Halloween | The Nervous Breakdown

My father’s farm in Virginia is called Oak Hill. When he bought it, not long after he divorced my mother, there was in fact a cluster of enormous oak trees that shaded a white clapboard, nineteenth-century house that stood on the hill in the center of the farm, but the house burned down before my father could move into it. Some of the oaks survived the fire, which occurred on a Halloween night, but despite whispers that the previous owner had torched the house, no charges were ever filed. I remember surveying the charred remains and spotting, not charred even slightly, an old board game called Why, the Alfred Hitchock Mystery Game, which, according to the blurb on the box, involved “real thinking, planning, and memory.” I took the game home with me—I lived a twenty-minute drive from the farm with my mother, brother, and sister—but I never played it, and don’t know what became of it. Maybe my memory wouldn’t be so faulty if I had better developed it by playing Why.

[Transcript from an interview exclusive to The Nervous Breakdown.]

Milton: Since Halloween was last night, and October 31st is his birthday, I am here talking with Satan, on Skype, from his holiday villa Pandaemonium deep in the depths of Hell. Satan, let me first wish you a Happy Birthday!

Satan: Gee-wiz, thanks, John. So kind of you to call. I am touched, really, I am. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you. And may I say you look marvelous for a 400-year-old? What is your secret? Who is your surgeon? You could pass for a teenager. It must be the poetry—Paradise Regained.

From galencurry.com:

Galen Curry honed his skills as a musician in the most intuitive way: by playing music whenever and wherever possible. He [has] played in jazz combs, chamber singing groups, wedding bands, and wind ensembles. He has toured the Eastern Seaboard with a rock [outfit] and Eastern Europe with a concert choir. For years, Galen front Upstate New York alt-rock band The Beds and Virginia funk-rock ensemble Ultraviolet Ballet, and it was with these bands that he began to find his voice as a songwriter.

Galen’s musical talents are now focused on a burgeoning solo career. Based out of a vibrant Charlottesville, Virginia, music scene, Galen honors his southern heritage with unmistakably American tunes that supplement his singular tenor with clever lyricism and upbeat rootsy instrumentation, but it is his penchant for heartfelt and rollicking live performances that definitely set him apart from the crowd.

To be fair, it was dark, and he might not have been a zombie.

He lurched and lunged like a zombie, albeit a post-Romero zombie. Herky-jerky twitching between lulls of ominous looming. Never more than an inch from my face, he demonstrated a blatant disregard for the persnickety personal space issues of the living.

I don’t have many memories from kindergarten. I remember Paul Angelos, heavyset and Greek and the first bully our class ever encountered¹, scrawling a curse word on the side of our bright red plastic playhouse. I remember guiltily stealing an intricately-detailed toy space shuttle that had been die-cast from some kind of dense metal – I stowed it in my palm and could still hide it completely by closing my fingers, such was its size, and yet it had considerable heft, and dragged at me in my pockets as I walked out of the gate and home. I remember also a night one December when my father read Christmas stories to a group of us as we sat cross-legged in pajamas around his chair; what stands out most in my mind is that it was the first time I’d heard ‘Saint Nick’ used as a sobriquet for Santa Claus.

Kindergarten.Snack-time.Children quietly convey Chex mix softly rattling across paper plates to their desks.And the one with a wooden chair on her head, a cup half-filled with orange juice balanced on the seat, dancing the Steve Martin “wild and crazy guys” shimmy?That’d be me.Minutes before, I’d told some joke the other kids laughed at.It was all the encouragement I needed to spring my inner funny on them full tilt, let loose and be the me I was at home, the me who invented the make-the-corpse-laugh game and kept a rubber-worm fishing lure in a box with holes cut in it.What could be funnier than that?Except maybe a five-year-old shimmying with a chair on her head balancing a cup of orange juice.

On October 31, 1984, I hopped into a Datsun
with three other boys and cruised
the neighborhood next to the Country Club
just to see what the rich kids dressed like on Halloween.
No one believed I’d jump out the car window
and press the point of a dull, four-inch blade
against that chubby kid’s belly and tell him
Hand over the bag. I was a good Catholic boy;
I wanted to convert the disbelievers. So my threat to cut
that kid down was quick: I flashed a five-dollar balisong
and my best altar-boy smile. I don’t care
what you say. New Jersey is beautiful at dusk. In winter
I love the insinuation of its cities through snow,
as if the white contours can’t hold all our dangers down;
the stiff chimneys sear into the sky a hole the size
of your hand, the portal, perhaps, through which heaven
snatches up small children or sends down vivid dreams
of butterfly knives and rich boys swinging bags
full of sweets. Come on. People go missing
all the time. No one cries for them. Even if I give you
the neighborhood back, the country club, the rich fat kid
dressed like C3PO. Listen: I’ll give you the whole bloody
New Jersey sky, that night, starless, magnificent. It don’t matter,
because somewhere in the world I still brandish a knife,
though I go by another name, and with three of my friends
I’ve disappeared into the smoke of a banged up
Japanese import. I keep thinking if I just tell the story
again out loud, I could bring us all back to make things right,
but there’s no trace, no knife, no stick-up kid or three boys
shamed into silence. I’m telling you, I hopped
into the Datsun and threw the bag of candy in the backseat
giggling. My friends said nothing. We were afraid of nothing —
for we were reared by a generation that could make
whole nations simply vanish. And like any good crew,
we kept waiting for an angel to come down through
a hole in heaven the size of a hand made in god’s forsaken
image and shackle us to each other for good. It’s no use.
You can retrace every inch of all the places I’ve ever been.
Trust me. I’ve looked. We’re nowhere to be found.

