime take them to task for dressing unprofessionally, and I’ve heard miserable, bitter aging writers who will die unread railing against how their vulgarity makes the genre look bad.

  (What was the...? oh yeah...)

  It was murder trying to find markets that would read me at all when I was earnestly trying to fit in coming up, but I figured it was the same for everybody. I didn’t get much useful feedback, so it wasn’t for quite a while that I began to realize there was anything weird, really, about my work. I was laboring under the presumption that the genre should continue to surprise, shock and stun, so I was trying to find subjects and themes and ideas that hadn’t been hacked to death. If it’s stopped being scary or mysterious and you’re still revisiting it, it isn’t horror; it’s comfort food, or porn.

  I made a lot of friends in the horror community, but my work isn’t what most people think of as horror, because most people define horror the way you’d define a western, with a checklist of things. Horror is less a genre than an emotion, every sensible book on writing the stuff tells you, but if it has no slashers, zombies, evil children, haunted houses or ancient evil appearing to fuck with a writer returning to his small hometown, it seems to miss the bus. The New Weird thing seemed promising at first, but it’s too self-consciously formalistic for me. I can appreciate sophisticated entertainment and criticism, but I love art that picks its nose and swears at the dinner table and isn’t afraid of what it is.

  Until Jeremy Robert Johnson invited me to put out my books through his Swallowdown imprint, I didn’t feel like a bizarro writer; I was just content to hang out and drink their beer. I still don’t think my work sits comfortably in the bizarro frame, now that it’s become an established subgenre, if not a formula. I try to take something really weird and make it as real and relatable as possible, whereas bizarro, boiled down to an imitable brand, mutates very universal humanistic themes by throwing in all kinds of absurdism and pop culture and cartoonish filters. In a broader sense, though, where bizarro is simply storytelling that fundamentally inverts or subverts the reader’s basic expectations, I think I fit in quite snugly. One of my earliest coherent memories is getting in trouble for loudly denying the existence of God and Santa Claus in a mall at Xmas, so it follows that everything I do is in some way to shake people out of their false contentment. Hanging out with the Bizarros has rubbed off on me, certainly. My readings get more ridiculous every time I go out. I’m trying to rehabilitate the subversive discourse of prop comedy.

  JB: I started with the Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk, in regard to your solo work. And I was blown away. It was a great big gory crash scene of government conspiracy, mutation, and cultish boogeda boogeda. From there, I picked up your short-story collection, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, and that thing is built of brilliant. The opener, “Baby Teeth,” sets up the ride perfectly. Where do these ideas come from?

  CG: Everywhere. I am motivated to write more by fascination than fear, and I’ve trained my brain to vivisect everything in my world that gives me even a fleeting spark of intrigue. You have to interrogate everything, letting it rattle around like the contents of a rock tumbler, until it reveals what’s so compelling about itself...or at least falls into some narrative that lets the mystery take on a life of its own.

  I threw everything at Radiant Dawn that I had in me, proceeding from the assumption that I probably wasn’t going to write another book. I’d had some rotten experiences in publishing that made me bitter and mistrustful of everyone, and so those books were going to be something of a declaration of war on everything I thought the people who weren’t giving me a chance were doing wrong.

  And the worst possible thing happened. Only a few people found it, but they loved it. So we had to do the sequel, which still didn’t get reviewed anywhere or garner any attention within or without the genre. So I broke down and started going to cons and meeting people. And the first person I met was Skipp.

  My short fiction is weird to me, because I couldn’t write decent shorts or even plot them, until after I’d done the novels. Now, some are years-long projects while others fall off the brow like sweat. But I’m terribly proud of that collection. Some of my newest stuff is in there with some of my first stories, and it seems to hit emotional registers I wasn’t aiming for, consciously.

  “Baby Teeth,” for instance, just distills a bunch of autobiographical stuff. I come from hoarders, and we keep everything. My brother was just finishing high school and being a prick, and my daughter had finished losing her milk teeth and I had them all in this little sack and I put them in a Camel tin in which I stored my step-grandmother’s false teeth, which is another story... But j
ust trying to find a metaphor for that compulsion to cling to the evidence, relics and trash, of the past. And so there’s a lot in there that’s intensely personal, but sublimated and stitched together into a scarecrow wearing odds and ends of mine, and stuff I stole off other people’s lives.

  JB: You’ve collaborated with Skipp on at least three books now. What is it like working with a man who is as hyper as a ten-year-old high on Pepsi and Sweet Tarts? I cannot imagine the idea sessions you two must have. You’re imagination seems to be as feral and out there as his. I’d wager it’s like living Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

  CG: He’s the calm one, most days. I’m a lot more pessimistic, but we egg each other on nicely. Working together is a ton of fun. It has to be, when it’s something you both could be doing alone. It’s more like air guitar dueling on trampolines than boxing.

  We’ve figured out how to divide labor according to our strengths and do our parts and then put it together pretty seamlessly. It helps that we both do music. Before we wrote anything together, we goofed around and made some songs, and that model has informed all our collaborations. You harmonize and you break into solos and just use the other guy’s variations to bring out new wrinkles in your own stuff. I love the solitude of writing, but eventually I get fed up with my own rhythms, my favored vocabulary, my pet ideas. Skipp puts surprise and a sense of play back into the work.

  JB: What or who, are some of your influences? I hear you carry a torch for that Lovecraft feller, but there is also an obvious cinematic vibe to your work, so I would assume a hefty presence of directors also play a part.