Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  BREATHE NOW. BLINK. There Groot sits at the kitchen table, Gillian’s record read, her request requested. Clear your vision. Sit up straight. Pay attention. And so I did, but it was a strenuous task to coerce my lungs into cooperation; for the past five minutes or more a vertigo had been braiding up through my brain. My tongue secreted glue and so I stumbled to the faucet and drank with greed and slosh. Groot, with infinite patience, remained silent, simply stared. I had no notice of sunlight, of trees, of atmosphere and air—I’m sure they were all there, just outside my window.

  And then I felt them approaching, rising, rolling: the tears that had been built up since my father’s death, warm and trembly, tight in my head. I bent over the sink and let those tears gush from my nose and mouth, tremendous cries that shook my kidneys and lungs and pieces of intestine. This went on for more minutes than was manly. Groot had sense enough to leave me be, not offer aspartame platitudes. Empty now, I stood erect and still, the window before me revealing a backyard in disarray—there was the picnic table we had built—and after many more minutes of silence I said in my new-man’s voice, “Groot, pack your bags. We have business bloody and long overdue in Boston.”

  10. RUMBLE ON THE WATERFRONT

  GATHER ’ROUND, NOW. We go forth hexed, a little crestfallen but well intentioned toward an ending always in progress, or maybe just a continuation from that to this, from there to hereabouts, defying the reaper by courting constant motion, shunning seclusion, inventing love, and then needing to see that invention light up, spin, sparkle.

  How debased I felt now for having wanted to suspend my quest for Gillian, abandon my aims in favor of what I could do with Webster’s idea of laze and loaf. How unworthy. I had bungled along in a creamy fog of dashed romance, yes, and snubbed reality for that jocund green light at the end of Gillian’s dock. Okay. Weary indeed it made me, helter-skelter all over this grand nation, from Virginia to Maine, even to prison, then from Bigfoot’s woods to Sandy McDougal to Morris Hammerstein to Richie Lombardo and the Dildo Duo. In cowardice I had wanted to choose retreat and rest, not realizing that such a choice was tantamount to comatose or else turning to ash. My father’s death didn’t help, not a bit.

  Those were my harebrained views in the passenger’s seat of Groot’s Ford Bronco—a red thing unfashionable and angry, murder on the ozone—the two of us on Interstate 84 trucking northeast through Hartford. We were, indeed, on our way to meet my Gillian, she who would swab the sewage of me, she who was due to arrive the next morning at Logan International piping with rage and planning a retribution only a fifth century Greek could appreciate. Orestes, say. Groot had seen fit to bundle in the back firearms and a combustible cache I was too enervated to inspect. He said he could tell from Gillian’s dispatch that we would need them during our palaver with Jacobi, that my gal had .50-caliber bullets and grenade shrapnel on her mind, all the holy cow and tallyho you can count. Me: I was thinking of rose petals and no more nights alone, of never again uttering the terms affliction and avalanche, and of what Hansel did for that nymphet Gretel. Still stunned by this epic turnabout and the fact that Gillian had come to her senses and wanted me back, I shook off cumber and looked to the other side of my offal. Heavens above.

  As Groot motored on in Neal Cassady mode, I read Gillian’s letter myself, tried to ignore Mick Jagger’s throat, and perspired with a fusion of disbelief and glee. We were children unhinged, not nearly adult, reaching for an apogee that might disintegrate as soon as we grabbed it. Adults, I’ve been told, do not thrive on frenzy; they go to work, avoid the preposterous. I did not consider what lunacy Gillian wanted us to perform at the New England Aquarium, only what she would think of my hair and complexion and clothes, how we would embrace and smooch upon first seeing each other after so long a spell, and the ease allowed to my ulcerated self. Groot, I could see, wanted a warpath gory enough to satisfy some slighted Iroquois, just itching to shoot someone, his countenance stern and of singular purpose, amped up as if on amphetamines. The love I felt for him just then puffed within me and almost pushed out tears. Our entire twenty-five-year friendship had been cloudless. What a pal. I felt just faintly less remorseful than Judas for saddling him with this glut and lade, but what could I do? We were both actors for a begetter who could not think more fondly of his project. Promethean players, our stolen fire inward and hotter than equatorial Africa.

