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Our Year Without Mum

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The Last Blog From My Post On My Route

December 13, 2014

Last Night

“This is the last worthless evening that you’ll have to spend.” Don Henley is crooning in that taunting way he has when you’re feeling low. I find him rather cruel on occasion.

I’m trying to ignore him because, Gentle Readers, this is NOT a worthless evening. Not all. I am here at my post. I am writing to you.

I spin the dial and Sinatra pops up. “And now the end is near and so I face the final curtain…”

My, my. At least Frank is kinder when he tells you the truth.

The first night I slept under this roof my kid was five years old and we used walkie-talkies to speak to each other from our respective bedrooms. The last night I will spend in this quirky beach cottage, my son is a grown man and we have cell phones to communicate across the miles.

You who know me well know this has been a frantic year. I have been dancing as fast I can – rushing toward what I finally understand to be this night.

After I write this tonight, I will go to bed among rows and rows of boxes that house our lives. Tomorrow evening I will go to bed among those same boxes, but we will all be under a different roof.

“My friends, I’ll say it clear. I’ll state my case of which I’m certain…”

Everything is connected, I guess. I never expected to feel compelled to write the obituary of a building. But when I leave here tomorrow, this small structure has only destruction in its future. I hope that during these final days, it will remember the past two decades fondly.

“I’ve lived a life that’s full
I traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.”

In the past twenty years, this joint has jumped and dipped, sighed and cried and held in its embrace family, friends, lovers and haters, cops, cons and celebrities. We’ve had birthday parties, baby showers, wakes and all night sleepovers for little kids and old people. The house welcomed it all.

Strangers from across the globe have walked through the front door on random holidays – occasionally with hilariously disastrous results – and dozens of young guys and dolls have snuck in and out of the back windows on school nights.

Teenage Nicole hid out here after she was almost arrested dancing in the fountain of The Jockey Club in the middle of the night with Johnny Depp. Fully clothed, I must add. They just thought out would be fun after a late night wrap. And Sissy has forgiven me for losing track of her daughter so many years ago.

“Regrets, I’ve had a few,
But then again, too few to mention.”

Baby L and Baby Sam, my son’s siblings and my godchildren, spent their first nights away from home as babies in this house. Baby J made the living room her own digs for the months when she left New Orleans and worked as a stunt double on Burn Notice.

Simi’s birthday party where we all wore glitter-encrusted sunglasses in the shapes of the constellations so she’d know she was a star was held here. Allison Millican and I spent solid December weekends watching vintage Christmas movies on AMC and munching on pizza.

“I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption,
I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway…”

I can still see Alison Troy running out the door on her way to the Los Angeles so we wouldn’t have a dramatic, tearful goodbye that is our Greek Boston-Irish birthright. Kellie, taking that leap of faith toward Hollywood, spent her last few minutes in Miami on the front step, leaving and coming back three times before she finally drove down the street. And returning every year to take over Baby J’s living room to flop in between jobs. The girls kept moving, but me? I stayed here at my post.

“Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew,
When I bit off more than I could chew…”

Terry Miller and Larry Crenshaw delivering a Christmas tree to my porch. I lived in a house that was also an office. Back when we did mostly feature films, we always began each job prepping out of my house – with production people sprawled across every square foot. Printers, copies, cell phones and Teamsters. I used to make huge trays of lasagna for our lunches, served on leftover Easter Bunny paper plates and balanced on everyone’s knees. Terry, Simi and I always wondered if we could have actually made 2Fast, 2Furious based out of my living room.

A group of us huddled around a cow-sized pile of money and counting piles of cash back in the music video days; forcing my landlord having to explain to the mailman that she knew for a fact we were not drug dealers. “Just a bunch of movie people.”

Chick Bernhard driving his Harley up the front walk and using the front tire to knock. Dressing up as either Santa Claus or Hanukkah Harry in my bedroom for The Annual Jews Decorate The Christmas Tree Party and then sneaking out the back to bang on the front door announcing that St. Nick/Saul had finally arrived. And repainting my kitchen after I set it on fire.

Rosie and I doing the Ouija board and eating ice cream sundaes while we scared ourselves silly and plotted new adventures.

Artie Malesci taking time out from his Burn Notice stunt coordinating job (and trying to get more money out of me) to unclog the toilets and repair the broken furniture that my kid and Baby J insisted “someone must have come in while we were at work at broke it because we were NOT doing stunts inside the house!”

“I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried,
I’ve had my fill, my share of losing.
And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing.”

It wasn’t always just good times, but the walls stood strong, despite nails and glue and Magic Markers and food (who got the food on the wall? I know it was you, Baby J) and never wavered in protecting us – even during the afore-mentioned fire. And other kinds of matches. Love matches made and hearts broken, including mine, all from a leopard-skin print couch as old as my kid.

Dear Sissy and I camped out on that same sofa every single weekend during her law school days, watching movie marathons and surrounded by our own concoctions of complicated snacks and desserts. We called it our clubhouse. It is impossible to count the number of times we watched Jaws, Halloween and The Godfather – each time better than the last. On the very same piece of furniture she dreams on as every Thanksgiving turkey roasts overnight. Even before the years she lived in Miami and made that long car trek with two little kids just to share that yearly meal. Our home expanded and contracted to meet the needs of its denizens in that quiet, unassuming way that houses do.

That same couch, by the way, has been reupholstered again and again as each group of kids graduated from spitting up infant formula to successful potty training. I feel as if I should leave it here just to keep our house company as it waits, but I’m afraid it will end up on the trash heap.

“To think I did all that,
And may I say, not in a shy way,
“Oh, no, oh, no, not me, I did it my way.”

This Thanksgiving Sissy knew she would never stay here again and took special care to whisper her goodbyes to walls she and Rosie painted so carefully.

My parents, so delighted when I moved their grandchild from our hip, swinging South Beach pad they called a tenement, drove down to visit more times than I can recall. Mom was always laden with a new set of dinner plates (leopard-skin print), lava lamps (red) and a bag full of baked goods and spent hours going through my bookcases for new reading and – with my permission – my drawers stuffed with junk costume jewelry and the latest failed beauty trends. I can see her perched on my bed and happily trying out purple eyeshadow matched with freeze-dried collagen patches.

She forced my Dad to stay every weekend after Thanksgiving to help me pack away the fall decor and raise the Christmas roof with more decorations than one family should admit to owning. He always pretended to be annoyed but we knew he was enjoying himself more than he would admit. I never realized how much fun it was until we couldn’t do it any more.

“For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught.”

You may remind me of the old saying “home is where the heart is” but there’s something to be said for your heart being that home. Our next encampment will never know my mother and perhaps even my father. Old friends who are no longer with us are part of a building that will be razed to make way for new families stacked one over another. The new roof will never get the chance to hide and hold the teenage girl from across the street kissing her boyfriend under the towering mango tree that started as a seed. The painted-over (yes, painted) bathtub will never again feel the joy of three to four little kids squirming naked in the bubbles after a messy Halloween pumpkin carve-fest. There’s nothing that I can do to change that.

“To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels…”

Last week, I had a visitor. Siobhan is a young mother and budding businesswoman, but not too long ago she went to school with my son and lived in the neighborhood. She popped by – all the way from Coconut Grove – to surprise me. Bubbly and friendly as always, she grabbed some newspaper, plopped down on that old couch and began wrapping glassware. We laughed as we talked about her toddler daughter, college, the years gone by and the hours and hours she had spent on that sofa.

Then suddenly her face began to crack. I know that look; I lived through all of her teenage break-ups. I saw it coming. She broke into tears. But it wasn’t about a boy.

“I don’t want you to move! I don’t want them to tear this place down! It’s just not fair. I want to always know that you will be here forever.” Siobhan cried as if her heart was breaking. It hasn’t been very long since she lost her own father. “I HATE when things change!”

Then she stomped her feet just as she did when she was little. We both burst into laughter.

I do too, Siobhan. I hate when things change. Both us want everything to stay the same.

But the world, like Don Henley, is often cruel and we have to keep moving to stay a step ahead of it. Anyway, as my mom would say, “Don’t you worry, Siobhan. I’m always here, no matter where here is.”

I’ll pack up my gypsy carnival and head on down the road. The new address will become home. I know that. All we need is one party to kick off some new memories. In the meantime I left our house a message, right on the wall. It has been a good place to live and love, to give and to grieve.

This is the Sinatra of homes. The record shows it took some blows over the years, but it did it its own way.

Goodbye, old friend.

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Instant Karma’s Gonna Get You – Or Maybe Not

December 11, 2014

1970 To 1977

The title of Stephen King’s tale of an epic snowstorm and an author’s descent into madness was inspired by one of fastest-released songs in pop music history. It took a mere ten days from the time John Lennon penned the tune until Instant Karmawas on the shelves at UK record shops. “We wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch, and we’re putting it out for dinner,” the Beatle grinned to the press.

King was especially taken with the chorus, “Well, we all shine on…like the moon and the stars and the sun.” Thus the book was titled and became one of the most controversial horror films ever born.

The Shining.

The once-innocent King has since been interviewed about the title and confessed that he was going to call the book The Shine,until a friend had to explain to him that “shine” had been used in the past as a derogatory term for black people. Horrified, King expanded the title before presenting it to the publisher. “I was a little naive back then.”

I don’t know if we all shine on just as the planetary system, but I can attest to the fact that not only is instant karma coming for ya, it’s also difficult to recognize why it hits when it does.

Instant Karma’s gonna get you
Gonna look you right in the face
Better get yourself together darlin’
Join the human race…

December 2014

“Yes, God,” I sigh. “I do understand now that just because a man can’t see you at night or on the weekends isn’t proof that he’s in the C.I.A. I get it. And yeah, OK, any random orange jumpsuit worn by a cute guy is not necessarily the latest Versace fashion and could be a prison uniform, but isn’t there some sort of dispensation for a sin committed out of ignorance?”

God rolls his eyes. “Ignorance is one thing, but with all due respect…”

“No respect due!” Nana cackles from behind His robe. “You’re GOD for chrissakes! Everyone respects YOU!”

God sighs. “As I was saying…with all due respect…there’s ignorance and then there’s just plain stupidity.”

“BOOM!” Nana yells.

“If you people hadn’t cremated her, I could have sent her back,” the Lord mutters.

“You know you love me, you wanna keep me..,” my grandmother sings. God waves a hand as she flies away.

“Some days, I just can’t,” He says.

“I feel ya, Lord. So let’s move on. I know I’ve dome wrong in my life, no doubt. But I try to make wrongs right and I’m truly sorry for being an assho…a jerk…during certain times. But Instant Karma. It’s hitting me like a wave. The job, my Mom, my building being sold, moving in the middle of shooting and if this isn’t enough, bad things just keep happening.”

God shrugs. “I’ll bite. Like what?”

“LIKE WHAT? ARE YOU SERIOUS?” This better be God and not some kind pizza hallucination.

He looks sternly at me. “I’ve been called many things but pizza hallucination isn’t one of them. And inside voice, please. This isn’t some production office where you can just yell out things, you know. And others find that rude – in case nobody has mentioned it.”

Geez. I’m takin’ a beating here.

I start again. “Sorry. My bad. But my phone is broken and yesterday the cable Internet company tells me they can’t install in the new place without ripping up the entire sidewalk…”

“Poor you,” God says. “Who will monitor the news for the free world while you wait? Who will tweet Bill Clinton where he is speaking at the same hotel you are working in to insist he tell the Secret Service to lift the valet lockdown so your staff can go home?”

Damn, God does see everything! I’m not taking the entire credit but the valet lockdown did lift right after my tweet. I do notice, however, that the Lord is a tad bit sarcastic.

“My car broke down. I cracked a back tooth. Then I get up this morning and the gas was off. And I had paid my bill!”

God rubs His eyes. “You think Karma shut off the gas? Because I can tell you that the gas company was disconnecting the service for one of your neighbors and turned the wrong valve. The service guy’s name happens to be Carl, not Karma. You tweeted the former president and the valet opened up. Maybe it was a coincidence.” He winks. “And maybe not. But Instant Karma? That John Lennon, I do love him but I’ve spent quite a bit of time debating this with him over the past thirty-four years.”

Has it really been that long? Time flies but grief crawls crookedly across a burning hot pavement. I don’t say this aloud but God nods anyway.

God hears all.

“So, is he like, around? Can he just pop up?” I ask tentatively.

‘This is HEAVEN – NOT TMZ!” God thunders angrily. “I don’t just pop people up for entertainment’s sake!”

“OK, sorry.” I apologize quickly. God is starting to sound like a studio executive.

We are silent for a beat. Then I ask what I really want to know.

“When is my Instant Karma going to end?”

God smiles kindly. “I know the song is based on the Buddhist philosophy that in very basic terms means what goes around comes around. Sort of my ‘you reap what you sow’ line. Misquoted, by the way, and Buddha would agree.”

“We don’t reap what we sow?” I’m confused.

God leans in and smoothes His robe over Hs knees. “I’m not mentioning names, but don’t you know truly horrid people who seem to get away with anything and everything they do and seemingly never pay any price?”

Don’t we all?

“Well, that kind of explains it,” He says. “Every soul will eventually have to answer for their lives. Eventually. But that isn’t on your timetable, nor is it really on mine. I’m patient and when the right time comes, I’ll open my book and then the tally begins. Until then, shine on, good people.”

Naughty or nice. Like Santa Claus.

God smiles at my thought.

“But my year, it hasn’t gotten any better…”

He smiles. “And it hasn’t gotten any worse. Not really. Your grief is an ocean and you control the tide. I hear your prayers. I see your struggle. But you have to work through it, not me.”

“But the Instant Karma?” I insist “What about the Instant Karma?”

God shakes His head. “There is no such thing as Instant Karma. It’s just a really good rock and roll song. Except for the encouragement to join the human race. You need to do only one thing if you want to shrug off what you call Instant Karma. Want me to put it in your vernacular? Name a movie.”

I’m stumped.

“Go ahead. Any movie at all. Oh come on!”

I blurt the out the last one I saw. “Blazing Saddles.”

God roars with laughter. “What a great flick! I wish they wouldn’t keep editing out the racial and homophobic slurs, though, when they broadcast it on TV. Those networks don’t really understand what the movie is about. If you take out those words, you ruin the film. And my own message. Think about it.”

Holy cow! I agree.

“OK, Blazing Saddles.” He thinks and then claps His hands. “Last scene. Cleavon Little saves the town of Rock Ridge and becomes the first black hero of an all-white prairie town. As he rides off into the sunset, what does he say?”

I know this movie better than each line of my own tattoos.

“He says, ‘Keep the faith, brothers.’”

“Amen,” says God. “Amen. That’s all I can do for you today. Keep the faith. Ride the wave of grief. It hasn’t even been a year.”

I think for a minute. “Can I talk to my mom?”

God nods His head. “Sure, but you don’t need me for that. You’ve got a direct line.”

It’s my turn to shake my head. “It’s almost Christmas Eve and I still don’t hear her.”

“Get the wax out of your ears, jackass!” Nana yells from the Great Beyond.

God winces. “Seriously, I would send her back if I could collect all that cremation dust. I got screwed on that deal. Anyway, if you can’t hear your mother, turn up the volume. And every time you feel that Instant Karma, look around for something else. I have placed little rest stops all around whenever you need to take a breather. Simple stuff.”

God turns to leave.

“Can I ask one more question?”

The Lord looks at His watch. “Sure.”

“Did it ever bother you…what John Lennon said about The Beatles being bigger than Christianity?”

God laughs as he turns away. “Nope. Any time I can get my name out there with free advertising like that, I don’t sweat the small stuff. Keep the faith, sister. And remember, we all shine on.”

“Wait! God! Where are you going!” I holler after Him.

“Nowhere special…”

And just like that, He’s gone. I laugh out loud.

If you’ve never seen Blazing Saddles, you probably won’t get it.

December 10, 2014

I hate to question the Divine, but I still wonder about Instant Karma.

And yet, I still feel tiny gifts sneaking past that Karma and landing on my shoulder as I wander toward nowhere special. This evening a glorious sound floated downstairs from the lobby of the Miami Beach hotel into the meeting room where I’m working a job.

