When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  She’s coming down fast.

  —Lennon and McCartney, “Helter Skelter”

  The Phillips Hotel sat like a giant flesh-tone wart in downtown Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Bartlesville was also the home of Phillips Petroleum Company’s headquarters. The 1950s mushroom-colored brick Soviet-housing-esque building was home to business travelers and displaced families like mine. The five-story building was our home for nine months while we waited for our new house to be built. We moved from room to room, floor to floor, until after about a month we finally settled in a hotel-apartment. One wall displayed the kitchenette. That wall faced the living area, where a closet held the drop-out-of-the-wall Murphy bed where I slept. Down a small hallway was a separate bedroom where Mom and Dad slept.

  Not an especially roomy apartment: I had to sit on the floor and lean against one end of the couch, partially in the living room and partially in the hallway, to watch the twelve-inch color TV, our first TV in two years and our first English-language TV in over five years.

  American TV was fantastic! Fat Albert and Pink Panther cartoons on Saturday mornings and sitcoms every night, and then these made-for-TV movies about true stories. Who needed friends when you had a TV to watch? So when the made-for-TV movie came on about the Manson Family murders, I was not going to miss it.

  The first night of the TV miniseries Helter Skelter began with Charles Manson slicing off a follower’s ear with a sword. I was glued to the end of the couch in our hotel room. The brutal and bloody murders of the LaBianca and Tate households had me riveted to the tufted carpeting. On the refrigerator doors of the Tate home, one of the Manson Family members wrote, “Helter Skelter.” I had no idea what the words meant, or why someone would paint them in blood on the household appliance of a murder victim. I certainly didn’t know a thing about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Revelations in the Bible and how Charles Manson interpreted the Beatles song “Helter Skelter” to be a message that the blacks were starting a race war. I just saw some crazy hippies attacking people with knives. The Manson Family members called Charlie “Jesus Christ,” and I did see a resemblance to the color photo of Jesus that hung over the refreshment counter in the First United Methodist Church basement. I’d seen the movie Jesus Christ Superstar, played the cassette tapes and sang songs at the top of my lungs, and I recalled Jesus being really pissed off, turning over tables in the market. This was not too dissimilar from Charlie Manson. Could Mom be right about reincarnation?

  By the end of the first night of the two-part series I was gripped. The question of how anyone could fall under a spell that grotesque had me walloped. And what if he really was Jesus Christ? How would we know? Lots of people didn’t believe Jesus the first time either. I was torn. A part of me was afraid if I believed the possibility, I too could be falling under Manson’s spell. “What if?” kept buzzing in my head after that first episode. I knew the second night would answer all my questions.

  Mom and I were joined at the hip when we moved to Bartlesville. Yet her presence, I sensed, was still nebulous. She could leave me on a whim. Just the week before we’d pulled into one of those newfangled ATMs, and Dad had jumped out of the car to get some cash. Mom whipped around to face me where I sat in the backseat. “I’m leaving!” she said. “As soon as I get a job, I’m getting my own apartment, and I’m leaving!” Had they had a fight?

  I couldn’t be more frightened. Blood rushed in my ears, and my heart pumped so fast that it felt as if it had expanded to three times its size and would explode. Kaboom. I couldn’t breathe. Surely she saw the look on my face, my eyes had to have been wide, giant, pleading.

  My dad hopped back in the car, and my mom turned to face the front. Nothing more was mentioned.

  The nightmares started then and continued for years—my mother leaving, me staying behind. As I had always imagined it would work.

  I would be left behind. Too frozen to ask, too scared to even think I could mention it. What if I asked, and the answer was no. What if she said she couldn’t take me? What if she said I was selfish for asking? See, Mom, I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll be no trouble. I can take care of myself. This is what I thought I should feel.

  While the Manson murders were on tv, Dad was out of town again, so after Mom and I ate our favorite dinner of Banquet frozen fried chicken, a new American food, I set myself up with a bed pillow and a chocolate Snack Pack pudding for dessert. After all the blood and gore of last night’s first night of the TV movie, I had myself prepared for more of the same, only this episode would surely reveal the answer to how this horror could happen.

