This is the 2020 pandemic version. Enjoy.
The story, I mean. Not the pandemic.
1.)
The Cat Lady
You might not have grown up in
the same neighborhood as a Cat Lady, but in all likelihood, one of the
neighborhoods next to yours had a Cat Lady. That was the case with me. I had to
bike five blocks to my friend Willy's house to get a load of the Cat Lady on
Adderley Street. Neighborhoods, like thermostats, so often change one degree at
a time. And that single degree that separated Willy's neighborhood from mine
permitted a habitat for an old woman whose ramshackle house was swarming with
felines.
The Cat Lady (I never got her
real name) lived across the street from Willy. One day we asked Willy's mom if
there was a Cat Man in the picture for this Cat Lady,
and she replied that, to her knowledge, the Cat Lady had never married. She had
been willed a large sum of money, so the story went, but she spent it
sparingly.
Willy's mom was one to adorn
ceramic plates and coffee cups with phrases such as “Blessed are the meek.” She
was an artist who made enough to get by and co-provide, along with her husband.
She never begrudged the Cat Lady. Some of her neighbors felt otherwise; they
instilled some anti-Cat Lady sentiments in their children. Rex Munson from
across the street used to grumble about her. Like all the Munsons, he was
incensed by the Cat Lady's indifference to the fortune she supposedly had.
We'd put a game of catch on hold
and gape at the lonesome Cat Lady as she lurched and labored toward the bus
stop. On one such occasion, Rex slugged the football with his fist.
“That lucky old bag...” he griped,
shaking his head.
I was too young to appreciate
the humor.
We watched her shamble around
the corner, out of view. Then something strange and magnetic happened: the six
of us were compelled to gather in a huddle. Those among us were either summoned
or summoning. The effect was the same. To children on the brink of puberty,
there is no human noise more compelling than “Psssssssstt.”
It was agreed upon that we
should take a look inside the Cat Lady's home while she was away. We reasoned
we'd be exploring rather than breaking and entering.
To add some intrigue and
suspense to the mission, we slunk past her house and followed the gravel
driveway to her garage. It was a small structure composed of worn and peeled
siding. The door was chained shut by a MasterLock. We crept around to a window
that was bug-ridden and sheeted in dust. One by one we peered in. When it was
my turn, I strained my eyes and made out the shadowy form of a bed.
“She lives in
there now,” Willy explained. “The cats took over her house.”
I reeled, shook my head, and
cupped my hands against the glass again. Sure enough, there was a kerosene
heater inside. I considered the nights of bitter cold that would eventually
come, shivered at the thought of how she must survive the winter: surrounded by
that worn and peeled siding, beside a smelly fire, hidden beneath a mound of
blankets, for five months. Alone.
It was too much. I jerked my
head away, toward daylight and friends. Despite the pleasant weather, I was
still shivering. When it came time to ascend the rickety steps into the Cat
Lady's back entryway, I felt conflicted. Rex turned the knob and cracked a
Grinch-like smile, for the door was unlocked. My guts sunk heavily. I kept my
mouth shut and considered aborting the mission.
“Last one in's a chickenshit,”
Rex declared.
The matter was settled for me,
but two others expressed their misgivings and opted out. Tyler feared his
father's wrath should we get caught; he seemed to have horrid visions every
time he blinked. Lucas cited religious reasons that still remain unclear.
Willy's little brother Calvin fussed with his jean shorts as he tangled with
trepidation. Our gazes met for a second and I gave him a quick, understanding
nod.
Rex shoved against the door
until a barrier of trash yielded enough room for passage. He slithered inside,
followed by Willy. I was next, dreading all the germs but pushing forward
anyway—and that made Calvin the De facto “chickenshit.”
“Hey! At least I'm doin'
this,” Calvin called out.
Tyler and Lucas fled to the
latter's home for lemonade and Super Nintendo. The rest of us were determined
to snoop around. We sought answers from this spinster who'd left civilization
without so much as murmuring goodbye. How did she succumb to this cat uprising?
We searched for clues left behind by this ghost who somehow lived among us.
The closest I ever got to
walking on the moon was walking atop the rubbish in the Cat Lady's house. The
stench notwithstanding, the sheer elevation of the garbage made me queasy—and
Neil Armstrong had no equivalent to the surreal feeling I had as I climbed the
trashy summit into the kitchen. During our tour, we leaped from one flimsy
plank of cardboard to another—landing spots that must have been strategically
placed by the Cat Lady herself. (Years later, this strikes me as a pretty
ambitious move for a shut-in: to even bother laying down a big piece of
cardboard here and there to plateau the heap of squalor you've amassed in your
own home.) Feral cats with coats like defiled carpet-samples hissed at us as
they backpedaled. Countless trash bags spewed their contents: shards of Coke
bottles and light bulbs, mold-consumed bread, soiled rags and tissues once
coated in fluids that had long since hardened, coffee filters splattered like
neglected diapers, newspapers from decades ago and yellowed mail that had decidedly
become junk. Clothing that would never be worn again was strewn everywhere, and
so were impotent cans of Pledge and Lysol.
