Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

There was nothing visibly wrong with her. Compared to the others, at least. Her spine was curved to the right; I heard Ron Szawlus mention that it might eventually realign itself. She always wore billowy, flowered dresses. Of course, this was 1966, and all girls dressed in clothes that covered every possible aspect of their young sexuality, the flowers exuding innocence. These days I see the same patterns on women wearing maternity outfits.

* * *

By the middle of 1967 the schedules of many of my classmates changed. Both Celandine and I, as well as several others, had improved enough with our mobility and coordination that we only had to come for therapy three times a month. This would continue until I was thirteen. The therapy offices—a two-flat on Aberdeen—were closer to our respective houses.

Gone were the memories of the boy in the burn ward, the one the nurses in the pain detail talked about. His mother had left him asleep on the top of a coil heater. Instead of doing skin grafts, the doctors had peeled away several additional layers of skin from the boy’s buttocks and performed experiments involving the injections of T-lymphocytes.

Gone, too, were the strange people kept in the psychophrenic ward, as I called it then. I now know that Jimmy Dvorak, Frankie Haid, Billy Bierce, and other infamous Chicago killers of recent past were diagnozed as schizophrenics. But this was a word my parents did not know, and I had to make do with phonetics.

I only saw Celandine during therapy classes. Celly went to Wells public school, which was a lot closer to the therapy clinic.

I learned a lot about her. The fact that she was a child of thalidomide, that wonderful sedative that pregnant women were given until 1963, when it was banned. Her mother had been prescribed the brand name Kevadon and was herself eventually diagnozed with peripheral neuritis. Being young, I thought that was really keen. A drug that back-fired. In therapy, Celandine and I both practised the FeldenKrais Method. This was something invented by a former judo instructor to help improve posture and self-image. The latter was something I certainly needed. Celly was getting more beautiful by the day. I would long for the first, second, and fourth Wednesday of every month that summer. I found out that her mother was into holistic therapy, and that she gave Celly daily injections of aconite, which was really wolfsbane, no shit, and this presumably acted as an adjuvant of her “Vagus nerve,” which was an ideal pain inhibitor. I often wondered later how much pain she had actually been in. Pretty, but still wearing frilly dresses instead of shorts and a blouse like most everybody else in Wicker Park, even the fattest of the girls.

And she liked me a whole lot.

My mother was glad that I had found a friendship in Celandine Tomei. Thinking back on it, I don’t recall that they ever met during our days at Childermas. Celly and I would often walk hand in hand through Humboldt Park. She and her mother lived on Division and Hermitage, right next door to a holistic healing house that was usually tenanted by beat poets and abstract artists. Celly’s father, before he died, worked as a steerer, someone who brought in potential poker players and gamers, at Mania’s Lucky Stop Inn, a Polish bar on the other side of their building.

The first time I went over to Celly’s house, I saw a framed quote, this being long before the cutesy arts-and-crafts-stitched logos. The bromide, in simple block letters, read:

HEALTH AND ILLNESS CAN BE REPRESENTED BY A CONTINUUM.

Celly showed me her mother’s bookshelves, Jan Smut’s Holism and Evolution, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions, there were others. I remember seeing a book on EDTA. Not knowing what it meant, I thumbed through it. The letters stood for ethylene tetra-acetic acid. There were pictures in the book of dwarf-like skeletons and bodies in foetal positions. I read that EDTA chelated the calcium lost in body waste. I started to ask Mrs. Tomei what this meant, as she had walked into the room with cherry Kool-Aid, but she quickly took the book away, putting it up out of reach of Celly and me.

I stayed late that evening, because my mother was putting in overtime at the radium plant. I was supposed to be home before dark, but she wasn’t able to make any calls, and I knew that crazy Anna Banana, the downstairs neighbour who was supposed to check on me, was at the horse track in Cicero.