  Then Mom said I couldn’t watch the second half.

  What???????

  “You can stay in the bedroom and do your homework,” she said.

  “I don’t have any homework. I did it already.” I wasn’t an academic superstar, but I was no procrastinator. Mom wasn’t really going to ban me from the second half, was she?

  “You can read then. Or listen to the radio.” Mom and Dad had a clock radio that woke us up every morning—another newfangled American appliance with which we were enraptured.

  “Nothing but church talk on the radio,” I said. It was true, Monday night radio in Bartlesville played all the around-town preachers’ sermons in case anyone had missed anything on Sunday morning. “What are you going to watch?”

  “I’m an adult, I can watch the second half.” Mom looked at the ground when she said it, then over at the spick-and-span kitchenette countertop.

  “No way!” I said. “How can you do this to me?”

  “It’s not appropriate for children. It says so at the beginning.” Now she was going to be a concerned parent? She picked up my propped-up pillow and put it on the couch where she usually sat.

  “You let me watch the first half last night. How can you change your mind?” This couldn’t be. I had to know what happened. If I didn’t find out why the disciples were so taken with this creepy man, I might be unable to detect when it was happening to me.

  “Amy, are you talking back to me?” Mom’s tone turned up to the level that said she was done, that there would be no more discussion. What would happen if I pushed beyond that level, I didn’t know because I never had tried. I was taking no chances that I might lose the one person that stayed fairly steady in my life.

  So I took my pudding and went to the bedroom while she prepared to watch Helter Skelter in the living room. I was angry that not only had she banned me from TV after a two-year hiatus, she had also stopped me from seeing the conclusion of a movie I had already started. I wouldn’t know what kept the Manson Family a family. I paced back and forth in the small space between the double bed and the highboy dresser. It wasn’t like I was going to go out and hack people up! But how would I ever know why those crazy hippies did what they were told? Maybe she thought the gory stuff would scare me. I yelled out the door down the short hallway. “I’m not scared. Remember when we used to watch scary movies in Ely? I wasn’t even the least bit scared. And I was only five then.” When we’d lived in Nevada, if Marty was babysitting me, we would stay up late watching scary movies. I remember several: one about the ivy that grew over the castle and trapped all the people inside, one about the zombies that climbed out of the lake covered in moss, and another about bandage-wrapped mummies who took over the town.

  “I said ‘no’ and I mean it,” Mom said from the living room. In no uncertain terms was I going to watch the second night of Helter Skelter.

  “I don’t understand why!” I whined.

  “It’s too violent.” Who was she kidding? I’d seen more violence in my life without a TV screen and diode transmitting the images.

  “Mom! Please!” I cried out from the little bedroom’s doorjamb boundary at the end of the hallway. But she ignored me. She wouldn’t say anymore, I knew from trying. She just quit the back and forth. I cried big fat baby tears, although I didn’t like to think of myself as a baby or even a kid. I was eleven. That space between child and
teenager. I wanted to skip teenager and just be an adult.

  As the commercials played, and I could hear, “Coming up next . . .” teasing me, I flopped down on the double-sized bed. Teeth gritted, arms and legs flailing, I pounded the mattress with all my might. When that didn’t satisfy me enough, and garnered neither attention nor sympathy from my mom, I grabbed the cheap white chenille bedspread on their bed, then stifling a good scream, I pulled at the spread as hard as my frustration would allow. When the thin cotton cloth began to rip, it felt so good—the relief, the satisfaction of destroying something. Of being bad. My tears subsided, and I dried my eyes on the corner of the spread where I had laid out on the bed. When I calmed down, I realized what I’d done, and I stared at the hole in the torn bedspread revealing the yellow fleece blanket underneath. Big trouble. My heart began to pound harder.