In the living room we gaped at
grime-encrusted knickknacks of fishermen and sad clowns. I spotted crushed
games of Life and Sorry and an antique vacuum lying kaput in the corner. Its
rubbery bag was bloated. Its chrome had been reduced to tiny dots amidst all
the rust. We surveyed the end of the world and its dearth of redemption. We
breathed fitfully through our mouths and gagged our noses as we pointed and
hooted at the cat droppings littered throughout.
We marveled at all the crap
until we got bored.
“Let's get the shit out of
here.”
That was Rex again. He cussed
more than the rest of combined, and though he may never amount to much, to this
day I give him credit for that suggestion.
As I've mentioned, he belonged
to the Munson clan. They were not typically known for breakthrough moments of
wisdom.
2.)
The Munsons
White Kids Dunking...
Rex was a participant in the slam dunk contests we had during those summers in
the mid-'90s. The events were held on a modest slab of concrete in Willy and
Calvin's backyard. The hoop was adjustable, and so we lowered it to a height of
about eight feet, for slam dunking purposes. To that same end, we procured two
mini-basketballs that were easily palmed.
Our slam dunk excitement was brought on by ideal circumstances. The best player
at the time, Michael Jordan, was also a sensational dunker. Ho-hum dunkers like
Bird and Magic had retired from the NBA. They gave way to a new breed of
high-flying freaks known for baiting chumps into poster-worthy dunks and then
losing to Jordan's Bulls in the playoffs. Finally, the sprites in NBA
Jam paired superhuman leaps with a tempo that catered to our
dependencies on Mountain Dew and Skittles.
In retrospect, few things are sillier than prepubescent white kids charging a
hoop and exclaiming in the high pitch of Mickey Mouse. “Clyde Drexler!” “Shawn
Kemp!” “Spud Webb!”
As a short guy, Spud was my favorite. Standing 5'7”, Spud's astounding dunks
actually made his NBA Jam counterpart seem pretty
realistic.
In one contest, Willy did a reverse dunk in which he clutched the ball beneath
his crotch and brought it up in time to hammer it home. (The “Harold Miner,”
worth a stingy “8.”) Rex answered by maximizing his wingspan and dunking two
balls at once. (The “Larry Nance,” old school yet valid, deemed a “9.”) I was
going to have to pull off something special to impress the judges: twin sisters
Mindy and Molly Munson.
Those two insisted on supplying the halftime show. We consented because
otherwise we would have lost our “unbiased” judges. The girls played TLC's Crazy,
Sexy, Cool cassette on a boombox, stood up on a stage of wooden planks
supported by cinder blocks, and sang and danced along to the song “Waterfalls.”
(“Don't go chasin' waterfalls/Just stick to the rivers and the lakes that
you're used to.” Remember those words of advice?) They were heckled to a degree
one below their threshold for quitting as judges. For my part, even though I
preferred the curvy sass of En Vogue to the willowy pleas of TLC, Mindy, and
Molly, I was unimpressed yet polite.
Only morons heckle their judges.
After the intermission, Willy's younger brother Calvin tried some dunks before
I did. He was a plump and maladroit kid who was years away from a growth spurt
that would enable him to become taller and trimmer than me, but nevermind that
last admission. Circa '94, that kid envied my hops.
Calvin's go-to dunk attempt was a 30-foot mad-dash to the net with the ball
clutched in two hands, with a launching point that was about three feet from
the hoop. That was it! There were always seven or eight mulligans, each
one compounding his frustration. It was harder to watch than a Faces
of Death VHS. Calvin had a strange routine, too. Before starting
his approach, he'd turn his Notre Dame hat backward and rub the logo, which was
a four-leaf clover.
“Gimme the luck of the Irish,” he'd say, mimicking the Lucky Charms leprechaun.
Such luck was not granted, mostly because no one has ever seen an Irishman
dunk. Mercifully, a seething and nearly defeated Calvin finally rattled in a
jam. The ball caught steel but its south pole surpassed the front of the rim by
an eyelash. The judges awarded him a “3.” He protested in vain and then went
inside to fix himself a sour grape Kool Aid, double sugar, and languish beside
a box fan. It was my turn.
