Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight
Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven
I was touring in a band called Living Hell on an old Oakland City Bus that John Benson had converted into a mobile concert venue by installing a bank of wheelchair batteries under the stage. There’s so much that could be said about that bus and tour but I’ll mostly do it in other pieces. I will say that this marked the beginning of me being the lead vocalist in bands for the simple reason that no one else wanted to do it. Unfortunately I have never watched The Zen of Screaming, not even to this day, and my voice was instantly shredded and only got worse.
The tour took us to Vermont; I don’t know what city but it’s the one with a statue of a Lake Monster. We met up with a kid named Julian who a lot of the other band members knew already. He had a tape of this band his uncles were in – a forgotten and groundbreaking Punk/Metal/Prog group from the ‘70s made up of Black guys from Detroit. We were all completely blown away by the music and couldn’t believe almost nobody had heard it at that point. He told us a story about some record company suits telling his uncles to change the name to something more commercial. One of the band members lit a joint and put his feet up on the desk:
“The name is Death, turkeys!”
There’s actually a Richard Pryor sketch about a Black punk/metal band called Black Death playing for and then mass murdering a white audience. The fringes of comedy usually express the limits of what the society of its time would or would not realistically be comfortable with. In that decade a Black band called Death was viewed as too militant and confrontational for the major labels and independent music was barely a thing. Over the following years we would all watch the newly released album and an accompanying documentary finally bring the group the recognition they deserved over thirty years after the fact.
The way that bus shows generally worked is John would pick a place to park unlikely to result in noise complaints then load up the local bands and audience for a show. The tour was plagued by mechanical problems – mostly regarding the system that had been installed to allow the bus to run on vegetable oil. In West Virginia we attempted to reverse our fortunes with a Viking Funeral for a mummified squirrel but the relief was only temporary. In Vermont a unique gremlin manifested: the wheelchair batteries had not charged and there was no juice with which to have a rock concert.
Ordinarily this would be a huge disappointment and mood killer but I happen to have a very limited and specific super power. I always seem to know exactly what activity to suggest when the morale of five to twenty of my peers is perched precariously on the precipice of disaffected futility. In this case we were sitting on a bus with a few weak sources of electric illumination but little else, a few brown bags were in a few hands but nowhere near enough for a drinking game.
I proposed that we tell each other ghost stories.
I’m ashamed to admit that while several of these anecdotes were proffered by the contingent of Vermont natives I can’t recall a single detail concerning the substance of these narratives but I have an ironclad excuse. It would have been bad form to steer the gathering toward this most ancient of pastimes without a macabre tale of my own as offering and I was racking my brain to invent one. I tried to concentrate on grief, dread and the supernatural; I employed the device of “this happened to a friend” for veracity and ended up with the following.
It should go without saying that what you are about to read is absolutely and 100% true.
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Francois was my best friend in High School and he even ended up living with me at my parent’s house but we didn’t know each other at all when we were younger. He grew up in a slightly rougher neighborhood up the street from me called Lomita Village with his French Canadian mother and two sisters who were significantly older. He had a best friend who lived across the street from him named Jamie and their friendship was founded on one of the most superficial yet stable initiatives for childhood association: Jamie always had all of the best toys and video games.
It wasn’t that Jamie’s parents were rich, the entire street sat just under the line dividing poverty from the middle class, but rather that he had some kind of terminal health condition. Francois couldn’t remember exactly what this was except that Jamie stayed small, low weight and didn’t go outside much. He missed a lot of school. Francois was actually a few years older than Jamie but, as is usually the case in these situations, Jamie’s parents were just excited that he had a friend at all. When Jamie did make it to school he wasn’t particularly popular.
The late ‘80s were a bit of a Golden Age in action figures and home video game consoles and the way Francois tells it Jamie’s house was like a Toys R Us. He had all the Transformers, Thunder Cats, G.I. Joes and even the deep cuts like the short lived holographic Visionaries and Supernaturals. More importantly he had a Nintendo Entertainment System and would get all the new cartridges like the game changing Super Mario Brothers Three. When Jamie was feeling a bit healthier and energized they would play with Nerf stuff in his fenced off backyard and get Blackie, his family’s Labrador Retriever, to bring back the foam balls, darts and arrows.
Eventually Jamie had to go into the hospital and Francois was brought over to visit a few times but he had to go back to his own school and he started to make other friends. Then one day Francois came home from school and his mother was sitting by the phone with the expression of somebody who was desperate to find meaning in a vicarious expression of grief. Jamie had died.
Francois dressed up and went to the funeral with his mother and sisters; Jamie’s father hugged him and cried and held onto Francois like he was the last solid object that could protect him from falling into the yawning reality that had suddenly opened below his feet. Jamie’s mother was smoking a cigarette and staring off blankly into the distance; intently focused on an invisible landmark that nobody could ever reach.
Francois went on with his life but Jamie’s house across the street began to look like it was being swallowed by time. The car never left the driveway, evidently Jamie’s parents had simply stopped going to their jobs, and the lawn grew wild and became overgrown with weeds. White envelopes and colorful junk mail overstuffed the mailbox and the mail carrier started piling it on a little shelf by the door most people used for potted plants. A free local newspaper of coupons and classifieds started colonizing the driveway – turning yellow in the sun after being soaked by rain.
One day Francois came home from school and his mother was wearing a similar expression to the time that Jamie died although she wasn’t sitting by the phone this time. She crossed her arms and declared decisively:
“Francois! You will go to visit them!”
