FSF, July-August 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  After serving all of us breakfast, Mickey addressed me individually.

  "All right, Mr. Lambeth. Do you have any particular needs other than a podium and microphone? Any preferred lighting scheme? No? Then if you would kindly follow me, we can run through your act."

  I willingly accompanied him, ready to make a break. But the breezeway doors had been barred.

  The first floor of the house had been retrofitted into a theater. All the interior, non-loadbearing walls had been removed, affording about one thousand square feet of floor space, ranked with over a hundred folding chairs focused on a small stage.

  "If you take your place, Mr. Lambeth, we can begin."

  I climbed the low stage, got behind the lectern, and nervously began to speak.

  Mickey took copious notes throughout. When I had finished, he delivered them. I listened incredulously.

  "Why, why—those are great suggestions! I never realized I was doing all those things wrong!"

  Mickey permitted a small smile to cross his countenance. “Thirty years on Broadway, Mr. Lambeth, were not entirely wasted. Judy and I would be there still, but this dreadful economy—Well, one has to adapt, doesn't one?"

  I returned to the garage, excited about Friday's reading. I tried to rouse the interest of my fellow performers, but they seemed jaded.

  Yet the next evening, before a full house, we all put on a fantastic show. I sold thirty copies of my novel! Thirty! I had never sold more than three at any one reading before.

  Well, to make the story of my engagement at Mickey and Judy's a short tale, I was there for six weeks—above average for a novelist, I was given to understand. I moved over six hundred copies of Black Swan Down before sales began to flag, and made my publisher very happy.

  As Judy drove me back to South Station to continue my roadtrip, I felt renewed confidence in my career, and a gratitude to my captors which was not entirely due to Stockholm Syndrome.

  "We hope you'll consider staying with us when your next book comes out, Karl,” Judy said as I exited the car.

  "I certainly will, Judy. But you've got to promise to upgrade your cable service beyond basic!"

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelet: PINING TO BE HUMAN by Richard Bowes

  In our last few issues, we've run several autobiographical stories by Mr. Bowes, including “Waiting for the Phone to Ring” and “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said.” These stories—along with this new one—will comprise part of his forthcoming book, Dust Devil: My Life in Speculative Fiction.

  So many years later I can still see the Witch Girls gliding over the grass amid the fireflies of a summer evening. I first saw them the July when I was four. That season in 1948 is the first piece of time I can remember as a coherent whole and not just a series of disconnected images. That evening I saw magic and told no one.

  A couple of my parents’ friends ran a summer theater in Ithaca in upstate New York. They hired my father as box office manager and he, my mother, and I spent a summer there. My mother had stopped acting by then.

  My bedroom window that summer looked out on a backyard with trees. Where we lived in Boston, my third-floor window overlooked an alley and beyond that a barn for the Hood's Milk delivery horses and behind that the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railway tracks.

  One night that summer crickets chirped, the trees sang in the wind, and women in long chiffon dresses walked silently over the grass. I knew they were the Witch Girls and stayed very still so they wouldn't see me.

  Those figures on that night were a memory that popped up at times later in my childhood to jerk me awake as I tried to fall asleep. Starting in my early teens they sometimes returned when I drank or got stoned and had started to drift off.

  They remained a minor chill and not something I much dwelled on until my last year of college. The first person I told about them was a psychiatrist, Doctor Maria Lovell. She was French. Her husband was a controversial electronic music composer. Many of her patients were artists.

  It was the winter of 1965. I had turned twenty-one and was in my second-to-last semester of college.

  Doctor Lovell was a Jungian and so actually displayed some interest in what I told her. “Who were they?” she asked.

  "When I first saw them they were characters in a play called Dark of the Moon that got put on in a summer theater my parents were with. It's about a Witch Boy who's in love with a human girl and becomes human to marry her. They used a lot of old folk songs in it."

  To illustrate this, I sang a verse I'd recently relearned, set to the tune of “Barbara Allen.” When I came to the line, “Pining to be human,” Maria Lovell gave a quizzical smile.