In those pre-YouTube days, my mind had to work hard to visualize the
contest-clinching dunk I'd seen Spud throw down late one night on an ESPN
retrospective. From the deep corner of the concrete slab, I breathed heavily
and tugged tightly on the knot that held up my shorts. I held the ball as if
measuring a free throw, lobbed it to the right spot just before the hoop, and
pursued it. I sprung into the air, snagged it with one hand, and tomahawked
that fucker with full-extension at the moment of truth.
My finest feat of athleticism was awarded a “10.” I basked in the admiration of
those two rail-thin, bedraggled sisters, and the scorn of my defeated
competitors felt swell, too.
Afterward, Willy officially declared shenanigans.
“You
only won because Mindy and Molly have a crush on you.”
“Really?” I said, forgetting in the moment to brush aside his bitterness and
defend my skills. “Damn. If they like me, why can't they be pretty?”
Willy shrugged and turned away.
The
following summer he became fitter and notched another two inches on the height
marker his mother sketched on their kitchen wall. When a dunk contest was
arranged, his leaps and finishes became more explosive. I challenged him as
best I could, answered his “9's” with “7's,” and made it to the final round as
the clear underdog.
Then he unleashed his grand
finale. Ball in hand, he strolled over to the baseline, one foot on the
concrete, one on the grass. He glanced at me and flashed a tame smile
momentarily. He dribbled twice, attacked the hoop and launched. In mid-air he
kicked up his right leg, transferred the ball from his left to dominant hand,
and windmilled a spectacular dunk.
He had mastered the “Isiah Rider.” Wow. Mindy and Molly both shouted, “TEN!” In
that instant, I felt their crushes leave me. A trade was made, like they'd
exchanged a washed-up fluke for an All-Star entering his prime.
“I can't do that,” I remember saying.
Nevertheless, I tried the under-the-leg dunk. Three times. Four times? The ball
slipped away from me and bounced onto the grass on each try. I'm not sure if
anyone was even watching. Beside the bench, Willy was being swarmed, getting
congratulated as he graciously returned high fives. I spotted Calvin admiring
his older brother and wondered if I should ask to borrow his Notre Dame hat for
luck. I thought better of it, though.
All I could do was make a mental note of it all. As a chronicler, maybe I could
win, or at least feel like I didn't lose. I dropped the ball and went over to
my best friend Willy to shake his hand.
Not all of the events in the neighborhood were so pleasant, however.
The
Wiffle Bat...
Since the traffic was so sparse, we were free to whiz a football up and down
Adderley Street. Rex had a way of needling Tyler whenever he threw to him, and
one afternoon, the needling finally sparked a fight.
Tyler was younger and shorter than the rest of us, and so Rex got jollies from
launching balls high over Tyler's outstretched arms. The ball skidded off the
pavement and bounced into the gutter. Tyler let out a groan as he hustled to
retrieve it.
“Throw it lower,” he complained.
Rex scoffed and held up his arms, looking very much like a dismissive scarecrow
in a tanktop.
“If I threw it any lower, I'd be throwing it to the ants. Jeez. It's not my
fault you're a midget.”
“Don't call me that!”
Tyler hurled the ball in an awkward shot-put motion. It landed short of Rex's
feet—which he refused to shuffle whenever Tyler returned one of his passes.
“Typical midget throw,” Rex said, under his breath.
As he stomped his stocky legs up the street, we could see the huff intensify on
Tyler's face. We gaged his anger by the reddening of his cheeks. It was like a
precursor to the Terror Alert system we'd grow to know and fear.
“I'm not a midget!”
“OK, OK,” Rex said, backpedaling. “You're a Munchkin.”
Tyler's cheeks turned from scarlet to crimson. His charge hastened. Rex
retreated back to the gutter in front of Willy's house. He glanced over his
shoulder, took stock of the curb, and sneered.
I watched along with Willy and Lucas on the front porch. Willy and I exchanged
the helpless shrug of two boys thinking, “Shit, I guess they're gonna
fight.” Lucas was mortified. He touched his right hand to his forehead and
brought it down to his chest. I looked away before he signed the rest of the
cross.
Rex stood between the curb and a livid Tyler. That Munchkin jab had Tyler
battling not only Rex but tears as well.
“I'm not a—”
Tyler's voice had cracked feebly on that second word. We all heard it.
Especially Rex. His grin got sinister.
In a Helium-affected taunt, he sang, “We represent the Lollipop King... the
Lollipop King!”
