When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  Tabloids and Cigarettes

  If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.

  —Mark Twain

  Things were looking up in Cochabamba. We had moved into a smaller house. I roller-skated with the street kids on our sidewalk out front. And I had a new friend from school. Marianne, the Dutch girl, and I became fast friends. I had my first girl crush.

  Marianne and I had been bebopping in her living room all morning. We’d listened to cassettes on her dad’s stereo, wiggling our bodies in some semblance of teenagers dancing. I had a snazzy dance step that I thought looked cool.

  I waved my arms over my head, shimmied to the right a couple of times, then to the left, all the while weaving my head around in semicircles. When I caught sight of the phantom reflection in the plate glass window of a chubby girl wearing bell-bottoms creaking around stiff legged, I realized I was not the sexy, jazzy girl in my mind. I stopped twirling my long hair immediately, turned my back to the window, and choreographed an entirely new dance step that involved straighter posture.

  Marianne and I played the same two songs over and over. Three Dog Night singing “Black and White” was my favorite, but Marianne preferred “Seasons in the Sun.” We listened to both songs so many times that I knew every word and found myself singing one beat ahead just to show off my memory.

  We’d played the cassette over and over. I held my fist up to my mouth as a microphone, closing my eyes, swaying. “Seasons in the Sun’s” chorus gave me a chance to wiggle my butt, but I wished I could ignore the lyrics.

  Goodbye to you, my trusted friend.

  I hated goodbyes, and here I was with the best friend I’d had in my ten-year life, and I didn’t want to sing this sappy song. But because my best girlfriend ever liked the song, I did too.

  I’d belt out the chorus to rid my mind of all the morbid thoughts.

  We had seasons in the sun!

  The music slowed, and the last line made me wonder whether it referred to someone dead.

  As the final words faded, I collapsed on the sofa, feigning exhaustion because I didn’t want to hear the song again. Marianne had been dancing on the coffee table, and in her rhumba to the music she’d knocked the newspapers to the floor in front of the gold velveteen couch. The tabloid newspaper in Dutch had been pulled apart in sections. I flipped through to find the horoscopes.

  “What sign are you?” I asked Marianne.

  “Gemini,” she said. “The twins. I have two personalities,” she said proudly.

  I did know a bit about astrology because my mother had me read Linda Goodman’s “Sun Signs” book. She’d bookmarked the Capricorn Child section and placed the sapphire blue paperback in my hands. “This is you to a T,” she’d said. “Even down to the not washing your ears.” I didn’t realize until that moment that I rarely cleaned my ears. “You could grow potatoes in there, they are so dirty,” she told me. “Sun Signs” and Shirley MacLaine had become my mom’s canons.

  “I can’t understand this,” I said to Marianne, who now sat shoulder to shoulder with me on the couch.

  “I don’t read Dutch that well,” she said. Reading wasn’t Marianne’s forte, but she could illustrate the most detailed veins of a cordate leaf or give the finest of eyelashes to our handmade, blue-lined notebook paper dolls.

  “Try to read it,” I encouraged. I wanted to know my Dutch future.

  “What are you?” She folded the paper over so just the horoscopes were displayed. My dad did that—folded the newspaper into smaller squares. “What’s your sign, baby?”

  Her hippy come-on made me turn up my nose.

  “It’s an expression,” she told me.

  “Capricorn,” I said and scooted closer to look over her shoulder as she read my future.

  “It says,” she hesitated to figure out the words, “You’re going to see the world in a new way today.”

  Boring. I always wanted it to be more specific, to say something more like, Today you will finally receive the Barbie camper and new Malibu Ken doll you asked for.

  “Read yours,” I said.

  “You dream wide, but walk skinny,” she recited.

  “I think you mean narrow,” I corrected her.

  She rolled her eyes and slapped the paper down. She hated it when I corrected her English.

  The paper fell open to what had previously been folded over. But her mood changed quickly as she saw what the newspaper revealed. “Wow! Look at this,” Marianne said. She opened the paper toward my face.

