Bone

Monday, October 31, 2005

On doings of the Halloweenish variety--part II

Remember what I said about luck? How sometimes, for no reason, it’s bad, leaving you feeling totally ass-raped by life? Other times, equally for no reason, it’s awesome, leaving you feeling like you could give the President the finger and it would get you a Cabinet position?

What sucks about that is that it can change on you like that. And, to be truthful, I have never seen such luck of either variety in an all-out battle like I saw that night.

Up until this point, once we had actually got under way, our luck had seemed pretty good, especially when considering how crappy our luck had been to begin with. The odyssey from Garrett’s house had heretofore gone well.

We were heading along another paved bike path that hugged a line of trees along the park’s border. The property line was somewhat irregular here; the fence along the border took a right turn up ahead. The trees followed; so did the bike path. We were staying close to the trees, and were preparing to scout out the path around the corner. Before we had decided who would do the scouting, we heard the unmistakable throb of a big V8 engine, and, beneath that, the whispering hum of tires on turf. We were all staring stupidly at each other when a police car, driving on the grass, straddling the bike path, prowled slowly around the corner.



















With no time to think, no time even to honorably react, we all dove toward the brush along the fence. I was the slowest to respond, so I was the last in. There was simply no way the cops hadn’t seen us; how could they have missed us? Jesus, we were on private property well after the posted closing hours; we were all wearing black, and if that were no indication that we were up to some kind of fuckery, we all had weapons. For all that’s holy, Garrett had a three-foot samurai sword. It would be a long time and a lot of money before we got out of jail.

Bob and Garrett had thrown themselves through the bushes toward the fence. Despite their fright, they were able to pull it together enough to stop moving as soon as possible. Joe went fetal and rolled as far towards the back as he could; I simply dove and curled up into a tight a ball as possible as I fell.

I ended up with my head tucked into my chest, facing the fence. I was waiting for the creak of the cop’s door opening, and the play of the flashlight over the dead leaves and other such detritus into which we had attempted to bury ourselves. This would undoubtedly come right before we heard the cop’s voice, but after we heard the snap of the safety strap on his holster being released.

We heard none of that. What we heard was the muffled burble of the cruiser’s engine as the cop nosed it the rest of the way around the corner. He didn’t slow down or speed up; he just kept prowling.

I remember something stabbing into my lower back. I reached down to brush it away and found that my black sweatshirt had ridden way up. My gear was not designed for cowering in bushes; curling into a ball had caused me to display a great deal of plumber butt. Not only that, but the waistband of my undies, a gleaming white, protruded fully two inches above the top of my pants. That was the side facing the cop; how in the name of God had he not seen that?

I counted to 10 fully four times before I could get my arms and legs to move. I poked my head out of the bushes and saw the cruiser’s taillights, still straddling the bike path, disappear over the rise over which we had come not one minute before. It sure seemed like a lot longer that that. Bob came scrambling out next.

“He didn’t see us!” he hissed. ”Holy shit! He didn’t see us!” He went on repeating this in some kind of mantra as we all did our best to get our shit back together.

Well, after that, there was precious little that could scare us off. We turned the corner and got back on our way. There was no pretense at stealth now; and besides, if we had been that close to disaster and walked away unscathed, what could get in our way now? We moseyed on down the bike path. We spoke in normal voices, instead of the harsh whispers we had been using, lisping instead of using the s sound to cover the hissing sound of a sibilant—the part of human speech most likely to be overheard. I bummed a smoke off Bob and fired up.

We hit the path into the woods and just kept going. I had thought there would have been considerable build-up required on all our parts; after the brush with the cop, however, I felt I could have punched Dracula right in the face without missing a beat. We made it to the slab and just hung out there for a while.

“So, what happened?” you, O Treasured Reader, are undoubtedly asking yourself.

Well, the short version is, yeah, whatever it was that stalked us that first night came on back and stalked us again. It did the surround thing, too, and after having my nerves nicely toasted by the cops, I just couldn’t seem to work up enough of a scare to really enjoy myself. I sat there, mostly, wishing I’d brought some Off, for the mosquitoes were certainly made of sterner stuff in late June than they were in late September. It seemed I was not the only one of this opinion; Joe, Bob, and Garrett seemed equally unperturbed. Garrett went so far as to draw his katana with a lovely sounding sssshing! and went in after the crunchy noises coming from all sides. It was kinda cool, actually; Garrett’s pretty good in the thick of it, and after we lost sight of him, we couldn’t tell which was Garrett and which were the evil bad nasty things.

He never did manage to catch sight of one. He came out of the woods after about 15 minutes and said, “You know, it was weird—I never could get any closer to them than they sounded from the clearing. It was like they knew I was stalking them.” Bob went in for a try, his boot knife clamped in his teeth as he pushed branches aside. He came out again with the same result.

Finally, I went into the woods, knowing that I was crazily pursuing something that seemingly had the ability to appear out of nowhere and without warning or delay multiply itself. I had my knife clenched tightly in my fist, wondering just what the hell I would do if I came across some gibbering ghoul that suddenly went for my throat. Or—and here I invoke imagery from that wonderfully similar scene in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, where he makes the second trip to the Micmac burial grounds, this time with the freshly-exhumed body of his son cradled in his arms—what if some disembodied head, grinning like a fiend, suddenly dropped into view from the branches up above? What would I do then? I sometimes wish I could have re-tried that scene with a fresh set of nerves, but after you’ve had your psyche’s ass kicked pretty resoundingly, it’s damned hard to work yourself into a suitable fright.

I’ll tell you what almost did it, though—having walked on a straight line away from the slab and the other three, I stopped for a quick bearing check, and verified that the stalking noises from The Other were still there—and still on all sides of me, which meant, much to my almost-dismay, that one of Them was between me and my friends. While not enough to scare me, it was enough to make me turn around and go back. It seemed to take a lot longer to get back to my waiting compadres than it had to leave.

I never did see anything.

