by Phoef Sutton
It was my own fault, of course, and if he’d picked me up and dropped me into the pit to be eaten alive by the alligator, there would have at least been some poetic injustice to it. But, no, in a few blurred moments, he knocked me down and then, mercifully, allowed the girls to pull him off me and lead him away while they muttered to each other about the crazies they let run loose these days.
I felt blood on my lip and a spectacular pain in my nose. You were next to me, bawling wildly at the sight of me. Charlotte was there, too, offering comfort while calling me an idiot. I heard no word of thanks from the alligator.
So, there I am, Maggie. Your dear uncle, Defender of the Meek and Mild. Protector of Jizz Monkeys and Man-Eating ’Gators. Funny thing is, I never get mad for my own sake. People can push me around, insult me to my face, and chances are I’ll just nod in agreement and move on. But when I see those things happen to other people, that Other always shows up at my shoulder, slapping me like Bud Abbott used to slap Lou Costello and telling me, “You’re not just going to stand by and let that happen, are you? Do something!” So, I’d dive in as if I thought this Bud Abbott guy would back me up. But, true to form, once the fighting started, he was long gone, and there was nobody there but me.
Okay, that’s not quite true. And we’re writing this to get to the truth, aren’t we? We’re telling the truth, the whole truth, and so much truth that I’ll probably toss this out before I even finish it. So, the truth is, I’m not entirely alone in those fights. There’s another guy who shows up—a guy who fucking loves it. A guy who loves the whole messy mix-up of a fight, who loves seeing the moment of fear in the face of the one I’m going at, who even loves it when the fight turns around, as it always does, and I start getting my ass whupped. Who loves the danger, and the blood, and the give and take of pain.
Now, who this guy is, I have no idea. Once the fight is over, he’s long gone, too, hiding in a dark corner of shame, and I never think about him or admit even to myself that he’s there.
Do I sound crazy to you? Talking about this guy and that guy, as if I had multiple personalities, or as if these aspects of my own personality weren’t a part of me? I guess I’ve always thought that there was within me this whole cast of characters, like the supporting players in a good Howard Hawks movie. The Bud Abbott guy. The Fight Guy. The Krispy Kreme Donut Man. The Good Mother, who somehow knew how to change your diapers, bandage your boo-boos, and soothe your tears without ever being taught. These have always seemed more like friends and enemies who visit me than parts of myself.
Trains of thought like this are just a few of the reasons I’ve never done well in therapy.
FOUR
I’d like a refund on this.” Mid-twenties and just out of law school, I guessed. The guy’s suit was too expensive to put on a body that hadn’t quite finished growing yet. I figured him for an intern at one of those lobbying firms that littered Alexandria. Spent his days playing gopher for a bunch of tobacco-pushing fat cats and his nights hounding secretaries in Old Town.
The unkind nature of this assessment was colored by the fact that the yuppie scum was pushing an un-rewound copy of Black Sunday (Galatea Films, Italy, 1960, Italian title La Maschera del Demonio, five stars on the Kehoe Scale) over the counter at me.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“It was boring. You said it was exciting, but it was just slow. And it was in black and white; you didn’t tell me it was in black and white. I can’t watch that.”
I controlled my breathing and laid a hand on the tape. I’d already lost my temper and one job today. “This is the greatest vampire movie ever made.”
“I thought it was stupid.”
“No, I think what’s confusing you is that you’re stupid. This is poetry, this is beauty.”
“Look, I just want my $2.99 back.”
“No. You don’t deserve it. Go rent Con Air. Go rent fucking Armageddon. As a matter of fact, no, you don’t rent anything. You’re not a member here anymore.” I clicked through the computer. “Look, I’m erasing you from our membership list.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Then you get one more chance. Rent this.” I slapped a copy of Les Yeux Sans Visage on the counter. “Eyes Without a Face, aka The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, France, 1959. A fucking masterpiece.”
“It’s black and white, I don’t—”
“You’ll like this.”
“Is it gross?”
