Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  “So …what kind of animal you think? A squirrel?”

  Down The Hole came Jeff’s terse “Probably.”

  “Oh. A squirrel, you say? …. Makes sense.”

  “Yep,” more distant now.

  Neil Armstrong had not set foot on the moon yet, but the similarity of my P.F. Flyer touching the gravel surface of The Hole’s bottom is noted here. Simply to have made it down the ladder, grail or no grail, was an event I thought worthy of a cover story on Jesus Christ, You Did WHAT?? magazine.

  “I’m here. I see gravel. Just gravel.”

  “Try over there,” said Jeff, directing his light to the area where he’d placed the gizzard, liver, and neck bone of a chicken Mom was preparing for dinner that night.

  “WOW! It’s here!” I said. “It’s really here!”

  “No kidding?” said Jeff. “Lemme see, lemme see.”

  I directed his attention to the small mess in the corner.

  “Wait a minute.” said Jeff. “That’s no squirrel. Those are pieces of a human being! There’s a dead guy down there!”

  He snapped off the flashlight, strode back through the attic and before closing the door, extinguished the 14-watt bulb. Leaving me in an interstellar blackness of such velvet even a visit from the Horrid Light would have been welcome.

  * * *

  Dreadful things lurked on the grounds of the Millstone.

  Fathers who raged for entire three-day weekends were certainly dreadful. And though the horrible things he said made you grow up fast, in the end you were still just 11 years old and what you really worried about was whether your friends thought you were cool or not. Or being seen naked, by girls. You worried about things that had sharp teeth, like the Dobermans owned by the Plunkett’s or the water moccasin in Grandpa’s pond down in Florida.

  Closer to home was the giant snapping turtle Sam Martin allegedly had in the abandoned fountain-pond behind his house. Some doubted its existence but none doubted the fact that a snapping turtle’s jaws could fold a silver dollar like a warm pancake. This finding, published exclusively in the Encyclopedia of Big Brothers, was accepted fact.

  The only item of debate was what kind of food snapping turtles most liked to crunch between their fabled jaws. The agreement around the jungle gym was, of course, penises. Snapping turtles almost certainly grew fat on the penises of fifth-graders who disturbed the turtle’s sleep by taking short cuts past Sam Martin’s abandoned fountain pond.

  Why my penis should occupy the top triangle of the snapping turtle’s food pyramid was never discussed. Nor was the curious chain of events that would have to take place in order for this obscure part of the food chain to go its natural course. It was just the horrible possibility of such an encounter, the snipping sound, the image of the creature and its captured prize disappearing under green water. It was so horrible it had to be true.

  And so the footpath past Sam Martin’s pond sported two separate orbits. One was where little boys who walked alone swerved wide to give the Peni-vore its due respect. The other path, closer to the pond, was where boys in groups swaggered by scoffing loudly at the whole idea of snapping turtles.

  Up the road, in the opposite direction of the Martins, was the Mayo Clinic’s Animal Research Institute, referred to simply as “The Institute.” The squat buildings swarmed around a huge water tower that fed the complex, and it all had that government-issue sort of architecture one suspects is on the grounds of “Area 51.” Occasionally the head physician there, Dr. Zollman, gave us tours through all the labs, past the wide, clean cages of little animals. It made us sad to think the rats and guinea pigs were being given cancer and we always felt a little guilty after a tour. In fact, it was here at the Institute where I contracted cancer too, or thought so anyway.

  I’d gone up to the Institute on a Sunday to poke around in the piles of medical waste just behind the high water tower. I was looking for syringes – the kind with the detachable needles. Earlier in the week my brother Chris had amazed me with a new syringe-weapon he’d purloined from the Institute’s junk pile. He’d poked the needle of a salvaged syringe into a candle, clogging it. Then, with a hard thumb on the plunger, you had a blow-dart straight out of Man From U.N.C.L.E. I succeeded in finding a few syringes, pocketed them, and on my way off the grounds thought I’d take a peek into the Institute’s windows; maybe get a look at animals with cancer.