So, there you have it. We walked on back to Garrett’s house, with no pretense at covertness, or any precautions at getting spied by the locals. We retrieved our gear from underneath the willow tree. I dug inside my duffel bag for my watch and was shocked to learn that it was after 3:00 in the morning.

We all went home.

Is that a bullshit ending or what?

As it happens, there is a small epilogue, though it seems to remove some (but certainly not all) of the mystique from the escapade. Whether you like that mystique to be more unexplainable in a supernatural vein or in a style more X-files depends, I guess, on your inclination to read further.

About two years after that (and a shitload of discussion over pool tables and around booths at Denny’s or The Country Cup in Lisle), I found myself leaving Garrett’s house after a night of our usual high-rolling pool-shooting bar-hopping antics. Bob dropped us off at Garrett’s in his new Riviera and pulled out leaving a nice pair of black stripes on the asphalt. I had my bike, so I started it to let it warm up and lit a cigarette.

“You know, I wouldn’t mind another shot at it,” I said, dragging deep and letting the blue cigarette smoke mingle with the condensation from my exhaust in the filmy glow of the streetlights.

“Shot at what?” said Garrett, one eyebrow arched.

“I wouldn’t mind going back in there and waiting until we see something,” I said, wondering if I really meant it. Hadn’t it been enough, just hearing? I could live my life pretty normally with that, but there are things people have seen that have changed them forever, you bet. You can’t unsee something, and some things, no matter how hard you try, can’t be forgotten.

“Well...” said Garrett, trailing off and kicking aimlessly at my front tire.

I waited. Finally, I prompted him. “Well what?”

Garrett just looked at the driveway for a little while. He pointed at my shirt pocket. I fished out a smoke and handed it to him. My lighter quickly followed, but he had his own. He waited a little while and made sure it was nicely going before he continued.

“When was the last time you went by those gates on Mack road?” I jumped a little inwardly at that, because Mack Road was the northern border between our woods and civilization. It was a fairly good-sized bit of the world, bordered by Atten Park on the eastern end, Butterfield Road on the southern side, Winfield Road on the western edge, and finally, Mack. There was another stretch of impossibly high chain-link fence that ran along Mack for a little while. About halfway along was a gate. With the proper key, you could have easily gotten into those woods with a car parked not five feet down the shoulder. Without one, you were stuck with the path and Shank’s Mare.

“Well, it’s been a couple of months, I guess,” I began, but stopped because I realized then that it had been more like five or six.

Garrett huffed out the last of his smoke and stomped out the butt under his boot heel. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you climb on this bad boy and motor on by there and call me tomorrow night and tell me what you saw.”

I did. And when I saw what I saw when I came around the bend and my headlight picked out the gate around the next curve, I slowed down and finally stopped. The gates were wide open, and through their gaping maw, picked out in stark relief in my high beam, I saw the battered yellow shapes of construction equipment. And standing at attention, eyes fixed gamely on me was a state trooper, his hand resting loosely on the butt of his sidearm.

Like an idiot, I got off and removed my helmet. As I pulled it over my head and looked up, I noticed that the cop’s gun had cleared the holster.

I have never had a gun pulled on me before. I tried to strike up some kind of conversation, as though riding along a deserted two-lane at two in the morning and pulling up in front of a cop to have a nice nocturnal chat were all par for the course. The cop beat me to it.

“Climb back on your hoss, boy.”

“Well, look—I used to play in these woods as a kid,” the fear in me kindling the lie, letting me knit it out of ether and ashes while I stared into the lidless black eye of his sidearm. I was prepared to go on and on, clueless as to what I would say but knowing the words would be there as I needed them. I was curious myself as to what would come out of my mouth, but he stopped me cold before I could get farther with a wave of hand.

“That’s great, he said. “Soon there ain’t gonna be any woods here to play in. Puttin’ in a golf course.”

I sighed, all my inflated ego, my wordsmithing, dissolved. “Well,” I half-whispered, not really paying attention anymore to my flapping lips, which babbled on seemingly of their own accord, “I guess you can never really go home again.”

The hammer of the trooper’s gun came back with an oily click.

“What did you say?” he asked, his voice dripping cold poison.

Frightened absolutely beyond the capacity for rational thought, I haltingly repeated myself, hoping I had gotten my own words right, taking great care to enunciate clearly and hoping to God he had misheard me, and that had been what set him off, not what I had really said.

“Oh,” he said, after I had finished, letting the hammer of his gun ease on back
down. “No, I guess you really can’t.”

By this time I was backing slowly toward my motorcycle, fumbling my helmet over my head as I went. He didn’t seem to be inclined to pursue, so I threw my leg over the seat and, not bothering to strap my helmet on properly, gingerly started the engine and slowly motored onto the pavement. With a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure the cop didn’t have his gun back out, I cranked the engine to the redline and let the clutch out with a snap. The front wheel came off the ground and stayed there, and the next time I looked at the speedometer I was over a hundred and climbing, and that was the last I ever saw of the woods behind Atten Park.
That’s where the story ends, dearest reader.

Or is it? As it happens, there is a small post-script. It turned out that what was surreptitiously stashed in those woods under that concrete slab was, according to my friend Adam’s home inspector, a fully functional Nike missile silo in retire. I guess the night I almost got shot by a state trooper was the night they were taking the missile out. Hey, you can’t build a golf course over a nuclear missile, for Christ’s sake. Think of what it would do to the back nine after a launch.

Though that explains the cops’ behavior, both on that night way back in September when the whole thing started, or that last hellish encounter at the gates, ready to expulge their mysterious and menacing contents, it doesn’t explain the slowly stalking thing that, while scaring us pretty badly, also helped to bolster our belief that there are some things out there that can’t be explained.

And, for a little while, I got to be one of them myself.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Ode to a Delta 88--update

Dammit--all back together and the thing still runs on 7.

Options are--scrap the bastard, or stick it out behind my garage (thereby cementing my status as true redneck emeritus) and drop a new engine in it this spring. I'm really angry, so I think it's gonna be the latter, because I'll be screwed if I'm gonna let this thing get the better of me.

Although, seeing it go to the crusher--fuck that, watching it actually in the crusher--would be perversely therapeutic...