“It’s very gross. All that face-removing stuff from Face/Off? They stole it from this.”
“Cool. Can I get Big Daddy too?”
What do you do with people like that? “Yeah, you can get Big goddamn Daddy, too. I don’t know why I bother.”
Hugh, the owner and manager, sidled up to me after I checked the guy out. “Did I ever mention to you that the customer’s always right?”
“Not that guy. That guy was so wrong.”
He laughed, so I thought this might be the proper moment to tell him that I’d been doing a lot of thinking about that second store in Dupont Circle and I’d decided I was ready to open it. “I’m ready to dedicate myself to running a video store,” I said. “I mean, I’ve been thinking it over and it’s really what I want to do with my life.”
Hugh just laughed and waddled off to the stock room. I didn’t take that as a good sign.
So, it wasn’t shaping up to be the best Christmas ever.
I drove home on the George Washington Parkway, singing along with the car radio. Dwight Yoakam and a heartbreak song that fit my mood so dead-on perfect it was like I wrote it myself. A moaning yodel caught in my throat, but when I tried to choke it down I felt a bubble of panic in my chest. I gripped the wheel to steady myself, to stifle the sense that the bottom was falling out of my life.
But who was I kidding? It had fallen out long ago. What terrified me now was the sudden awareness that the new supports I had painstakingly built for myself over the past five years had proven false, nothing but paper simulations that were tearing loose, threatening me with another dreadful free fall.
No Anne. No career. Barely a job. No school for Maggie. Charlotte alone and drifting. And that old woman in Anne’s apartment.
As I said before, I hadn’t let myself think about the apparition I’d seen on Anne’s sofa; there was enough other unpleasantness for me to focus on. But I couldn’t ignore it forever. It kept flickering around in the corners of my vision like an annoying floater. Now, it forced itself to the top of the garbage heap in my mind; I wondered for the millionth time just how crazy I was.
It had been years since I’d seen a “spook.” Five. No need to count, I knew the time exactly. As the years had passed, I’d assumed I’d grown out of it or that the tumor, or whatever it was that made me see these things, had dissolved in my brain and left me like everybody else. Could it all be beginning again?
Maybe not. Maybe that image in the apartment had been a one-shot deal. I’d been upset; heartbroken, in fact. So, maybe it was some ordinary, stress-linked delusion. Comforting thoughts. But I’d had those thoughts before.
After the first incident in the gym, I’d never seen Mr. Meloni again. Not a trace, not a shadow. I didn’t feel icy fingers down my spine any of the hundreds of times I walked into the gym after that. Sure, I hated the place, but I hated it for all the normal reasons teenage kids hate gyms. Once, I found myself sitting in that very spot in the bleachers where the gym teacher’s phantom had appeared, and I didn’t even realize it until the game was half over. No eerie sensations, no spectral visions, no big deal.
I never kept a journal (this is as close as I’ve ever come to that), so I might have forgotten the whole business if it hadn’t been for Charlotte’s seventeenth birthday slumber party. It was the evening of Senior Skip Day, the end of Charlotte’s last year at Henry James High School. She’d spent the day with four of her friends, all beautiful, grown-up women—at least that’s how sixteen and seventeen year olds looked to my fourteen-year-old eyes—cruising up
to Great Falls in Melody Fleming’s Buick Skylark. They came thundering back that night, rushing through the kitchen door, a flash of legs and hair and pure clear skin that I caught just a glimpse of as I looked up from a game of Stratego I was playing with my brother, George. They were gone in a second, but my head stayed turned in their direction, like Wile E. Coyote when he realizes he’s about to hit a mesa. Feminine beauty hit me hard in those days, leaving me flattened and fluttering to the ground like a Kleenex in the wind.
George grabbed my head and turned it back toward the board. “Don’t start that, Sammy; you’ll never stop.” But words of wisdom, even from a revered older brother, often backfire. In this case, they captured perfectly the feeling swelling in my lungs; something had just happened that was going to keep on happening to me until the day I die.
