Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Celandine snuggles a little closer to me, caught up in her REM dreams. She tells me that she dreams in black and white. We rent an apartment on Wolcott Street, a common area for gangster films shot here in the forties and fifties. I dream in colour, and in my dreams, it always seems to be the hours before dawn. Like now. Streets deserted. My mind alert. I can hear my heartbeat in my nostrils, in my ears.

Celly has the sheets pulled down to her waist. She sleeps in the nude. I wear shorts and an old t-shirt. I hear soft snoring, a peaceful sound. Soft waves hitting the shores of Fullerton Beach.

I look over, recognizing the sound. More nasal than Celly’s.

The vestigial twin growing out of my lover’s ribcage is the one who is snoring.

The gentle sounds bring back memories.

I. 1959 Babies

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places—Hemingway

Crystal Street in those days was a world removed from the gang territory it is now. There were no burned-out tenements, no need for orange signs in each window of the three-flats telling passers-by that they were treading through a Neighbourhood Crime Watch Zone. There were social clubs. But we all saw The Blackboard Jungle and knew things were on the verge of change.

My parents were living off Crystal and Washtenaw when I was born. It was a Polish neighbourhood, the kind where nobody ever moved. They just died, and after that, their sons and daughters stayed until they married and moved to a bigger house in Bucktown or Logan Square. Or maybe they died as well.

The summer of 1959 was sweltering. I recall hearing this much later in my life from relatives who had gone to the World Series game to see the White Sox. It was ninety-eight degrees on my birthdate, September ninth.

My mother and two of her friends from the radium watch plant she worked at—painting the dials with the luminous ink, in ten-hour shifts—had gone up and down Division and Milwaukee to the shows to get out of the heat that summer. The Banner, The Royal, the Biltmore; they were all air-conditioned.

My mother had to work into her second trimester; back then, my father was pulling in barely enough to feed a family of two working as a security guard at RB’s, a now-defunct department store on Milwaukee. I fondly remember getting a Whamm-O Monster Magnet and a Rock-’em Sock-’em Robot from the store in honour of kindergarten graduation.

My father let me pick out whatever I wanted, and by the time I was six, the word monster was embedded in my brain.

My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck when I was born, and I’m certain my mother’s exposure to the radium didn’t help. (The factory was eventually closed, after many years of court battles; if you stand on Ogden Avenue overpass, you can still look down and see the ghoulish lime-green glow in those windows that haven’t been painted black.)

In September of 1959, my mother and her friends went to the Biltmore on Division to see the premiere of Ben Hur. I’ve been told that she went into labour with me then and there.

The ambulance made it to Lutheran Deaconess in time. When I made my entrance into the world, my face was blue and there were traces of blood coming from my nose and ears. To give you an idea of how limited we were medically just thirty-five years ago, all the doctors could really tell my parents was that I had a degenerative muscle disease caused by trauma to the womb.

My mother blamed herself for many years.

When I was in grade school, one of the class trips was to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in Oldtown, where there was an exhibit of freaks from the Barnum & Bailey circus. Freaks was actually Phineas Barnum’s get-rich-quick term. His partner later referred to people like me and Celandine as “human curiosities.” Me with my bulging head and wrap-around eyes, Celly with the second head sticking out of her ribcage.