I'll wait a couple of days and let myself cool off, and then we'll see.

Crap.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

On strange doings of the Halloweenish variety...

A story whose time to be told has come

We’re in the meaty part of the Halloween season, and in no profession (other than, say, store manager or costume manufacturer) is this more evident now than in the schools. Jack-o’-Lantern and Frankenstein cutouts are plastered on every door (except mine), little embroidered ghosties bob jauntily from the rearview mirror of the Ford Excursion in the lane next to me; the school-teacherish lady behind the wheel of this behemoth remains next to me until she gets into the left turn lane about a half-mile on and turns into the Hobby Lobby. What’s she got a hankerin’ fer? Your guess is as good as mine, but I think the chances are at least even that she’s there for some more of that cuddly Halloween malarkey.

That’s all fine and well, and taking things like vampires and zombies and ghosts and horrid amalgamations of human body parts that are formed into one staggering, lumbering automaton with a suspiciously verdant complexion and a strangely-flat-topped head and making them all cuddly is fine. We don’t want to actually scare anybody with any of these things, now do we? ‘Course not. And really, what could be cuddlier than a furry little bat or a hook-nosed witch? I can’t think of anything offhand, can you?

In truth, these things are kinda scary before they get run through the cute-inator. Their histories and etymologies stretch back long ways, and there was a period of time when people actually believed in that stuff—that witches rode broomsticks, that bats drank blood and were the transmogrifications of Slavic aristocrats; that werewolves stalked the streets whenever the moon was full; that the house on the hill was full of ghosts.

Who’s to say that no one believes in that stuff today? I sure do. And sometimes, when you’re lying all snug in your bed, it can give you a bit of an uncomfortable pause to consider what might be stalking around just outside your tightly-shut and locked door. There could be anything out there, anything. Things that go bump in the night are not always totally explainable. There’s been countless volumes written, countless movies made, countless TV documentaries aired, on stuff that goes bump. It can’t all be explainable. You got your ghosts, your yeti, your chupacabra, the mysterious Goat-Man of the Northeast. There’s werewolves, and maybe just one or two of the countless goths that roam the colleges and cities really are vampires. I once read an account of a ghost sighting in Ohio that consisted of a woman in a blue ball gown standing in the doorway of a room and just staring at the viewer. Her head was that of a well-decomposed corpse. Another in Ypsilanti Michigan reported seeing a skeleton busily digging a hole in the viewer’s backyard. Can you imagine that? Just a skeleton, plugging away with a shovel in your garden?

There’s creepy stuff out there. And, of course, there’s me.

All right, here I gotta mention a little detail about what I was like as a kid. I read The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I loved them. I read all of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and a year to this day does not go by that I don’t read all of them again at least once. These books and others of their ilk spoke often about doors that led to other places.

"A door," said the Queen, speaking more to herself than to him.
"A door from the world of men! I have heard of such things. This
may wreck all. But he is only one, and he is easily dealt with."


From C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I spent a lot of time and money in the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of my local bookstore, and on my free time, I’d get on my bicycle, or later on, I’d get in my car, and I’d look for my own door. I already believed in magic, ghosts, and UFO’s; why not my own wardrobe, my own magical country, with talking beasts and mythical creatures and battles and valor and knights and magic coming out of every hole in the ground?

I never did find that door. I haven’t stopped looking, either. I suspect I’ll find it someday, one way or another. It may come in the form of a fast-moving truck when I’m crossing the street and not paying attention; it may come in the form of some rapidly-metastasizing tumor that the doctors just didn’t catch; it may come in the form of a heart attack. More than likely it will come on the bike, when I’m (stupidly) not wearing my helmet and I hit a curve too fast. But it may be that I’ll be hiking in the woods and I’ll just come upon a door. Not in a tree or cave or anything like that; it may be just like the door at the end of Prince Caspian or The Last Battle, where a door that appeared to lead from nowhere to nowhere actually led farther than anyone could otherwise go in a lifetime.

I’m digressing like a bastard here. Like I said, I never did find that door, but what’s most interesting, it turns out, is that all my friends from high school were looking for it too. None of us have found it, and some of us have stopped searching. But there was a time when that was what just we did. Some groups of friends do the paintball thing; some got together and played Dungeons and Dragons (I liked the idea, but I always thought the guys who played that stuff were a bunch of pussies); we looked for the door, and we did stuff that felt like looking, even though we knew it wouldn’t get us anywhere.

We went to abandoned drawbridges. We went to cemeteries. (Hey, it seemed logical to us. Still does—if ever there was a gateway to the next world, it would seem to me that a cemetery is as likely as anyplace else.) We went to places where important historical events happened. My buddy Garrett went to Stonehenge. I went to Four Corners. Joe did all the research. Joe was, and is, by the way, the closest thing to a true psychic I have ever met. Larry provided the cigarettes, and Bob provided the booze. We took my old truck most of the time. We busted out the Ouija Board on several occasions, and that thing was a story in itself. We bought spell books, tarot decks, maps, incense. All we wanted was some kind of proof that the door to the next world existed, and we would have taken anything weird as evidence, using the argument, “Hey, if this could happen, why not that?”

Finally, one night, we were all hanging out at Garrett’s house. Garrett’s folks lived (still do, actually) on Creekside in a little subdivision called Adare Farms. What this meant was that Garrett’s house was close to our high school, St. Francis, and also close to Wheaton-Warrenville South High School, which adjoined a large outdoor sports complex called Atten Park.

In those days, Atten Park ended and the woods began, and they were some heavy-duty woods. Garrett, having grown up around there, played in those woods a lot and knew them like the back of his hand.

This night, we had nothing else to do, so we were on our way out the door to shoot a little pool at Gala North—a bowling alley in Carol Stream. It was Late September-ish, and still warm out. We were all dressed in what we thought were our sophisticated pool-shooting clothes—button-down shirts, black jeans or slacks, shitkickers, the occasional black leather vest. We all had two-piece cues, three of us were packing squares—Larry with his Reds, Bob with his Camel Turkish Blends, and me with my Light Wides—and Bob had his pocket-flask nicely filled to the top. We were waiting for Garrett to get his shit together. He came out of the bedroom after a few minutes, combing his hair back in that modernized duck’s-ass he used to use before the he went with the George Clooney look.