He tried to argue that they probably didn’t want to see him and that he had to finish his work for school but his mother was having none of it.
“You were his best friend! When they go to Disneyland they bring you and even buy your ticket! Now you can not go? You must be too busy to watch the television and use my computer also then, yes?”
There was no getting out of it. Francois nervously walked over and knocked on the door. Jamie’s father opened it instantly as if he’d been expecting him, wearing an almost absurdly relaxed smile that looked like his face had been made of clay and he had reshaped it in front of a mirror. Jamie’s mother had occasionally smoked outside before but now she sat in a cloud of haze in the unlit living room. A large crystal ashtray overflowed on the end table beside her recliner as she gazed in concentration at a television with the volume turned off.
Francois said hello but if she actually heard him she didn’t show it outwardly.
They went into Jamie’s room and it had been left exactly the way it was before Jamie had gone into the hospital. There was even fresh folded laundry sitting on top of the dresser the way it had been whenever Francois had visited in the past. The Sega Genesis had actually come out while Jamie was in the hospital and his parents had bought one in the hope that he would be able to come home and play it. It sat in it’s box and while Francois was as excited to play it as any other kid his age he didn’t quite feel comfortable enough to ask if they could hook it up.
Jamie’s father turned on the Nintendo and Super Mario Brothers Three was already in the slot. I’m pretty sure the same pattern established itself in every materially lopsided friendship of the era: whoever’s house and game it actually was played as Mario and the friend who always came over got Luigi. In my experience I was always taller and more lanky than all of my friends who had Nintendos so the characters seemed to fit. This had also been the case with Francois and Jamie but now Jamie’s father, a full grown man, was controlling Mario and the whole thing just felt wrong.
On top of that Jamie’s father either didn’t know how to play the game or didn’t feel like actually trying. He just died on the first jump or turtle shell over and over but didn’t even respond like anything bad had happened. Francois cleared a couple levels but started to feel embarrassed about how one sided it was and just switched to dying on purpose too. Jamie’s father started saying really awkward things:
“I bet Jamie’s looking down and is so happy to see us playing like this! He probably wishes that he could come play too!”
It went to the game over screen and Francois thanked Jamie’s father and told him he had probably better be going home. He figured that it would be a one time thing but the lawn and junk mail stayed exactly the same and his mother started making him go over every Friday. She did it right before the weekend so she could reward him with a trip to an arcade or a show at a museum he wanted to see but he was basically forced. He hated it every single time but he didn’t have a choice.
Things settled into a routine. Jamie’s mother never stopped smoking, said anything or even turned up the volume on her TV. Francois stopped even greeting her because he started to feel like he was being rude. He would rush to the first Game Over screen but Jamie’s father had figured out how to continue so it became three continues every time. Three continues of rushed deaths and forced smiles and oppressive grief and never moving past the first level; not even out of boredom.
Finally he decided that if he was going to have to be there anyway he might as well get to play the Sega Genesis. Nobody else he knew had been able to convince their parents to buy one and the TV commercials made it look as good as the games they had in the arcade. He turned to look at the box where it was still sitting on top of the dresser and froze.
The folded shirt sitting on top of the pile of clothing was blue. The last three times he had been there it had definitely been red. For some reason he knew instantly that something was very, very wrong. Jamie’s father noticed where he was staring and turned, somehow smiling even wider than the one he had frozen his face into for every one of these bizarre ritual visits:
“Guess what Francois?! There’s somebody here who’s very excited to see you!”
He stood and Francois had no choice but to get up and follow him. He had been raised to never say no to a grownup in a position of authority and wasn’t quite old enough for the first wave of rebellion although it would be coming very soon. They walked out of the bedroom and through the oppressive miasma of cigarettes and absence to the sliding glass door that led to the backyard.
Blackie, Jamie’s Labrador Retriever, had a child’s red shirt pulled over his head and front legs and a pair of shorts that forced his tail to run through one of the leg holes in the back. The moment it heard the glass door begin to open it pulled itself up onto its hind legs and turned expectantly toward Jamie’s father. Blackie would have wagged his tail at least a tiny bit in recognition but it could only twitch because of the awkward way it had been threaded through a leg hole. Jamie’s father called:
“Jamie! Look who’s here to see you! It’s your friend Francois, Jamie!”
The dog’s eyes looked wild and lost, as if it wasn’t exactly sure if it was being praised, punished or some sadistic combination of the two. It let out a faint whimper and started to walk forward in awkward, swaying steps. It couldn’t properly use its tail for balance and this forced it to compensate by moving its front legs in small, stiff gestures that looked like a cross between begging and the expressive movements of an opera singer. It seemed frightened, like it knew how completely unnatural everything that was happening was but some combination of training and crushing, tyrannical need left it helpless to deviate from the very actions that unsettled it.
Blackie inched forward in tiny increments but his expression was frantic. He opened his mouth and made a sound that didn’t quite register as a yelp, growl or bark. Something in between all of these but also different from all of them as well. It was like he was trying to talk.
Francois ran out of the house and no matter what his mother threatened him with he never returned again. Not too long after the car disappeared and he overheard his mother talking to someone about how Jamie’s mother had left. The grass kept growing and the mail kept piling up but he never saw Jamie’s father again.
Even years later he would catch tiny flickers of movement through the windows and quickly look away, crossing to the other side of the street.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 