Generally my production staff makes the rounds of this place once daily. Hell, it’s the holidays. Free cookies and hot chocolate are nothing to sniff at when the temperature in Miami is fifty-five degrees, although I do think hotel management put them out for the paying guests.

Tonight it isn’t cookies, snacks or beverages that lure me away from the bowels of the spot that once hailed Sinatra and the Rat Pack. It is the sweet sound of young voices singing in the holiday. The higher I go on the stairway, the stronger the glorious sound resounds.

The lobby is fully decorated in red and gold. A fully-lit Christmas tree and a row of gingerbread houses line the entryway. The marble staircase to the mezzanine is packed with scores of young singers praising the season. The diners in the lobby restaurant chatter and laugh, raising their glasses upward. Incoming guests stop and smile at the joyful shining faces. The twelve-foot Christmas tree casts a rosy glow across us all.

I stand and listen. It’s pretty glorious no matter who you’re waiting for – St. Nick or Hanukkah Harry. It’s just nice.

I think about God, Karma and Blazing Saddles. At the end of the movie, Cleavon Little rides triumphantly out of town. On his way out, he passes his sidekick Gene Wilder. “Where are you headed, cowboy?” Wilder asks.

“Nowhere special.”

“Nowhere special,” Wilder muses. “I always wanted to go there.”

Cleavon Little, now Black Bart, Rock Ridge’s first black sheriff, waves a hand forward and tells Wilder, “Come on.”

They ride off together into the faux sunset.

To nowhere special.

And not at all worried about Instant Karma. Because we all shine in, like the moon, the stars and the sun. On and on and on, on and on.

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A Night At My Museum While Home Alone

December 10, 2014

December 9, 2013

“People just keep too much crap,” says my mother, hoarder extraordinaire, from her hospital bed as she flips through the pages of The National Enquirer. We are reading what you Gentle Readers have come to know as “the newspaper.”

“Yes,” I sigh. “Remember Nana used to say, ‘Trash or treasuah?’ about everything.”

Mom nods. “Mostly because if my father brought it home, it was a treasure she ended up sneaking into the trash.”

Poppy WAS a well-known junk collector.

“What happens to all of that crap when we die?” Mom muses. “Our treasures are then crap. I’m glad I won’t live to see what piles of junk you girls will have to go through after I die!” She tsks at the paper. “How does a woman get a behind that is so huge and yet it stays up in the air?”

I dunno. Duct tape?

“Mum! That’s ridiculous! Don’t talk about people going through your things! That’s not to happen!”

I never consider the death of anyone to be something that will occur in my family. Even when it happened in the past, I was always the last person to come to the acceptance table. I am, after all, the person who set a place at the Christmas dinner table for Dean Martin. The singer from back in the day when Mom was a singe mother struggling on St. Nicholas Ave. Dino’s voice was the one I heard flowing out of our windows each afternoon as I skipped up the hill toward home from school. When he died on Christmas Day, it felt like a personal loss.

My mother drops the paper. “You want to talk about ridiculous?”

Uh oh. I hope she isn’t thinking about Dino’s place card.

She wags a finger at me. “I recall you saying your biggest regret after you die will be that you didn’t get to live in a world when the robots take over!”

That is not what I said.

“Mum, that is NOT what I said! I said I am disappointed that I won’t live to see robots integrated into human society, working side by side with us.”

Mom snorts. “I suppose that is Al Gore’s new plan. And THAT – is ridiculous! In the meantime, start getting rid of some crap. Trust me on this. The Irish will never steer you wrong when it comes to crap.”

There’s a hidden meaning there, but I let it go. I don’t want to discuss the crap associated with dying.

December 9, 2014

Mom is gone but the fact remains that most people do keep too much crap. The problem is that it really doesn’t become crap until the owner travels toward Heaven. In our mother’s case, nothing was trash. I cherish her grade school drawings, the smudged notes in tattered cookbooks, her autographed photo with Hulk Hogan, even her faded little housecoat.

These days I find myself in Irish-Crap-Freefall. I’ve lived twenty years in this tint beach cottage and lived a good many years prior to that. I’m in the middle of a complicated short-term production, trying to go Christmas-Bankrupt on the Internet shopping for gifts and packing decades of…well…crap. All by myself.

I am home alone.

It isn’t all it is cracked up to be the way it was back when Kevin McCallister’s family flew off to France after accidentally leaving him behind and he got to watch hours of cheesy movies, fill up on junk food and thwart hilarious criminals during Christmas break.

In fact, it hasn’t gone so well at all. Alone for months on end. And so I needed this job in the worst way, so I cannot complain about compressed into a Shrinky Dink. Younger readers may have to look that up.

After Mom died, I lost interest in buying a home and so the house that Burn Notice built became savings. I’m not independently wealthy, but I could afford to take time off. Until I began to slide into stir-crazy. By that time, the year was winding down and most jobs were ending. I had to work. So much so that I even called my old boss at the studio and asked him if he knew anyone who could hook me up with the Sharknado 3 people.

“Oh boy,” he replied.

“I’m a JAWS FAN!” I snapped back defensively.

“Boy, oh, boy!”  I could see him shaking his head.

Then our complex was sold, all the tenants got a notice of the impending boot, I got a job and Christmas is chasing me.

With the kid away on his own job, it was me and my whole life of memories to pack.

Trash or Treasuah, as we say in New England.

The Late 1990′s

I assisted in the packing up of a large home that belonged to a famous movie star. Or at least that was how it started.

The event was supposed to be a purge. He too had many treasuahs, he assured me. It was time to let go of some of the past that was only collecting dust. We worked at night, in the cooling Florida sun after work.

Pulling out boxes and crates of movie memories was truly one of the most joyful experiences of my life. Just to hold a Golden Globe in my hands. To run my hands along a desk that once belonged to director John Ford. Reading a very racy note written by Dean Martin. To try on a glove once worn and discarded by Greta Garbo. For a film junkie, it was nirvana.

Not the band.

The final goal of Buddhism.

Two nights later, when every single item was out in the open, the problems started.

“OK, let’s start with junk,” I asserted. I waved a stick over the Hefty trash bag. “Like this.”

The stick never made it to the bag. The actor jumped up and grabbed it.

“Good Christ! DON’T toss THAT! I picked that up off the ground on location during the first scene of the first western I ever did!”

And so it went.

A cracked pane of glass John Wayne accidentally broke. A ragged belt Errol Flynn once wore. The lone survivor of a set of gummy eyelashes that once balanced precariously over one of Marilyn Monroe’s wide peepers.

Cherished bits of flotsam floating across a man’s life. Unlabeled, unidentified. Only he knew what the real treasures were and how they should be respected.

A week later the inventory of the vast museum of a life were carefully packed and returned to their original storage locations. The trash filled the one Hefty trash bag. It mostly dust balls and the sandwich wrappers we’d accumulated over the evenings he told the stories and I listened.

I learned an important lesson during that time, but I didn’t realize it until recently.

Late November 2014

The start of my urge was easy. Like many women, my first pass at closets and drawers unearthed many oddities I’d bought and never used. My neighbors send monthly packages back to their families in their respective countries to be distributed within neighborhoods possessing much less than most of us Americans do. It was my pleasure to hand over boxes and bags of unused tableware, books, sweaters, sheets, Tupperware.

“This is going to be a breeze! I’ll jam through it two days with no kid here to convince me to keep crap!” I said to Maury Povitch. Maury, busy on my TV screen determining the paternity of triplets, seemed to agree.

I did jam through it in two days. I tossed and donated everything I could get my hands on. Until I hit the stonewall of my past.

My own museum had carefully hidden itself on high shelves and behind everyday items. All treasure that could not be trashed.

My cracked baby mug Mom has so carefully stored for decades. Notes from my nieces two decades old. My baby daddy’s wedding photos that I actually took at the wedding. Familiar items I love still.

But then – small clear gumball bubbles encasing fake ruby rings and feather earrings – special gifts from my son’s sister Baby L. Now a grown-up fourteen, she’s forgotten and only I remember where that fine jewelry came from, complete with a carefully printed note. These Is How Much I Luv U Thea!! But no signature.

A small wooden incense holder Nicole saved her money to buy me one Christmas. The feathered mask Baby J carted all the way home from the French Quarter. A tiny metal statue Sissy gave me – two figures curved around a small crystal ball that cost her more than she could afford so many years ago. A sea rock necklace from Gale, intricate and thoughtful mix tapes from Dina. Baby’s Sam’s valentine. A black and white photo my son took in elementary school of a homeless man. The kid won an award for the picture but there isn’t any evidence of the backstory. The sunny day we introduced ourselves to the kind gentleman living in the street and offered to buy lunch at Wendy’s for him and his dog in exchange for the snapshot is only our memory. There’s no video of our shared midday meal with a veteran.

A thin worn gold band no stranger would recognize as sole Yaya’s keepsake after the death of the man we never knew. The tiny glass parakeet gave me after her close friend Louise died.

“Louise loved her little birds, so remember her with this.”

The rusty keys that were in pants pocket of my grandfather’s old work pants that had waited patiently and intact in the three months between the time he was lost in the winter sea until the spring thaw when his body washed back into Scituate Harbor. They appear to be outdated initiators to enter rooms that no longer exist.

“If I die,” I said to Maury and myself, “no one will ever know what these things meant to me.”

I cried while Maury remained stoic, like he does. And then I opened a box of Christmas napkin rings.

Mom had a tradition of given each grandchild a simple napkin ring every year. On the bottom she always wrote the year and her name with her trusty Magic Marker.

Love, Grandma. 1999

How brilliant.

I have to move this weekend, just two days before I start shooting. I am not ready as my packing has gone on much longer than expected. I have taken the time to write on the bottom of each of my treasures as I packed them to move. A whole box of Sharpies and I carefully marked the items with the name of the person who took such care to give them to me.

Poppy’s keys and things like them are now in small Baggies that boldly state their identity.

You may think I have lost my mind but are far too polite to say so and I can live with that. Because I did manage to figure out which items in my vast museum must be kept and admired until that day comes when I have to let go.

The person who comes by to pack up may not consider my bubblegum rings and rusty keys priceless artifacts, but they just might want to take a small treasure for safekeeping after discovering its history. A free keepsake from the days and nights at my museum.

If I have one regret when it comes to my nights at the museum of another, it is that I didn’t take that grubby stick an excited young actor picked up off the ground and shove it into a Baggie with a Magic Marker label. Then I wish I’d placed it on a shelf so someday someone else would know what it meant. Treasuah, not trash.

And now we slide toward the holidays together. I’ll tell you what I can as I am able.

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Dead People Raise Hell, I Vote & A Priest Walks Into A Bar…

November 4, 2014

November 4th, 2014

Now I understand why the carful of dead Democrats has been hitchhiking with me the past two weeks. Not only is it the day to vote – it is also Nana’s birthday. The woman who had a neighbor she admiringly referred to as the “Big Black Mama” – to the woman’s face and had such a relationship with the stylish lady of color that the neighbor accepted it as a divine compliment from a crusty old Irish broad. She, in turn, always yelled cheerily out her window every morning, “Good morning, you snow white Potato Digger!” If you’re shocked by this little tidbit, you must also understand how scandalous this friendship was back on the good ol’ South Shore. Very few people crossed racial lines for friendship purposes. It was a basic tactical politeness and yes all are created equal but it wasn’t until Nana and Poppy opened up their cottage to “political meetings” that some folks realized how stupid that all was.

“Political meetings” was what they were called. Basically they were huge raucous Irish house parties with booze, beer and buckets of clams where everyone sat around raising glass after glass and bemoaning the fact that, “Johnny [Jack Kennedy] we hardly knew ye.” But not one of those partygoers ever missed an election – local, state or national. Each one understood that if you want the right to bitch, you must exercise the privilege of voting.

My grandfather Poppy always made it his business to be first in line at the polls on the appointed day no matter how late the “meeting” had run the night before. He never said, but I suspect he had that Irish paranoia that there wouldn’t be enough ballots for everyone and didn’t want to be left out.

Nana would be one hundred years ago today had she not moved on in 2007 and no doubt she would be down at her local polling place, getting in trouble with volunteers for loudly espousing her political leanings. Kinda like me today. That’s another story. Suffice to say, this IS Florida and some folks need better instruction at the polls.

And so here they are, haunting the election cycle when the last thing I need is more stress.

October 2014 Late Afternoon

I roll down my car window and yell, “Hey! Are you a real priest?”

I asked for a sign. I asked for some guidance. Jesus, Mary and Joseph! And there it is!

I’ve been driving through Hollywood Beach with a full car of chatting relatives. Up and down side streets, looking for a place to live. I’ve used up twenty of the sixty days allotted to me by the new owners of my building. As I roll through an empty parking lot, I see a man dressed as a priest, white robe swirling around him as he’s rummaging through the trunk of his car.

“Hey! Are you a real priest?”

Startled, the man jerks his head up and cracks it on the open trunk.

BANG!

Oh great.

June 2014

I returned from the first leg of burying Mom’s ashes in June to find a letter waiting for me. An unsigned form letter informing me that the building we have lived in for twenty years was sold without warning in the five days that I was gone.

But I was not to worry! The new owners had no plans to make a decision about their end game until after the first of the year. Miami, like so many cities, is changing. Although the papers are full of foreclosure horror stories and the streets teeming with the New Homeless, buildings are coming down and rising three times higher in the blink of an eye. The stretch of beaches from trendy SoBe to Fort Lauderdale are especially in the line of fire for wealthy developers. For a shoreline that may well be extinct in fifty years, there sure are entire high-rise monoliths blithely rising skyward. At least for now, I was not to worry.

October 1st, 2014

“Please be advised,” the new letter read, “all tenants have 60 days to vacate the premises or risk the doubling of monthly rental.”

Exercising my secret and powerless cinematic immunity, I ignored it. Because I didn’t exactly get the letter. It came certified when I was away for a day or two and the other tenants told me about it. Now I don’t know about y’all, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna hike it all the way to the post office, stand in line, wait for the over-worked clerk to find the letter and to sign for just so I can read what I already know.

I’m being evicted.

October 2014 Earlier than the late afternoon

I’m driving aimlessly up and down the beach, confused and pissy. “It’s always a mystery to me,” my friend Alison Troy said years ago, “that we film people can send two hundred people and an elephant to Guam within twenty-hour hours, but we cannot always remember to pay the electric bill on time.”

True. During the day there are hundreds of details we recall as we juggle shooting and after work, I sometimes have to sit and think to remind myself where the grocery store is located. So finding a place to live seems almost insurmountable.

Nowhere is like here, I’ve decided. Here where my things need to be dusted and the second bathroom is a utility closet with a toilet and sink. Nowhere is like here and no place will ever be like here. That’s the problem and the reason I cannot find a new place to hang my sneakers.

I am further put off by the sheer amount of dead relatives that have managed to cram themselves and their opinions into my vehicle. I’ve told you before that I do not have spiritual visitations, but I am experiencing a tremendous amount of scolding from The Great Beyond with regard to my impending homelessness.

The entity that is my grandfather Poppy groans from the backseat. ”Whattya gonna do, wait until the police bust the door down and drag you away like your Greek relatives?”

I shake my head. “That’s not even a thing! You’re just making that up.”

“Bigot!” yells my very Irish great-grandmother Yaya Molly from the seat next to him. “You’re a Greek hater!”

“This has always been your problem,” Mom asserts. “Living beyond your means. Why do you insist that you have to live at the beach? This is Florida, everywhere is the beach!”

“But I want to look at the water when I wake up every morning,” I whine.

“Is that so?” Mom’s disembodied voice rises. “Well, You can’t always get what you want. I used to want to look at Cary Grant every day! ”

I turn down a side street. “I guess you can now, though. So it kinda worked out.”

Mom sits back in the seat next to me, purse on her lap. “Don’t be fresh!”

“SHOTGUN!” Nana hollers and immediately Mom is relegated to the back seat.

“You know you can’t always get what you want but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need,” my grandmother says sagely. “I think Dear Abby said that.”

“It was the Rolling Stones!” Mom is exasperated. “Go ask Dear Abby, she’ll tell you!”