Walking out the door, I remember saying something like, “Man, I’m fuckin’ bored. I don’t wanna just go shoot pool again. I want something different. I want a fuckin’ adventure.”

“What, you wanna get into a bar fight?” Bob asked, grinning and cracking his big knuckles. “I could go for that.”

“Naw,” I said, “I mean something different. I mean like a quest.”

“Whaddaya mean, ‘a quest?’” asked Joe. “There ain’t nothing to quest for around here.”

“I wouldn’t care if we had to make one up. I just wanna do something different—something that means something.”

Nobody said anything. After a little while, though, Garrett said, “Well, actually…”

Which is how we ended up walking through the woods behind Atten Park on a pitch-black moonless night at 1:00 in the morning.

It may have sounded up to now like I was in the midst of one of my usual pointless meandering blogs. This is not the case—because as of now, this is where the story gets weird, and I swear to you that what I’m about to tell you is true, for the very life of me.

As I said, Garrett knew these woods like the back of his hand. When I mentioned doing something different, he got his crafty look on his face.

“Okay. You want different? I’ll show you different. How’s this?

“In the woods behind Atten Park, there’s this weird concrete slab. I don’t know what it is—it’s just this rectangular slab, on the ground out there in the middle of these woods. It’s about the size of a basketball court. I’ve known about it for a long time, but I can’t explain it. It’s just—weird. Wanna go check it out?”

“What, now?” asked Larry, his tone incredulous.

“Yeah, now,” said Garrett. “Jay’s all on about how he wants to do something different, even a quest, maybe. All right, here’s our quest—to go check out this creepy fuckin’ slab in the middle of the dark frickin’ woods when it’s pitch black out.”

“Hell, I’m in,” I said.

“Me too,” said Joe.

“Hell yeah,” said Bob.

“What the hell,” said Larry.

So we piled into my old truck—a little brown Mazda with blue-dot taillights, raised-white-letter tires and a good-sized valvetrain racket from me running the poor thing at the redline while all kinds of crossed-up sideways in snowy parking lots. (See my previous blog for an action shot.) Larry climbed into the shotgun seat, and everyone else jumped in the back.

We pulled up in the rearmost parking lot of Atten Park—about 200 yards back from the street, adjoining the community garden plots. Garrett took us down a path through the middle of the postage-stamp sized gardens filled with late summer squash, armpit-high corn, beans, pumpkins. We ended up on a small beaten single-track into the woods. None of us thought to bring a flashlight. Larry and Bob alternately fired up their Zippos. It didn’t help.

We walked down this path, blacker than midnight in a mineshaft, for what felt like hours. In reality, it was only around 15 to 20 minutes, but when you’re out walking in the woods at night, I’m sure you can understand how time can stretch out when you’re not looking.

Garrett seemed to know his way pretty well, and eventually, we emerged into a clearing that was suspiciously geometric. Just like he’d said—a concrete rectangle, out there in the middle of these woods. For no reason.

I guess we hung out there for about a half an hour. Mosquitoes are still pretty thick ‘round these here parts in September, and we got our share, but we were too blown away to care very much. Larry’s Zippo had long since run out of fuel, but Bob’s was still going strong, and we estimated this big concrete slab to be about 100 feet long on the long axis and around 60 feet on the short. We also discovered that the surface was not perfectly smooth—it was lined with grooves at regular intervals along both axes, dividing the surface into congruently-sized squares.

Well, in reality, there was not much to do once we’d gotten there and sized up the thing, and so we were just hanging out, discussing in harsh whispers what the nature of the place could possibly be, when Joe stopped us all. He held up a hand, quavering in the flickering of Bob’s Zippo.

“I think it’s time to get out of here,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Garrett hissed, his dander up, as you might expect, given that we were in a creepy place and Joe was insinuating by both word and action that things were about to get creepier. They did.

As if on cue, we heard someone walking through the woods. We didn’t hear it gradually get closer, as we would have expected; it was just not there one second and there the next. Not on the path, mind you; it sounded as if this person were crashing blindly through the trees. Its footfalls made a distinctively human sound—Crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch. One foot at a time, not hurrying.

In hindsight, the situation was even creepier than it seemed at that moment, standing there, listening. Let’s look at the facts—had it been a cop, I sure as hell don’t think he or she would have been taking his or her time, as this thing seemed to be doing. More than likely, a cop would have been moving at a far greater pace in order to bring us to bear that much sooner, and, probably, would have been waving a flashlight and/or shouting something to let us know he or she was on the way. Face it—crashing through the woods is no way to sneak up on something.

No flashlight. No hurrying. No shouts. Just crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch.

Had it been punk kids out to raise a little hell, I would imagine they’d do a lot of sprint-and-hide, just like any kids do when up to fuckery. You really can’t assess what kind of hell you’re raising if the sound of it is obscured by your progress through the branches, and anyway, what kid raises hell all by him- or herself? There’d undoubtedly be some hollering, some name-calling, perhaps a Black Cat or M-80 lit off every once in a while. Hey, I was a kid not so long ago myself.

No sounds of sprint-and-hide. No hollering. No M-80’s. Just crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch.

This is enough to scare the shit out of anyone, I guess, and we were. Transfixed there like an insect pinned to a card, that was me. I was just getting ready to whisper to the others that it was probably time to get the hell out of there.

Like I said, it gets weird, but I swear to you that I am not making this up.

Up to now, we had heard only one person (thing?) out in the woods, just walking. Getting closer? Getting farther away? Doing laps? Too scared to tell, but at least it was only one.

As I thought that (I swear I’m not making this up), instantly instantly instantly there were noises on all four sides. Crunch. Snap. Pop. Crunch. Either some twisted sadistic quadrophonic deal, or now we were surrounded.