My friend, Melissa, and I dressed up to look silly when we went to the hospital on Halloween. We do it every year because the kids get a kick out of it and we really are up for anything to spice up the day.

(One time I really blew it dressing up on Halloween to go to the old folks home with Brooklyn, my Therapy Dog. I dressed to the nines as Raggedy Ann. I had it all, down to the red and white horizontal striped tights and red shoes. The residents at the home are four-fifths from Cuba and one fifth from Russia. Not a soul had any idea who I was supposed to be. It turns out that Raggedy Ann is an American phenomenon. It had always seemed so universal to me. They thought I was nuts, but they didn’t care, because Brooklyn was with me.)

In any case, this year Melissa and I were fancy rich ladies. My name was Miss Bling and Melissa was Miss Bling-Bling. We aren’t allowed to take pictures of anyone at the hospital, so I will just show you some of the stuff I had on.

Here are my prostitute shoes. I love them. Get a load of the size of the rhinestones on the pink flip-flop leather! And the soles! Are they beautiful, or what? I’d wear a dress made out of that fabric! It’s just a shame that you have to cover it with your feet. I actually wear them when I go out, because, when you are my age, no one pays any attention to you, so you don’t need to fret about what other people think. You can dress as crazy as you like. I think these are glorious shoes. This view is from the top.

This view is from the side, so that you can see the subtle leopard print and the lovely silver heels. My daughter, Lenore, says that they might as well be clear. She’s a snide one, Lenore is.

These are the pieces of rhinestone jewelry that I have left from my girls playing dress-up with their friends when they were little.

I wore every single piece. I was covered in rhinestones.

I have some fabulously gaudy hair clips. Here is a picture of just one of my many hair clips.

Here it is from the top.

When it comes to flashy, I do not fool around.

I wore as many ostentatious clips as I could fit on my head. Melissa even wore some, since she somehow lost her tiara between the parking lot of the hospital and the hospital itself. She was resplendent in her own jewelry, pink feather boa and long white gown.

We saw quite a few kids that day and had lots of fun with them. As we were walking into a new area, we met a mom carrying a weeping boy who appeared to be about six. The mom asked us where she could get a wagon, and she was delighted to hear she just had to go around the corner and pick one up. When they came back around with the boy riding in the wagon, he was no longer upset. He was a really beautiful child, with olive skin and stark black hair with a touch of wave. The little boy had a scar on his chest and a large, squarish lump under his skin.

We played with him for quite a while. He was smiling a lot by then. I remarked how adorable kids looked when they lose a front tooth.

“Oh he didn’t lose that tooth the regular way,” said his mom. “He lost it when he hit the sidewalk during a dropdown seizure. In fact, that’s why he was crying before. He had a seizure in bed and he doesn’t like the medicine he has to take when that happens.”

“Ah,” we said. We are not allowed to ask any questions. We just listen and play.

We had lots of puffy boy stickers for him to stick on various things like door hangars and visors. (You would be surprised the variety of stickers nowadays. There are stickers obviously meant for girls and some meant for boys. Then there are the ones for just kids in general, like zoo animals and dinosaurs. Also, stickers are made for an amazingly broad age group. There are huge, toddler stickers all the way to super cool My Little Kitty and sports and superhero stickers for the older kids. This is not even counting the scrapbooking stickers that are selling like hotcakes to adults. We all should have bought stock in the sticker companies before all our money evaporated last year. I’ll bet the sticker companies are still doing just fine.)

The particular stickers we were using this time are difficult to use for tiny fingers, since you have to peel off the paper on the back of them and it is hard to get your fingernail under the paper to get it started. I told the little boy that we could help him while we were playing with him, but when he was playing with them later, he might have to ask his mom for help peeling the paper off the backs of the stickers.

“Use your left hand,” the mom said.

“Kids don’t usually like to use the hand on which the nurses tape the board so that the IV stays in place,” explained Melissa.

“Oh, it’s not that,” said the mom. “He recently had his right brain removed, so he does not know he has a left side. I keep trying to encourage him to notice it. The doctors say it takes a long time for the left brain to begin to control the half of the body it does not ordinarily control.”

This dark, delightful boy needed the wagon because he did not know he had a left leg. He needs to learn to walk again. He needs to discover that he has a left side.

No amount of bling will teach him that.

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Comment by Marcia (former next-door neighbor in Illinois and frequent visitor to Florida) |Edit This

2009-11-02 09:52:10

Could he talk?

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