  The first windows I tried were paned with fogged glass, so I went farther down to the end of the building to an odd-looking window with slats. I pulled myself up and at the moment I had my face in position, the exhaust fan inside turned on, the slats blew open, and I received what I was certain was a face-full of hot cancer.

  This was surely air so rank with infection the doctors inside thought it best to rush it out of the animal cancer ward through the nearest pipe and just pray it dissipated in the Minnesota winds. And now I had placed my face directly in front of a propeller blowing the carcinogens from a laboratory of tumors, served up hot and fresh like malignant food from a charnel house diner. I had looked in the asshole of the famed Mayo Clinic, inhaled its cancerous fart and had at best only a few days left.

  Rushing home, I consulted my father’s medical journals to see how I might suffer my final days. Dad’s journals were normally a form of great entertainment – mutation and injury, amputation and necropsy, all the things that delight fifth-grade boys. Now it was less a journal and more a travel brochure of a place I was going.

  The most-thumbed page in Dad’s entire medical library featured a photo of man suffering from elephantiasis of the scrotum; the poor soul had privates so public he had to cart them about in a wheelbarrow. “At least he’ll live,” I thought, flipping past Wheelbarrow Man, to my section – tumors of the face.

  There was my future: page after page of immense suppurating wounds which would soon be erupting under my thick black eyeglasses. In shock I went running upstairs, journal in hand, to confess my crime to an elder brother.

  Big brothers, however, have no interest in scaring the bejesus out of you if it’s not a job they contracted themselves. Jeff quickly laughed off my concern, told me not to worry about it, and kept the journal to thumb through later.

  * * *

  Scaring yourself was the greatest achievement: the Eagle Scout of the bejesus-scaring merit badge system.

  High up in the Millstone, through a door off Kip and Jeff’s fourth-floor bedroom, was the rooftop balcony, a tar-floored 12’ by 12’ area where we regularly courted death.

  During tornado warnings, when the Hartmans were likely down in their basement listening to the radio, my five brothers and I would race to this highest point of the Millstone to greet the great twisting beast. We’d commandeered the large umbrella that shaded the table by the pool, and as the rain sprinkled and lightning flashed over the valley, there we were on its highest point holding a large metal pole. We never spotted a tornado but we did co-opt the storm weather and its strange green-yellow atmosphere as a stage for another assault on the peacefulness of Bamber Valley. We lugged the amplifiers from Kip and Jeff’s rock-and-roll band up to the balcony and boomed our voices out over the neighborhood.

  “CITIZENS OF ROCHESTER! THIS IS GOD!

  “YOU HAVE ANGERED US – ME – I MEAN ME ... BY BEING ... BY BEING JUST SO NOT COOL. FEEL MY WRATH!”

  During better weather the balcony was base camp for great climbing treks across the roof of the Millstone, where we’d ascend the red slate tiles to the peak of the house and then higher still to stand on the top of the chimney, an additional eight feet above the red clay roof of our world.

  Getting back down from whatever part of the roof our adventures took us often meant descending the south face of the Millstone. We’d usually head for the safety of the balcony off Mom’s Tower Library but that meant coming down the steep pitch over our parents’ bedroom and then dangling by hand from the rain gutters. From there it was fifteen feet of hand-over-hand dangling until the tips of your sneakers found purc
hase on the library’s balcony railing. Brother Dan remembers hanging from this gutter when Dad pulled into the driveway and caught him there. (“Just ten feet,” Dan remembers, “from completing the trek. Ten goddamn feet.”)

  Another balcony stunt that entered family lore was the day Jeff stood on the railing of the fourth-story balcony backwards – like a diver – the balls of his feet on the edge of the railing, his back to a 45-foot drop onto a stone patio, which a little math (V^2 = 64 x S) reveals would’ve had him moving at about 95 miles per hour when he hit.