Melody was the redhead of that blurred mass of beauty. The oldest, of course, the most ridiculously unattainable of that unattainable group. The worldly one. The one whose eyes looked out from a place of deep sorrow. The one whose laugh was music from deep in her throat. The one who could drive.
I’d had crushes before, but good God, never one I felt in every cell of my body. Never one that made me feel like there was a balloon being inflated in my chest that was going to keep on expanding until my ribs shattered and flew across the room like confetti.
George knew what was going on. He tried to get my mind off the whole deal. Offered to play Trivial Pursuit with me, which he only ever did on rainy summer days on the island when there wasn’t a blessed other thing to do. I said I wasn’t in the mood. He tried to talk me into joining the Parents as they watched The Jewel in the Crown on Masterpiece Theatre. The Raj would have to fall without me; I was tired, and I was going to bed. At nine o’clock.
But how could I sleep, my mother wondered, with Charlotte’s room right next to mine and them blaring her stereo at full volume? Pat Benatar and Bruce Springsteen, with the bass up so high it made the bed frame vibrate.
Not just the bed frame, either, but my bones as well, as I lay in my bed, hand under the covers, half-dreaming, half-fantasizing about Melody and the whole adult world of love. There was no way to make out their conversation under the pulsing beat of “Love Is a Battlefield,” but I could hear the rhythm of their voices, their laughter like rainfall on the other side of the wall.
I couldn’t hear footsteps, though, so I was taken entirely by surprise when the door opened and light from the hall fell onto my bed. I snatched my hand from under the covers, guiltily, and looked up at Charlotte and Melody.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Of course, the way Charlotte meant it, the question was about why I was in bed at this early hour, but I didn’t take it that way.
“Nothing,” I said.
Melody’s laugh rumbled. “I think he’s busy, Charlie.”
A blush, a warm blend of humiliation and excitement that set the stage for hundreds of bad moments in my love-life to come, rushed to my face.
(Look what I’m writing. I can’t possibly ever show this to you, my little niece. But I can’t stop writing it either.)
“Shut up.” Your mother defended me in her off-handed way, and even with all I was feeling I had time to note it and be grateful.
The girls were searching for something in the corner of my room, where the board games were kept. So, that was why they had come in, I realized, and surprised myself by feeling disappointed. But had I really thought sixteen year olds would leave a party to visit me?
“Well, fuck, it’s not here.”
Swearing, like drinking too much and driving the Parkway at night with the headlights off, was reckless youth’s idea of acting like a grown-up, and it always thrilled me to be in the presence of it. I sat up, turning on my bedside lamp and illuminating the wall display of old Vincent Price posters; I wondered if I should start opting for more mature decor. I wonder that still. “What are you looking for?”
“The Ouija board.”
“We took it to Maine.”
“Shit.”
I adjusted my pajamas to make sure all was concealed and threw off the covers. “You don’t need one.”
I leapt from the bed and, with a boldness that amazed me even as I did it, walked down the hall and into Charlotte’s room. Well, the girls were still in their day clothes, which exploded my fantasy of them all rolling around in their jammies like Olivia Newton-John in Grease. Probably just as well, considering my own state of comparative undress.
I stumbled over the towel that had been crammed under the door and breathed in a roomful of smoke. The window was open on the hot night, and Jamie Butler stood by it with a pillow case, trying to fan the smoke into 9the backyard.
Seeing it was just harmless me, they all laughed, and Lyn Adams appeared from the closet, joint still smoldering in her hand. Charlotte’s homemade cassette tape cut to an end in the middle of “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and the room was suddenly silent and waiting for me to say something.
Charlotte saved the day again, speaking up from behind me. “What’s the plan, Sammy?” Well, that was Charlotte all over. Most big sisters would have thrown a fit at the invasion of a little brother into a scene like this.
“I can make a Ouija board. All we need is a table and masking tape and a wine glass.” It was a trick I’d seen in a sixties British horror picture from Hammer Studios. Even then my knowledge of trash cinema bordered on the obsessive.