  "There were two Witch Girls who wanted to break up the marriage,” I said. “That's who I saw under the trees. Even though I knew the actresses who played the parts, had been in their dressing room and everything, this was very scary."

  "You dreamed this when you were small?"

  "No, I saw it out the window when I was small."

  "Your parents were in the theater?"

  "When I was small."

  "Do you remember other things from that summer?"

  "I remember all the plays in the repertory. One was Abe Lincoln in Illinois which is about his life before he went to Washington. There was a scene where Lincoln read to his youngest son, Todd. The kid who was supposed to be Todd got sick or something and they wanted me to do the last performances. All it involved was sitting on Lincoln's lap.

  "The actor was a man who went on to play the father in Lassie on television. My parents were okay and didn't force me. But there was this fire engine I wanted, all red and plastic with little firemen hanging on the back and a ladder that went up and down.

  "So that was how it came about. I sat on the actor's lap and didn't look at the audience just like I'd been told. He read something aloud. I wore a costume with long stockings that itched but I didn't scratch my legs. I was supposed to have a line but instead of me one of the kids playing my older brothers said it. And the last night when the curtain came down for that scene, the stage manager had the fire engine for me."

  "Was that before or after the Witch Girls?"

  "They were at the start of that summer. Abe Lincoln was at the end, as I remember."

  "So you made your debut."

  "My only performances; I've never set foot on stage since."

  She made a note. “Next week at this time?” She never asked where I got the money to pay her so I didn't have to say.

  My writing teacher had referred me to Doctor Lovell after I told him that I'd secretly dropped compulsory ROTC and gym. Without four semesters of each I couldn't graduate from college.

  On my first visit Doctor Lovell asked why I'd done that and I said, “Because one day last spring in the gym, a couple of cadet officers who didn't like my attitude jumped me as I came out of the shower, called me a faggot, and slammed me against my locker. Everyone stood around watching! I can't go back."

  "It is all right to cry, you know,” she said and pushed a Kleenex box across her desk. My eyes burned and I blew my nose but I didn't cry in those days.

  "Their problems with their own sexuality led those young men to attack you,” she said. “How did you come to study to be a soldier?"

  "That's what happens to boys who lose scholarships at good schools. When I flunked out of the first college I attended, it got decided that a couple of years of close order drill would straighten me out. The alternative was getting drafted and I don't think I'd survive a week in an army barracks."

  "I've seen many soldiers,” she said, shaking her head. “You are not one."

  Friday afternoons that winter, without telling my family, my friends or anyone else, I came into Manhattan from Long Island and talked to her. At that time a psychiatrist on one's schedule was a sign of sophistication.

  Her office was in the East Seventies. Walking fast, I headed down Third Avenue in my chinos and penny loafers and winter raincoat. For a coup
le of years my old man and the Army Reserves had kept me very crewcut and unhip. Now I was growing my hair like an English rocker. But freedom felt precarious.

  Boston where I'd grown up seemed like a town compared to this city. Third Avenue was a cruising zone on a Friday afternoon. Guys stood casually on street corners, paused significantly in doorways, gave sidelong glances. Eyes tracked me from the windows of the bird bars: The Blue Parrot, The Golden Pheasant, The Swan.

  I went into a place in the low Sixties. It was dark and quiet before the weekend began. Piaf sang on the jukebox. A pair of men in suits at the far end of the bar stopped talking when I came in. The bartender was big and bald. He looked me over and said in a weird little-girl voice, “You should try Rhonda's."

  "I have a draft card.” The legal age was eighteen but in straight bars I always got carded. Sometimes they refused service because they thought my card was phony and I was underage. Gay bars were much less fussy.

  "Scotch and water,” I said.

  He waved the card aside and watched me put the whiskey away in a swallow. When I went to pay for it, he shook his head and poured me another. “You're new?"

  I nodded.

  "Honey, I'd love to have you around but management doesn't want kids in here."

