Creepy Come Ons

Channeling my youth. Awakened thinking of this one:

My bff in hs, Claudette, invited me to visit her older sister who was living in Questa, NM. Her sister had one kid and was expecting another. We took a bus out to Questa which is in the sticks and beautiful country. A small town, lots of mountain scenery.

Her sister's husband was in the armed forces, I don't remember which one, and he'd been wounded. There was something about a plate in his head, but I didn't pay too much attention cause I'd just gotten my license before we left and Claudette's sister owned a '66 Mustang.

Wow, was she insane to let me take that car out on the open road or what? I drove the mountain roads with the pedal to the floor and with both of us squealing as only almost sixteen-year-olds can do. I wheeled around switchbacks skirting the edge until Claudette begged me to stop. Deer and bunnies spread the word to stay off the road.

The husband hadn't been home for a few days. On the bus ride to Questa Claudette shared tidbits she'd picked up about him; he drank and had psychological problems, what we'd term post traumatic stress disorder nowadays, but again adult stuff - not all that interesting.

The house was small and Claudette snored, so I slept on the couch. One night the husband was home. He took us out for burgers, but was mostly quiet during dinner.  In the middle of the night he crept into the living room where I slept. Literally folks, the man was on his hands and knees. I'm a light sleeper, and I'm also near-sighted, but the blurred vision of his stealth crawl is vivid in memory.

He crawled over to the couch and started touching me on top of the blanket, kind of petting me like I was a cat or something. I was totally freaked and pretended to be asleep. He reeked of liquor and mumbled some b.s. I could barely understand telling me I was beautiful and that he wouldn't hurt me. My heart beat so hard it filled my ears and drowned out all other sound.

I've always wondered if my heartsound woke up Claudette's sister. She tiptoed into the living room, but stepped on a squeaky floorboard as she rounded the corner. Busted! He immediately laid down on the floor like he was passed out. She went over to him whispering, and he acted like he didn't know how he got there and that he'd fainted. I was still pretending to be asleep.

I could barely look at them the next day and remember nothing more about our stay there.

Shite like that was always happening to me. For a long time I thought I must have some sort of electromagnetic draw for all the adult creeps in the world.

INCONSTANT MOON

If they say the moon is blue,

We must believe that it is true.

 Old English Proverb    

                                                                                           

    “It was different in my day.  Kids respected their parents," Mom said. "My mother and father were wonderful.” 

   Her father was a drunk and a pedophile.

   By the time Mom turned five her mother was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. It happened on the night of a blue moon. No medical opinion rendered, the family suspected witchcraft.

   “My father worked hard and he took care of mother. He only drank for birthdays and religious holidays,” Mom said in his defense. 

    Then I must have a photographic memory for those holy Hallmark days of Grandpa lit up, his eyes and lips shiny, unzipping his pants and grabbing little hands to rest on the hard surprise there. We never told. The aunts and uncles paid no attention to the kids hanging around jolly old Granddad.

    “It only happened once,” Mom says when I remind her that he molested her, too.  “And my mother chased him with a frying pan.”  

    That’s her story and she’s sticking with it. That was the night of the blue moon and her mother never walked again. No more chases with the frying pan: truth waned with the moon.     
      

    “We were happy then,” Mom says.  “Life was simple.” 

    She smiles at her happy-ever-after ending to the story of her life. She’s 83. I still have a life to live, a ways to go, the irresistible pull of the blue moon to fight.

Published in 2007 in Storycircle                              

Let the Right One In

St. Martin's Press, 2007

Loneliness plays an important part in coming of age stories. Toss in brutal bullying of a latchkey kid, single moms, a nondescript – read soulless – apartment complex, an assortment of teenaged glue sniffers, drunks, and other layabouts living on their disability benefits and you have the makings of a contemporary take on the usual outsider story.

Add a bleak, wintery landscape and a pedophile, Hakan, who moves in next door to the 12-year-old protagonist, Oskar, with his “daughter” of the same age, and you might have a predictable story. Except that in John Lindqvist’s “Let the Right One In,” the girl, Eli, is a vampire.

A series of gruesome murders occur and Oscar compiles newspaper clippings in his scrapbook. This is not morbid behavior. The story is set in 1982 and the Nintendo Entertainment System hasn’t been invented yet. Anyone who has played a video game knows that plenty of slaughter happens on the screen. Parents reading about Oscar’s scrapbook actually wish their kids would turn off the video games and read about murder in the newspaper.

Hakan is to Eli as Renfield was to Dracula, only with a sick twist. He worships Eli, but it’s his sexual compulsion which drives the truly horrific, and the sickly comic, aspects of this story. He supplies her with blood . . . at a price, but his ineptitude leads to his capture. Even here, Eli takes pity on him, but her sympathy leads to a further twist in the story and Hakan becomes a zombie with an erection. This is new in vampire lit. It is also social commentary. Hakan is a pedophile who will never be rehabilitated, much less killed.

These three are the fulcrum around which the intersecting stories of a multitude of characters converge. The chapters are short and the author feels free to jump into all his character’s minds as they aimlessly head for disaster. This is author as God, but Lindqvist doesn’t disappoint. Even the short chapter where we’re in the mind of a squirrel is well-written and packs a punch at its end. Don’t misread my words – I loved this book. It’s every writer’s dream to be able to get away with these POV shifts. Only a good plot and an author who knows where he’s going can do it.

These twists wouldn’t be enough if they weren’t contrasted with the everyday terror of schoolyard bullying, leading to the eternal question of who is more violent, the humans or the vampire?

The friendship between Oskar and Eli is tender and nonsexual. There is a gender-bending aspect which underlines their bond, and is a further contrast to the adult lives around them. Like some alternative Charlie Brown Cartoon Special, all the adults are marginal or missing. Those that are present are shadowy losers, except the gym teacher (go figure), and he provides only minor optimism. That arrived toward the end of the book so I knew more bad stuff was going to happen to Oscar.

Just when I thought he’d solved his problem with the bullies, they come back in force. In my heart, I was rooting for Eli to appear and save Oscar, and you will be too.