So I'm trying to think of a good setup for this chapter. Instead I'm thinking about ten other things, none of which have anything to do with writing. I need to shave. I can't breathe out of one nostril. Why don't we have flying cars yet? I'm out of Scotch. Shit like that. So, while my brain runs right off the rails (again), you should sit back and enjoy the latest installment of my memoir,
Chapter Twelve
Conroe, Rabid Were-Beasts,
and Shitty Detective Work
Hi. I'm in your house. C'mon in.
There are, as I have learned,
consequences for making shit up. I’m not talking about lying. I’m talking about the kind of over-active imagination that
can make for an awesome game of Cops and Robbers and Cowboys and Indians with
Super Heroes and Super Villains, but that can also get away from you and make
you one hundred percent convinced that a snarling, rabid were-beast is in your
bedroom.
(I just realized that a theme is beginning to emerge in some of my
stories about childhood. A rabies theme. Evidently rabies was an epidemic when
I was a kid. At least that’s what I believed, because according to my mom every
living thing could potentially give you rabies: a dog, a raccoon, the
neighbor’s cat, the neighbors, every species of bird, unicorns and Sasquatch.
Some times that shit would just drop out of the sky and land on you, and you
were well and truly screwed. According to Mom, rabies would make you foam at
the mouth and drive you homicidally insane, and the only way to prevent it was
to stay inside, with the doors locked and the drapes drawn. I spent a few weeks
living in my mother’s fears – Pink Floyd’s The
Wall was still a few years away – then decided that if playing outside
meant I had to die a horrible death from rabies because I was attacked by a deranged
possum, that was far preferable to a life trapped indoors with Mom, watching
soap operas. Way, way more preferable.)
By the time our family landed
in Conroe, I was pretty much over my worry about rabies and, for that matter,
cooties. We moved out of the townhouse and settled into a run-down ramshackle
on the other side of the tracks (for real – you had to cross the railroad
tracks to get to my neighborhood). Dad had taken a night-shift job at the
carbon black plant, and Mom was still working for the phone company then. We
moved right next door to my Uncle Louie (my Paw Paw’s brother) and Aunt Rachel.
Uncle Louie was what we call a “character,” and by that I mean he was slightly
crazy and only had one arm. He only had one arm because when he was twelve he
had an “accident” with a shotgun, and by “accident” I mean he was twelve and,
like all twelve year old boys throughout history, had yet to grasp the full
implications of a) proper respect for firearms, and b) his own mortality. And
he blew his arm off with a shotgun.
Paw Paw had found us the
house. Not surprisingly, it was in his neighborhood, after he and Mee Maw had
to sell the farm and moved to the suburbs of Houston. And even less
surprisingly, our house was conveniently located next door to his half-mad
brother, whose interest in shooting blue jays with a .22 rifle from his front
porch was matched only by his desire to stick his nose across the fence and
into my family’s business, to then report his findings, suspicions and
prejudices back to Paw Paw. Which he did. Religiously.
Summers in Conroe were
different from summers on the farm. I used the word “suburb” earlier, but
really, Conroe was just a sleepy little town forty miles north of Houston, that
had no ambitions to be anything other than a sleepy little Texas town. The town
was founded in 1881 by Issac Conroe, a former Union cavalry officer, and a
lumberman. When he arrived in the nothingness north of Houston after the Civil
War, he saw something others apparently did not. Pine trees. A shit load of
them. So he built a sawmill, and the demand for lumber made him a very wealthy
man. There was also crude oil north of Houston. So Oil and Lumber made a baby,
and they named it Boomtown. For a period of a few glorious weeks in the 1930s,
the little town of Conroe boasted more millionaires per capita – in the form of
oil and lumber barons – than any other U.S. city. Elvis Presley performed at
the high school football field in 1955. It was a high time, indeed.
By the time we got to Conroe,
the boomtown days were over. The pines had long been obliterated, and the
lumber industry moved on. And in the 70’s the local oil economy came to a
screeching halt. What remained for unskilled or uneducated laborers was the
creosote plant (which smelled like Beelzebub’s asshole), or the carbon black
plant. Both of these products were toxic in their own way, and my dad ended up
with a graveyard shift at the carbon black plant, breathing nightly a material
most health researchers now agree to be highly carcinogenic. One of the first
mornings he came home from his shift, Uncle Louie damn near shot him with his
blue jay gun. Dad was so thickly covered with soot and grime residue that Uncle
Louie thought a giant black man was trying to break into the house.
My point is, my sister and I
had a lot of time to our selves, in particular late afternoons, when Dad was
just leaving for work and Mom hadn’t got home yet. And here begins the tale of
the rabid were-beast.
I believe it was a summer
afternoon. The first thing my sister and I would do after Dad left for work was
put a record on my stereo and crank up the volume so we could hear it through
the house. Then we would make sandwiches. We’d been playing all day (mostly
outside), Dad slept through what would have been our lunch time every day, and
we were too scared of waking him up to bang around in the kitchen while he was
still asleep. (Bad shit tended to befall anybody who woke him prematurely.) So,
by the time he left for work around 3PM, we were starving. We would dutifully
wave goodbye as he backed down the long driveway of our house on Lakeshore
Drive (it wasn’t a lake; it was a man-made pond, and it was infested with water
moccasins), then push and shove each other to be first back in the house to get
food. We couldn’t afford lunchmeat a lot of the time, and so I had adapted and
learned to make my favorite sandwich: Kraft Miracle Whip on white bread.
Larenda would make herself a PB&J, and we would stand in the kitchen and
eat, with a scratchy album playing full blast from crappy little speakers at
the other end of the house, where my room was. That was truce-time between my
sister and I, maybe the one time of the day when we weren’t picking at each
other or outright fighting. We ate our sandwiches and listened to music and
didn’t speak; we were busy resting and fueling up for the shit we were going to
give each other later in the day.
On this particular afternoon
we finished our sandwiches and both went back outside to play. I can’t remember
what the hell she and her friend were doing, and I really didn’t care because
my buddy Dean had brought over his brand new go-kart. It was yellow and shaped
like a racing car. Actually, it kind of looked like the white-trash version of
the Mach 5. I really wanted to take that go-kart for a spin, and Dean really
wanted to play my hand-held Mattel Electronics Football game. Larenda and her
buddy could have been playing with knives or rattlesnakes, and I wouldn’t have
given a shit.
Our property had a large oval
dirt driveway in front of the house, which was perfect for drifting a go-kart
around. I spent the afternoon as Speed Racer, careening around the driveway in
Dean’s go-kart, always a hairs-breadth away from slamming into a tree or
spinning into the ditch, while Dean sat under the carport and played a
first-generation, shitty hand-held video game. (Looking back, that go-kart is
probably what led to my deep, abiding love of muscle cars. My dream car is a
1972 Plymouth Barracuda, fully restored. If I ever sell this book, I will buy
that car, drive it till the tires fall off, and be buried in it.) Thus went the
afternoon, until Dean’s dad whistled him home from several blocks away.
Larenda’s friend left at about the same time, and we were headed in to wash up
and wait for Mom to get home. I opened the carport door that led directly into
the kitchen – and heard a nightmarish sound coming from inside that immediately made me recoil in horror, slamming the door
so hard I damn near tore it off its hinges.
What I heard sounded like
something large and alive, raking its claws down the walls of our house, while
alternately hissing and spitting. And it was freaking loud. I looked at my sister, who was forming a question that died
on her lips as she heard it too. She looked positively terrified, and I’m
willing to bet I looked worse than that. Something loud and evil was inside the
house. But what was it? And how the hell had it gotten in there? We listened to
it for another minute, trying to make out if it was a dog (we didn’t own one at
the time), but it sounded larger. And that terrible hissing and spitting was
like scary, rabies-infected fingers on a chalkboard. That may have been the
first time in our lives that my little sister looked to me to figure something out.
I don’t think I had ever been
brave on another’s behalf before that day. We stood under the carport for
several long minutes. I desperately tried to think of some action to take.
Obviously, we couldn’t go inside and use the phone to call Mom at work; we
didn’t know what was in there, and whether or not it might like to eat
children. It never occurred to me to go next door and get Uncle Louie, perhaps
because I subconsciously didn’t want to add any more crazy to this already
weird situation. I kept coming back to the question: how did a rabid creature get inside the house? (I had already
concluded that, whatever it was, it must have rabies. The hissing and spitting
were definitely homicidal in tone.) I decided to leave the carport and go
around to the back of the house. We had a patio with a sliding glass door.
Maybe I could see something, though I wasn’t at all excited about the prospect.
With my luck, the rabid were-beast would turn its furry, fanged face and look
directly at me just as I was approaching the patio door. It would lunge right
through the glass, ensuring that I would be flayed with shards of spiky
shrapnel and then devoured in my own
backyard.
Larenda was definitely not in favor of going
around back. She wanted to stay rooted to the carport and wait for Mom to get
home. Seeing her genuinely scared, I found this sudden, very unexpected need to protect my baby sister. That is
a feeling that exists to this day, and was evident during her dating years,
when a few of her poorer choices in boyfriends had sudden encounters with big
brother in dark parking lots or, in one memorable case, while the asshole was
at work. I told Larenda to stay on the carport, that I’d be right back. I moved
around the side of the house, through the cyclone fence and into the backyard.