“Whatever. Anyway, me? I like the beach,” Nana says.

“There’s a nude beach up here too,” I say, just to make trouble. “It’s mostly gay.”

The invisible Nana claps. “Terrific! I like to look at naked people! Gay or straight, men or women, doesn’t matter to me!”

From the backseat Mom snorts. “Mother, zip it!”

I feel Nana twist her unseen crepey chicken neck around. “You always were such a prude.”

I feel like I should defend my mother. She wasn’t a prude and I don’t think you have to be labeled as one if you choose not to jump up out of the grave just to gawk at nude beach-goers, but I stay silent.

“Jesus, shove over!” Poppy’s voice floats forward.

“You shove over. Gawd ya feet smell!” Yaya pipes up. “And put out that cigar!”

My face is hot and I feel dizzy. Yes, I want to live at the beach. Just for a year. Sort of “My Year At The Beach After Our Year Without Mum.” It’s part of my newest plan of not buying a house but instead a condo or a townhouse. My kid is almost off on his own and I no longer desire the upkeep of a single family home to keep me occupied. I want a place I can lock up and drive away from if the dismal state of the Florida film business doesn’t change. I can take jobs out of town and rest easy that my collection of eclectic possessions no one would want won’t be decimated by anyone who thinks they are actually worth anything.

“Answer the phone, dear,” Mom points a ghostly finger.

“The phone isn’t…” The phone rings.

“Show off!” Nana grumbles. “I can do that too. Wanna see me pull a rabbit out of a hat?”

My deceased grandfather bangs his knees against the back of my seat. “Alice, DO NOT touch my hat! The last time you tried that, a bunny shit in my fedora!”

Yaya howls with laughter.

“Such language!” Nana’s second husband scolds.

If Poppy could jerk a thumb in his predecessor’s direction, I’m sure he would. “Geez, talk about prudes!”

“SHUSH!” I yell as I answer the phone. “EVERYONE SHUT UP! HELLO???”

Sissy sighs. “That doesn’t sound good. Who are you yelling at?”

I should have counted to three before I spoke. “Oh my GOD! Mom, Nana, Pop-…” I clamp a hand over my mouth.

“Smooth move, Ex-Lax!” Nana cackles.

“Oh boy!” Sissy gasps. “You’re looking for apartments with our dead relatives? Bad idea.” No shock at the dead relatives, just at my perceived bad judgment. It wasn’t as if I had a choice.

“Not like I had a choice.” I grit my teeth as the call waiting beeps through. Simi.

“I got Simi on the line.”

“Oh good,” Sissy says. “Click her in, let’s do a three-way.”

“MOM. NOT. ONE. WORD.” Mom admonishes her own mother before Nana gets a chance to make that crude joke about three ways we all know is on the tip of her dusty tongue.

Simi chirps in. “Find anything?”

“No, she didn’t,” Sissy answers for me. “And now she’s got the whole car crammed with dead relatives. She outed herself.”

“I hate when that happens,” Simi sighs. “Hello all!” she calls.

Everyone yells a greeting back. Simi can’t hear them. Or maybe she can. I have lost control of the situation and almost sideswipe the ice cream truck next to me. I starting talking over everyone, hoping one person or non-person will answer me.

“I just feel so defeated. So…”

“Crazy?” Nana asks.

“Crazy?” Poppy agrees.

“Crazy?” both Simi and Sissy say.

“Damn it!” I slam my hand on the steering wheel as the ice cream man gives me the finger. “I am not crazy and even Terry says certainly not as crazy as I used to…”

Damn it again! I just outed my own self AGAIN.

“AH HAH!” Both Sissy and Simi are gleeful.

“Terry actually said that you aren’t as crazy as you used to be?” Simi demanded.

Terry, as you Gentle Readers know, is our usual boss in production.

“What is he, a dumdum?” Poppy says to no one.

“Not in so many words that are like crazy, but he did say I was doing great!”

I have to defend myself.

Sissy actually harrumphs, just like in old English literature. “I am sure he just said that to be polite.”

“Terry is very polite,” Mom muses.

“Oh yes, I agree.” Simi is definitely talking to my dead mother. “She could shave her head like Britney Spears and Terry would find a nice thing to say about it. He’s just very polite that way.”

‘WILL YOU ALL SHUT THE HELL UP?” My father suddenly roars from his prone position on top of the car. I slam on my brakes and screech onto a side street, coming to a noisy halt.

“Ow! Geez! What the hell,” virtually everyone yells. My hands are shaking.

‘DAD! DAD! Are you…are you…I just spoke to you this morning!”

‘NO I AM NOT DEAD! I AM TAKING A NAP IN MY OWN BED AND YOU ARE ALL ON MY FREQUENCY! I don’t know how to shut you up!”

Nana loves an opening. “Hey, where’s it at, Monistat?” Then she cackles at her teenage movie joke.

Dead silence and I am grateful that only my dead grandmother and I are familiar with the name of that “strictly for lady areas” feminine product or I fear the car would have blown up. Please God, give me a sign that I am only fraught by indecision and not completely deranged.

My Dad is still yelling. “Maybe I should call a priest!”

“Oh yes, do!” Nana chortles. “I’d love to see you carted off the nuthouse!”

“SHUT UP, OLD LADY! I HAD ENOUGH OF YOU WHEN YOU WERE ALIVE!”

Great, now Dad is REALLY mad. “I have got to get some sleep. Oh wait, let me turn off the TV.” Click.

He’s gone.

“Jesus, that was somethin’!” Poppy exclaims.

I roll down the street, one long palm-lined parking lot. Give me a sign, I keep praying. And suddenly, there’s a priest. A lone priest. I pull up next to him as he rummages around in his car trunk.

“Careful, deah,” Yaya whispers, “don’t scare him. They’re very jumpy these days.”

“As they should be!” Poppy was never a priest fan.

I lean my head out of the window. “Hey! Are you a real priest?”

Startled, the man jerks his head up and cracks it on the open trunk.

“Oh Holy Mother!” He’s got a real Irish brogue – I swear to you – is fresh-faced and in his mid-thirties. A small line of red blood is escaping from the swelling egg of his forehead.

“Oh Jesus! That’s a sin right there. I’m out!” Yaya disappears.

My glove box flips open. “Grab a napkin! He’s going to get his white priest suit all bloody!” Mom yelps as she disappears with a blip.

“Now we’re in the shit!” Nana elbows her dead husbands and suddenly I am alone, jumping out of the car with handful of McDonald’s napkins.

The priest accepts them gratefully and I try to apologize.

“No, no.” He waves me off, confused. “I’m fine, just a bump. Why did you ask me if I were a real priest?”

I shrug. It’s Miami, kinda. And almost Halloween. I don’t add that in Miami or at least on South Beach, religious costumes are all the rage for trick or treating. But they usually show some genitalia. “Why don’t you sit down in my car?”

He does and five minutes later I am seated at a table inside Capone’s Flicker Lite Lounge and Pizzeria while the Father mops up in the biker-style bathroom. The ample busted waitress has already slapped a Band Aid on his head and deposited two beers and a glass of water on the scarred tabletop. I chug down the icy cold water in an effort to calm down. So far I have talked to the majority of my past relatives, almost killed the ice cream man, had a telepathic experience with my father and semi-assaulted a man of the cloth. Not my best showing.

As the priest approaches the table, not one head in the joint turns.

“What were you doing in the parking lot?” I ask as we clink our beer glasses.

“Oh well, I was supposed to get my picture taken for the new church directory. Do you think they can Photoshop me?” he asks hopefully.

Not that noggin!

“Sure!” I answer. “You’ll be fine!”

A burly biker walks past and shoves a five dollar bill into my empty water glass. “God bless you, Father. I’m liking that new Pope.”

“Oh yes, I do too!” the priest calls as the guy hits the sunlight. He turns back. “What can I do for YOU?”

I start tentatively. “I am having some problems making life decisions and also, do you ever hear your dead relatives talking to you?”

He sips his beer thoughtfully. “Are you Irish?”

I shrug. “Part.”

“The percentage that hears dead family members, I assume? That’s just part and parcel. You learn to turn them out.” He shrugs. “That our gift.”

He says “gift” like he means “pain in the ass.”

“Let’s talk about these decisions.”

An hour later, I have learned a few things that I should have known all along. It is better to take a leap of faith and move forward “like a happy fool” than to hold back out of fear. And the fact that the police will drag you out of your former apartment kicking and screaming. And people will stuff dollars and change into an empty glass in front of priest like you’re in a high holy strip joint.

And that things can never be exactly the same as they once were but that is supposed to be life’s journey.

“If it was supposed to be easy,” Father Sullivan says, “there wouldn’t be any need for the Jack Kennedys, the Dali Lamias, Socrates, Plato or Bruce Springsteen types.”

I blink. “Is that how you keep your faith?”

He shook his head and grinned. “My dead mother will come after me over this, but I think God made the world as the result of a snap decision with no exit strategy. Like, He wanted it to work out well but when He added Free Will, well, things got murky. It’s not going to be perfect. Then there’s nothing to evolve to. My faith is based on the fact that if everything were perfect and never changed, there really couldn’t be a God. A Buddha, Christ, any of them. Because what would be the need? In this world, everyone needs something to hang onto because too much changes too quickly. Reach out and grab onto something. Even if it is just yourself. And then make a decision.”

He finished his beer. “Anyway, if you don’t like your new place – just move again. It’s not the end of the world. And don’t mind your relatives. It beats being alone.”

I drove the priest down a palm-lined parking street but I didn’t see his car anywhere.

“I’m good.” He waved as he got out. I scanned the other side of the trees and turned back to him but he was gone.

I drove up and down the small parking streets that line the north end of Hollywood Beach, but they were all empty until I got to the last one. A young hip-looking guy was pulling a camera and tripod out of the back of an SUV. I rolled slowly past, my window down.

“Hey,” he waved. “You haven’t seen a…I know this sounds weird…a priest, have you? I’m supposed to be taking his picture.”

I shook my head. “Can’t say that I have. But have a great afternoon.” Because really, who is to say? He shrugged, smiled and returned to setting up his equipment.

My car was silent the whole way home.

November 4th, 2014

I’m running out of time to move. I have made offers at two different buildings. It’s been twenty years since the days of walking up to a place, plunking down your cash and shoveling your stuff inside. It’s a whole new changy kinda world with background checks and five page questionnaires. So please keep your fingers crossed for me, Gentle Readers.

I wake up this morning and jump into the shower. I add some make up and my voting uniform of a red, white and blue t-shirt and a Boston Red Sox ball cap. I think of my mother and I voting together for the first time so many years ago. For my whole family, Election Day is a holiday that requires no gifts or a huge meal. A day to celebrate why all of those relatives ended up here when they were young. As I get into the car and start the engine, I turn on the radio.

A familiar voice crackles. “Hey, where’s it at, Monistat? Don’t forget it’s my birthday!” Nana.

My ghostly mother pops into the car. “MOM! I know what that means! Helen Gurley Brown just told me! That’s completely inappropriate!”

“Hey, don’t be a dumdum! Hurry up! The polls close in ten hours! They might run out. It’s Florida! And you vote Democrat!” Poppy blows unseen cigar smoke.

“Do you remember Senator Brooks?” Yaya sighs. “God, I love him.”

Senator Edward Brooks was from Massachusetts and the first African American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate in 1966.

“Do not vote for ONE of THEM!” Poppy sputters. Uh oh.

My great-grandmother, outraged, sputters, “You mean a black person?”

I gently interrupt. “No, Yaya. Ed Brooks was a Republican. Poppy means REPUBLICAN.”

“You bet your ass I do, dumdum. And ANOTHER thing…”

I smile as everyone begins arguing and I head toward the polls.

Happy Birthday, Nana! You’re still a pissah.

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HAUNTED, part 4: How To Perform A Reverse Self Exorcism Collection

October 2, 2014

Summer 2014

“Not an exorcism with hooker wearing a nun’s habit! It’s not going to be like that exorcism you wrote about in your novella, is it?” Sissy asks nervously.

“Of course not!” I am indignant.

“You know the one I mean,” my sister continues. “With the hooker dressed up like a nun that you got from the Teamsters because you couldn’t find a priest? When you guys almost burned the production office down because you used Pine Sol instead of pine incense too close to the candles?”

God, Sissy never forgets anything. “That wasn’t real,” I insist. “That was just a piece of fiction! I was thinking of turning it into a screenplay! You know, sex and sin in the movie business!”

“Uh huh,” she says. “Right. More like a Lifetime docudrama.”

“Fiction!” Well, most of it anyway. Years ago, an exorcism seemed like a perfectly good way to rid oneself of a bad boyfriend who could have been Satan’s brother. “Maybe we just have to try and embrace the ghosts of our past so we can take them with us in a more positive way. It’s like a Reverse Self Exorcism for Spirit Collection.”

She stares at me. “You just made that up, didn’t you?”

Yeah I did. OK, maybe that’s a stretch. But we are looking for something.

My sister shrugs and agrees with me in principle but has one caveat. “No hookers dressed up as nuns. We’ve spent enough money already on this vacation.”

“Do we have to actually go to the old empty Quarterdeck?” I ask, as I silently will her to say we don’t have to lean that far into the healing process.

“We do,” she confirms. “How else can we say goodbye? Or hello? Or whatever it is we’re trying to say?”

I feel this would be a great time to suggest we get dressed up like Irish nuns and go barhopping but once my sister has made up her mind, there’s no changing it. And anyway, nuns barhopping in this neck of the woods really isn’t any big deal. Rabbis would be a big deal.

We drive slowly down the main drag – Front Street in Scituate Massachusetts. I find a parking spot and we get out of the car. The closer we get to our once-favorite shop, the slower we walk. No one wants to see her childhood haven repurposed.

Suddenly, we are there. The weather-beaten shack stands straight and jutting over the water as if nothing earth shattering has happened since it was built in 1939. As if decades of hours spent wandering around reading old postcards and trying on hippie clothing haven’t been completely wiped out. I pull out my iPhone and point the ghost detector at the building. Silence. The app is over us now. Too many hours roaming the haunted countryside has either worn it out or it too thinks barhopping as Holy Sisters would be more fun.

Upon closer inspection, we see the inside is under construction. Gleaming white, it is being remodeled as the new home base for The Lucky Finn Schooner. A twenty-two foot Bugeye sailboat, the Finn offers charter trips and public jaunts around the harbor. During one hiatus from shooting Burn Notice, we charted the Finn ourselves and watched the New England sun set while one of the deckhands played Irish music on his fiddle. It was pretty glorious.

I look at Sissy. She has a quizzical look on her face. “Feel anything ghostly?”

She shakes her head. We both stare. Nothing. The building doesn’t say a word to us. It stares through us as if we are the ghosts it cannot see and shows us nothing for our trouble.

No visions of Mom digging happily through an overflowing box of vintage glass balls that once bobbed around the harbor as floats for fishing nets. No whisper of her deftly dipping a bare hand into the glass lobster tank that used to sit in the back by the bait barrel and pulling up a live one for a salad. No appearances of our grandfather chasing us down in an attempt to repossess the beer money we’d lifted from him in order to buy treasures only The Quarterdeck would stock. And no apparitions of the younger us trying on long silver earrings and rope bracelets.

It is just a building. If the Ghost Detector Pro app could yawn, this would be a perfect time.

“Maybe we have to come back at night,” Sissy muses. I feel it may be time for some snacks to cover our disappointment at the lack of any paranormal twinges. Plus I want snacks.

We wander down the street, snacking as we go. Sissy shakes her head again and again. “I just don’t get it. We should feel…I don’t know…something else.”

I know what she means. I often wonder – and I can admit this to you only, Gentle Readers – if buildings remember us. The essence of us. I think about it every time I pass Greenwich Studios in North Miami or The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. The empty block that was once the Coconut Grove Convention Center. Or 85 Rebecca Road in Scituate. Places where I have spent long periods of time. Do they recognize me when I fly past and remember all of my calamities and adventures? I know they keep my secrets safe for me. Maybe that has to be enough.