A scavenger hunt ensued, and I cleared Charlotte’s desk of its usual rubble. They were an odd group, your mother’s high school friends, neither in the “in” crowd nor the “out” crowd. An unnameable clique that really didn’t give a damn what anyone called them. Ten years earlier, they might have been hippies, but our generation missed that opportunity, as they would continue to miss so many others.
Charlotte was their den mother, or gang leader, depending on your opinion of the group. Even when she led them astray into the world of recreational drugs and casual sex, she did it with maternal concern and a warm heart. (Now I can’t show this to you until after Charlotte’s dead, too. Maybe I’ll never show it to you at all.) That unhappy mix of good impulses and terrible choices would plague her all her life, but for now it looked like nothing more than youthful exuberance.
Our mom and dad approved of all this, or as much of it as they cared to be aware of, seeing something almost Victorian in the passionate nature of Charlotte’s friendships. More than anything, they were thrilled to see her refusing to conform to the new conservatism of the eighties. “She’s just plain ornery,” Dad would say with pride. “She doesn’t cut her conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” Mom would say, placing the whole burden of Lillian Hellman’s martyrdom on Charlotte’s deceptively broad shoulders. For the Kehoes, nonconformity was a birthright, a responsibility. A heritage that went far deeper than the crabgrass that sprouted on their front lawn.
My parents thought of their children as more than just family. We were friends; we were entertainment. Supporting players in their You Can’t Take It With You style of living. So, they loved Charlotte for her untamable character. They loved George for his piercing intelligence. And me? Well, I was the baby of the family, and I’m sure they came up with something.
I watched this group of girls in my sister’s room, filled with fascination; an astronomer studying a newly discovered planet. I loved them as pals and lusted after them as women. At fourteen, I couldn’t distinguish one feeling from the other. (Oh, why kid yourself, Sammy, do you think you can now?) Melody found the masking tape, and they tore off twenty-eight pieces at my instruction and stuck them in a big circle on Charlotte’s desk. On each piece, Lyn wrote a letter of the alphabet and on the last two the words yes and no. The wine glass was placed in the middle of the circle, upside down.
“Are we ready?” Charlotte asked.
“This is stupid,” Angela Gray said, filling the vital “this is stupid” role every group needs so much. “Nobody believes this crap.”
“Giv
e it a try.” That was Melody, placing her slender fingertip on the base of the glass. The six of them all reached out, placing one finger on the glass; Melody was next to me, so that our fingertips touched, and I thought, This is it, this is all I need for the rest of my life.
I had started out loving all of them, in sort of a mad, indiscriminate lump, simply infatuated with the whole notion of females being in the world. In the past year, my crush had narrowed its focus onto Melody, and not because she was the most beautiful one of the group, but because she was the saddest. Sorrow seemed to pour out of her deep-set eyes; sorrow over a father who died last year following a long bout with cancer; sorrow over a known scumbag of a boyfriend who cheated on her and slapped her around; sorrow over an alcoholic and heartbroken mother. She needed rescuing, and I knew that my love, untried and untested as it was, could save her if she’d just give me a chance.
Now, here we were, fingers touching, me already in my pajamas. Could true love be far behind? I’d have killed myself for her right then, if I thought it would bring us together.
Angela Gray still scoffed. Nobody believed in ghosts, she said. “Has anybody even seen one?”
Now, I’d never told a soul about seeing Mr. Meloni in the gym; I figured I’d have been laughed at, at best. But here was a chance to make myself stand out, to center all attention on me, to possibly impress the woman whose fingerprint was currently in contact with mine. I couldn’t pass it up.
“I did.”
All eyes were on me now, and Melody’s seemed particularly engaged. I could only go forward. So, I told them about that day in the gym and, when I’d reached the end of the tale and sensed the impending let-down of the anti-climactic truth, I knew I had to embellish. “Then he reached out a bony finger,” I said, visualizing Meloni’s pudgy digits as I lied, “and he said ‘Forgive me.’” It was the best I could come up with on short notice, but the wide eyes around me told me it had been enough.