  The TV in the other room began playing the Helter Skelter theme song, a grating electric guitar crescendo. With my head at the foot of the bed, I saw the red credits flash on the screen. I could see the TV from this diagonally-across-the-bed twisted position! What a find. But I had to do something about the torn bedspread. I tried positioning the two sides of the rip together as neatly as possible and imagined pretending nothing had happened, but I could tell that wouldn’t fly.

  As the “previously on Helter Skelter scenes” started to flash on the TV screen, I remembered the sewing kit Mom kept in the top dresser drawer. I got up and dug around inside the metal candy tin where she kept various colors of thread and needles. The metal tin lid was hard to remove and clinked against the maple of the dresser.

  “Amy?” Mom called from the living room.

  “I’m sewing!” I said. My heart pounded harder and faster, worrying she’d come in the room and discover what I’d done.

  I found a spool of white thread. The electric guitar zinged as I poked one end of thread through the eye of the needle, remembering what I’d learned in the sewing class I’d taken a few weeks before at the YWCA. I arranged myself so I could catch a slanted sliver of the twelve-inch TV screen. I turned the bedspread over and stitched from the underside. Mom never called out again, but I’d hesitate if I heard her rustling in the next room, readjusting herself on the couch or getting up to go to the kitchenette. In between stitches, I looked out the door to see what was happening on the TV. Mom had turned the sound down, but I knew enough from the first night to follow along. More stabbings, the women who did what Manson told them to do, the malevolent gaze in their eyes, the vicious smiles. I pulled the thread taut through the fabric till the knot caught and tugged.

  The trailer before the movie had said Manson offered his followers love and family. Is that what made them do these heinous acts? I looked down to stitch one stitch at a time, then stared at the TV.

  The tear in the bedspread was about six inches long, and I was no more a seamstress than a singer, but I steadily sealed the hole I had made, continuously looking up to see more flashes of stabbings or Manson’s cunning face and eyes. The Frankenstein of stitches across the end of the bedspread looked so mangled that I knew Mom eventually would denounce me for it. I tried tugging the cotton to smooth it out, but the movie had me riveted. What bothered me most was that this group from the commune called themselves a “family.” Manson offered love in exchange for murder. The deal was no one could leave, no matter how badly they were treated. Once you were part of “The Family,” you had to stay. The murders kept them together. You had to kill to prove you wouldn’t betray the others. It looked so easy to end up in a place like that, doing what someone told you to do without realizing you were brainwashed until it was too late, or never at all. But they were a family that stuck together. Despite my family’s transiency, it was the ephemera that held us together, like ectoplasm. The anticipation, the appreciation, and even the apprehension of each visit—when would they be back and how soon till they left—had led me to see my family as a special treat. We didn’t make promises, we weren’t together enough to betray, and best of all there was no carnage, no slashing off of ears. Mom’s refrigerator, spick-and-span, no weird phrases written in blood.

  When the red credits began to roll at the end, I smoothed out the area I had stitched as best I could, then flipped over on my back with my head against the pillows. I pretended I was reading a sappy Nancy Drew. When my mother came in, I tried not to look at the end of the bed where my handiwork bunched up with bulky stitches at my feet. Instead I asked, “What happened?”

  “It was just courtroom scenes. Boring, really.”

  “How long will he be in jail?” I asked.

  “He’s up for parole in twenty years.” She pulled her pajamas out of the drawer where I’d taken the thread from the candy tin.

  Twenty years—I added in my head—I’d be thirty-one. “What will happen when he gets out?”

  “He won’t get out. They don’t parole someone like him.”

  “They could, though,” I said.

  “They could,” she said.

  I slipped under the covers on Mom’s bed. Dad was out of town, so there was no way I was going to sleep out on the living room’s Murphy bed by myself. I would sleep with Mom.

  “Can I sleep in here tonight?”

  She smiled.

  “I won’t move. I’ll be so still you won’t know I’m here.”

  “You can keep me company,” she said.

  Yes, yes, I would.