  “Gilgamesh and Sir Gawain and King Arthur,” Groot said after a swath of silence. “Robin Hood and Van Helsing. Also the Americans Luke Skywalker and Rambo. Let’s get zippy.”

  “What makes Luke Skywalker American, pray tell?”

  “His accent, for one. His California looks, for two. Also his propensity for humdinger and making merry. Need I continue?”

  “Please, no.”

  “Here, put this on,” he said, and tossed into my lap a piece of black fabric with two holes cut into it.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your Lone Ranger mask. I have one, too.”

  “Groot,” I said, “I’m not wearing a Lone Ranger mask and neither are you.”

  “We need to hide our identities. Plus, you know, I’m the Lone Ranger.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not.”

  Back at my condo we had changed out of our funeral clothes and were now donning inconspicuous summer duds, he in frayed cut-off jeans and a Rolling Stones T-shirt, and I looking—should I even say?—aggressively adorable in a pinkish polo shirt and pressed khaki shorts. Groot found it necessary to wear his combat boots, I my flip-flops.

  With trees and rock faces blurring by outside our windows, Groot informed me thus: “Goethe once wrote that the secret to life is living.”

  “Leave it to Goethe. That’s like saying that the secret to fish is fishing.”

  I fiddled with the vents so the cool air would come my way and leave me smelling unlike sleaze.

  “Hey,” he said, “let’s stop for some belly-timber, a burger or hot dog or something made in a laboratory. By the way, how are you feeling right about now? I’m guessing your head’s in a storm.”

  “I feel strange, yes.”

  “We didn’t even say goodbye to your mother, ya know.”

  “I know, thanks. Let’s stay focused here. Those guns in the back make me nervous. It’s like I’m forever in an ad for the NRA.”

  Mick Jagger squalled through the speakers with his philosophy of satisfaction for the maniacal among us. What was his point exactly? Groot asked why the guns caused me fright.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Groot, maybe because I sat in prison for a while because of a gun and, oh, let me see, they kill people.”

  “Precisely. People might need some killing. You remember that movie we loved as teenagers, the one with Christian Slater, before his career went into the crapper, called True Romance? His character said, It’s better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it.”

  “That is logic hard to argue with,” I said.

  “Just trust me, Charlie. A gun in the hand of the right individual makes living a more easeful affair.”

  My father’s coffin was right then being lowered into the ground. The scenery outside my window, rocks and trees and houses on a hill, went by me swish, swish. Far off down in a valley I spotted, for just two seconds, a large dog sprinting after…what? A fox? Freedom? The earth felt tilted. Mack trucks growled everywhere.

  “Hi-Ho Silver!” Groot said, and I think I sneezed.

  Our lunch break: for those emailers who like to criticize my quote paucity of socioeconomic insight unquote—apparently I was not Balzacian, too self-consumed and solipsistic to pay any heed to issues larger than my own sacked heart—let me say thus: What a depressing rest stop it was, just south of Boston on Route 90, all those overweight and half-asleep consumers jamming lard into their pie-holes, their Nosferatu tanks swigging gasoline, most of them hideously dressed and far from pretty, buying plastic trinkets, oblivious to the Lilliputian migrant Latinos dancing behind mops and rags wet with t
oxic soap. The place was sadness personified, screwing with my high.

  “Groot,” I said, “hear me out: I feel mephitic. I’d rather consort with criminals than witness this American ugliness.”

  Samaritan that he is, Groot stuck a five-dollar bill into the grip of a pregnant sixteen-year-old with bloodshot eyes, washing windows with one hand, holding her belly with the other.

  “Let your child be among the killers and not the killed,” he said.

  She rejoined with a face that called many questions, only a few of which applied to the molecules of this world.