  To make the game more interesting, Jeff would jump off backwards, fall a couple of feet, and arrest his descent by catching the railing with his upper arms. (That all six of us survived to adulthood is a statistical anomaly that should astound both my mother and insurance actuaries.)

  Scariest of all was climbing the 30-story water tower, the one up the road at Mayo’s Animal Research Institute – 30 monstrous stories, where the estimated impact velocity for a fifth-grader falling head-first would be a full 140 mph. Brother Chris was the first of us to make the ascent, proudly laying his hand on the warm glass dome that covered the blinking red light at the tower’s very apex. But the scariest part wasn’t going up, Chris later reported; it was coming down.

  “Descending from the top of the water tower meant inching backwards out over the lip of its conical hat,” Chris recalled, “with your feet reaching blindly around for that top rung of the ladder. I remember my foot waving about in the high air, while my attention was focused on a single square inch of chipped paint two inches in front of my face.”

  Only three of us ever summited the water tower and why my brothers Chris, Jeff, and Dan ever did a thing so dangerous remains a mystery.

  Perhaps it simply felt safer up there.

  You can hear both sides of the Pagans’ 45rpm at ThirtyRoomsToHideIn.com.

  BABA YAGA

  From the Rochester Post-Bulletin: “Pagans Cut Disc For Kaybank Studios.”

  The Pagans of Rochester, a teen-age band composed of five John Marshall High School students, have cut a 45 rpm record for Kaybank Studios in Minneapolis. The record is “Baba Yaga,” with “Stop Shakin’ Your Head” on the flip side, and is due for release in local stores late in April. Both songs were written by Kip Sullivan.

  “I’m with the band.”

  That’s what you say when you’re a roadie or a groupie going past the ropes.

  “I’m with the band” is the essence of borrowed cool. If there’d been a 1965 bouncer who stood between the Pagans and me, my patter might have been different.

  “Yes, I know I look like Ernie Douglas from ‘My Three Sons’ but let me through.

  “Why yes, I do happen to be a Sprinter but perhaps you haven’t heard me perform the opening drum roll from ‘Wipe Out’? So if you’ll just let me ....

  “Oh yeah? Well if you’re so cool, tell me, have you ever borrowed cigarettes from Kip or Jeff Sullivan? Huh? Bet you never sat in the band’s VW bus and pretended to drive it either, have you, Mr. Big Shot? Noooo? Well, there you go then.”

  To fifth graders with buck teeth there was no difference between being cool and standing next to someone who was actually cool. Borrowed cool was legal tender.

  This is why choosing which Beatle you were was important. Once you declared your fealty to John you immediately derived his characteristics. Choosing John, I was suddenly witty (though it bothered me that Dick Bianco who’d chosen Paul was suddenly cute). Still, you made decisions and lived with them.

  Having two brothers in Rochester’s coolest band put you in elite company. Being able to point to my brothers in an ad for the local menswear shop was impressive. But when the Pagans went to the Twin Cities to make their own record, the Assumption of the First Person Plural made “us” famous and I became cool enough probably to need my own agent.

  It was over Easter weekend in 1965 the Pagans got into their black VW bus and drove the two hours to Minneapolis to record two songs for release on a 45rpm. The A-side was a song Kip wrote about a witch from an old Russian folk tale – Baba Yaga – who flew out of the mountains in her big black mortar, brewed thunderstorms, and spread fear.

  She shrieked at the clouds

  as they rumbled toward her,

  laughed at the winds

  and pounded on her mortar,

  Baba Yaga.

  In The Flip Side: A Look Back at the Minnesota Bands of the ‘60s, Jim Oldsberg wrote, “The guitar work in the song is fantastic and Kip’s vocals are as dominant as ever, but the sound quality of the record left a lot to be desired.”