Garrett stepped up. I have never lost my respect for him for his actions that night, and in particular at this moment.

“We just gonna go back down the path to the truck,” he said, “and we’re not gonna run. We’re just gonna take our time, and while we’re doing that, we’re gonna talk. About anything. The Bulls. The White Sox. Monica Lewinsky. Anything. Just walk and talk. Now.”

That, O Treasured Reader, is what we did, and that was a) the scaredest I have ever been in my life, and I have been really scared; and b) the longest walk, by far, that I have ever taken. We made it back to the truck with no problems, no boogeymen jumping out from behind trees with fangs bared and a severed head in each dripping fist, no goblins, no vampires.

There were however, two police cars in the parking lot, nicely blocking the truck in its place, radio squawking with the results from the run on my license plates.

In ten seconds they had us spread out—Bob on the hood of one cop car, Larry on the trunk; Garrett and Joe on the other. It was my truck, so I guess it was only fit that they had me spread ‘em on my own hood. They held us there—no cuffs, thank God—while they searched my truck. I was too scared to notice whether they had us at gunpoint, but I’m sure they realized it wasn’t necessary.

It was a small truck, and there wasn’t anything in it to find, so the search was over quickly enough. The first cop had us line up along the side of the truck.

“You hold ‘em,” he said to the other. “I’m gonna take a walk back there and see what’s up.”

Now, does it sound to you as if the cops were overreacting just a little? It sure seemed like that to me at the time. It doesn’t any more, but I’ll get to that.

We stood there, feeling like assholes, while the second cop smoked a cigarette and stared at us. The first came back out of the woods after another eternity. We thought he went back there to look for beer cans, roaches, illegal fireworks. The following exchange between the two cops absolved us of that notion.

“Everything all right?” asked the second.

“Yeah,” replied the first, sliding his flashlight back onto his belt loop. “Nothing got touched.”

Rewind rewind rewind

“Yeah,” replied the first, sliding his flashlight back onto his belt loop. “Nothing got touched.”

Nothing got touched
.

What the fuck were they talking about?

“All right, you punks,” said the second cop. “Park closes at sunset. You’re trespassing. Could bust you, I guess. How ‘bout you pedal your little asses out of here and don’t let us see you back here again, daytime or night time? That work for you?”

It worked. We pedaled. And when we got the chance, we talked, and talked. It turned out what was supposed to be a fuck-around quest became a real quest, of sorts, after all.

We didn’t really care what we had found. All we cared about was that we had found something weird. And what we wanted was not so much to find out what that big concrete slab was, or why the cops were so touchy, or even what it had been that was stalking us out in the woods.

What we wanted was some proof that we hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. What we wanted was to do it again, and see for ourselves if we had really heard what we thought we heard.

I guess it was the unseen thing that intrigued us most. The truck parked out on the gravel parking lot was visible enough from the street, I guess, and it wouldn’t have been too hard for the cops to pick up on that. But we had been way deep in the woods when we heard that noise, and we all agreed that it just wouldn’t have been possible for cops to move someone into stalking position without us hearing them move into position. The thing we heard hadn’t moved into position—it was just not there one second, and there the next. And besides, how had it multiplied like that, just instantaneously?

We wanted to answer these questions, true. But more than that—had we really heard something? Only way to find out was to do it all over again—but no truck, no cops this time. Nothing to give us away. If that thing had just appeared like that, like it sounded it had, it would find us no matter how we got back there. Or so we thought.

After many long nights of discussion over pool tables and at bars, waiting in line at the movie theater or for our turn to play Double Dragon or Street Fighter at the arcade, in the back of my truck in a blue haze of cigarette smoke, we decided that a mission of sorts was in order. Our mission—to make it under cover of darkness into the woods and back to the slab without a vehicle and without being seen by the cops. Once there, we would engage in a rigorous regimen of sitting and waiting for something to appear, as it had last time—with no warning. If it came back, would it come closer? Would it multiply like it had last time? Would we actually see it this time? Part of me hoped we would, but I think a bigger part of me hoped we wouldn’t.

We figured covering the two miles from Garrett’s house to Atten Park would take some doing—especially at night. We decided all black was the way to go. We put our gear together with the following criteria in mind—it had to be black. It had to be black, and anything that wasn’t black had to be black. It also had to be close-fitting, as getting caught on a branch by some loose flap would undoubtedly have sucked, especially when the chance that we would be chased by an unseen stalking thing was not altogether zero.

We also agreed that carrying a weapon of some sort was a must. If whatever was back there decided to show itself, I’ll be fucked if I’m gonna find myself defenseless. Garrett, who put his gear together in the ninja style, came packing a katana the length of one of his legs. Bob had a wicked little boot knife. Joe brought three tiny throwing knives that tucked neatly into a quiver on the back of his hand. We laughed at their effectiveness—how could something that tiny be accurate?—until Joe took all three out with one pull and went snick snick snick—and there were three tiny throwing knives sticking out of a tree ten feet away. I was convinced. For myself, I brought a hunting dagger that strapped to the outside of my leg. It was wicked sharp—in fact, the only blood spilt during the entire fiasco came when I tried to put it back in the scabbard and used my finger as a guide. I still have the scar.

We also felt it was necessary to plan out our route from Garrett’s house. To this end, we did some research and learned that there was a small corporation in West Chicago that specialized in taking high-altitude photos. Give the guy an address, and he’d produce a two-foot-by three-foot rolled photograph with your address’s coordinates as the center. At the altitude from which the photograph was taken, you could count on a five-mile spread in any direction from your specified coordinates. We gave the gentleman Garrett’s address, figuring that a five mile radius would more than encompass Atten Park and the surrounding woods. With such a high vantage point, we could plan our route much more effectively.

Surprise, surprise. Upon receipt of our photograph, we found that the area due west of Atten Park—our woods—was blacked out. Completely. For two square miles, on the photograph at least.

Now what the fuck? Strange stalking beasts? Hyperactive cops? And now you can’t even get a picture of the place?