We trudge along and soon we are at Native, a popular shop. We both blow a sigh of relief and wander through the front door. I am embarrassed to say we snubbed Native for the first few summer visits after its opening in 2004. Pottery, jewelry, textiles, masks, accessories and artifacts from diverse tribes and cultures across the globe were nothing we were interested in – we’d sniff. Why would we ever be when we had the reliable Quarterdeck and our shared history at the other end of Front Street? New England denizens – notorious reverse-snobs!

Five summers ago or so, I was desperate to print out some FedEx labels. I never travel on an airplane with checked baggage. It’s too much of a hassle so I throw everything in Rubbermaid tubs and ship it FedEx ground. It’s much cheaper than you would expect and then you can rush off your plane and head right to your adventures without having to stand around a creaky carousel waiting for the news that your suitcase is in South Dakota. It is also much classier than the last minute film production luggage we all used before 9/11 – back when we threw everything into Hefty trash bags and checked it. Those were the days, my friends. You cannot say you have lived until you have seen your own panties dancing across the tarmac in Jamaica after your “luggage” split wide open.

There wasn’t a working printer to be found in town. Out of desperation, I slipped through the front door of Native. I figured anyone who collected stock from so many countries HAD to have a printer and I was right. The owner Marie greeted me warmly and waved me to her small, crammed back room.

“Use my computer, check your email, print, whatever you need!”

While my labels printed, I strolled around the store. I can only describe the goods as exquisite funk. Gorgeous chunky South American silver jewelry with indigenous stones, wooden carved bracelets, textile bags and woven purses, collections of wearable art depicting the Day Of The Dead (the real one, not the horror movie one), hand painted cards and unique wall art.

Ever since that day, Native is a regular summer stop where we load up on Christmas gifts and jaw about music and the local scene with Marie. A graphic designer as well, Marie has an incredible sixth sense for eye-popping art that can be worn. One of my most cherished jewelry items is an eclectic silver cross layered with stones three dimensions high that Sissy surprised me with after I’d admired it in Marie’s glass case. Native is not The Quarterdeck nor is the opposite true. Like parents of more than one child, we’ve loved them equally.

Marie greets us as usual. “Well, look who’s back!” After she shows us what is new and we load up on gifts, we lean on the counter to gossip. We show her our new tattoos of Mom’s drawing and she nods approvingly. “Very cool.” We talk about her college age daughter and Marie’s next trip to South America in search of new treasures for the shop.

“You know I love this place, but I sure am heartbroken about The Quarterdeck closing,” I lament.

Marie nods. “Me too. I loved that place, used to buy from her all the time. A lot of her stuff is what I use for my displays. But you know, Joan is still around. She’s still in business.”

“WHAT!!” I yelp as Sissy nearly drops a stone statue. ‘THERE’S A NEW QUARTERDECK??”

Marie grins. “Ah the secrets of Scituate! Oh yes, Joan took everything and moved to a new location. Said it was time.”

I nod and remember the article I read during my Quarterdeck mourning period. Joan taking the interviewer from The Scituate Mariner through the shop’s history.

The creation of her inventory: “I originally sold antiques and when my kids went off to college I started going to the Army Navy surplus stores. Then I found the places where I got all the funky stuff.”

Filming a movie. ”It’s so tedious to make a film. I couldn’t believe the number of trucks they brought in. Now when I see a scene in a film where the sun is seen through the trees, I’ll wonder how many times they had to do it to get that shot.”

And to the end. “It’s kind of like a divorce,” Noble said of moving from the building she actually sold three years ago. “You wake up one day and say, ‘it’s over.’”

I remember reading that and thinking of my Mom. Yes, it happens that quick. You turn around and suddenly it’s all over.

Before we can recover to ask where the new shop might be, Marie has a map spread across the counter, drawing a red squiggle to show us the way. That’s the kind of chick she is. “She’s not completely set up yet,” Marie says, “but she’s open for business. Her hours are probably fall hours by now, but I know she is open tomorrow. You be sure to tell her I was asking about her.”

We leave with our map, purchases and promises to come back soon. Marie is never to be missed while in Scituate.

Later That Night

We can hear the waves thundering against the rocks as we call out to each other across the hall, just as we did when we were kids.

“What do you think it’s going to be like?” Sissy wonders.

I don’t know but it won’t be the same and once again, we’ve missed a chance to say goodbye. If the building doesn’t even remember us, there seems little chance a few over-flowing boxes will bat a flap at us. I don’t sleep well and it isn’t the ghosts of the haunted places we have visited that keep me awake.

A Month Into The Future

“You still milking that dead mother thing?” Kellie Jo says over the phone from her shoot in New Mexico. Kellie is the friend that can say it just like that. Translation = “Are you feeling any better these days?” Because she knows if she asks me straight up, I’ll start bawling again.

“Yeah,” I admit. “Still milking. It gets worse. I just got a certified letter. My building sold and even though they said nothing would happen for eight months, I gotta get out in 60 days. They’re knocking it down for condos.”

Kellie whistles. “Well, fuck me runnin’, Calamity Jane. Sis, your life is goin’ down the toilet.”

“I know,” I sigh. I know.

“It’s gonna be OK, though. You know that, right? It’s gonna be what it’s gonna be. We always get through it.”

Yeah. We do.

“The building will remember you, even after they knock it down. So don’t worry about that. And,” she adds, “at least you found your ghosts.”

Ya. True.

Summer 2014 The Day After Native

Be there, be there, be there. I chant silently to myself.

We follow the map and nestled between a bakery and an auto shop, we see it. The old familiar sign.

IMG_0056

Sissy claps her hands and I barely have time to shut off the engine before we are running children trying to beat each other through the big roll-up door.

In a small, shelved garage with three rooms piled with furniture and boxes galore, the full fragrance of The Quarterdeck embraces us. The ocean, the salt, the postcards and buoys, the lobsters and the hot summer sun drying your wet jeans to a perfect snug fit as you sprawl across the seawall.

I turn slowly around in a circle and the room spins slowly as I see what I came for in every corner. All things Quarterdeck.

“Are you all right, dear?”

And there is Joan Noble, the Queen of The Quarterdeck. She could be sixty or eighty; she still looks the same as she did when I was a kid.

“You probably don’t remember me, but…”

Joan smiles. “Pull up a box and sit down. I remember you all. ”

And she does. Not by name, but by the hundreds of faces bearing the same look of delight, decade after decade. I tell Joan how much it hurt to think she’d closed for good and how Marie pointed us in her direction.

“She’s good people,” Joan nods. She tells us how she’s moving more toward antiques. “Country stuff, like we have in New England, not high end fancy stuff.” Everything we see around was stored in her warehouse as The Quarterdeck overflowed. “I’ll sell and replenish with some different things.” Joan is constantly evolving now but there are still plenty of memories still for sale.

We talk about the town. “Scituate. It isn’t a tourist town, like some down the Cape,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong! People come. Summer people. And so many to see the lighthouse and the harbor. Lots of history here. Lots to see. Artists, shops and great food. But we’re not a tourist town. We’re a visiting town. Ninety percent of those who come are coming back to visit. For a day or week or the whole summer. Everyone who comes back to Scituate is looking for something they once had and for a time – to get it back.”

And there it was. Unprompted. My sister and I had come to this very renovated garage for the same reason. I see them now. At last. Not just the fleeting memories I have been writing about over the months. Sissy does too. I can tell as she cocks her head to one side, listening to the room. Our family is there.

My mother is buying an old cable-knit fisherman sweater, holding it up to the light and checking for any holes she may be able to mend. Nana choosing another cloth triangle hat with straw men sewn all over it and Yaya, her mother, sitting at the door and drinking a cold can of beer. I smell Poppy’s cigar as he barters for a rusty anchor. In the parking lot, I hear Aunt Sis calling us by revving her battered VW bug with the peeling flower-power decals on the doors. I see my sister and I – much younger – carefully choosing leather friendship bracelets from a basket. They smile and wave at me. Then they go back to what they came for at The Quarterdeck. We’re all together in that small garage.

Because it’s New England, I am pretty sure Joan sees them too. But because it’s also Scituate, she’s too polite to mention it.

I don’t know how long we are there. One hour? Maybe two? Sissy chooses an aged stained glass window held together by delicate metal soldering. I find a long strand of ancient glass beads I could have chosen in the 70s. We collect a pile of vintage used books by authors like Ira Levin and Peter Benchley and a handful of postcards. Joan undercharges us with a grin.

“People go to that much time and trouble to find me – I gotta give a discount!”

When it is time to leave, I ask Joan if I can hug her. New England is not the huggy capital of the world so I ask first. And she wraps her arms around me. “You girls come back and see us again soon!”

Behind her, our family members nod and wave. In a ghostly karmic twist, they exorcise us back into the real world. They opt not to follow and for some reason, this seems right.

Scituate, Mass. The New Quarterdeck.
Scituate, Mass. The New Quarterdeck.

Sissy and I get in the car and drive. We wave until the small building disappears behind us.

After a few minutes of silence, I say, “You know, I bet we could scare up a coupla nun’s habits and…”

“NO!”

Later that night, I download my pictures and I see something that didn’t register with me as I took the picture earlier that afternoon. Joan is a sign collector and this one was on the outside of the building.

quarter2

Medium.

Now that’s something, isn’t it?

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HAUNTED, part 3: The Bitches Of Eastwick Go On A Pilgrimage

September 26, 2014

“I think it’s a little late in the season.” ~ Alexandra Medford, The Witches Of Eastwick

June 12, 1987 

Today is the much-anticipated film release of a little story about three lonely New England women who fall madly in love with the same guy every woman ends up meeting sometime during her dating tenure – The Devil. Based on John Updike’s novel, The Witches Of Eastwick stars Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as well as a stellar supporting cast.

One of those players is a tiny little shop hanging lazily over Scituate Harbor. Born in the 1960s, The Quarterdeck is a town mainstay reliably offering beads, hippie bracelets and hand me downs, army jackets and bandanas, bone earrings and buoys, nets, antiques and just about any other cool thing you don’t yet know you want. The Quarterdeck is now also the exterior location utilized for the home of Cher’s Eastwick character Alexandra Medford – single mother and sculptress.

Any Given Labor Day

The official end of summer is non-existent. Summer in the United States begins each year on the day of the summer solstice, somewhere around June 21st and ends on the day of the autumnal equinox, which is on or near September 22nd. But ever since I was kid – back when the new school year didn’t kick off until we closed up the shop of summer with a bang – that carefree season didn’t end until midnight on Labor Day.

Life goes on as usual post Labor Day in the steamy tropics. We still have another good month of hurricane season to contend with and the ocean gets a fraction cooler. Still the temperature of bathwater. But the coast of New England pretty much rolls down the awnings and shuts down for a week or so as the residents ramp up for fall.

The preserved merry-go-round – all that remains at the Paragon amusement park – is closed for renovation during this slow time. Many beach shops make the turnover to fall offerings and hang signs that announce, “See Ya Next Week.” Stores that have struggled since the previous fall try to make it through the summer season before they must close their doors, like Scituate’s Front Street Books. The owner held out until the holiday weekend and then sadly had to change her sign to read,“Closed Forever! Thank you and Good Bye!” The death knell of type-on-paper finally hit the South Shore this year. Used books are like crack for hysterically deprived readers and we all scurry up and down the coast in search of the few remaining bookstores.

Attractions are shut tight, beachy stores close. The towns nap in anticipation of autumn and the renewal of apples, pumpkins and cider. Besides the movies, or roaming the state in search of haunted buildings, there isn’t such to do in Scituate except relax in the waning sun.

But there is always The Quarterdeck.

The Boston Globe February 14, 2014

The Quarterdeck, a beloved Scituate landmark hovering over the harbor on Front Street, will close its doors mid-March after over 45 years of business.

Just like spending Christmas of 2012 with my mother, I had no idea that my time spent in this tiny haven last summer would be my last and that again, I would lose something I so dearly loved. My sisters and I would be left with another ghost.

The Quarterdeck, 1960s & 70s

I have written before about this tiny one room store. Big windows set in aging wooden frames looked out over the harbor. They were shelved with aged glass bottles and hung with colorful light catchers that dazzled the interior with broken jeweled sun shafts.

The perfume of The Quarterdeck was the heady aroma of heavy boat ropes saturated with seawater and dried for days on the steamy seawall. Faint traces of incense, the vague and pleasant smell of musty pea coats freed from old trunks and now freshly expanding on clothing racks settled over the patrons. Leather necklaces and rope bracelets. Hippie beads and old sailor’s duffel bags. The heady scent of old postcards that traveled around the globe to settle in tattered cardboard boxes mingled with brass Hindu bells fastened on anklets and the fragrance of any old Cape cottage. The smells of summer-heated sand and the cold low-tide ocean rocks and the ever-present olfactory sense that Stephen King’s characters are closer than one might think.

Most any kid might hatch a plan to steal a single comic book from the local newsstand or rubber lobster – the really good kind that had a rubber hose under it attached to a hand pump so you could make it jump around – from the 5 and 10 but no one ever even considered walking away from The Quarterdeck without paying for something. Not even a single loose Indian bead. That was a real sin and One Of The Big Ones (as we the Irish know). We gladly counted out crumbled wet bathing suit dollars and coveted coins encased in bubble gum for the privilege of purchasing.

I can’t even guess at the number of rainy day hours I’ve spent just sitting in a corner as a teenager. Reading a Dark Shadowsnovel and waiting for the movie theater to open was a typical routine in a sunless day.

Summer romances between teens from different states were solidified with a sea glass ring from The Quarterdeck. Bought in June, if the wearer still sported the tint sparkle by Labor Day it had to be destiny!

Once you visited The Quarterdeck, the memories and the fragrance stayed with you forever.  At least Sissy and I have the knowledge that each one of our kids walked through those doors at least once before they were permanently locked.
Scituate, Mass. The Quarterdeck back (front – as facing the ocean is called) window as it looked for decades. Rain or shine, it was mesmerizing.

Miami, 2014 

As I’ve told you in a previous blog, Sissy called me in March. She had just finished shoveling snow and was tooling down the South Shore of Massachusetts. I was on my back at a Florida beach.

“I have bad news. You better sit down.”

News had already been pretty bad of late but there was no reason to rub the beach thing in, so I sat up.

“Go,” I prompted.

She took a breath. “I’m at The Quarterdeck.”

“HAAH?” I yelled over the sea gulls cackling at my bag of snacks.

“It’s closing.”

It’s a long ride from her house all the way to Scituate. You took a chance it would be open on any given day. Casual opening and closing hours – especially in winter. “Did you get a chance to buy anything?”

She sighed. “I’ve got an armful of stuff for us. Because this is the last day. It’s closing FOR-EVER.”

FOR-EVER? FOREVER? FOREVER AND EVER AMEN EVER? The very first time we set foot into that sweet-smelling hippie hideout, sunburned and excited, our mother was with us. Decades later, we play the Lotto religiously with one goal in mind – to acquire The Quarterdeck with our sister Dina and our other sister Gale (who are not quite sisters but get along just fine) and become The New Bitches Of Eastwick. A bookstore, a law office, a psychic sitting area, writer’s room, barroom and laundromat all in one and hanging precariously off the town pier.

“If not now, when?” was our mantra. Now it was just never.

“No suh,” I yelped and the gulls scattered hastily.

“Ya suh,” Sissy replied. “A customer was kind of snotty when I was so shocked – said I should have read it in the paper. What Boston paper, I have no idea. Anyway, it’s closing.”

As I always tell you and always quote from Goodfellas – “and there wasn’t nuthin’ that could be done about it.”

Summer 2014

We’d driven up and down Front Street the past two days and were careful to avert our eyes from The Quarterdeck’s former home. To look, we agreed, was tantamount to cramming our faces up against an ancient Cape Cod mirror and chanting “BLOODY MARY!” three times out loud. There was no telling what vengeful entity could burst forth from the small wooden building, covered in dripping wax left over from the movie voodoo doll made in likeness of Jack Nicholson and blaming us for the removal of history.

It is safe to say we would rather creep around the grounds of a haunted asylum than catch an accidental glimpse of an empty angry Quarterdeck. Instead we each took a deep breath and headed toward an area know as The Bridgewater Triangle.