  Though they had only four tracks to work with, the Pagans cut the wax on two songs that were solid mid-‘60s rock and roll. Side B was Stop Shakin’ Your Head, a more traditional Baby-I’m-not-comin’-back number. The Pagans pressed 500 copies and began distributing them all over Rochester. (NOTE: Both Pagans songs can be heard at ThirtyRoomsToHideIn.com; both are for sale on iTunes.)

  When copies of the record arrived back home it was as if I had been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; anointed with glory everlasting. To actually hold the black plastic disc in your hands, to see the songwriter’s name printed thereon – KIP SULLIVAN – you were officially with the band, my friend. You were in.

  As for the guys who were actually cool enough to make the record, well, I imagined the Pagans enjoyed it in their own way too. In The Flip Side, Kip remembers, “It was such a rush to hear yourself on a record that you produced coming over the car radio on the way to high school.”

  Kip’s diary, April 27, 1965

  I was at practice over at Rushton’s when [brother] Chris came down, said Mom wanted to see me. I went out, looked in car window and there were three packs of records! Grabbed two, ran inside, and the whole band jumped up and down yelling. ….. “Baba Yaga” on WDGY up in the Twin Cities! Jeff heard it. The D.J. said, “Here’s new sound from Rochester.” I was downtown and found out Dayton’s sold a bunch more. A WIN DAY! SHIT, I WISH I WASN’T GOING TO COLLEGE. WOULDN’T IT BE COOL IF THAT RECORD GOES BIG?

  Kip, now living back in the Millstone, May 12

  It’s almost 11pm and Dad is still bitching about the bills from “the goddamn Bach Music Store.” God, what frustration. I just went upstairs to take a shower and he came up and pulled on me. I said “Get your hands off me,” and he hit me in stomach. Not too hard but it sure as hell surprised me. Mom came up with hell fire coming out of her eyes and Jeff joined the argument. They’re still at it. I imagine I’ll be up late tonight. Practice was good. Wrote new song. Oh, God, I think he’s coming upstairs to our room again. Jesus, I hate that bastard.

  Mom’s letters to Grandpa, May 14

  Kip is in the hospital with unexplained belly pains.

  Memory: I Am The Fifth Beatle

  I am in fifth grade. I am standing just outside the door of Bamber Valley Elementary School as kids run out into the spring air for recess. I am standing in a pose that is exactly – and I mean exactly – the same pose John Lennon strikes on the back of the Beatles VI album.

  I am holding a rolled-up piece of paper just like Lennon did. My chin is up at the same roguish angle and I am looking off at the same spot in the distance. Precisely three-quarters of my weight is on my right foot, making my right hip – like John’s – jut ever so slightly. Mathematically, there is no difference between the two of us. Aside from the fact that I look like Ernie Douglas and my sole musical accomplishment is mimicking the drum-roll opening to “Wipe Out,” the similarity is unsettling. Wait till Debbie Laney gets a load of this.

  Debbie, my winsome classmate of five grades, should be coming down the hall presently. When she sees how well I’ve nailed this pose she will finally know what I’ve suspected for some time now: that I am so very like the Beatles in word, thought and deed I may well be the fifth member of the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band.

  Scientifically, it is feasible. The possibility of my being the Fifth Beatle does not challenge any established physi
cal laws of the universe. Gravity remains unseated; the sky remains blue, the sun still rises and sets. My fantasy asks only an open-mindedness to the possibility that, but for some backroom Liverpool screw-up – perhaps a dropped bit of paper or missed phone call – I was meant to share a microphone with Paul McCartney and belt out “Kansas City,” the opening track on the A side.

  Paul’s the cute one. John’s the witty one. I am “the fifth grade one.” Again, I claim only feasibility. And consider too that it took only a last-minute personnel shift by the producer to push the original drummer Pete Best out. Is it not possible that by similar whimsy I have been pushed in? And where the hell is Pete Best, by the way? Not standin’ here with me lookin’ way cool and waitin’ for Debbie Laney, that much I can tell you.