This did nothing but increase our intensity and resolve. There was enough on the aerial shot to plan enough of our route to get close, and then we’d just wing it. We walked our planned path more than a few times in the daytime, knowing that it wouldn’t look anywhere near the same a) in the dark, b) while you were running your ass off and c) while you were scared out of your skull. We figured we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

All of our planning took almost the entire year. We set a date of June 23.

Have you ever noticed how, sometimes, your luck seems to turn for the worst when you most need it? You’re late for work, but every single traffic light you come to turns red at your approach. You’re busily trying to make dinner so you can eat so you can get on the road so you can get to the gig, but all of a sudden your parents, every single one of your friends, and about three telemarketers call your phone within five minutes. That happens to me all the time. Once, I got so angry that I took my cell phone, went into a nice slow windup, and heaved that fucker across the lawn.

Other times, your luck will run straight and true and blinding white for a little while. This doesn’t seem to happen as often, but it does happen. I once found myself at the heart of the Christmas season without a penny to my name and no way to buy Christmas gifts. I hired on as seasonal help with Toys ‘R’ Us, but the first paycheck wasn’t due ‘til after New Year’s, the bastards. I got invited to a pool tournament two weeks before Christmas and walked out of there with $250 big ones in my pocket. I pulled shots off that night I had never tried before and wouldn’t dream of trying. I simply couldn’t miss. I’m no pool shark, and if you played me tonight you’d have a good chance of winning, but I was unstoppable that night. I still can’t understand it, but I sure appreciate whoever was doing the shooting, ‘cause it sure wasn’t me.

We had luck of both kinds on June 23rd. It seemed the evening would be cancelled by rain, though it had theretofore not rained for the past three weeks. All that evening, it seemed to threaten rain with low-lying clouds and ominous rolls of far-off thunder. Driving to Garrett’s house, I got pulled over for having a broken turn signal. Garrett’s parents were supposed to be gone, but his mom came down sick and they cancelled their plans. Joe’s mom decided that day to put his one black shirt in the wash, and shrank it almost laughably. Bob couldn’t find his car keys.

We all got to Garrett’s a little late. I was a little lighter for the lack of my driver’s license. Bob had to borrow his folks’ extra set of keys. Joe stopped by Wal-Mart on the way and got another black pullover. We met on Garrett’s porch, wearing our street clothes, our gear and weapons stowed in a couple of large black duffel bags. It was 9:00 in the evening. We felt that it wouldn’t be right to get the ball rolling before the witching hour, so we dropped the stuff in Garrett’s garage and went to the local Denny’s to load up on caffeine and sugar. When you’re three hours away from an escapade you’ve been planning for almost a year, those three hours can take a hell of a long time.

Hit time. We had planned to get suited up and leave from Garrett’s back porch. His parents were, however, sacked out on the couch in the downstairs room adjoining the porch, so that was out.

“Fuck it,” said Bob. “What else could possibly go wrong? Let’s just get started, and bring the stuff with us. If there’s a place to change along the way, under a tree, behind a bush, I’ll do that. I just can’t stand waiting any more.” We all agreed, so off we went.

About ten minutes into the two-mile hike, along a route that took us through backyards, along deserted side streets, along the banks of a large retention pond, skirting the environs of a large waste-water treatment plant, and along an eternally long bike path that was far too well-lit by sodium arc lamps from the park, we found a big bushy willow tree. Pushing aside the drooping branches was like parting a thick velvet curtain, and we found the space within as dry and shielded from view as Garret’s house. We got ready, and left all our street clothes there. Dressed all in black, masks on, knives out and ready, we got started.





Remember how I said that sometimes, all the luck you have is bad? And sometimes, though it happens rarely, you get a run of luck that is so good, it scares you? We had used up all our bad luck for the trip, it seemed, and we were due for some good luck. As a sign that Luck herself agreed, upon emerging from the willow tree we were shocked to see the full moon emerging from a break in the clouds. Would Luck continue to smile?

The hardest part was the long stretch of bike path. Brightly lit, and narrowly guarded on both sides by high chain-link fence (the really flexy kind with the spiky stuff at the top that can’t be climbed), it provided the greatest chance that we’d get spotted—either by cops or nosy townspeople out for a walk. We decided to tackle that section on at a time. I was the fastest runner, so I ran point and sprinted down the path—a good 75 yards—until I made it to the dark shelter of the park beyond. I made it without incident, and turned around and flashed my little red LED flashlight to signal the others. In about 10 seconds, here came Garrett, almost as fast but silent in ways I knew I hadn’t been. Joe came after, huffing like a freight train but with arms tucked into his sides and his head held low. Finally, Bob, mustering all the speed for which he’d been known on St. Francis’s defensive line, came hauling down the path like a demented steamroller, arms pumping, knees popping almost to his chest, teeth bared, eyes blazing. Holy shit.

Getting past that point, we felt, was the most difficult part of the journey. All that remained was a lovely stroll through the park under cover of darkness to the path at the edge of the woods. Okay; actually, the walk through the woods would be more difficult, but at least we wouldn’t have to worry about the cops.

Hee hee.

Well, like I said, this one’s a long one, and I didn’t think it’d be fair to make you have to swallow this all in one shot. So maybe this is as good a place as any to break it up. Stay tuned for the next post, which should be up shortly.

Dare I say it—to be continued?

Friday, October 21, 2005

Ode to a Delta 88















O what a frustrating piece of shit you are.

Who knew? Who could possibly have known?

Here is a list of things I am not:

Politician
Florist
Veterinarian
Banker
Doctor
Hippie
Bricklayer
Freemason
Mechanic

I lament only the last.

A mechanic would have looked at you and said “Fuck this.”

Actually, a mechanic would have looked at you and said, “Yeah, I can fix that.”

I looked at you and said, “How hard can it be?”

Getting your fat ass on the trailer to take you home and tuck you cozily into my garage for the next five months, I noticed 1 out of 8 cylinders had taken the day off. Also, an interesting blue cloud was wafting oh so gently from underneath your vast hood.

“No problem,” thought I. “Bad spark plug. Surely nothing more involved than that.”