According to paranormal researcher Loren Coleman, The Bridgewater Triangle is an area of Massachusetts about 200 square miles that belies a multitude of claims including – but not limited to – sightings of poltergeists, spectral phenomena, Big Foot, giant snakes, flying pterodactyl, orbs, balls of fire and such factual incidents such as cattle mutilations, “ritualistic murders committed by admitted Satanists, as well as a number of gangland murders and a number of suicides.” [I didn’t write that part in quotes but I know folks have made those claims]. Lizzie Borden also hailed from within the Triangle. She was a resident of Fall River.

The exact center of the Triangle as it has been mapped is Taunton State Hospital. Opened in 1854 to “take the overflow of nuts from Wustah” (as I was informed by a blunt local), Taunton’s architecture was the brainchild of American physician Thomas Story Kirkbride. By all accounts he attempted to become a mental health pioneer and based his Kirkbride Plan on an open, breezy standardized style for insane asylums that included expansive grounds and plenty of sunlight. Such was his moral belief that the insane could be completely cured, he married a former mental patient after his first wife died.

If you are interested, just a little research reveals stunning structures in the many hospitals that adapted the Kirkbride Plan across the country.

The doctor also created his “magic lantern” theory as soon as photography became less of a novelty and more of a mainstream activity. Using slide shows of positive images and exotic places, he believed viewing these images would assist the insane mind in returning to normalcy. I don’t know about that – but it does sound like fun. As long as it wasn’t some sort of A Clockwork Orange therapy. An advocate for the kinder approach to psychiatric treatment pursued by England’s mental health pioneer Samuel Tuke, Kirkbride did have his detractors and one patient even attempted to murder him.

Yet Taunton’s scandalous history began after the good doctor’s tenure. He died in 1883.

Lizzie “Forty-Whacks” Borden herself was held there in the early 1900s while authorities tried to unravel the mystery of how the hell she could have chopped up two people without a trace of blood on her person. Another noteworthy inmate was former psychotic nurse Jane Toppan. She murdered thirty-one people in her personal life and throughout her medical tenure at other facilities and after her capture in 1927 received life imprisonment at Taunton. Her crimes are so grisly and her joy at committing them so encompassing, I can’t repeat them. Look her up in detail if you need further proof that the dark heart of human nature beat long before there was a Charlie Manson.

But Jane may have gotten her just desserts after all. Taunton was no rest home.

The practice of carelessly committing community troublemakers, incorrigible youths and “mouthy” women began to rise and with it, the overcrowding of the very places meant to be spacious and roomy. Human warehousing opened the door to unsupervised “treatments” by unscrupulous staff members.

From the roar of the 1920s and well into the 1970s, rumors of treatment degeneration and the rise of mistreatment and abuse – again – ran rampant. Evidence shows certain staff members – including doctors and nurses – utilized patients as participants in either basement Satanic rituals and/or sex parties. Fact or fiction, the residents and staff agreed on one thing – sightings of a “shadow man” that crawled across the walls and watched the patients. The hospital was finally closed down in 1976 and by 1999, the main administration dome had collapsed and the buildings were in ruin. Only two structures remain.

We drove through the grounds another massive piece of land that now houses other facilities and discovered that the folks who manage the Taunton property must have learned a lesson or two once they realized that the property is listed across the Internet as one of the “most haunted” in New England. They erected a barbed wire fence and Jersey barriers around the building and a chain-link fence around those barricades.

Sissy hiked up her pants like a Saturday Night Live character, pulled her camera strap over her head and adjusted her shoes. “OK, let’s do this! I think we can get over the first fence and with any luck at all, someone ahead of us has cut a hole in the chain!”

“Ya. No.”

In a compete role reversal of our stations in life, Sissy wanted to jump the fence and I had to shut her down. It doesn’t usually happen that way.

It wasn’t fear. There was just too far of a distance to cover between the chains to the barbed wire without detection. No way I was ruining my Janis Joplin t-shirt while being tackled by a local-football-hero-turned cop. And although I can actually see the benefits of anyone in my immediate family sneaking into instead out of a psychiatric hospital, we had to be satisfied with a photo.

What is left of the original Taunton State Hospital.

“Handsome,” the Ghost Detector phone app announced. Yes, the building had to have been handsome back in its infancy but we got back into the car and drove across the grounds.

On a small hill, we found the other building. It appeared to be a storage structure in the final stages of disrepair. Locked tight, it made for some beautiful photos.

 

It was especially creepy that the on-property street sign indicated we were on Murray Road. You Gentle Readers may recall that Murray The Tailor was the fictional evil entity created by my nieces to scare my son with – invoking the image of a the mad sewing murderer who would be sure to appear if their younger cousin didn’t wait on them hand and foot while they were babysitting. It sucks to be the youngest sometimes.

 

The Ghost Detector was unimpressed, even when the sound of metal on metal grinding began on the exposed side of the building.

“Did you hear that?” I said quietly to Sissy as she snapped away. There was a pile of junk leaning against the building, but there wasn’t a reason it should be emitting a harsh grating sound. Yet it was.

“SISSY!” I hissed. ”Did you hear that?”

“HAAH?”

“I SAID…did you…”

Grind.

The app said nothing but Sissy said, “I heard THAT! IT’S MURRAY THE TAILOR!”

Oh for the love of God! He’s not real! That’s a family urban legend! IT’S BIGFOOT!

That was what I was thinking as we both ran for the car.

That’s all we saw of The Bridgewater Triangle.

As you have come to expect, we skipped away thus confirming we will never be able to apply for any ghost busting jobs in the future.

As we sped away, Sissy looked at me and sighed. “Now it’s the pilgrimage.”

“Why?” I resisted. “We’re not even pilgrims! Our people were potato farmers and gamblers and winemakers!” I just didn’t want to see that final empty building.

“This is New England, almost everyone comes from potatoes,” Sissy said sternly. “We must take the pilgrimage. It’s our destiny.”

“Self-exorcism,” I said under my breath. “You say potato, I say exorcism. And I need a donut.”

We got back on the highway resigned to our fate. The only ghosts we really needed to visit in order to conclude our pilgrimage were those waiting for us at the former Quarterdeck.

I thought about Cher’s sculptress character. Along with her friends, desperate to rid themselves of Nicholson’s devilish Darrell, she formed a wax voodoo doll to exorcism the demon. I wondered, is it just a little late in the season for that?

The car headed toward Scituate Harbor. And – after six months of grieving our lost childhood touchstone – some shocking news.

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HAUNTED, part 2: Whattya Gotta Do To Get Haunted Around Here?

September 21, 2014

An Afternoon In 2014

“It’s You People, you know!” My sister is cheerfully exasperated. “You’ve ruined this place! Even the Ghost Detector app said, ‘BORING!’”

She must be exasperated if she’s using our family’s biggest insult. In the general population, “You People” is still mostly thought of as a vague racial slur. In my family it is used in place of the very long sentence, “If it weren’t for you/some-people-you-know having done something or other, things would be different right this damn second and so now I must shame you.”

Saying “You People” expends much less energy for utilization should a massive family brawl break out later on in the conversation.

“Whattya mean?” I say as I rummage through the back seat. There has to be something to eat.

Sissy raises her palms. “The movies. There’s something that is inherently creepy or mysterious about certain places and then show business comes along and takes it to a much higher level. It sort of wipes away the original.”

Notebooks, a broken umbrella (how could we have broken an umbrella we have owned for less than a day?) and rocks from the beach despite the fact I vaguely recall a posted sign that read, “Do Not Take Rocks From The Beach.” Stingy New Englanders. They’ve got, like, a million rocks.

“Do you agree with me? That Hollywood dilutes or distorts things?” my sister asks as I triumphantly grasp the bag holding the remaining pumpkin donut I managed to buy at the Dunkin’ just past the Meat Raffle. I twist back into my seat and take a bite. Now I can respond to my sister.

“Ohybennhkasudiayigifyyiwsetman?”

Sissy shakes her head and hands me a Diet Coke so I can float the gooey mass down my throat.

Sigh. That is so good. I answer again. “Oh, I get it. You mean like Mae West was a man?”

Sissy’s jaw drops. “Mae West was a man? Mom used to say that all the time!”

It was Rachel Welch who added fuel to the persistent urban legend that sex bomb actress Mae West was really a man. As the story goes, the busty blonde actress supposedly passed away and in order to keep folks to come up and see her sometime, her brother reprised her role well into the 1980s with one tiny addition. An Adam’s apple.

“I’ve never believed that,” I say as I ingest the rest of the donut. “I think she was just jealous. She knew she could never be Barbarella and it ate her up.”

Sissy stares at me. “Mom? Mom wanted to be Barbarella?”

“What’s wrong with you? Not Mom, Rachel Welch. She didn’t get to be in that French Italian film and be all Madonna-looking and just got to be a cavewoman instead.”

“Then why didn’t Rachel Welch say Jane Fonda was a man?” Sissy demands.

I sigh. “Because we’ve seen her naked. She’s definitely not a man. But I get what you are saying.”

Earlier

After leaving the vast expanse of Fernald, Sissy and I navigate to a surprise haunted area that popped up in our IntraNecksearch.

The Met in Waltham.

The Met in Massachusetts is nothing like The Met in New York.

2010 New York City

The Big Apple’s Metropolitan Opera House is the largest classical music organization in North America. Seating for almost four thousand and standing room only areas for another two hundred. Paintings by the artist Marc Chagall hang in the lobby and the interior is a breathtaking masterpiece of mid-century modern architecture.

In 2010, my dear friend and art patron Suzanne invited me to join her at The Met to enjoy Vittorio Grigolo starring La Bohème.I was in New York to meet a book agent and it was an incredible offer for me. The closest I had ever come to an opera was ringside tickets at the World Wrestling Federation. Now known as the WWE, I’ve always considered it the opera of true Americana and lest my snobbier film friends protest; for all of us who work on action TV shows and movies, these fans are the people who actually pay our salaries and drive up our ratings. God bless them.

I will always believe it was true fate – that invitation to The Met. La Bohème is the same opera Cher’s character attends in Moonstruck. When I got out of the taxi that night in New York and looked up at Lincoln Center, I felt like a glamorous (albeit chubby) Cher, all dressed up and coiffed so no one knew it was really just me. The night was a magic act of transformation. Just as some snobby film folks may feel about wresting, such was my pre-conceived attitude about the opera. I am proud to say I was wrong. I loved every moment of the performance, panicking as it came to an end because I wanted it to go on forever. Backstage Suzanne introduced to Vittorio Grigolo and it was my pleasure to meet him and perhaps his pleasure to have converted a townie to opera. The New York Met is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

2014

So is the Waltham Met, but it’s an experience that I doubt anyone enjoyed.

In 1930, two days before Halloween, the Metropolitan Hospital threw open its doors and “invited” a thousand patients with varying degrees of afflictions both physical and mental to take up residence. Nicknamed ”The Hospital of Seven Teeth” and called “The Met” in accordance with geographical tradition of shortening everything to the nth degree, the hospital was closely associated in practice and proximity with The Fernald School for the Feebleminded. The two properties even shared a dumping ground cemetery with few marked graves. As you may recall from my last blog, the child residents of Fernald – many of average or better intelligence – were either abandoned or deemed incorrigible were subjected to physical, sexual and emotional abuse, physical torture, sexual humiliation and “therapy” in the form of experiments.

The Met certainly has enough of its own diabolical history to land on any list of haunted locations in the state of HOLY-CHRIST-WHAT-WERE-WE-THINKIN’-A-CHUSETTS and the reason for the famous nickname has nothing to do with the quality of any dentistry practiced at the hospital. In 1978 there was a grisly patient-on-patient murder. Mild-mannered Melvin Wilson got hold of a hatchet, dismembered fellow resident Anne Marie Davee and studiously buried her parts across the grounds after saving seven of her teeth as souvenirs.

Only one original building remains on the grounds and sits within view of the clusters of brand lush new condominiums that popped up after the renovation of the property (and after construction workers accidentally unearthed even more unmarked graves in 2006). No doubt a few fancy digs rest above the still-missing pieces of Miss Davee.

The rumored underground tunnels that moved patients from one building to another have been permanently sealed. At least, that’s what the state government insists. Teenage kids still roam the footpaths and bike trails looking to discover a capped opening.

Back To Earlier

For folks interested in the national pastime of creating amazing architectural structures and then abandoning them, The Metropolitan Hospital Administration Building in Waltham, Massachusetts certainly is a monument.

The area directly around the building boasts a lack of NO TRESPASSING signs – we look as we drive in as to not end up meeting the same police officer from our last haunted location. At first glance, it is creepy. It reminds me slightly of the fictional, foreboding Collinwood from the old Dark Shadows TV series.

 

Sissy grabs her camera and I click on the Ghost Detector Pro (Pro – as in – we aren’t just foolin’ around heah!) app. It immediately begins clicking away; all its circles and meters whirling and searching.

This “for entertainment purposes only” application has brought us many hours of delight and horror. The disembodied voice announces random names and phrases as it searches your environment using ”your mobile device sensors to detect sources of variable magnetic emissions. Which could indicate us the presence of some kind of paranormal activity.” The word or name it “feels” pops up so you can also read it. It will also scream out, “GHOST DETECTED!” and force your camera to take an immediate picture when it detects an entity. I’ve had results ranging from floating orbs to huge blind white spots in the ensuing pictures and the app is also fond of yelling out, “JESSICA!” This has become a source a delight for my grown niece Baby J. “See? I’m everywhere!” she swears from Los Angeles.

“Take that off your phone right now!” my friend and fellow New England transplant Alison Troy bellowed into her cell when I told her I had downloaded the thing. “You’re just inviting bad things to come in to your life!”

“Hmm,” I grunted. “Seems they don’t need an invitation.”

“Exactly my point,” she insisted. “Just ask yourself – aren’t things bad enough as it is?”

Apparently not.

Sissy and I started to use the app at our first haunted location but were instead overcome with our own feelings and left the phone silent. The Met seemed a good place to let ‘er rip.

“BORING,” the app yawns as we round the corner of the building to the entrance. It takes us a few minutes to catch up with the Ghost Detector Pro. Sissy points upward and laughs.

 

PEACE LOVE AND ICE CREAM STONERS! DOH!

The graffiti is more inviting than foreboding. I feel our ghost app is secretly shaking its electronic head in disgust but we walk gingerly up the steps. The door is missing all of the locks that appear to have been installed over the years and is cracked open. I hesitate and put a finger to my lips so Sissy won’t talk. I listen for the sounds of any cannibals, murderous wanderers or crazed dentists.

“DISMAL!” the ghost app screams in a tone usually reserved for young children whining, “Can we please GO now? Gawdddd I am sooooo bored!”

“Shut up!” I growl at my phone.

The phone yells back. “RUDE!”

Sissy screams with laughter behind me. “OH MY GOD! Do NOT make me wet my pants!!!!”

“It’s not me! It’s the damn ghostbuster!”

She plops down on the steps and tries to catch her breath. “Even better!”

Now all killers have been altered to us so I shrug and swing the door open and shed sunlight into the entrance. Sissy peers around me. We jump back at the written warning. I drop my phone and it bounces without complaint.

 

Then we start to look around. It does appear a dilapidated movie set enhanced by teenage creativity, local slang and poor spelling. A messy swastika, NO RETURN! DEATH THIS WAY! and the ever-popular, grammatically painful townie insult, YOUR A QUEEH! make us snigger.

The two doors that open into the actually building are shaky wood with jagged pieces of remaining glass. Deeper inside it is dark and dank and as we shine our phone flashlights, Sissy says, “Someone shot something in here. It just looks like one of your film jobs.” We take a few cautious steps further and both cover our mouths. I don’t know if my sister detects a bad odor but I am just protecting my teeth against any ghost with a pair of real pliers.

The air changes and it feels all wrong in a very human way. What had we been thinking? Two women wandering alone and unarmed into an abandoned structure ripe for malfeasance. I felt no eerie unseen forms or vengeful spirits. A slight rustle, maybe. Rodents or rabid criminals? I don’t want to stick around to meet what surely is flesh and blood (and hair).