To this, Tyler rushed forward, as Rex was expecting. The bully sidestepped the
bullied as a matador would sidestep a bull. Tyler's foot caught the curb and
onto the grass he sprawled—tripped, bested, and overcome by tears of rage.
Rex raised his skeletal arms in celebration. His body then convulsed in
laughter—wicked, spitting laughter.
Grass-stained and seething, Tyler rose to his feet. His shoulders rose and sank
and rose and sank and then he snorted snot back up his nose.
“I'll be back,” he screeched.
He stormed across the grass and darted up the driveway that led to his garage.
He shoved the side door open and went inside.
Rex turned and addressed us with the gall of an unconscionable insult comic.
“What's he gettin'? A lollipop?”
We heard clomps against the driveway and saw Tyler throttling the neck of a
Whiffle bat as he stalked toward Rex. Instead of fleeing, Rex held his ground
and mugged. He puckered his lips in defiance.
There was no hesitation or suspense from Tyler. He didn't waste a moment. He
cranked his thick, plastic weapon back and then swung it forward with the fervor
of a kid whose life depended on belting a home run. The bright red bat
bludgeoned Rex right in his kiss-face.
The blood that streamed from his bottom lip reacted much quicker than Rex did.
In fact, he seemed to be having a hard time processing what his own blood was
trying to tell him. When the realization came, that his face was too consumed
with throbs of pain to counterattack Tyler—who stood heaving before him, poised
to take another swing if provoked—we saw the tears passed on from Tyler to Rex.
It wasn't much different from a game of tag, actually. In the new moment, when
it came to crying, Rex Munson was It.
“No fair,” Rex managed to say. He assessed our astonished smirks on the front
porch through a haze of misty discharge. He tried to blink us away but he
couldn't. With a clumsy pivot, he screamed, “It's not fair!”
Rex sprinted a short distance home. He flung open the creaking screen door on
the small concrete platform that was the Munson's front porch. He disappeared
just as his hysterics pierced throughout the neighborhood. Willy and Lucas
rushed over to Tyler, who looked bewildered as he let the Whiffle bat slink to
the grass.
I kept my gaze trained on the Munson's front porch, for it was a threshold that
divided the Munsons living among us and the Munsons living on their own
unfathomable terms.
X-Men Battles at the Park...
Nature's dimmer-switch was turning from dusk to
dark when Chet Munson Sr. shoved past a screen door and stepped onto his front
porch. The old man tussled with the bill of his meshed hat and lurched tobacco
through a gap in his incisors onto the bush beside him. Through oversized
glasses, he scowled in the general direction of the park located a hundred
yards away from him, across a steady stream of traffic on the adjacent street.
At Grant Park, among the slides, swings, and jungle gyms, kids were at play,
his own kin Rex included—and he didn't like it one bit. Chet Sr. folded his
arms and set his mind to transmitting psychopathic threats to his grandson.
Grant Park was the site of our X-Men battles.
The cartoon series was a Saturday morning phenomenon to us. When we fake-fought
each other, no one was willing to play the part of a villain like Magneto or
Juggernaut. Instead, we all opted to adopt the character of one of the
X-Men. It now seems like a delightful
paradox: all these good guys trying to destroy each other because nobody wanted
to be the bad guy.
Even though the sun was becoming less and less
of an issue, Rex sported Shutter Shade sunglasses with fluorescent yellow
frames. He did this to emulate Cyclops, the straitlaced leader known for
shooting optic blasts through a visor. I thought it was a lackadaisical
costume. Sure, he wore blue jeans and a turquoise tanktop to affect Cyclops'
color scheme, but anyone could do that. Plus his argument was that he could
kill us simply by looking at us, and that hardly seemed fair.
To his deadly gaze through garish sunglasses,
Rex added laser beam noises to let us know when we were supposed to be dead. I
was running across a wobbly wooden bridge when he emerged from behind a tree on
the fringe of the park and looked at me.
“Bee-ooh-bee-ooh, bee-ooh-bee-ooh!” he
exclaimed. “I got you!”
I ducked behind the protective barrier at the
peak of the winding slide.
“Nope! You missed me,” I said. You're damn
right I tossed out the “You missed me” card.
“Bullshit, Olig!”
I resented that. At the time, I was Gambit,
whose mutant power allowed him to explosively charge playing cards (and other
inanimate objects, for that matter, but he was a gambler, and so a deck of
cards was his first choice). Gambit also wielded a bo staff, which I simulated
by carrying around a three-foot stick I'd found in Willy's backyard. Disposing
of “RexClops” called for my long-range attack, though. The breast pocket of my
shirt was stocked with playing cards, all of which had pennies duct-taped to
them to lend the cards a chance in hell of cutting through wind resistance.