  “What is that?” I said. “What are they doing? Read it. Read it!”

  The double-page spread lay scattered with photos of bloody men and women, apparently at a party. Closer examination revealed that the blood had oozed from their heads. In the next photo a man pointed a power drill at his own head; another showed the man pointing the drill at a woman’s temple, and she appeared to be screaming out in agony.

  “Come on, read what it says.” I had to know what was going on at this party.

  Marianne tamped at the bottom of the paper to get it to flatten out fully. She read silently at first, driving me nuts. “It’s a party.”

  “I can see that. What kind of party?” I was both creeped out and extremely curious. I pulled my knees up under me, to lean in closer.

  “A drug party.” She read further, her lips moving, but not giving me any clues.

  I had heard about the danger of drugs. I knew my dad’s friends tried to stop the drug lords. When some teenagers at our school were caught smuggling, I figured that had been my closest encounter to drugs. One teenage girl always liked to brag about how “high” she was, her eyes rolling around in her head. This Dutch party, it had to be the photographed version of what happens. All the blood had me scared, so scared I didn’t even want to touch the edge of the tabloid newspaper.

  “An ambulance had to come,” she said. I could tell she was piecing it all together the way I did when I read Spanish and didn’t understand all the words.

  “Why did they do it?” I asked. “Why would anyone drill into their own head?” The partygoers were about our parents’ age. Is that what adults did at parties? My parents went to parties every weekend, or they had their own parties. I was afraid for my parents. The photos looked as if it had been any ordinary dinner party with adults gone astray. What if my parents went to a party and didn’t know this was going to happen? What if they felt they had to do it because everyone else was doing it? I was always doing things I didn’t want to do because everyone else was. If you didn’t, you got ridiculed. But in this case, it would be better to be ridiculed than drill a hole in your head.

  “It was cocaine,” Marianne said. “They were out of their minds.”

  “Did they die?” Maybe they just wanted to find out how far the drill bit would have to go in before they hit blood? But once they got started there was no stopping. They weren’t thinking clearly.

  I was thinking too clearly. I was thinking constantly about ways that my parents, my family could die. Their departure happened so readily, so easily, our togetherness was always tenuous. Any minute their image, their physical essence could fade. A visit home from Suzanne and Marty soon meant a goodbye. My mom had almost died, and even when she came back, she never fully came back. Juana was still writing letters from Peru, honing in on what I considered my spot in the family lineup. If Daddy was home, his suitcase would sit in the hallway prepared to leave again for the jungle. Everyone was like a slippery bar of soap, I would just get to hold them, and they’d slide out of my grasp. But the one thing I couldn’t fathom, that I knew would take them away from me for good, was death. I’d gone from a fear of abandonment to a fear of death. Theirs.

  I not only had to protect myself, I had to protect them too. No one seemed capable of this except me.

  A bush scratched against the plate glass window across from us. I glanced up and was greeted by our reflection: two girls, one concentrating, the other too eas
ily distracted. “Did they die?” I asked again, turning my attention away from the reflection.

  “I don’t think it says,” she replied, her finger following the text slowly. Too slowly.

  “You don’t think it says because you can’t read it, or you can’t find it?” They had to die. How do you survive that much blood loss?

  Marianne quit reading and slammed the paper down on the coffee table. “You can read it, if you want to know.”

  “I don’t know Dutch.” I was too worried about their fate, especially the guy who had the most holes in his head, to realize I had pissed off Marianne. I leaned and gaped at the pictures. Stupefied, I tried to figure out a few words to no avail. The party had taken place in a modern apartment, a home not too different than our own. The yellow walls in the kitchen were splattered with blood, the linoleum had rivulets running between the welts. One drill-game participant slumped over a kitchen chair not too unlike the yellow kitchenette set my mom had bought in Miami.