I’m not sure if using a Ouija board, watching The Exorcist or letting your phone ghost-bust are things that invite evil. But I’m damn sure isolated crumbling structures situated away from prying eyes do. Why do I keep thinking about that?

1970s

My first car was crammed with my girlfriends as we sped down the highway in my first car. It was a used white 442 with red interior that I would wreck a month later – without anyone injured, thank God. We were headed toward a church sleepover.

No, we weren’t.

We had snuck off to see The Rolling Stones three hours away. In those days, you camped out all night outside the stadium to jostle for general admission in the morning. Meatloaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light pumped from the radio and the green of the real dashboard filled the car with an eerie glow as we sang along. It was a thrilling moment in time. For a few seconds we were immortal.

‘OH MY GAWD I GOTTA PEE!” Mary Keds screamed. Mary Keds was named Mary and wore Keds.

Neesie rolled her eyes. “Again?” Mary Keds had a very weak bladder.

“Rest stop!” Pammy drawled and pointed. “Yank on over!”

I guided the car into the dimly lit spot. Ted Bundy had recently been recaptured and according to the logic of the young, we had nothing to fear from the squatty structure. We tumbled out of the car into the ladies room, following Mary Keds’ lead. If we had to stop again, it would be doubtful we’d manage to secure a super spot in the camp line.

As we exited the bathroom and headed back to the car, I had my keys in my hand as my father had always sternly insisted. “Be ready!” Twenty or so yards from the safety of the ignition, we heard a guttural roar behind us. A large man rounded the corner of the concrete building. Sweating, he was a middle-aged monster, shirt open and flapping. He had a heavy pipe in his hand.

“Come here, you bitches. You whores! I AM GONNA TO CRUSH YOUR LITTLE HEADS IN!”

That’s how it happens. That fast. We froze with all four heads cocked to the side. For a beat.

“RUN!!” Pammy screamed. We grabbed at each other, taking an instant inventory and flashed forward. The man was so close we could hear his footfalls crunch dried palm leaves on the ground. I slammed the key into the lock and turned. The girls piled through front seat without bothering with the back doors. I yanked the door shut just as the man reached us and swung the pipe. “DIE! DIE! DIE!”

As I hit the gas, Pammy calmly reached over and spun the steering wheel, knocking the man off his feet. “Pedal to the metal, Sis!” But she didn’t have to tell me. We roared out of the lot even as the man jumped up and tried to chase us on foot. In the mirror, I could see his face was a mask of rage.

Shaking and crying, we managed to put five miles behind us before we pulled into a brightly shining shopping center with an inviting IHOP, the International House of Pancakes. We were scared beyond any threshold we could imagine. Three of us were anyway. Neesie just wanted to eat. There was also a big issue on the table next to Neesie’s stacks of buttermilk pancakes. If we called the police, we would surely be outed for not being at church camp. But if we didn’t call, the next group of girls might not be so lucky.

“Don’t tell!” Mary Keds protested. “He’ll find us and kill us!”

Neesie shoveled pancakes two at a time but still managed to sputter, “Shut up, stupid!” and splash everyone with syrup. We debated for about ten minutes. A police officer pulled up in the parking lot and it was a sign – we all agreed. We left money on the table and shuffled outside and told him our story. No sense in dining and dashing into the arms of a waiting police officer.

I was surprised when the cop didn’t bat an eye. “I know just where you mean,” he said even as he was shouting into his radio. “You kids stay tight here! I’ll come back and get your statements.” He skidded out of the lot, siren blaring.

Pammy, Mary Keds and Neesie looked at me.

“We gotta go sit back down,” Mary Keds demanded.

“We could get dessert,” Neesie offered.

“We ain’t gonna make that show and we’ll have to go to church camp and confess all our sins and such…” Pammy grinned.

I yanked the keys from my pocket. Pammy war-whooped.

“Oh shit, no dessert!” Neesie trudged behind me.

“But, but, the policeman said…” Mary squealed.

“GET IN THE CAR!” The rest of us yelled.

“We done our civic duty, Mary!” Pam shoved her into the backseat. “God is so pleased He wants us to get front row seats!”

Pammy rode shotgun. She turned to me as I revved the engine. “Pedal to the metal, Sis!”

So maybe that’s why.

2014

I turn to my sister but before I can suggest we take off, the ghost app announces it for me. “SCREW” the app says seriously and writes in red for emphasis. In our neck of the woods, that is not an invitation for sexual congress. It means, “Get the hell out of here! Go SCREW!”

 

And so screw we do. We run to the car after carefully closing the door to The Met Admin Building behind us. We are nothing if not polite guests.

Later In The Car

“So I see your point, someone shot there and sort of wiped it clean.” I say. “But what it left in place of ghosts was that sort of Boogeyman Halloween fear. You know what I mean? It looks like a movie set, so it make you think about a really horrifying movie.”

Sissy nods. “Yes, life could definitely imitate art inside that building.”

I make a creepy voice. “It looks like the set of The Exorcist even.” It did not at all, but she’s never seen the movie.

My sister blanches a bit as she yanks out the notebook. “Does not! I saw the preview. Either way – pedal to the metal, Sis! And,” she deflects, “let’s talk about whether or not Mom really wanted to be Barbarella.”

One of our last two stops will be a building we will realize is truly haunted. By us. And we will accept the golden opportunity to be our own exorcists.

I just wish we’d thought to pick up two Barbarella costumes and the soundtrack from La Bohème.

Author’s note: Unlike the Waltham Met, the New York Met frowns on photography, but hell…they let you take photos at pro wrestling, so here’s my sole picture – no flash – to always remind me that for one night in my life, no one told me to “Snap out of it!”

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HAUNTED, part 1: Carrying Our Ghosts

September 19, 2014

2014

“OK ladies, out of the cah!” The Massachusetts State Trooper shakes his head and points at us.

“Oh my,” stage-whispers my sister. “Apparently he doesn’t know who you are, Miss FancyPants.”

Moments Earlier

“Did ya or did ya not see the NO TRESPASSIN’ signs all ovah the place?” The young cop demands as he leans into the window. From inside the rental car I can feel Sissy cringe. She’s a lawyer, as you know. And she didn’t see the signs, as I know. She was just so damn excited about our investigation that her tunnel vision kicked in. You know, that specialized tunnel vision when every kid in the house is screaming and throwing various items, a plate shatters, the phone rings and you just keep watchingDancing With The Stars because the mess will still be there but you may only have one chance to see David Hasselhoff to do the cha-cha?

No doubt now she is terribly embarrassed because she always follows the letter of the law down to its purest form.

So do I. Well, sort of. I follow the law but automatically make allowances using an unwritten clause called CINEMATIC IMMUNITY.

“That’s not a law,” Sissy hisses. “It’s not even a thing!”

“Oh it may not be a law, but it sure is a thing,” I whisper back.

Author’s Note: Taken broadly, the entertainment and news outlets would say that “cinematic immunity” is a tool used by the rich and famous to avoid prosecution for crimes everyday people would be prosecuted for in a court of law. Or to disregard industry safety laws and fair treatment of employees. That is not a “thing” I subscribe to, Gentle Readers. Certainly I could pontificate on that for hours, but I won’t. We know the lack of balance in society when it comes to celebrity, money and power in politics, entertainment and professional sports versus the rest of us. Especially of late in small urban communities and the vast world of the NFL. 

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My little bit of perceived CINEMATIC IMMUNITY is the simple fact that yes, I saw the signs and continued driving right onto the property. It never dawned on me that I was excluded from access. After all, I was there to observe, investigate and report. Not to vandalize anything.

“Why yes, Officer. I did see the signs. But I didn’t think it meant me.”

He sighed and cracked his neck. “OK ladies, out of the cah!”

Even Earlier

You Readers know my family has a strong interest in the paranormal. Mom became a Spiritualist after being booted unceremoniously out of the Catholic Church. Mostly every member of our tribe has experienced a visitation or outrageous premonition that invariably unfolded in truth. Our adage about belief in entities that cannot be seen (including God) goes…just because you’ve never seen a million dollars in cash is not proof that it doesn’t actually exist.

We love a good haunting.

My earlier blog entries depict strange events in our lives before and after our mother’s passing. So I guess on one gloomy Scituate morning when the fog hung heavy in an foolhardy attempt to hold off the rain and Sissy and I ate leftover lobster, it seemed natural for us to pack up our notebooks, cameras and – I’d like to remind her here – not nearly enough snacks – and head out to parts unknown. Haunted New England. Over the breakfast table I had scrolled through what Mom once called the IntraNeck looking for sites within our proximity to add to our notebook. The Fernald School popped up first. One of New England’s “Most Haunted” Asylums. It seemed vaguely familiar – the name I mean. I shrugged and turned the laptop toward Sissy. “This looks haunted.”

My sister nearly dropped her coffee cup as she stared into the screen. “Oh my God!”

Oh good, she seemed excited. Hurrah for me for finding something she would like!

“This is the site of the American Eugenics movement! You remember my paper on Eugenics!!”

Uh oh. This is not good.

Sissy was vibrating. “I cannot believe this! We must go here first! I just want to drive by! You will be glad we went!”

GLAD WE WENT? Holy cow!

My sister wrote her law school thesis (or what Nana would have called her “Big Repoht”) on the history of forced sterilization by self-appointed authorities over individuals deemed “idiotic or feeble-minded” – insane – in an effort to take control of their money, property or to just shut them up if they seemed incorrigible. In this manner they disposed of unwanted wives and also procured innocents for their mental “experiments.”

I’ve minimized her well-received thesis, I think, and strongly do not want to do that. It took years of research and planning but you know I will never be capable of explaining the subject. Suffice to say it stands a brilliant legal expose of one group physically and medically overpowering another on a permanent basis. And all I really know about Eugenics is that it is the belief that “negative” qualities in those deemed disabled or “feeble-minded” can be sifted out of the next generation with forced breeding. Think Hitler’s master race.

Sissy leapt from her chair and filled our tattered beach bag with our investigation tools. Phones, cameras, composition books and again I repeat – no snacks – before she runs upstairs to change into marching around messy Massachusetts clothes.

I already had on my stomping outfit of jeans and Janis Joplin t-shirt so I took that time to figure out how NOT to go this haunted location. I now remembered the stories. Although the heyday of the America Eugenics movement was during the 1920s and 1930s, the dark secrets of this particular American child concentration camp didn’t come to light until the seventies.

I’ve been to haunted places. Lizzie Borden’s house (really small). The Ambassador Hotel (I refused to set foot in the kitchen). The Versace Mansion (damn it is colorful). I’ve walked quietly through the Friends Cemetery in Worcester. Also known as Spider Gates due to the intricate design in the wrought iron fence, Friends is a lovely isolated spot that has somehow morphed into the “Eighth Ring Of Hell” due to paranormal events real and imagined. The most frightening part of visiting Spider Gates is that you must park near the woods and tromp a good half mile in on foot. Any random faux Satanist, real meth head or crazed killer could be lurking in the forest where no one can hear you scream. At any rate, I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. I follow a simple rule when visiting these locations. Don’t touch, don’t laugh, do no harm and for the love of God – don’t holler out, “If you are really a ghost, SHOW YOURSELF!!!”

Plus, I carry so many of my own ghosts along with me, there’s hardly room for any spiritual hitchhikers. My own mother’s ghost is a billboard.

Sissy – the girl who to this day refuses to watch The Exorcist – bounded down the stairs in her stylish, sensible attire. She was beaming with an-ti-ci-(wait for it)-pation. And why shouldn’t she be? This is the culmination of her excruciatingly hard work to further expose a historic shame. She has no salacious interest. My sister is a researcher and fact finder.

I like to fancy myself a fact finder as well, but unfortunately any facts I might uncover could only end up in the National Enquirer (but never, ever will). I think of all the adventures Sissy has joined me on. She’s been splattered with fake blood at The Evil Dead: The Live Musical and suffered teetotaling through countless drunken film business wrap parties – the kind of parties that beg for sedatives. Super Bowls, carnivals with throw-uppy rides, Godzilla movies, and five decades of The Three Stooges. Always cheerful and along for what I insist will be a fun ride. The road trip was on. We piled into the car with all of our junk. Antibiotic tattoo cream, hand wipes, pens, Sharpies, books, bags.

No one remembered the snacks. Again, it bears repeating.

Stroll Around The Grounds Until You Feel At Home

So many New England maps feed from highways into neighborhoods that swerve down one-way streets and unmarked paths; I find it as hard to get around as Siri. The electronic iPhone voice finally resorted to pitching out gibberish. “Turn right, turn left, turn right, next left!” We finally found our way to the Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center (formerly known upon its inception in 1848 as the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded).

There are scores of articles to be found about the one hundred and eighty-six acres of Fernald. They are not for the squeamish, but certainly for students of psychiatric history and its missteps. The only thing I will write is that in 1995 class-action suit resulted in a 1998 District court decision awarding the victims a $1.85 million settlement from MIT and Quaker Oats. This was handed down after it was revealed that from 1946 to 1953 young male patients at Fernald were given varying amounts of doctored foods to test levels of radioactive calcium under the guise of belonging to a “science club.” That’s the tip of the iceberg of what happened at this facility for decades.

My stomach ached for the whole ride.

I drove the rental car right through the front entrance and past the NO (and apparently they meant it) TRESPASSING signs. I wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. The grounds were well-manicured and the sidewalks were sparsely dotted with pedestrians. The Center is open on a limited basis and apparently houses some teaching facilities.

No way I was getting out of the car.

We found our way so far into the property that we eventually rolled into an area of clustered abandoned buildings. Small worn dormitories squatted defiantly under the darkening skies. Several with overgrown weeds and vines, some with broken windows or wide open doors banging casually in the slight wind.

I wasn’t going to get out of the car.

Sissy looked at me. I looked back. Then we said a little prayer. It went something like this. “Dear Ones, forgive our visit. We’re not here to disrupt or disturb. Just to pass through your world so we may know more about all of you [I pointed at my sister while her eyes were closed to indicate to the spirits SHE was the researcher an I just the lowly film business carny and transpo girl for the day] and wish you eternal peace and blessings.”

Holy cow! The snake in my stomach suddenly vanished. No kidding. That usually only happens when we have snacks. I cautiously opened one eye. My sister was already out of the car with her camera and her reference notebook, talking to no one. “Yes, yes. I now what this building is. I can see that.” She was deep in her own thesis again.

So I got out of the car.

We traveled the back roads of the property, stopping at each cluster of buildings. I was overcome by the silence, the lack of graffiti coupled with casual neglect. Sissy wandered along with her notes as I kept her in my eye line. Then I sat down on a bench and wept.

Wept? You’re laughing, Gentle Reader, as you alone know I would normally write – I fuckin’ bawled. Wept isn’t in my general vernacular dictionary. But I did. I wept because I wasn’t afraid. No ghosts taunted me and the wind didn’t howl. The storm-heavy clouds held the rain captive. It was almost as if I was meant to be here on this bench to pay my respects to the scores of children relegated to such a place through no fault of their own. The grass whispered as perhaps my ghosts mingled with the residents. I felt I could hear faint chatter, hear my mother’s voice intermingling with that of children. And my grandfather who lived his whole life just to be around kids. It could have just been the wind but I don’t think so.

Across the small field I watched my sister, my best friend and the only person who has always forgiven me my trespasses. She always stuck by me and up for me against everything reasonable – even against our parents. She is my champion, something our mother never had.

A few days earlier, Sissy and I decided to permanently honor our mother in an indelible way. Since her passing Christmas Eve we had grappled over what would be best. While in Salem, the home of financial Eugenics if you really read the history of why so many people were executed, we procured matching tattoos. Because she’s a lawyer, she chose a body spot that could be covered if needed but my wacky profession coupled with reaching the ripe old age of “SO-DON’T-LOOK-IF-YA-DON’T LIKE-IT!” placed mine on my left forearm. I need to see it every day.

It is a drawing. One of the original selfies from seventy-two years ago. My mother carefully crayoned a picture of herself for a school assignment and proudly signed it. I found it among her papers after she died. I chose my spot so my mother will know for eternity that finally – we are her champions.

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It’s a branding so large and immediately obvious that even the tough townie women of Scituate nod approvingly, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. “Ya. You got balls, honey. BIG ones.”