I sprung to my feet and sidearm dealt the Ace
of Spades at RexClops. It missed the strike zone, which happened more often
than not. I ducked back down as RexClops cackled at my errant throw.
“Not even close! Ya dead guy.”
Blast! I devised a new plan to go down the
winding slide, hide behind the foot of it, wait for my enemy to grow bored and
wander over, target his sunglasses, and then chuck my stick at him.
I plopped my butt onto the lip of the slide and
positioned my stick carefully so that it wouldn't snap on the way down. Next I
buttoned shut my breast pocket to prevent cards from falling out. In that
moment of readiness, my right hand grabbed the support bar above me, I inched
back, and then jerked and let go of the bar. I propelled forward and down the
winding slide.
When I got to the brief straightaway at the
bottom, sheer horror awaited. Willy had made use of his dad's duct-tape as
well, strapping three nails to both knuckles. Nails! Sharp, pointed
nails capable of puncturing jugulars. As my feet hit the ground, he held up his
lethal fists a foot away from my face.
“Jesus!” I blurted out.
“No, you can call me Wolverine,”
Willy said. “Heh, heh.”
“Are you nuts, Willy?!”
I was not immune to breaking character.
“Relax,” he said. “I know what I'm doing. These
nails aren't even rusty.”
In a momentary truce, RexClops called to us.
“He's done for! He's gotta be out of the battle
now.”
WillyVerine nodded nonchalantly.
“He's right. Sorry, pal.”
“Dude, you almost stabbed me.”
“Exactly. That's why you're out.”
Before I could dispute the rationale of this
boy with murder weapons stuck to his hands, RexClops was heard making laser
noises again. I turned to see he was not looking at us.
“I shot you, too!” he proclaimed.
“Oh, calm the hell down, Rex.”
That was McNash. He lived about a block away on
the other side of Grant Park. His mom was of Korean decent and his dad was
Irish. His mom's genes dominated his physical features, while his dad had reign
over his last name and love of hockey. McNash was carrying what appeared to be
a bulky green tube.
“I just got here, so you ain't killin' me,”
McNash added.
“Game off!” I announced.
As McNash leisurely made his way across the
playground, Willy pointed at the tube. I flinched and jumped back when he
raised his spiky hand.
“What's that?”
McNash strode to the slide casually. He held up
the bulky green tube for display.
“Bazooka.”
“No way!” Rex said as he rushed to us. “A
bazooka?!”
The branches of a faraway bush rustled and
Calvin emerged.
“Did someone say 'bazooka'?!”
Calvin was cloaked in a clear, plastic tarp. To
explain: he had taken on the problematic role of Nightcrawler, who could
teleport (or vanish, move elsewhere, and reappear). Calvin had told us
beforehand that we were supposed to be unaware of him while he had the magical
sheet of plastic draped over him. Only when he removed the tarp, so said
Calvin, could he be seen or unleash an attack. To insure his invisibility tarp,
I suppose, the kid hid in the bushes an awful lot, too.
“Yup. It's a bazooka,” McNash confirmed. He
showed us the thin, rectangular front-sight and the hand grip grafted to the
trigger that fired the weapon (which was unloaded, solidifying Willy as the
most dangerous kid at the park).
“My grandpa got it in World War II," McNash went on. "Souvenir or
something.”
“It's like an antique,” I said.
“An antique that blew up Nazis, yes,” McNash
said. “Anyway, can I get in?”
“Sure,” Willy said. “Olig's out.”
“Which X-Man are you supposed to be?” I asked.
“Bishop.”
That was one of the more obscure X-Men. Bishop
was from the future, which was apocalyptic in nature. I seem to recall he could
shoot laser beams out of his hands, and he also had a big laser gun. Now that's
what I call a shit-load of lasers.
“Fair enough,” Willy said. “OK. Everybody
scatter. Olig, since you're eliminated, you can be like the referee. Give us a
minute and then yell, 'Game on!'”
I burned disdainfully but was unwilling to bike
home until nighttime. With a begrudging nod, I accepted. As McNash turned away
toward his hiding spot, I nudged him.
“Don't let him stab you,” I said, gesturing to
Willy.
Rex darted back to behind his trusty tree.
Willy and McNash stalked far apart over the grassy ridge to the alcove that
included a merry-go-round and another swing set. Everyone but me and Calvin
dispersed. He lingered conspicuously as though he was about to say something of
grave importance.
“Which one's Bishop?” he whispered.
I exhaled a long sigh, realizing I had sunk to
both the acting ref and the
X-Men historian. After my sigh but before my explanation, a gruff and heinous
voice boomed throughout the landscape.
“REX! GET YER ASS HOOOMMMEEE!”
That was Chet Sr. He sounded like a drunken
coyote. His grandson jerked his head in dejection and kicked the tree trunk in
front of him. Rex would not be mutating into RexClops anymore that day.
“GIMME 10 MINUTES!” he pleaded.
The Munson voices were so adept at
long-distance screaming that they proved capable of communicating this
way—across 100 yards, muddled by passing vehicles on the adjacent street.
“YER ASS'LL BE MUH SHOE HORN IN 10 MINUTES!”
If the Munsons had a saving grace, it was their
quick-witted rancor. Rex had no retort. He stared vacantly at the grass and its
declining vibrancy and plodded past me.
“Rex is out!” I announced.
He feigned a punch at me but couldn't muster
the verve to follow through. He removed his sunglasses and plodded on, barely
dodging oncoming traffic and barely caring. Upon seeing his grandson cross the
street, Chet Sr. did an about-face and entered his household. Thirty seconds
later, Rex trudged onto the front porch and flung open the screen door. Neither
Munson was satisfied, but between them, there was a winner and loser and the
matter was settled.
The Barbie Licker...
We were sitting with slumped shoulders on the front steps of Willy's house when
Rex spotted us. He had a habit of pressing his face against the tight wiring of
screen doors whenever he checked outside. He flung the door open and approached
us from across the street. Detecting our dispirit, he asked what was wrong.
Willy told him the scoop.
“Yikes,” he replied. “Well, you guys wanna come
over to my house?”
Circumstances made it an offer worth
considering. The aforementioned scoop had to do with Willy's older brother
getting nabbed for stashing a dingy pot plant in his closet.
Willy and I were playing NBA Jam in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother when Mr.
Cameron's voice boomed through the floorboards. The two of us exchanged wary
glances, paused the game, and crept to the peak of the L-shaped stairwell. We
spied through the thin wooden beams beneath the banister and caught sight of
the evidence. Some of its buds and jagged leaves had been spilled onto the
floor of the foyer, as by strangulation. Jared Cameron was nervously scratching
his precocious goatee, pinned against the front door and granted little room to
breath by his admonishing father.
“Dad. That's not a pot plant,” he
disputed. “It's just a potted plant.”
“Buuulll-oni!”
Mr. Cameron bellowed. He spun away from his son and muttered a terse and
incomprehensible plea to God.
His raging eyes met ours as he spun away. He
must have sensed us snooping preternaturally. We gathered that he did not
approve and so we retreated.
The game remained on pause as havoc broke loose
downstairs. We overheard scolding, crying, steps climbed raucously, and then
door-slamming that gave way to icy silence. Slated for a sleepover that now
felt as unnerving as an episode of Slim
Good Body, we waited another five minutes and tiptoed down the steps. I
caught a glimpse of Mr. Cameron sitting on the couch, his arms crossed beneath
his stout chest. His almond-like eyes stared unflinchingly at a TV that hadn't
been turned on. We fled out the front door and reassessed our options on the
porch.
That brought us to Rex's invite. We were still
mulling it over.
“Come on,” he wheedled. “Dad and gramps are off
drinkin' on a fishin' trip. Chet's in charge. And Chet could not give less of a
shit.”
There were no matriarchs in the Munson
household, and on some nights, the place was without paternal influence as
well. On some nights, too, there were charms to the endorsement of an adult who
could not give less of a shit.
When Willy glanced at me, I shrugged, deferring
the decision to him. He sighed and gazed down, going over the facts.
“So, it's just you, Chet, and the twins. No Rex
Sr. No Chet Sr.”
The Munsons designated the Seniors and Juniors
in the father-son bloodline in this rare way. The elder Munsons named their
first sons after themselves, deemed themselves “Seniors” once the boys were
born, and were unwilling to acknowledge anything special about their Juniors.
Though Chet was a year or two deeper into his thirties than his younger
brother, Chet had never married (or divorced) or fathered children. Chet had
therefore lost a little favoritism since Rex Sr. could at least nod with
conviction—on drunk fishing trips and so forth—when dad spat the words: “I told
ya kids was a pain in the ass.”
Back in the moment, Rex nodded at Willy's role
call.
“No Rex Sr. No Chet Sr. Right. There's
just the four of us, and you two. And some of Chet's friends.”
Willy winced and shot me another look, seeking
an objection, perhaps. I had none.
“Well... OK,” he said.
We rose to our feet as Chet chirped a few words
of excitement. He walked much brisker to the Munson's doorstep than we did.
When we crossed the threshold into that home,
Rex led the way and did so nonchalantly. We had misgivings, but ugly vibes had
at least been replaced by curious ones. We glanced first at the soiled shag
carpet and then to our left where we saw Chet dealing cards to his friends, all
of them sitting stooped beneath a cloud of smoke, flanked by ashtrays and malt
liquor. Having inherited his dad's eyesight, Chet squinted at us through wire-rim
glasses that made his eyes bulge hazily.
“This is Willy,” Rex announced. “From across
the street. And that's Nick.”
Chet scrutinized and quickly lost interest.
“Well. La-dee-fucking-da.”
From the TV to our right we overheard noises—lusty
moans that made us do double-takes. The moans were coming from a permed
brunette with bounding breasts, who was cowgirl-riding the tall, meaty summit
of a disgusting man.
“La-dee-fucking-dat,” Chet's pal
cracked.
Chet and his pal had arranged a cheap, seedy
double-date. Their four cackles struck against the round oak table and
resounded throughout the living room. A moment later, Rex nudged Willy in the
ribs, once he got the joke.
Slack-jawed and acting natural as best we
could, we took notice of the young woman's hypnotic bounce before we looked
away, as though the porn stars would soon scold us for snooping.
Shortly thereafter, the living room was invaded
by Mindy and Molly, embroiled in a sisterly dispute over a Barbie doll. Mindy had
possession of the doll and Molly was desperate to get it back.
“You made my Barbie look like a ho!” Molly
charged.
“That's 'cause your Barbie is a ho,” Mindy countered.
In her haste, Mindy had retreated into an arm's
length of her brash uncle Chet. He snatched the doll from her and proceeded to
disrobe the thing, peeling off Barbie's nightgown as though it were a banana.
He played King Kong for this damsel who handled distress with a plastic smile.
“No, Chet, dooonnn't!”
the twins protested.
We were to see many viler things throughout the
courses of our lives, but in this instance, we were about to witness vile
things for which we were totally unprepared.
Chet smeared his tongue all over that Barbie
doll. He defiled both sides of it from head-to-toe, lashed the lewdest licks on
Barbie's exaggerated curves.
“Now I'm done with her,” Chet said.
With that he hurled the doll far against the
opposing wall of the living room. Barbie thumped onto the carpet, her blond
mane mussed. The porn on display was about to take a ghastly turn, and yet
Barbie's smile never wavered.
“Sick,” Mindy said absently.
Chet flung the tiny nightgown at Mindy's feet,
but neither twin wanted anything to do with it.
“Oh, my God...” Willy murmured.
This time he nudged me. On TV, the post-coitus
couple was getting ambushed by a madman with an ax. The sex scene took place in
a cabin, and so it must have been a lewd adaptation of Friday the 13th, in which, I'd surmise, “Mason” donned a ski-mask at “Camp
Tryst-All Lake” and hacked couples to pieces before they could get to the sappy
business of cuddling once the deed was done.
The young woman's screams were ceased when the
madman's ax split her skull. Fake blood streamed against horizontal logs on the
Munson's TV.
“Money shot,” Chet said.
His pal shuffled the cards, glanced up from the
whirring transformation of the deck in his hands to the women they had brought
over. They weren't smiling. Willy gulped and quickly devised an escape plan:
running away. I was entranced by the vapid, pleasing stare from that Barbie
doll lying on the carpet. Willy had to jostle me as though I was asleep on my
feet. Before we bolted out of there, Rex piped up.
“She sure had some monster jugs. You know... like dad always says.”
The Hi-C Heist...
The summer was on the brink of its inevitable
end on the day Willy told me about the Hi-C Heist. We stood on his front lawn
drinking cans of Mountain Dew but mostly wasting the soda with spit-takes. One
of us would chug Mountain Dew, feigning casualness, while the other blurted out
something outlandish that caused the soda to be spewed in a wide and
far-reaching froth onto the grass.
“Whoa,” I said. “Those squirrels are having a three-way!”
To which Willy did an explosive spit-take. In a week's time, we knew we'd be
sitting in class bored by lectures about fractions, walled off from summer's
afterglow and staring out windows, and so we were compelled to one-up each
other's Dew-spitting while we could.
We laughed about the squirrel three-way for a beat and then I took a swig of
Dew. Willy caught sight of something in the distance.
“Rex Sr.'s coming this way,” he said.
I stopped drinking and asked, “What's so funny about that?”