  No time to tarry, we chowed our lunch in the truck doing eighty-five into Boston. The midday summer sun took no prisoners, and in my abdomen a jangle indicating anxiety. My inner monologue consisted of: Breathe, think, and then back again. But think what? Wasn’t thinking for those who hadn’t already gone down the rabbit hole with Alice? Groot had made reservations for the night at a hotel he said came highly recommended by someone he had met in Bolivia. He was determined to arrive this evening, not the following morning, because he needed—needed—to perform surveillance on the aquarium, on Jacobi’s vessel docked in the harbor, before Gillian arrived to disclose her plan to us. Every time he spoke her sacred name my enzymes went a little bonkers, and in my mind were the lines of the immortal Longfellow (lines, for some reason, that my father had been happy to recite when I was a child with no notion of tomorrow): “Let us, then, be up and doing, / With a heart for any fate; / Still achieving, still pursuing, / Learn to labour and to wait.”

  Up and doing. Ah, yes Henry, but the labor and waiting are over now, dear friend, and tomorrow is mine only mark.

  WELL, NOT COMPLETELY over, I guessed, because I still had to wait at this tumbledown hotel Groot had found for us—a small manse really, circa 1810—outside Central Square in Cambridge, across the river from Boston, just blocks from those snobbed prodigies at Harvard who sat devising ways either to improve or further waste the world. The hotel occupied a quarter of a block on a residential, spruce-lined street that did not feel even a centimeter urban. It had taken us twenty tense minutes and several wrong turns to find the dump after we got off the Mass Pike. And what did the sign read, the one wired to the iron gate of the hotel’s entrance? It read: CAMBRIDGEPORT HAUNTED MANSION.

  “Groot, what is this?” I asked as we pulled into the horseshoe drive.

  “It’s our hotel. Nice character, right? And history. Lots of culture.”

  “What’s with the haunted business?”

  “That’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. I have guns. It’s cheap, that’s the main thing. Plus we need a garrison set back from the frontlines in order to consider our tactics safely, without the chance of breached security by one of Jacobi’s infantry.”

  How could I have responded to that? With what wisecrack would I have retorted? The multiple pink folds of his brain simply didn’t whistle like yours and mine. Give him a subject, any subject, and he’s happy to oraculate.

  As we unloaded our duffel bags, the proprietor came through the front door and down the splintered steps to greet us. This proprietor wasn’t a back-bent old geezer in round specs carrying a leather-bound copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, an appearance that might have been better for business. Rather, she was a twenty-something blond almost-beauty in painted-on running shorts, sandals, and a Red Sox T-shirt to boot, plus two eyebrows it took hours every week to perfect.

  She said, “Welcome to our haunted hotel. I’m Candy.”

  “You certainly are,” Groot said, giving her his hand, clicking on his mojo. “My name is No Man and this is Charles Homar, memoirist of no small fame. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s a pupil of the difference between want and need, plus cares about the path between slaughter and salvation. When you get a chance, ask him about the word chasmal.”

  “Pleased to meet you gentlemen,” she said, her voice lathered in Massachusetts-cum-Kennedy. “Charles Homar of the giant squid stories?”

  “One and the same,” Groot said.

  “Wow. I’ve been following your journey, Mr. Homar.”

  Circumstance had rendered my tongue useless. I just stared and perhaps drooled. I was in this thing whole hog now, wasn’t I? So much to celebrate, and me standing there a spiritual syphilitic, mangled mental-wise from too much tumble.

  “Candy,” Groot said, “forgive Mr. Homar. He’s contemplating cognitive dissonance. We must be shown to our rooms anon to drop our bags. Night is coming on, no time perchance to dream, for I have some quick dealings on the waterfront.”

  “I hope you gentlemen don’t mind, but there’s a TV crew here tonight filming an episode of Haunted Nation. They have equipment set up,” and she jabbed over her shoulder with a lovely little thumb.

  “Huh?” I said. “What?”

  The sun was everywhere, even this late in the day. Where was my UV protection?