  Images on a Paper Soul

  Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.

  —Walt Whitman

  This time my brother calls me. He is writing his will. “I don’t have much, but anything you want?”

  “Yes,” I say. I know exactly what I want.

  Great Grandpa Schultz’s stony face with its sharp-pointed beard looks out from a mahogany frame, the matte tinged brown with age. His face appears hostile, with black eyes that travel around the room. When we were kids, visiting Mommom and Papa, all of us were frightened of the photo. His eyes followed us as though watching our every move.

  “He knows what you’re thinking!” we would whisper. “He’s looking at you!” Then we’d scream and run across the room, jump on a bed with a pile of cousins to see whether we could divert his attention. But it never worked; he kept an eye on all of us. Even after the lights were out.

  A cousin had told me that the photo contained his soul, that’s why his eyes still moved. Marty had said it was Grandpa Schultz in that space between the cardboard backing and piece of glass. That he wanted out.

  A trick of the light, the way the image ended up on the photographer’s film, or how the lens captured the perspective of the eye, that’s what caused the photo’s subject to follow you. I was a logical child and wanted a reason, I wanted it to make sense. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” my mom told me, but everything made me afraid, so why wouldn’t a pair of moving one-hundred-year-old paper eyes frighten me?

  “That’s all I want,” I told Marty on the phone. “Grandpa Schultz’s picture.” He had taken it when our grandparents died.

  When photography was first being invented, the small wooden box with a lens at one end projected a scene onto a piece of frosted glass at the back, where the artist could trace the outlines on thin paper. They called these fairy pictures, creations of a moment but destined as rapidly to fade away, the images left only to our memories. Artists traced the pictures until experiments with writing paper brushed with salt, a thin coating of silver nitrate, and the right amount of sun caused these natural images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed upon the paper.

  Permanent memories.

  What Remains

  You say goodbye and I say hello.

  —Lennon and McCartney, “Hello, Goodbye”

  This time, instead of a phone call, I am visiting my folks in Texas. I want to touch the pottery, read the Daily Sun articles, flip through photo albums.

  In the doorway of the den, my parents stand and watch me as I ravage the cabinets where all the smaller memorab
ilia is stored. Albums stuffed with all my letters from Papa, our visas, Dad’s signed contracts with witch doctors to allow him to traverse the tribal lands—I rifle through all of it—the paraphernalia of our lives.

  I open a small drawer in the middle of the oak cabinet built in Lima to hold our stereo equipment.

  “What’s this?” I ask, holding up a plastic baggy so old and opaque that I have to open it to see what’s inside. A poof of dust escapes as I unzip it. I have to tilt my head back to let it pass. The last ghost?

  I pour out a handful of metal pieces, some an inch square, flat but curved, some just fingernail-sized, patina covered like dead moss.

  “That’s the crown,” my dad replies.

  I pause. I’m having a hard time thinking this is what I think it is. “From the skull?” I ask. Marty’s skull, I want to say. The skull that belonged to a man who lived over one thousand years ago.

  “Yeah,” my dad says, “When I gave the skull to the movers, I took the crown off. It’s silver.”

  “You kept the crown?” My disbelief twines itself around all the brittle pieces in the palm of my hand. He not only robbed a grave, but denuded the skull? He robbed the prince? He just had to keep the crown?

  “It proves he was a prince,” my dad says.

  I don’t mention that the skull the crown wrapped around is missing. That the prince is scattered. That there is no prince to prove a prince. There is no body, as my mom would say.

  Yet, it’s not really about the body. When I watched the body being unraveled, I really expected there to be no body under the tela. That’s why I had to keep confirming. I expected nobody.

  It’s not the physical. It’s none of this paraphernalia in the room I stand in.

  It’s the fleeting emotions. The fragility of their thereness. One swipe of my arm for a hug, and they could turn to dust or thin air. But my memories, those are like bone. Their love is dust, but memory is bone. My memory is all I have, so it must remain. Even if it’s remembering the dust.