On the bench, I looked down at my healing tattoo. The angry red outline the flesh always displays to combat its indignity was gone. The little Margo (“The Flower Girl” as the drawing is named) glows happily under the clouds. She seems to dance in the fading light. The location of so much suffering is – for a few moments – a place of peace and calm. All around me, spirits are visiting. My sister was right. I am so glad that we made this trip.

In the distance, I saw a statie – a state cop – winding toward us. “Pardon me,” I said to my mother and the children. I whistled loudly to Sissy. “We gotta go!” She cupped her ear and shook her head. Our children have made us partially deaf, I think. I hated to do it. I hated to interrupt whatever is going on in the world around me, but I had no choice.

“HEY DUMDUM! GET IN THE CAHHH! HEAH COMES THE COPS!”

That got her attention and she sprinted toward the rental.

And Then.

After some fancy verbal footwork, insisting we had I.D. somewhere in the messy car and the young cop’s realization that we truly meant to do no harm, the situation calmed down.

“Lemme tell you girls a little story,” he began. “See, this place still has about nine or so residents living here.”

Even after the scandals, the horror and the court battles, Fernald had patients still residing in a small portion of the facility. By early 2000 and after the “clean up” many buildings on site had been classified on the U.S. List Of Historic Places. The original building was in fact an old Victoria mansion. In addition, about a hundred and fifty residents were receiving professional acre and when the state moved to finally shut it down, the residents and their relatives mounted a lawsuit claiming it would be much too distressing to relocate them. The lawsuits were defeated, except for two still active in the court process. Fernald has been a thorn in the side of both sides of the political aisle -from Governor Mitt Romney to Governor Deval Patrick.

The cop continued. “So last month, I catch a kid sneaking in here, like you girls. With a camera, like you girls. But he wasn’t taking no pictures of the buildings for some repoht.” He leaned closer to us, his face twisted. “He was trying to take a picture of one of the…”

He struggled for the word. I know what he wanted to say. A term utilized for decades, even by the government and still in use geographically. Retarded.

“Disabled people?” Sissy offered helpfully.

“Ya!” He looked like we felt. Sickened and trying not to cry. Both Sissy and I covered our mouths with a hand.

“No suh.” I shook my head and uttered a geographically correct response.

“Ya suh!” He nodded and blurted out another. “Can ya imagine?”

The incident was so distasteful, so completely horrifying to the young officer that he charged the kid not only with criminal trespass but the added charge of sexual abuse as the victim was not fully clothed.

“The sex charge didn’t stick, but that’s what I think anyway. You can’t be taking pictures of someone like that who don’t know any better to cover up.”

Indeed. He was right. He told us another tale of savage youths looking to slaughter a deer on the property. “Got them too.”

“I am sorry, we are sorry,” I said. “If you show us to the nearest entrance, we will leave immediately.” The visit was over. We knew it and the spirits knew it. And I knew for sure at that moment they were glad for our calm and peaceful visit.

The cop nodded and noticed our license plate. “Hey what are you girls doing here all the way from Maryland?”

I laughed. “It’s a rental. We’re from Miami.”

The officer threw his head back and howled joyfully. “Miami? Oh for chrissakes! You shoulda said that from the staht! No wondah! All the nuts come from Florida!”

Indeed they do, it seems.

Before he led us out, he asked for a favor. “Can ya not put those pictures on the Internet? I’m not gonna ask you to delete ‘em. Just please don’t upload. See, people are always lookin’ for another way to sneak in here and my job is to protect the residents.”

We weren’t interested in the legalities of whether or not he had the law on his side if he had asked us to delete the photos. We had no interest in being the cause of more pain at Fernald. We agreed.

He waved us on and goodbye.

I drove as Sissy consulted our notebook of INTERESTING HAUNTED PLACES. The next closest place was the Metfern Cemetery.

Sissy read from the book. “There are about 300 graves. Most of the graves are identified only by numbered gravestones. A “P” prefix is used for Protestant, a “C” prefix is used for Catholic. There are only four graves marked with proper names.”

“Who’s buried there?” I asked as I scanned for food. There had only been one sign for two miles.

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Certainly enticing in a creepy New England sort of way but I’d never make it to Saturday. My stomach growled.

She peered into the book. “Active from 1947 to 1979, residents of The Fernald School For The…”

My stomach stopped mid-rumble. Oh.

Sissy paused and flipped the pages. “We’re not going there.”

And we did not. Because we’d had our one allowed visit. Anything else would be wrong. It started to rain and Sissy navigated the four us toward food to shore us up for our next adventure. Me, my sister and the two tattoos of a little girl. One of the ghosts we carry.

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Author’s Note: The photo at the top of this blog is not the Fernald School. It is another haunting stop I’ll tell you about. The black and white just above this note is on the Fernald grounds. I have carefully cropped it so the location cannot be discovered. Nor is it near any access points. I do hope the officer will forgive me. I just wanted you to see it.

By the way, I just read that in May of this year, Massachusetts state officials approved a deal for the city of Waltham to buy the Fernald property for the relatively low price of 3.7 million dollars. The sale still has legal rubber stamps to acquire and will not go through until after the appeals of the final residents are exhausted.

There are several options being presented as to how the property will be utilized. A cemetery, parks and walking trails and my least favorite.

A television and movie studio.

I wish I could vote on this. I’d go for the cemetery, the park AND the walking trails. I would visit whenever I am up north. But I promise you this, Gentle Readers. If they make it into a studio, I will never shoot there. Ever.

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Back On My Route Like Harriet The Spy

September 15, 2014

1970′s

The man swinging the guitar over his head as he runs toward me is not wearing pants. Geez willya lookit that, I think to myself.

It’s the end of summer and I’m in the hospital. I had a car accident that resulted with my boyfriend’s Toyota ass end up in a ditch right off the main drag. I had two kneecaps torn down to the bone.

Right after the wreck and my arrival at the hospital, my father insisted that the hospital immediately bring in a plastic surgeon to do the final closing of my messy knees. Thank God, because although the faint scars are still visible all these years later, I would have looked like a roadmap without that extra help.

My recovery was not without the calamity you have come to expect from me. One night a gentleman who had arrived involuntarily at the same hospital slipped out of his ward, grabbed an abandoned guitar from the patients’ lounge and began to lope through the hallways announcing that he was indeed The Lizard King. Being a lizard, it stands to reason he would not bother with slacks or even a worn set of drawstring pajamas.

As I look back, it was probably my fault. Because even back then I was Miss Fancypants, my father insisted on a private room. The nurses kept the patient room doors closed for privacy – the one thing I dreaded the most. There was only one private room available the day I came in and it was in the first ward off the emergency room. I was reading two books a day, listening to the same songs on the small radio, sick of watching the three available TV stations and had no one to talk to about life. By the third day, I found privacy and privilege overrated. The halls were teeming with activity. The day heat of South Florida gave rise to what the nurses called The Every Night Knife and Gun Club as the sun set.

I begged Joey, the hippy orderly on the night shift, to prop my door open and he shoved a doorstop in the small crack of the door jam so I had a front row seat to the revolving mayhem. Stretchers and crash carts slammed past each other, patients howled and families bellowed. Bewildered heads popped in and out of my door; parents asking if I knew what room so-and-so might be in or had I heard anything about someone else’s status. Only age demands you understand the difference between the screams of anger and the wails of grief. I feel guilty now to recall it was one dazzlingly lurid big drive-in movie to me at the time. But that’s the way it was that late summer, way before I became used to wandering the halls of a hospital at night like a visiting zombie myself.

I heard the slappy footfalls and sat up in bed. It only takes one night in a hospital to be able to identify the walking cadence of a nurse from an orderly, a visitor from a security guard. This sound was a locomotive wearing paper shoes barreling up the track. In seconds the conductor appeared in my doorway.

If you, Gentle Reader, are old enough to recall the wildly popular TV 70′s show Taxi, then this fellow was the character Reverend Jim ”Iggy” Ignatowski. If you move up a decade or so later, think a much greasier Doc Brown from Back To The Future. For the rest of you, one quick Google search using the words “Nick Nolte’s Mugshot” will give you the instant gratification of knowing exactly what I was seeing that night.

He is under six feet but seems twice as tall. His age is ageless, like any good horror film villain. His scrawny chest heaves in and out of his unbuttoned yellow hospital top and he gnashes his teeth. Gnashes is an oft-misunderstood and therefore seldom used word but he truly is gnashing them. Back and forth as if attempting to unhinge his jaw and launch his mouth over my head like a baby alligator or tiny snake that the tabloids insist Floridians keep flushing down toilets and are even at this moment growing to gargantuan proportions in the sewers systems – just waiting for the opportunity to revolt against their former flushers!

‘I AM THE LIZARD KING!” he screams.

“I DIDN’T FLUSH YOU!” I scream back.

The Lizard King pauses, cocks his head and makes a sound like Scooby-Do. Huh? Then raises the guitar over his head as he rushes at me.

“NOW YOU DIE!”

In one second, I see the strings on the guitar are all broken and loose. They rainbow-glitter in the light of the television tube. I see he has left his pants behind. Geez willya lookit that, I think to myself. My mind stays in the bed as my body leaps up. Stitches stretch and pop and then I hear a harsh metallic clang. The sound of metal hitting bone.

2014

Patrice leans over her register at the small cafe inside Target, her round ebony face serious. “So then what happened? Your kneecaps bust off on account of metal plates snappin’?”

I shake my head as I swipe my debit card in anticipation of my hot-dog-no-roll and Diet Coke. “Naw, it was hippy Joey. The orderly? He rushed in and whacked that psycho across the noggin with a bedpan!”

Patrice throws her head back and laughs so loud even the cashiers turn to look in our direction.

It has been a long, sometimes painful summer. With a lack of productions shooting to sustain an entire film community, my closest tribal members have flung themselves to the wind and floated away from Miami for a time, cruising above the national cinema scene. I remain as the keeper of our flame – or at least that’s the story I’m sticking to for now.

I didn’t blog in August because I could not think of anything to write that you may actually want to read. But now I am back. I am back as soon our year together will be complete. The Year Without Mum will have passed its anniversary. I have so much more to tell you. So I am back here. And in order to commune with my secret-other tribe, I have finally returned to what my most-of-the-time boss Terry Miller deems my “ROUTE.”

In between seasons shooting Burn Notice he would call periodically to “see how you’re doing.” I believe that was his polite euphemism for what he secretly called “checking to make sure you are not in some sort of trouble, in jail for some obscure protest, in a tattoo parlor or a free-falling catastrophe I will definitely hear about and will make me very, very nervous.”

“Heywhattayadoin?” He started every conversation like a Florida Tony Soprano. From Florida he began our tenure with no accent at all. Now after working so many years with New England and New York tongues, he often pronounces words just like the rest of us.

“Ya,” I’d answer. “You know, nuthin’.” This would indicate I was behaving like a normal citizen.

“Ya. You on your ROUTE?”

“Ya. On my ROUTE.”

My ROUTE, an all capitalized moniker, is Terry calls what I do on my days off. This involves an intricate map of driving stops in a three square mile radius of my house, conversing with my various regulars as I run errands. There is much news and information to be gleaned along the way. As the years passed, the term has inserted itself into the vernacular of almost everyone I know. Even my mother referred to my daily wanderings as my ROUTE.

Patrice is one of the best parts of my ROUTE. She runs the Target cafe attached to the Target Starbucks. We both battle our weight and snicker at the coffee customers and their long, complicated drink orders. We became friends after my fifth trip for the bread-less hot dog. I’d buy my lunch and then lean against the condiment stand to consume it while I people watched. One afternoon she followed me.

“Girl, you from New Jersey?”

I turned around and said, “No, Boston. Why?”

She brushed off her apron and grinned. “‘Cos you don’t never sit down and you eat like you standing on the Boardwalk. Plus your hair is sticking way up. And I don’t know why you get a hut dog with no bread because I know you gonna eat twenty Double Stuff Oreos when you get home!”

I almost choked laughing because she was right on all counts. Patrice became a fixture on my ROUTE. We always have a topic of discussion that revolves around either raising kids or reigning in one’s weight in a world dripping with salty and sweet delights. She speaks in the easy-breezy language of urban Miami. By urban, I don’t mean what is generally identified as black culture. Down here, it’s different. Urban means true city living in crippling heat when sometimes it’s just too hot to worry about using the correct tense or grammar in casual conversation. Every color of every person speaks a jumble of phrases and everyone knows what everyone else is saying.

“Just say ‘Where Larry at?’” one of my Teamsters told me years ago after I had clicked on my walkie and broadcasted, “Does anyone have a location on Larry Crenshaw?”

The Teamster wagged a finger at me. “It’s too hot to hear all that New York jibber-jabber!”

“I’m NOT from New York! And that is bad grammar!” I protested. I had always prided myself on my grammar. That was before the movies.

“Whatever. It’s a hunnert degrees with no shade and two hunnert people tryin’ to talk on the walkies! You clogging up the airwaves!”

“What about just asking where Larry is?” I pushed.

He growled and swiped at the sweat across his forehead. “What about soundin’ stupid? Just ask where Larry at.”

I got the message. I must admit, I do find my crew more quickly now when using the walkie. Although Simi generally doesn’t allow me to be assigned a walkie because I am too chatty and also as I have dropped several in the ocean in our early days together.

“Just call people on their cells,” she insists.

Patrice has the added Virginia twang I noticed when she was telling me about her vacation. “Oh let me see, the name of the resort was something like…[then she spelled it out]…T-H-AHRAH..”

“Wait, wait!” I interrupted. “What the hell is AHRAH?”

She stared at me. “The letter. AHRAH. Q-AHRAH-S-T-U-V. Don’t you know your alphabet?”

Yeah, yeah, OK.

Patrice leaned in. “You’re a fine one to TOCK – as you say. The reason we say AHRAH is because that when the Good Lord was passin’ out AHRAHS, the Boston people was too cheap to buy any! So we got double – buy one get one free!”

I sat down right on the cafe floor so I wouldn’t wet myself laughing.

I told Patrice we had lost my mother Christmas Eve and she admonished me for not informing her sooner. But I knew she too had suffered a recent loss.

“One pain at a time, Patrice.”

She shook her finger angrily. “That’s not what friends is about. You know that. We friends or no?”

Yes, we friends. So we cried a little and then laughed at the coffee drinkers.

My ROUTE has also returned me to Beverly, the Jamaican woman who runs the photo counter at Walgreens. Bev knows almost everyone in my family. She cheered my son’s graduation from high school and Sissy’s passing of the Bar Exam. She’s read my book and given me a ballsy review “Wasn’t that some ting! You gotta watch out for them Irishes!” And she continues to mourn for my mother although they only met a few times on Mom’s infrequent trips to Miami.

Sunday she was pensive when I dropped by to check out the new As-Advertised-On-TV-Products. ”You buy them here, you see, because I know ya gonna be buyin’ them! Then when they don’t be workin’, you can just bring them back easy!” She was adamant. Beverly never buys anything from “the TV.”

I perused the stuffed hamburger presses, shower radios and glow-in-the-dark pillows.

Beverly suddenly said, “I remember when Mom came down on the bus to go to your book readin’! Wasn’t THAT some ting! All dressed up and so proud!”

And I started bawling. “I was so rude to her! I barely spent a minute with her! I suck, I suck,” I sobbed.

“Oh Lord, now gimme your phone. We took some nice pictures of that, I know we did! Let’s look them up!” Bev grabbed my iPhone and scrolled with one hand as she yanked tissues from under the counter with the other. I believe we were both shocked that my immense grief still lurking so close to the surface of where my head is finally above water. Like Jaws. After I calmed down, Bev let me buy a set of plastic food containers with the lids permanently hinged as a consolation prize and managed not to declare they would all break within the week.

I’m gonna return them Wednesday when she is next scheduled to work. Only Bev understands these purchases – the hopeful message of television that usually turns out to be faulty.

Next, my boyfriends. The drive-by convenience store is owned by two middle-aged guys Ric & Charlie who are life partners and huge Hollywood fans. I swing by to grab some cigs and actually round the little stone building three times as Charlie and I discuss the recent loss of his elderly grandmother who had a seizure in her nursing home and was left unattended. We must do this in between customers so each time a car pulls up behind me, I circle back and get in line.