  Candy said, “It’ll be good for business, I hope. Our ghosts have been especially active these last few weeks. You know, with the Red Sox finally winning the Series.”

  Groot said, “Your shades and shade hunters won’t perturb us in the least, my girl.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, and put down my duffel bag. “Pardon me,” I repeated, and mashed my eyes. “I’m sorry, but this is simply a piling-on of the absurdity. I don’t have the room in my narrative for ghosts. Plus I’m belletristic and can’t write Stephen King litter about sprites.”

  “Charlie,” Groot said, “as your longtime friend, I advise you never again to use the word belletristic.”

  “Okay, fine, but you see my point.”

  “I do not. Your namesake sang about ghosts and so did Big Willy from Stratford-upon-Avon. Also Dickens. I was forced to read their ejaculations at the Naval Academy and I’m glad I now have cause to drop their names.”

  “Gillian is coming tomorrow,” I said. “We have vengeance to spread. I am right now, Groot, the very incarnation of unease. I cannot take a round with the unsettled souls of this hotel. So please. No more.”

  You should have seen that ludicrous manse/motel looming over us.

  “No more?” he asked. “What does that mean? We came here for more, Charlie. Always more. What are you saying?”

  Candy said to me, “We’d be delighted if you wrote about us in one of your memoirs, Mr. Homar. We subscribe to New Nation Weekly here.”

  I counted to ten as I had been once taught to do by a tranquilized someone on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa.

  “Let me say this real slow so everyone understands. I. Am. Not. Writing. About. Ghosts. Next thing you know I’ll be writing about vampires, my narratives no better than the Anne Rice tripe clogging bookstore shelves. Plus a TV crew is here. There’s albatross aplenty on my shoulders. I know that in some circles I am considered a tribute to the inadequacies of the prefrontal cortex, but I’m trying to change all that.”

  Groot made what the fuck? faces.

  “Candy,” he said, “would you excuse Charlie and me for just one second, please? Thanks so much, dear,” and he put his arm around my shoulders to guide me to the far end of the wraparound porch. “Buddy, you and I both know that spirits don’t flit through these rooms. Believe me, if ghosts existed, I would have played poker with a few by now, considering all the people I’ve sent from this world. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve already written about Bigfoot and UFOs, plus a midget and a bodybuilder, and ghosts really fall into the same category, don’t you think? Plus we have no time to waste looking for other quarters. Let’s malinger no more.”

  I protested much: “Not the same thing. Sasquatch is natural and so are midgets and bodybuilders. Well, you know, not natural, but of this world, at least. Sort of.”

  Candy was all eavesdrop, inching closer on the porch.

  Groot said, “People like to read about ghosts. Think of your readers. I have to go now. Unwind. And don’t deflower Candy, because I plan to do that myself later. That gal is walking Viagra, all filly and no frump.”

 
“Viagra, Groot? You’re thirty-three.”

  “And a fan of modern science, Charlie. It’s a swell day,” and here he sniffed the air as if pleasantness itself had become gaseous.

  “Well,” he said, “I mean weather-wise, not, you know, funeral-wise, this morning and all.”

  He made haste to the aquarium to conduct his necessary surveillance—he knew Boston well partly because after 9/11 he had undertaken some shady national security business there, the finer points of which resulted in dead jihadists—and left me on the wooden steps with Candy, two duffel bags in my hands, the glow of daylight about an hour from death. Four dingbats stood in the foyer with their array of machines: a camera guy with his camera, a lighting gal with her lights, and the two ghost hunters themselves, both of them overweight underachievers in their mid-thirties, the dweeby breed imagined fairly as staying up for six straight days dueling it out over Dungeons and Dragons, nothing but Doritos and orange soda for sustenance. Faithful to form, they even wore those dorky black Velcro sneakers you can get for fifteen bucks at one of Warren Buffett’s many stores. The lighting gal could have been half attractive if she gave up sweets for a month, traded black for more summery shades, did something definitive with that hair. The three gents, however: hopeless.