After you ran for a while in my driveway, though, did I detect the sickly-sweet aroma of overheated antifreeze? Yes, I did. And when I checked under your cursed radiator cap, did I notice that your coolant level was low, indicating a latent internal leak? Indeed. And when, in an act of final desperation, after new plugs and wires and distributor cap and rotor had failed to awaken that 8th cylinder, did I perform a compression check only to find that cylinder #5 was fully offline and effectively compressionless? Sai, you speak only truth.

Is this a blown head gasket or a warped cylinder head? Is there any way to tell, really, with the meager tools and skill at my disposal? No. What other options, after my hubris, but to replace the cylinder head and hope for the best? None.

I shall address you now, O Treasured Reader, to avail you of the travails involved in replacing a cylinder head on a 307-cubic-inch V8. Should you choose someday to undertake the task yourself, dearest friend, be advised that the procedure is germaine to most V8s, but not necessarily identical.

To remove a cylinder head, first you must take off the intake manifold. To remove the intake manifold, first you must remove the carburetor. To remove the carburetor, first you must disconnect a legion of hoses and connectors. Whether they will find themselves back in their original and proper locations is as much your guess as it is mine. Why didn’t I take notes? Why didn’t I label? Why did I think taking digital photographs on the lowest possible resolution would suffice as a proper mnemonic?

Also, you must remove the valve cover. To remove the valve cover, you must first remove the alternator and power steering pump. To remove the power steering pump, you must first remove the heat shield. To remove the heat shield, you must first remove the air injector four-way crossover pipe. To remove the air injector four-way crossover pipe, you must first strip the holy Jesus out of the bolts holding the air injector four-way crossover pipe on because those bolts have been on since 1983 and aren’t going anywhere. To remove the air injector four-way crossover pipe despite the stripped bolts, you must get out your grinder and cut the sucker off. While you are doing this, you must also get a glowing-hot fragment of metal in your eye because you are too stupid to wear your safety goggles.

Also, you must remove the exhaust manifold. To remove the exhaust manifold, you must first jack up the front end of the entire vehicle and remove both front wheels. Then you must lie on your back in a puddle of a noxious mixture of freshly-spilled antifreeze and transmission fluid because you broke your creeper last week using it as a ramp to load your motorcycle on the trailer. Then you must disconnect the exhaust manifold from the header pipe to the catalytic converter. You must also get a nice big chunk of rusty metal in your other eye because you are still too stupid to wear your safety goggles.

Once you have done all of these things, you can remove the cylinder head—but only after you have removed all 10 cylinder head bolts, each of which requires the application of over 150 foot-pounds of torque. Only then can you remove the head and smash the shit out of your thumb with it against the inside fenderwell.

Reverse all these steps to reassemble. Add to the mix that the cylinder head weighs about seventy pounds, and getting in onto the block without scraping the shit out of the new head gasket is a near impossibility for one of my so-called skill. Have I compromised the head gasket now? After all this work, will the thing run for five minutes (if it runs at all) only to rupture the new head gasket and advertise this fact by spewing steam gaily out through the tailpipe? Also throw in the fact that the intake manifold bolts just barely don’t line up with the bolt holes, for reasons only God knows why. Also throw in the fact that the new intake manifold gasket is a flimsy piece of tin that bends if you look at it funny, and which also must be liberally spread with Silicone RTV, an orange sealing substance that looks a lot like a melted popsicle and smells a lot like shit mixed with puke. Don’t forget, as well, that the RTV sets up in 5 minutes, so you have about that long to hoist the 50-pound intake manifold on top of the engine and bolt it into place—only then to find out that the bolt holes don’t line up.

Ah, lovely carburetor, with your four varnish-enslimed barrels and your vast Medusa of vacuum hoses and sensor clips! How would I like to throw thee across the garage? Let me count the ways...well, I guess there’s really just one, but man would that be satisfying.

And here is where I sit, staring at the oil-encrusted engine bay and wondering what to do next. And here you sit, O dear Delta 88, with your dented bronze finish and the small scrapes along the tops of the fenders because I forgot to use fender protectors, your nose in the air due to the jackstands, lending you a haughty fuck-you air that mocks me still.

Was I thinking this would be easy? Was I thinking you, O delta 88, would cooperate with me at all? Was I really so naive?

Will you be so smug, dear Delta 88, when I finally get you to run and take you out to Sycamore Speedway and beat the absolute shit out of you with an enormous grin upon my face the entire time, high on the sweet nectar of revenge? Time will tell in the ways that only time can tell.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

On hiding, and on why I like stuff from the '70's.

I’d like to thank all of you who told me that you were pissed off at me. You have every right to be pissed, of course—a lot of you are close friends with whom I hold close correspondence; others of you know me only by these words that appear in this sometimes-more-coagulated-than-othertimes ether we know as the Internet. Both camps have been wondering just where the fuck I’ve been, and the fact that you gave a shit at all means a lot. I appreciate the sentiment sincerely.

I dunno—sometimes you just gotta hide, I guess. I’m emerging from the hermitage thing, though, little by little. And in my months-long tenure of pulling the covers over my head, I’ve got a few blogs back-logged. Please find one of them enclosed herewith.

I was born in 1973. Of late, that year is starting to sound like a long time ago. It didn’t always, but between then and now is a span of 32 years and counting, and that ain’t too cool. I don’t like how pictures my folks have of me riding my first two-wheeler, or of my first day at kindergarten, or of the puppy we got when I was four—her name was Patch, and while she was no Lois, she was a sweetheart whom I loved dearly—or of my first piano recital (a seven-year-old in a blue pinstripe three-piece, can you dig it) are starting to yellow and curl at the corners. There was a time when these photographs did not look old, even as the styles worn by the people in them grew increasingly anachronistic. Now they do. Oh well. I guess they say that you can’t stay young forever, but at least you can be immature for the rest of your life. Thank God for that.