“Get a lawyer to look into it,” I say firmly. “It’s not about money. It’s about finding out the truth.”

He nods. “But I don’t think I can sue them.”

I buy a Diet Coke. “Whattya kiddin’ me? This is America. Anyone can sue anyone. But maybe it won’t come to that. Just find out what happened.”

“Actually,” he says, “I don’t think I can sue them because they’re in Canada and I think that’s socialized medicine.” He hands me the soda. “You want a straw?”

I shake my head. “Canada? Even better! They’re much more polite over there! Get an attorney and they will tell you everything right away because they won’t want to be rude!”

He laughs. “OK, Miss Making Judgments About Other Countries! I’m gonna put this security footage on YouTube!”

“Wait, let me circle around again and put on some lipstick!”

We grin and I promise to bring some lasagna later in the week but easy on the cheese as Charlie has been doing so well on his diet.

I end my ROUTE at the small corner store in my neighborhood run by a gentleman from the Middle East – I am not sure exactly where nor do I care. I know he takes some shit from time to time and because he is never anything but kind to me, I try to frequent his shop often. Like me, he is always looking for someone to discuss the news with and try to break down the stories of the day. I buy a 5 Hour Energy just to have a reason to chat awhile. He takes his time rummaging for it for the same reason.

“Hiya Handsome,” I say as I push through the heat and into the chilly store. His wife chuckles as he blushes. Above them hangs a freshly pressed American flag. I love it.

“News Girl!”

We discuss the recent terrorism events that cause him to bow his head. “I don’t look but sometimes the news just says it. Horrible, horrible.” And whether or not the NFL will have to change its name to the National Felony League. “A man hits you,”his wife pipes up and waves a glass bottle, “put him down!” We wonder about the Ferguson Grand Jury and whether Hillary will finally make a run for the White House. His wife likes Hilary. “She is no nonsense with that husband of hers!” 

“How have you been?” he asks – his way of checking on me.

“Some days are better than others.”

His wife nods. “Some days we are the windshield and some days we are the bug. So when you feel like that, don’t even bother to get in the car of life. Just walk slow, you know?”

I do.

Then I go home. I catch a glimpse of a battered copy of Harriet The Spy on my bookshelf, nestled comfortably between Charles Bukowski and The Giver. I’ve told you before, I’ve loved Harriet my whole life. She stood tall, even under the heavy shadow of her own mistakes and stayed true to herself. She stayed on her ROUTE, no matter whatever wicked her way came. I realized until today that just like that little elementary school spy – I too have a ROUTE and I finally wrote about it. It kind of makes my day.

1970′s

My Dad is furious at the hospital staff. I can hear his booming voice all the way from the nurse’s station. My mother is next to my bed. She’s concerned with the dots of blood seeping through my bandages but the shift doctor assured her the plastic surgeon would be back tomorrow to freshen everything.

After Joey clocks the Lizard King, I am elevated from Dumb Teenager Who Drove Car Into Ditch to a charter member of The Every Night Knife and Gun (and now Guitar) Club. Cops and security guys swarmed the hall and my room and hustled the limp reptile monarch away. Then they called my parents.

“Oh I am going to sue you! You can bet your ass on that! What kinda of hospital hires musicians that are nuts and don’t even wear pants? What THE HELL IS THIS? WOODSTOCK?”

Dad cannot not be dissuaded in his estimation of what has happened.

“Are you all right?” Mom asks me worriedly. The nurse had already told us what we figured out. A disturbed patient made a break for it and ended up in my room. He’d been sedated and returned to his own ward.

“I am. It was freaky and kinda scary but I feel bad for him.”

“Yes, I do too. People go crazy. It happens. Sometimes they just cannot help how they feel.” She leans closer. “Did he really not have on any pants?”

I nod. “All his business was just flapping around in the breeze. Gross!”

“Well. Thank God for him that he didn’t play the marching drums. He really could have hurt himself!”

We laugh until tears soak our faces.

Thankfully, there never was a lawsuit. Once my father calmed down, he too had a bucket of sympathy for the Lizard King who turned out to be a damaged veteran. As my mother said, sometimes people can’t help how they feel.

That’s my ROUTE, Gentle Readers. Easing back into it because I have some true tales of summer hauntings experienced in the last few weeks and we will need all of our strength!

Thank you for reading me. And thanks, Harriet…wherever you are.

harriet.jpg__631x0_q85

“Life is a struggle and a good spy goes in there and fights. I am an observer. And if I say I’m going to be a writer, then I am going to be a writer.

~ Harriet The Spy, satisfied, as she turned back to her town

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The Summer Of Jaws, The Winter Of Bigger Jaws, part 3: They Let The Irish Guy Die!

July 30, 2014

“Take it from me, girl. ‘FIRE!’ ain’t the worst thing you can yell in a movie theater…

…the worst thing is to yell ‘Bruce Willis is dead!’”

~ The animated King Of The Hill character Lucky, voiced by Tom Petty

It may have been comedian Chris Rock who popularized a stand-up routine that insisted all black people routinely yell back at the movie screen while a film is being shown. I tried to research to pinpoint if it was indeed the talented Rock who launched it, but haven’t had much success. So please sing out if I’m incorrect. It’s a funny routine but I have to respectfully disagree.

I live in Miami, a diverse city easily mirrored by a glance at the rest of the cinema patrons on any given Saturday. My experience with “movie talkers” falls solidly into two groups; teenagers and old people. I truly believe the rise of social media as a communication tool has led to younger users viewing the world as one big huge Twitter. Redditt or Instagram. In a society where news and gossip travel as quickly as it takes to snap a picture or type 140 characters, I’m never surprised when I hear young moviegoers of all sizes, shapes and colors talking right back to the screen. They are trained to respond instantly.

Old people are just, well, old. I guess if you’ve lived so long that you require a walker to get from the car to the ticket booth, and then have somethin’ to say – damn it – you’re gonna say it. The old, like teenagers, also travel in packs. Get them together in a theater and the sound can be deafening.

The great leveling of audience playing field consists of two elements. The first is the gross-out comedy. If you buy a ticket to see the latest Hangover offering and no one talks back to the screen, I suspect the audience is dead. It’s just the nature of the content. It elicits a response.

The second is the horror movie. Not a suspenseful thriller or psychological drama. I mean a real, true creepy, scary, wet-your-pants horror movie. Everyone talks back to the screen. Everyone.

Scream 2 even parodied the whole American theater experience in the first few scenes. Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps play college students Maureen and Phil, a couple out for the evening. Phil insists of seeing Stab – the film of the fictional story from the first Scream. Maureen resists. She’d rather see the Sandra Bullock flick playing down the street. “The horror genre historically excludes the African-American element,” she admonishes him. Any blacks are generally the first to die.

Her character, by the way – was right – with the sole exception of iconic director George Romero. But I think horror cinema has opened up in later years.

Maureen eventually settles in as the film rolls, finds herself talking back to the characters on the screen – along with the rest of the audience. And she and Phil, the black college students, are indeed the first to die in the film. Reviewers’ interpretations vary but for me it was a subversive way for screenwriter Kevin Williamson to inform Hollywood that audiences actually recognized the lack of African-American horror film heroes.

I pace my trips to the theater based on my research of audience ebb and flow. For serious films, I only go during the daytime when the seats are occupied by folks with the same idea. Watching a story unfold as it was meant to – between the characters. But a horror film? An action hero? I’m a Miami girl. I’ve screamed my encouragement at John McLane in every single Die Hardflick. And I need my people around me yelling back at Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees lest they turn their attention from the screen and onto us!

Back to Chris Rock. I invite you to join me front row in a darkened theater on the rocky coast of New England to watch a movie about a killer fish. You, me and a bunch of Irish American fisherman. THEN you’re gonna hear some back talkin’!

February 6, 1978 • 6pm to Midnight

As New England residents watch the weather coverage unfold, many scream back at the television. This cannot be happening! The power begins to flicker across the state.

The Boston Globe formats the front page for the next day. It will never hit the streets. There will be no one and no way to distribute the newspapers.

June 1975

In 1975, Roy Scheider is about to become this summer’s action hero and twenty-year old Bruce Willis may very well have taken the day off work as a New Jersey nuclear power plant security guard to slip into the darkness of a local movie theater to cheer him on.

Hunkered down in the movie theater on Front Street in Scituate Massachusetts, my sister and I – and a whole row of our closest summer friends have our eyes glued to the action. On the screen a thirty-foot high Richard Dreyfus inspects the leftovers that were once swimmer Chrissie Watkins.  ”This was no boating accident,” he tells Police Chief Martin Brody. “Did you notify the Coast Guard?”

From the back row, our designated-adult for entry into the theater expressed his dismay. My grandfather grunted loudly at Dreyfus.

“A ‘course it wasn’t a boating accident for chrissakes! Didn’t ya see the beginning of the movie? It’s shark!”

There was a general wave of shushing.

“Geez Ed,” another patron said loudly. “He can’t hear ya! He’s in the movie. But I wouldn’t bothah callin’ the Coast Guard. They can’t find no shark.”

Poppy peered into the darkness. “Big Sully, that you?”

“Naw,” a voice echoes back. “It’s me, Big Sally.” The audience titters. “Shut up, you!” Big Sally threatened vaguely. Sissy and I tried to concentrate on the movie.

“It wasn’t any propeller! It wasn’t any coral reef! And it wasn’t Jack the Ripper! It was a shark!” Dreyfus finishes triumphantly.

“Told ya,” Poppy announced smugly. Back in the 70′s, cinemas still had the kind of ushers that patrolled the aisles with bobbling flashlights on the lookout for misbehaving miscreants and rowdy loudmouths. Unfortunately on this day, Young Sully the usher – also the ticket taker – had his hands full with the line of customers for the next showing.

Other audience members mumbles their agreement. Yeah, Ed was right.

“Way to give it away, Ed!” one brave soul offered.

Poppy stood up and shook a fist. “Give it away? Give it away? The name of the movie is JAWS! I didn’t give nuthin’ away! You knew it wasn’t about no dentist!”

Another guy yelled. “Hey Ed, how’s the new teeth?”

“Ya. Good!” Poppy waved.

A woman seated a few rows ahead turned around and yelled, “Would all of you please shut up!”

We probably would have agreed had we not gone adult-deaf. You may be familiar, Gentle Readers. Especially if now you have kids or barking dogs. And most especially if any of you were related in any way to Eddie Hart as children.

There’s a pattern of noise that may start off similar to a wailing car alarm but becomes so common that it eventually mushes into a bland white noise you may notice, but doesn’t really interrupt other auditory concerns.

“Who are you even?” Big Sally roared. “You ain’t from here!”

OK, no one can not hear that kind of sentence. Who are you even? A classic even by New England standards.

“How rude!” The woman turned back to the movie.

“She’s from Marshfield,” one guy grumbles. “They got movies in Marshfield, ya know! Go and do your not talkin’ back in Marshfield, for chrissakes!”

February 6, 1978 • 6pm to Midnight

Before sunrise, eighty per cent of the city of Boston will be out of power. On the South Shore, things are much worse.

In towns such as Hull, Scituate and Cohasset, seawalls crack and give way under the seventeen-and-a-half foot storm surge. Sea water rushes under homes and floods the streets. The Scituate Point, a literal point of land sticking out into the Atlantic only ever had one street that squiggled the way around. Now the street is in darkness and deep underwater. Any attempts by rescue workers may only be facilitated by boat, if at all. The old fisherman’s custom is enacted and the few stranded residents know their only chance of rescue is to place a lit candle in a window facing the street to alert rescuers there are people in the home.

June 1975

It is fair to say that there wasn’t a soul left in the theater that would consider diving off the jetty into the refreshing cove water once the movie ended.

I’ve run into the waves at Zuma Beach, swan in the Caribbean, the British Virgin Islands, Aruba and bathwater-warm water off both coasts of Florida. I love the ocean. The smell of Coppertone suntan oil (that thing they now call SPF), the hot sand, the spray of the waves. But there’s just something different about jumping barefoot from hot rock to rock and throwing myself into the shockingly cold northern Atlantic. Blue on the top, green down below. Through angles of seaweed filled with tiny hitchhiking crabs. An accident mouthful of full salt. To jump when you cannot see the bottom is a leap of the highest faith. Especially after seeing Jaws.

On screen Captain Quint and his shark hunting party were already underway. Sissy and I were leaning forward on the edge of our seats as Chief Brody bitched about shoveling chum off the back of The Orca and the huge gaping maw of the shark reared up out of the sea.

“Oh Geez, oh geez!” Poppy, Big Sally, the lady who might be from Marshfield and a few other grown up types had settled into a running commentary not unlike sportscasters at Fenway Park. A summer movie morphed into an almost-live event.

The theater manager, experiencing an usher shortage, appeared to have instructed the projectionist to continue to bump the volume of the film to at least match the decibel of ongoing conversation.

Remember, Gentle Readers. These were the days between the 1960 premiere of Psycho – way before our time – and the release of John Carpenter’s original Halloween. Sure pure horror that boasted a nameless, faceless enemy whose unrelenting stalking could not be explained hadn’t yet made it mainstream. In 1973 Texas Chainsaw Massacre was truly horrific but everyone had a basic understanding that the crazed family were cannibals and also from the South. Buckets of blood and gore had only been served up Hammer Studios style in a cherry orange shade you knew wasn’t real. In the collective minds that encompassed Jaws viewers across the world – and especially “up North” – THIS could really happen. This nerve-wracking single-minded massacre WAS possible. Maybe.

“Quint. Ya. Quint,” Big Sally kept hooting. “He’s the guy. Heah that accent?”

Irish actor Robert Shaw’s dialect was fashioned in an attempt to mimic that of a stereotypical crusty New Englander but to the trained ear of the locals whose own accents were occasionally intelligible to outsiders, Quint would be victorious. Because Quint was Irish.

Another woman put her two cents worth into the conversation. “My daughter up the college told me Lee Marvin was gonna be in this picture.” True, Lee Marvin was first considered for Shaw’s part.

“Lee Marvin?” Poppy yelled so loud he shushed himself. “He’s a cowboy. He can’t be in no fish movie.”

“Or Army mebbe,” Big Sally stage-whispered. “He’s good in a soldier picture. But this kinda thing…you need Irish.”

“Ya,” Poppy agreed. “Oh ya look. There goes the scientist.” Dreyfus disappears into the depths.

I can’t really recall too much more of that first showing, of the actual movie. There was just too much going on. God knows I have seen it scores of times since 1975. But I do remember that moment when Quint lost his footing. When the giant shark shot up and ate his way through the stern of The Orca and ingested the Irish sea captain. The audience screamed and rolled in horror. Parents tried to cover their own eyes as they reached for their kids. A chunky redheaded guy behind us puked a heavy stream of Milk Duds, hot dog, Coke and popcorn that ran like steamy volcanic vomit under the seats. The soundtrack, the screams, the blood pouring out of Quint’s mouth.

And the lack of conversation. The back section of the theater went dead silent with shock.

The shark ate the Irish guy.

To better put in modern terms – it was as if John McLane had actually died hard and been thrown of the top floor of the high-rise Nakatomi Plaza by the very terrorists we had been sure he would vanquish.

For a handful of fishermen and a few middle-aged chicks in the back of a small-town movie house in 1975, someone may have as well just screamed, “Bruce Willis is DEAD!”

Even over the screaming and pandemonium, I heard Sully-who-sewed-his-fingers-together yelling over Sissy at me. “There goes ya grandfathah!” I turned from the screen just in time to catch the back of Poppy scooting through the rear doors of the movie theater, Big Sally and a few following.

As the doors swung shut, I heard Big Sally yell, “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! THEY LET THE IRISH GUY DIE!”

I shrugged and swung back to see if Chief Brody, now hanging on to the sinking Orca, was gonna make it.

February 6, 1978 • Sometime Before Midnight

As the waves begin to shred the shingles oceanside, a shaky candle burns in the upstairs window at 85 Rebecca Road in Scituate Massachusetts.

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