  I hit the street a bit later with a glow on and the bartender's telephone number in my pocket.

  At Fifty-third the young boys stood in canvas sneakers and thin jackets, waited under awnings. Hostile and wary, they stared at me out the windows of Rhonda's Coffee Shop and knew just who I was.

  That afternoon I'd told Doctor Lovell about the Witch Girls because they'd been on my mind lately. It was also to turn the conversation away from the scary stranger with unblinking eyes who stopped me in a South Boston subway station when I was thirteen.

  On my second visit I'd told her how he took me to a place he knew, opened my clothes, did me as I stood transfixed, gave me five dollars, told me to forget this had happened, and disappeared. The next time I saw his face was on the front page of a newspaper. He had killed two brothers a little younger than I was. The last time I saw the face was when he got murdered in jail. She wanted me to talk about that, but I didn't even want to think about it.

  At Grand Central I caught the cross-town shuttle, took the A train down to vast, doomed Penn Station.

  Then I was on a Long Island Railroad car headed back to school surrounded by ladies with shopping bags from Macy's and Bloomingdale's. I realized the plays I'd seen that summer in Ithaca were clearer in my mind than ones I'd been to that semester.

  At the train station I caught the shuttle bus to the campus. The commuter school was mostly deserted on that February evening. A few lights burned in offices. A stray faculty member with a briefcase walked to his car. A pair of uniformed cadet officers strutted past. Guys like them had tried to make it impossible for me to graduate.

  Suddenly I was back in the mire of a strange and seedy commuter college that had a major drama department and compulsory ROTC for all male students. I turned a corner and lights were on inside the playhouse; rehearsals were in progress.

  The Witch Girls, one dark, one fair, stood on the front stairs smoking and shivering in the chill. Each had her long hair tied back and wore a black leotard and a diaphanous black top that flowed about her when she moved. The drama department's main stage play for March was going to be Dark of the Moon.

  They waved when they saw me. The girl playing the Dark Witch and I found each other amusing. “You a Witch Boy,” she called in a low, sexy voice, “and you always gonna be one."

  Mags McConnell, the Fair Witch, watched my approach through slitted eyes. She was a year or two older than I was and would graduate in the spring. Everyone knew that she had the hots for me. Having a girlfriend seemed a safe idea.

  "I got ways,” Mags said in the phony Ozark accent everyone had started using onstage and off and blew smoke in my face. “I can turn you into a human boy.” We all laughed.

  Inside, work lights shone on the stage. Cast members sat scattered throughout the house. Professor Cortland, the drama department chairman, who was directing this production, stood down front talking to the lighting techs.

  Marty Simonson sat toward the back of the house. Like most of the cute boys in the cast, he was barefoot and wore bib overalls with the legs rolled above his knees. “God, you look fetching,” I whispered, just to see him blush.

  Cortland looked my way briefly. “So glad you could join us,” he said.

  I picked up the prompter's copy of the script. The theater was the only interesting spot on campus. To get credit for a drama minor, I had to do things like this each semester. The first time I read the play I'd been startled by the power of my memories.

  Cortland said. “Places. Rehearsal starts in five minutes."

  The first scene of the play has John, the Witch Boy, asking the Conjur Man, a kind of backwoods wizard, to turn him into a human. The Witch Boy was a tall senior with a dazzling smile who went on to star in several popular cigarette and deodorant ads on TV.

  The Conjur Man was Carl Ryman, who at twenty-one was losing his hair but who owned whatever stage he stood upon. Five years out of school he had his own Off-Off Broadway repertory company of transvestites and manly women in a rat-infested loft on lower Second Avenue.

  The Conjur Man repeatedly says that John is a Witch Boy and always will be and is never going to change even if he marries a human girl. Everyone in the company but Professor Cortland, so deep in the closet he didn't get the joke, now said Witch Boy and Human Boy instead of gay and straight.

