Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

the organs.

* * *

April, 1968.

Our happiness was short-lived. The spring after we had first seen each other nude, James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. The neighbourhoods around us were burning to the ground. The biggest gang in the area was the Blackstone Rangers, and they vented their frustrations on the Puerto Ricans who were moving in to the west of us. There were daily rumbles with the Latin Kings.

The Friday that Ricky’s Deli, on our corner, was firebombed, my parents broke their lease on the Crystal Street apartment. I had hoped that I would continue to see Celly at rehab classes when this whole thing blew over, but it wasn’t to be. My father quit his job at RB’s and we moved down to Shelbyville, Kentucky to live with relatives.

Celly and I exchanged letters, and she often wrote how bitter she was at how everyone, even the therapists, looked at her. I told her not to worry. My parents said we’d be moving back to Chicago soon, maybe a nicer neighbourhood around Albany Park.

“Soon” became 1970, and when we returned to the place I was born, I found that the Tomeis had moved. Out of state and somewhere west was all I could find out. I received several letters from Celandine, postmarked Iowa City and Thermopolis, Wyoming. She sounded increasingly depressed, saying how her mother was taking her to a climate that would help her feel more healthy. They might move to Albuquerque.

I watched MASH and All In The Family, saw the Vietnam War end and Nixon resign. Around the time of the fall of Saigon, I received a letter from Celandine’s mother in New Mexico. She told me that Celly had left home.

In her room she found a ticket stub for Denver. She was going after her.

II. Zombie Tongue

The word freaks … sounds like a cry of pain

— Anthony Burgess

“You ain’t gotten anything until you had yisself some zombie tongue.” Several men on downtown Fremont Street repeated this like a litany the entire first night Norm and I were in Las Vegas.

We had taken a week off from our jobs, working at the Lion’s Lair. Norm Brady was a bouncer, I was a disc jockey. Those wraparound RayBans were quite the style now. It was June of 1987, and I had been living in the Denver area almost since I graduated from college six years before.

Viva Las Vegas, Elvis sang back when I was at Childermas with Celandine. Visa Las Vegas was more like it. Expensive as shit! Well, the shrimp cups were cheap. Looked like little sea monkeys, I recall David Letterman joking once.

We walked the seedier part of town, thinking our long thoughts and keeping them to ourselves. We were just damn glad to be out of Denver.

The cool neon of The Mint and the Golden Nugget that was so prominent on Crime Story were far behind us. Eighth Street was home to a bail bondsman and Ray’s Beaver Bag. On Ninth, we saw The Orbit Inn, but couldn’t enter because an armless fat man wearing a purple sweatshirt had passed out in the revolving door. No one inside seemed to care. We kept walking, amused at kids pitching pennies between the legs of butt-ugly whores. Looking back towards Glitter Gulch, all we saw was a tiny blob of pink and blue neon. That, and the memory of voices whispering conspiratorially about zombie tongues.

I had a BA in English Literature from the University of Illinois. Tried my hand at Behavioral Sciences, but I couldn’t cut it. I guess it was because I still thought of Celandine. I was ten when she left Chicago for points west. I think it was the Holistic Center that told Mrs. Tomei that the drier air might do Celly good, by alleviating stress and “allowing a better view of oneself.”

My actual thoughts were that the Tomeis wanted more privacy. The riots weren’t just a racial thing. The blacks were hitting on the black handicapped, too. I could understand Josephine Tomei’s concerns.

My family surprised me by moving back to the southwest side of Chicago. Bridgeport, a few blocks from Mayor Daley’s home on Emerald. A nice area then, the Stevenson interstate a new and wondrous thing, and most of the blocks filled with squalor had spanking new Tru-Link fences put up courtesy of da Mayor hisself. He did this several years before, because Chicago was going to be portrayed as a lovely town during the 1968 Democratic Convention, for all network television to see.

I had several mementoes of Celly; tactile things, not simply memories of her naked, and of her seeing me in the same way.

We had often exchanged books, and I still had one of her Happy Hollisters mysteries. They were on a ranch somewhere, is all I remember. A menu from Ricky’s Deli that we had played connect-the-dots with.

I had felt comfortable on Crystal Street, where we grew up. I realized this walking past the casinos and neon signs. Even in Las Vegas, as in Denver, no one thought of me as being different. Hell, I had both my arms, for chrissakes, and wasn’t blocking a revolving door. That’s how it was back in the Humboldt Park neighbourhood.

The older Poles liked us — not just tolerated us — because they weren’t too far removed from the atrocities of Dachau. The kids our age, the normal ones, well, that was an entirely different tune altogether.

To them, we were freaks. There they go, the freaks. Some offered the opinion that my mother had fucked something in the gorilla house at Lincoln Park Zoo. And though Celandine’s defects weren’t easily apparent, she did have a slight stoop, like the older women who cleaned office buildings in the Loop after the rush hour ended.

The other thing that made Celandine a freak in the eyes of the other kids was that she hung around with me. This was before I got the black sunglasses and I looked like those creatures from Spider County on that Outer Limits episode. Celly kissed me in public. Those awkward, preadolescent kind where it’s like kissing your sister. The saddest memento I had of Celly was a photograph my mother had taken, with white borders and the date printed on the right-hand side. When everyone from St. Fidelus was out on a class trip, my ma took the colour photo of Celly and me in front of the yellow brick entrance. To show off to relatives and coworkers who were never told that I was in actuality enrolled at Childermas. Ever. Always in a real world. James Trainor and Celandine Tomei, February 1967. Here in the real world.

* * *

In the real world, I graduated from college and left town. Found a job in a bookstore in Streator, then moved on to Navaoo, near the Mississippi. I was going west, too, you see. One night in the latter town, I came home from my job at the International House of Pancakes to find my place ransacked.

The memories of Celandine gone. Everything else didn’t matter. I left the state that night. Carthage, Missouri. Colcord, Oklahoma. Whoever would have me. Not many places would. And the ones that did eventually found excuses. I was The fucking Fugitive, all through the early eighties. Just like in the tv show, I’d have some menial job, be there a few weeks, and then some self-righteous person or group would make up a rumour to get the funny looking bug-eye out of their safe little hamlet.

* * *

Until Denver. It was pure luck that I heard about the ADAPT program for handicapped people while I was passing through Sedalia, Colorado. I don’t know why I shucked it for the dj gig; guess I liked the nights better. Denver’s compact skyline, the Flatiron Mountains invisible until the grey of false dawn.

Best yet, I found a friend in Norm Brady. I was at the Wax Traxx on Twelfth Avenue in Capitol Hill, hunting down a copy of Robert Mitchum singing “Thunder Road” for one of the bar’s theme nights. Norm had retrieved the last 45, seconds before I walked down the aisle. We struck up a conversation about Elvis and actors who should have never recorded albums, all the while walking down Colfax On The Hill. Norm lived in a studio apartment above the Metropolis Cafe on Logan; I was three blocks over on Galapago. Norm tended bar at a place on Wazee, over