At any rate, it has come to the attention of a few of my closer associates that I have an affinity for things of 70’s vintage. This is certainly true. I love 70’s movies, like The French Connection, The Driver, Bullitt, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, History of the World (part I), Blazing Saddles, and so on. I love 70’s music (fuck disco, although some of it’s cool, and the bass players to a one were fabulous), like Kansas, Boston, Uriah Heep, Brownsville Station, old Clapton, Allman Brothers, Zep, Ringo Starr solo stuff, and the list keeps going—to the extent that I have a 10-CD set of popular 70’s music indexed by year, given generously to me by one of my students (thanks, Jordan Kalasky; I listen to them a lot, and 1975 is my favorite, because that’s the disc that’s got Linda Ronstadt’s Blue Bayou on it). I love 70’s decorating styles, like Lava Lamps and black-light posters, and THICK FUCKIN’ SHAG CARPET. I even dig 70’s clothes, though I would not be seen in public in them today—platform shoes (c’mon; I’m six-five already), tab collars, corduroy pants, suede vests with fringe, and paisley. Bring on the paisely!

I like the goofy iridescent daisy-type flowers they stuck all over the dunk-tank in the Brady Bunch; I like girls with ramrod-straight ironed hair and pullover dresses; I like horn-rimmed glasses, I like perm haircuts on guys; I like CHiPs and BJ and the Bear, and most of all, Dukes of Hazzard; I like Jiffy Pop, Friday the 13th and Halloween, Amityville Horror and Jaws, old Sesame Street episodes where all the kids looked like they had head lice, and, in particular, I dug the fuck out of Electric Company. Sing it with me now, childrens—"One-two-three four five, six-seven-eight nine ten....(wait for it)...ELEVEN TWELVE." Gimme an amen-hallelujah if you see that cheesy pinball machine in your head while the music courses through you. I know I do.

I like 70’s bicycles, like the Schwinn Orange Krates and Lemon Peels with the rear slick tire (with raised white letters, no less!), and 70’s weight-benches with the overdone metal-flake upholstery that was usually red or blue, but occasionally white and, very rarely (get ready to hurl) orange, yellow, or (blargh) green. I like the Atari 2600 and the hopeless-yet-still-loveable renditions of Space Invaders, Omega Race, and Pac-Man they foisted upon us clueless-yet-rich consumers. I like Pong, dammit.

This summer, I extensively landscaped my crib with (are you ready for this one?) Lava Rocks.

"In the name of God," you, O Honored Reader, are undoubtedly asking yourself, "why?"

I’ll tell ya why, you impatient fucks.

When I was a kid, my dad would take me shopping with him at Ace Hardware. There were no Home Depots or Menards back then (holy shit I sound old), so Ace was where you went for stuff. I remember walking along the aisles with him, and in those days, you could smoke just about anywhere you wanted. My dad would fire up a Winston Unfiltered and we’d stroll along, looking for whatever it was we were looking for. Usually it was somewhere in the vicinity of the electrical department, and there was always an area where they had all the outdoor lighting arranged in this spiffy little display. Invariably, the lights were high-powered incandescents designed to project bright lights onto the side of your house from ‘neath your hedges. The lights themselves were black, but you could buy filters to change the color of the light to just about anything you chose—blue, green, red, white, and—of course—amber. I thought those were just about the coolest things, and just see if you can guess what they used in those mock-up displays to provide a landscape, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, to put those lights in.

Lemme give you a hint—it rhymes with "Schmlava Rocks."

You never see that shit these days—now it’s mulch and more mulch, and lighting systems are all the candy-ass solar jobs (Shut up. Shut up right now—I fucking well know that’s what I have, but they’re cheaper to run and don’t require you to connect wires to them. Let’s move on.) that turn on at night and cast weak circular puddles of light for about a foot and a half.

I remember seeing that stuff in the aisles at Ace Hardware and thinking to myself, "That’s the stuff that grownups have; when I get old enough, I’m gonna buy me some stuff like that and then I’ll be a grownup too."

I still feel that way, and there were a bunch more things besides landscape materials and outdoor lighting that I ascribed to adulthood. And, since most of the things that were around when I was a kid that led me to associate them with being a grownup were from the 70’s, that’s where (or perhaps I would be more appropriate in saying when) I take things from.

The Dragon’s a good example. I saw a lot of adults driving shit like that when I was a kid. Now I have one, and that must mean that I am an adult, too.

My Sharona by The Knack is another. I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking to myself, "Well, jeez—only an adult would understand what these guys are talking about. What’s ‘running down the length of my thigh’ mean, anyway?" Well, now I’m older, and now I get it. I love that song. I like old Kiss, Queen and Rolling Stones for the same reason. I don’t think I was really grown up until I got my first copy of "Sticky Fingers."

I remember going to the bowling alley and wishing I was old enough to go into the arcade so I could play "Pac-Man" and "Galaxian" and "Omega Race" and "Donkey Kong" and "Jungle Hunt" and the king of them all, "Defender". Well, now I am, so I go. I like to play pool for the same reason. It’s something only adults were allowed to do when I was a kid. Well, I’m not a kid anymore, so I play pool whenever I can, and I’m usually smoking a cigarette when I do, because that’s what the adults did.

I remember going to my Aunt Joanne’s house when I was seven for Christmas Eve. My cousin and her oldest son, Phillip, had just turned eighteen, and for Christmas, my aunt had gotten him a Gibson Flying V. I remember going into his room so he could show it to me. This would be about 1978, I guess, and he had decorated his entire room in red velvet and tufted black vinyl. All the room lights had red bulbs in them. The guitar itself had a flame finish—it faded from black at the edges to red at the center. The case was black vinyl, and it was lined with red velour—and that’s why to this day, as far as I’m concerned, the colors of the 70’s are always gonna be black and red. Seeing those two colors always makes me feel like a high roller, and I don’t think the fact that the four suits in cards are black and red goes any distance toward relieving me of that sentiment.

Twenty-seven years later, I don’t feel any different. I’ve said to my friends and to my students alike—I don’t feel any different inside at 32 than I did at 12. I just have more life experiences with which to compare things. But I’ll tell ya—putting that Lava Rock in went a long way toward making me feel like a grownup. Now—who’s ready for some Pong?