  Holding the script through a dozen rehearsals had stripped away most of the magic. But at moments, like Carl's performance, or when Lisa and Mags as the spiteful Witch Girls were on stage, I was four years old and sitting enthralled beside my mother.

  I tried to stay slightly ahead of the cast, gave them lines when one occasionally glanced my way. But my mind wandered and sometimes when the actors missed a line, I missed it too. Cortland was not happy.

  After rehearsal I sat in a student beer hall between Mags and Marty, laughing as Carl Ryman said, “The barest hint that you're a Witch Boy and Cortland takes you on a camping trip to the Catskills so he can show you how the birds and the chipmunks engage only in Human Boy behavior."

  Mags took my hand and I let her. She had to leave early. I walked her out to her car. In her freshman year at Swarthmore Mags had a nervous breakdown and spent a few months in a hospital before coming here.

  Our college specialized in bright, damaged kids who washed out at the good schools where we started and had to transfer. She gave me a Benzedrine tablet which I downed along with the beer I carried.

  "You want to get together Sunday afternoon?” she asked as we kissed good night. I shook my head. It drove her crazy that I'd never say why I wasn't available Sundays. “We could invite Marty,” she said. “Would that tempt you?” It did, but not enough.

  Quite a bit later Marty drove me home because I currently had no car. He'd ended up at the college when his parents split up and there wasn't enough money for him to continue at Penn State. I'd seen him the first day of fall semester in the ugly uniform and brutal haircut, looking very lost. I'd fallen for him, but we stayed just friends.

  He stopped in a secluded back road along the way and we shared a joint. “Mags wants to turn us both into Human Boys,” I said and cracked up at his wide-eyed expression.

  Apparently he drove me home because I found myself making my way around to the back door of my parents’ split-level. I shared a bedroom with my younger brother in what otherwise would have been the rec room next to the garage.

  As I turned the corner into the backyard I saw figures in long dresses with silky tops and flowing sleeves. They moved toward me across the lawn. By the light of a big Long Island half-moon that looked like a stage contrivance, I saw that they had no faces.

  I gasped and sat up in bed wearing only my undershorts. My brain was still soft with booze and drugs. In
the other bed my brother stirred and turned over in his sleep. A light was on upstairs in the kitchen. I smelled cigarette smoke. One of my parents was awake.

  I hoped it wasn't my father. Very late one Saturday night in January I'd staggered in encrusted with snow. According to my brother I was so drunk and stoned that our father had pulled all my clothes off, smacked me around and put me to bed. My old rust-bucket had died in the blizzard half a mile from home and things were still cold and distant between my father and me.

  Tonight my clothes were strewn on the floor which meant I'd gotten myself undressed. The chances were it was my mother upstairs. So I put on a robe and went up to the kitchen. She sat at the table doing the Times crossword puzzle. The clock said it was just past four. She glanced at me, quizzical, unsmiling, and beautiful. It seemed to me that she must understand exactly what I'd been up to.

  "Couldn't sleep?” she asked. “I heard you come in about an hour ago.” That I'd awakened her was unspoken but a given. She slept very lightly.

  "Who were you with?” she wanted to know.

  "Marty drove me. You've met him."

  She said nothing, drew on her Phillip Morris. My parents smoked but I didn't much—not cigarettes, anyway. Again she gave me the look.

  "I was thinking about Ithaca,” I said and kept my voice low as I tried to change the subject. My father, my two sisters, and my youngest brother were asleep upstairs. “Especially the Witch Girls,” I added.

  She nodded and finally half-smiled. “You loved them. You didn't understand much else in that play but when anyone talked about it, you'd say, ‘Oh, them Witch Girls!’ Everybody loved your doing things like that."

  "Did you want to come and see Dark of the Moon?” I asked my mother. She never went to see plays anymore. Rarely went out.

  "Not if you don't have a part in it,” she said, and turned back to her puzzle.

  "I'm writing now,” I said and she nodded. She wrote too—had done scripts for local TV back in Boston when I was a kid.