  “The story is trying to make an impression drugs are bad,” Marianne said. She had crossed her arms across her chest. I’d hurt her feelings, but I really needed to know some answers about this drill party, or I couldn’t go on.

  “I get that,” I said. I just needed to know if they died. My parents didn’t do drugs, but they had plenty of cocktail and dinner parties. They’d been partyers since Nevada. I needed to know whether I should worry that my parents would die at one of these parties, or if perhaps they would just be terribly injured with drill holes, like pox scars on their heads, like the gooey, pink welt on my shoulder I got in kindergarten after the vaccination.

  I would have to warn them. I would have to be vigilant.

  It never occurred to me that it was all staged. That the magazine had photographed actors. It didn’t dawn on me that the fancy appliances and the otherwise spick-and-span house was not a drug den. That the glasses of whiskey and lines of coke and the perfectly arranged apartment were photo studio props. In one picture the camera pulled back and got a shot of all the partyers slumped here and there, Phillips and DeWalt drills still in their hands, trickles of blood flowing down their foreheads, ears, and necks. It never dawned on me how odd it would have been to have a newspaper photographer handy while doing these heinous activities.

  I knew only the one girl in our school who did drugs. I knew her because her parents knew my parents. “No one ever knows,” she told me on the bus one day, “because it’s just a tiny pill or a piece of paper sometimes,” she told me. “Parents don’t pay attention.” Then she disappeared.

  This is what I worried about—that no one was paying attention but me!

  Somehow somebody did find out about the girl’s drug use. She got deported. Her father was in the military, and they found out she was sending drugs back and forth in the U.S. mail to her boyfriend in the States.

  I would never do drugs, I thought. I must remember, I scolded myself, never to do what others told me.

  Marianne had walked away from the sofa and now stood behind me. “Come on, let’s go smoke a cigarette.”

  “Where you going to get a cigarette?” I asked.

  “My mom’s.” She slid open a kitchen drawer and pulled out a package of Winstons, the same brand my dad smoked. She popped the edge of the pack against her thumb as though she’d done it before, pushing one white, slender cigarette from the foil and cellophane package. The menthol wafted up to my nose. My dad never smoked menthols. Those were lady cigarettes, he told me when he sent me to the bodega to buy him more. With a book of matches from Taquiña brewery and restaurant where my folks liked to go for Sunday dinner, we stepped outside Marianne’s back door and lit up. We each took a puff.

  “Hold it like this,” Marianne said, pointing her two fingers forward in a peace sign. I thought I’d feel cooler than I did. I felt like a dork.

  The screen door creaked open, and I jumped. To get caught smoking a cigarette—the punishment could be bad. Marianne quickly put the cigarette behind her back. But it was only Helmi, her older and cooler sister. Helmi wore her hair in a short brown shag, and a swath of embroidered red and yellow flowers grew across her denim bell-bottoms’ backside as if wildflower seeds had been sprinkled around her back pockets.

  “What are you doing?” Helmi asked. Her jeans sat just below her hips and her tiny belly button showed off beneath her midriff T-shirt. She stared at Marianne’s elbow. Marianne pulled out the cigarette and purposefully took another drag.

  “None of your business,” Marianne said. Helmi and Marianne stood at the same height even though Helmi was two years older, four years older than I was. I wanted to be Helmi when I grew up, although I knew I would outgrow her in no time. I’d never be a petite person. But I also wanted to be Marianne, to be able to do what I wanted without being so afraid. To stand my ground. Whatever that was.

  “You stole one of Mom’s smokes. She’s going to be mad.”

  “How will she know it was me? You do it all the time.” Marianne handed me the cigarette, and I took it reluctantly. I realized I was supposed to take a puff, but I pretended I was not in a hurry and waved it in the air instead.

  “Peter and Berche are here,” Helmi informed us.

  “So,” Marianne said, taking the cigarette back from me, letting it droop from her pursed lips.

  “Let’s play spin the bottle,” Helmi said. She always had something going on, a party of some sort.