As I edged along the brick, trying to stay flat against the side of the house,
I tried imagining myself as a hero in one of the many games of Pretend that me
and my buddies - Paul and Dean - played often during that summer. But I
couldn’t. Because, in the words of Martin Lawerence in Bad Boys, “This shit just got
real.”
I came up very slowly on the
sliding glass door of the patio. And it was
open. Like, all the way open. You could have driven a truck through the
fucking thing, which, in my mind, was now the approximate size of the beast
lurking in my house. And the scratching and hissing and spitting were even
louder from here. I was just barely holding my shit in, and my first thought
was to turn around, go back to the carport, fetch Larenda, and maybe go to
Dean’s house. When Mom got home and we weren’t there, she’d call around. But
wait. We had no way to warn her that something large and monstrous and evil was
waiting inside for her. So that was out. Then I did the first brave thing I
ever did in my life. I decided to go in.
Let me be really clear here: I
did NOT want to go in. I was pretty sure I was going to soil myself; I was almost
as certain I was going to die. Fine, then. If the thing ate me, maybe it
wouldn’t want my sister. I couldn’t go back to the carport and tell her my
plan, because she would have cried and begged me not to, and that racket would
have undoubtedly drawn the creature to our location. I positioned myself just
outside the sliding door, back pressed so hard into the brick I actually
bruised myself, and waited. And listened. SCRRRRAAAAATCH!!
HIIISSSSSSSSSS!! And, this close to the open door, I smelled something. Something
burnt. The stench was god-awful, and
that’s when I knew I was dealing with a creature quite possibly not of this
earth. I watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild
Kingdom from the time I was old enough to understand television until it
went off the air. And never once did I see or even hear of a creature that made
these kinds of terrifying noises, and reeked this badly. Marlon Perkins knew
his shit, and he would have warned us of such a beast.
When I finally spun through
the door, I screamed “Alright, fudge face!!!”
at the top of my lungs. To this day, I have absolutely no idea why I uttered
that particular phrase. It was literally the un-coolest thing I could have said
in that situation. Fudge face? Who the fuck says THAT? How many heroes of
action movies do you know who ever called somebody “fudge face?” You think
Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris ever said that shit? My first moment of real courage,
and I had to go and take a dump on it with a crappy entrance line.
Maybe I just needed to shout
something – anything – to get me over the threshold. I was now inside the
house, and right away understood that the scratching and hissing was coming
from the back of the house. Down the hall. The smell was really strong. I
almost gagged. But I figured I’d come this far. No turning back now. I crept
down the hall to the back of the house, the otherworldly noise growing louder
with each step. My heart was in my throat, and my balls had retreated north to
my stomach. My parents’ bedroom was right across the hall from mine. They kept
their door shut all the time, but mine was wide open. The fucking thing was in my room.
The stench of rotten, burnt
death was in my nostrils, and the sound of my terrible, impending doom was in
my ears. It was then I understood the samurai maxim, “Common sense will not accomplish great things. Simply become insane
and desperate.” (I read The Book of
Five Rings when I was nine.) I figured saving my baby sister’s life would
be a great thing so, desperate and probably a little insane, I spun through the
doorway into my bedroom.
No rabid were-beast. No
half-eaten, bloody corpses strewn about. Everything was exactly as I’d left it.
My Farah Fawcett poster was still watching over my stuff. I looked over at my
dresser, and noticed that my stereo was on. At the end of an album, the
turntable arm was supposed to automatically return to the rest position. Except
it hadn’t. The needle just kept scraping over the last bit of vinyl on the
record, occasionally moving over the label and producing an amplified scratch
and hiss. A sound that, in the playground of my overactive imagination, had
become a rabid were-beast crouched in my room, and waiting for a victim. I was
relieved for several moments before embarrassment set in.
When I opened the door to the
carport I found Larenda, right where I’d left her. I said, simply, “It’s okay.” When I told her what the
sound had been, she didn’t laugh at me, or make fun of me. The only thing I saw
in her eyes was gratitude. We never talked about it after that day. We never
told Mom or Dad about it. I eventually found out that the stench in the house
was from Dad over-boiling eggs to the point where the water completely
evaporated and the eggs exploded. He’d turned off the A/C and opened the patio
door before he’d left for work. I didn’t stop making shit up after that day,
either. Something down deep told me never to give up my fertile imagination.
Though I did start reading a lot more Arthur Conan Doyle. Because even a
half-assed detective could have figured out that there never was a rabid
were-beast in my room. I may have learned that I could be brave, but I also
learned I was no Sherlock fucking Holmes.
Next Week, Chapter Thirteen: Spear Hunting on a Budget.
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