“No. That's Rex Sr.,” he said, pointing. “Way down the street, riding his bike.
Slowly.”
I looked over my shoulder and sure enough, halfway down the block, he was
approaching at a glacial rate. His scraggly black curls tufted out from under
his meshed trucker hat, which was embroidered with the logo of a manufacturer
of construction equipment:
“CAT.”
His rusted mountain bike squeaked in gradual
intervals like a porch swing. Rex Sr. used to summon just enough force to let
his momentum keep him upright.
“He got fired a week ago,” Willy went on. “From a Hi-C plant. His job was to
glue those straws wrapped in plastic to the sides of the juiceboxes.”
“Did he put the straws inside the plastic wraps, too?”
“Nah, I think someone before him on the assembly line took care of that,” Willy
said. “But while he had the job, the Munsons drank Hi-C for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner.”
“What kind of a spit-take could you get from a Hi-C?” I had to know.
“Not sure. They never shared their Hi-C's. Anyway, his boss busted him. He
spotted all these rectangles bulging out of his pockets. The cops got involved.
Rex Sr. asked to be sent to jail for a month and then collect unemployment.”
“How does someone collect... not having a job?”
Willy shrugged. The bicycle squeaks got louder. I could see how low he had the
brim of his hat pulled. His eyes were shadowed and we had no clue if he was
staring at or through us. Willy lowered his voice and cupped his mouth, did
everything but hiss: “psssttt.”
“They just fired him and made him pay for the juiceboxes. He never got to go to
jail.”
Willy shut up as Rex Sr. rode past us. He was like a hot breeze that brought
with it a whiff of garbage in the sun. Maybe that's harsh, but the man was
always frowning, always a grouch.
The bill of his cap turned to us. I wondered what he was thinking. Was
he scoffing at all the suckers who walked around on two legs or
stewing about all the big shots who drove around on four wheels?
The truth, probably, is that he was thinking: Those kids better not be
talking shit about me.
Rex Sr. turned away from us and pedaled on. We could gawk at the back of his
black shirt and hat and that was it. The porch-swing sound carried away
faintly.
We watched him reach the Munson's driveway but he didn't pull in. He just kept
riding the middle the road. We watched him until he got to the Stop sign.
“Where's he going?” I said.
“Yeah,” Willy agreed. “Where's he going?”
###
I scarcely thought of Rex or the other Munsons for years, until one afternoon,
in the spring of 2008, Willy was called in to visit a police detective at the
precinct. The two of us had been attacked by senseless lowlifes outside of a
bar. One of them broke my jaw. He was wearing rings, too, and I should add,
they really made him look effeminate. (Though I didn't mention that while
getting my ass kicked.)
Anyway, the detective showed Willy six
different pictures, mugshots, and asked which of the possible perpetrators, if
any, had assaulted us. Willy complied. His dour expression faltered when he saw
the first mugshot. He snickered and shook his head in wonder. The detective
frowned.
“I grew up across the street from this guy,”
Willy explained. “And no, detective, we did not get jumped by Rex Munson.”
Aside from that instance, I've lost track of
what happened to the Munsons. Some of them still live in that house on Adderley
Street. I suppose I could inquire about them to Mr. or Mrs. Cameron, neighbors
of the Munsons as I write this, but I choose not to broach the subject. Certain
things are more trouble than good to reestablish in the timeline. Maybe I'm
callous that way. I prefer the Munsons as memories.
If wealth continues to elude the Munsons, I do
hope they've gained rationale and conscience. There's only so much money to go
around, and sustaining it all becomes a vicious racket. (Perhaps that's why the
Cat Lady opted out.) But if nothing else, the cap that can be imposed on
responsibility and kindness is more generous. I don't wish the end of the world
and its dearth of redemption on the Munsons.
Part of me will always be tickled by them, of course. The kid who snickered at
their debasement of Barbie dolls has much in common with the adult who laughs
hysterically when he sees the Trailer Park Boys use hockey sticks to
swipe garbage off the hood of a jalopy known as the “Shitmobile.”
Certain gags never age. And certain
recollections convince me I will always be alone, as when I picture what was
inside the Cat Lady's haunting garage. When I recall the senior Rex's CAT hat,
the gags and the ghosts become one and the same, just like everything else.
Momentarily.
Not long after she passed away, the Cat Lady’s house and garage were
condemned and bulldozed. Now between two houses in the neighborhood there’s
only a gap of grass and dandelions.
The Cat Lady and the Munsons helped me realize I can't always tell fact from
fiction. But I do know which one keeps us grounded, and which one keeps us
going.