  The cigarette passed back to me, I put the paper-wrapped stick to my lips, only instead of inhaling I exhaled and it made the smoke flutter around my face.

  Marianne took the stick from me and dropped it on the ground where she stomped it out with her foot. As she and Helmi made their way inside, I put my foot over the flattened cigarette butt and squashed it even further with a rotated ankle flourish, making sure to swivel my hips a little too. I may not have been very good at smoking, but I could practice my sexy extinguishing.

  Once inside we walked through the living room, and Marianne snatched the tabloid off the coffee table. “Look at this, Helmi.”

  “Can you tell us what it says?” I asked. Helmi’s Dutch was better than Marianne’s.

  “That’s Mom’s crap. Don’t read that,” she said, brushing the newspaper aside. How could she be so nonchalant?

  “Just tell us what it says,” I asked.

  She scanned it for a minute. “Gross. It was a pact. They all made a pact. They wanted to try it, but only if they all did it.”

  As I walked down the hall to play spin the bottle with the group in the back bedroom, I still couldn’t get my head around why someone would follow through with a pact when you saw the damage done. Had they been such good friends that they could make a promise and have to keep it? Were they that close? The dark side of being connected to people that closely revealed itself. A group could collectively lose its mind. My parents’ group of friends, did they do drugs? I knew they drank a lot. That they partied with daiquiris and gin and tonics, rum and cokes. How would I talk to my parents about this?

  Solo, I could be more aware. Safer. I could make my own decisions. Maybe it was better not to be part of a group.

  I sat cross-legged among the circle of kids hoping the bottle wouldn’t land on me. I needed to get home, check on my mom.

  Politicians in the Living Room

  She’s not a girl who misses much . . .

  —John Lennon, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”

  An email from my mother reads, Maybe we could rent God’s house. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Maybe they still have those opera records. I pause, not getting it at first. We have been lamenting the current political fiasco, and I suggested we could escape to Cochabamba. Oh yes, God’s house—it’s what we called the castle behind our house. The random mansion with turrets and a cupola owned by the Bolivian newspaper magnate. The same family that rented us our house behind it. I reply: Yes, I remember the dining room now—like Downton Abbey. From God’s house poured music every afternoon.

  When
I walked in the front door, I saw my father doing something curious in the living room, something I had never seen him do before. Above the fireplace on the wall, a frigate ship was sculpted out of alabaster. The soot from the smoke of years’ worth of fires had accumulated on the bottom third of the sculpture. The effect made the ship look as though it tossed in a black-and-gray sea of tumultuous waters—the depths of the waves at the blackest part, the tips of the waves fading to gray, the ship, like a ghost ship, the white of alabaster.

  My mother sat on the gold velvet couch across from the fireplace watching my father. She appeared most concerned about his soot-covered hands, which he kept placing on the chalky white mantelpiece. As his left hand’s black-stained fingers held onto a white sail of the ship, he said to my mother, “Hand me the needle-nose pliers.” Then he stuck his head back up the chimney.

  My mother reached into the toolbox with most of its guts strewn out on the tan shag carpeting. She extracted the requested tool, stepped precariously through the rubble, and handed the pliers to my dad. Then she returned to her seat in the center of the sofa.

  My mother and father both appeared too serious for me to come right out and ask what was going on. From out of the chimney, my dad pulled a length of dangling cap wire normally used as a fuse for dynamite. He pulled it across the room to the small black leather-encased shortwave radio sitting on the gray-and-silver veined white marble coffee table. The cap wire now ran from the radio, midair through the living room, and up the dark chimney.

  Four years earlier, a group of right-wing generals from the Bolivian military gathered in the same living room. One of them was Rogelio Miranda, and they would become known as the Mirandistas. Together they planned a coup d’etat. This would be the 186th coup in the 146 years Bolivia had been a country.

  I have heard my father say a coup was strategized in our Cochabamba living room—in the little house behind God’s house. The details I have to google. As I research the coup, this is how I imagine it went down: