Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

“Soon” became 1970, and when we returned to the place I was born, I found that the Tomeis had moved. Out of state and somewhere west was all I could find out. I received several letters from Celandine, postmarked Iowa City and Thermopolis, Wyoming. She sounded increasingly depressed, saying how her mother was taking her to a climate that would help her feel more healthy. They might move to Albuquerque.

I watched MASH and All In The Family, saw the Vietnam War end and Nixon resign. Around the time of the fall of Saigon, I received a letter from Celandine’s mother in New Mexico. She told me that Celly had left home.

In her room she found a ticket stub for Denver. She was going after her.

II. Zombie Tongue

The word freaks … sounds like a cry of pain —Anthony Burgess

“You ain’t gotten anything until you had yisself some zombie tongue.” Several men on downtown Fremont Street repeated this like a litany the entire first night Norm and I were in Las Vegas.

We had taken a week off from our jobs, working at the Lion’s Lair. Norm Brady was a bouncer, I was a disc jockey. Those wraparound RayBans were quite the style now. It was June of 1987, and I had been living in the Denver area almost since I graduated from college six years before.

Viva Las Vegas, Elvis sang back when I was at Childermas with Celandine. Visa Las Vegas was more like it. Expensive as shit! Well, the shrimp cups were cheap. Looked like little sea monkeys, I recall David Letterman joking once.

We walked the seedier part of town, thinking our long thoughts and keeping them to ourselves. We were just damn glad to be out of Denver.

The cool neon of The Mint and the Golden Nugget that was so prominent on Crime Story were far behind us. Eighth Street was home to a bail bondsman and Ray’s Beaver Bag. On Ninth, we saw The Orbit Inn, but couldn’t enter because an armless fat man wearing a purple sweatshirt had passed out in the revolving door. No one inside seemed to care. We kept walking, amused at kids pitching pennies between the legs of butt-ugly whores. Looking back towards Glitter Gulch, all we saw was a tiny blob of pink and blue neon. That, and the memory of voices whispering conspiratorially about zombie tongues.

I had a BA in English Literature from the University of Illinois. Tried my hand at Behavioral Sciences, but I couldn’t cut it. I guess it was because I still thought of Celandine. I was ten when she left Chicago for points west. I think it was the Holistic Center that told Mrs. Tomei that the drier air might do Celly good, by alleviating stress and “allowing a better view of oneself.”

My actual thoughts were that the Tomeis wanted more privacy. The riots weren’t just a racial thing. The blacks were hitting on the black handicapped, too. I could understand Josephine Tomei’s concerns.

My family surprised me by moving back to the southwest side of Chicago. Bridgeport, a few blocks from Mayor Daley’s home on Emerald. A nice area then, the Stevenson interstate a new and wondrous thing, and most of the blocks filled with squalor had spanking new Tru-Link fences put up courtesy of da Mayor hisself. He did this several years before, because Chicago was going to be portrayed as a lovely town during the 1968 Democratic Convention, for all network television to see.

I had several mementoes of Celly; tactile things, not simply memories of her naked, and of her seeing me in the same way.

We had often exchanged books, and I still had one of her Happy Hollisters mysteries. They were on a ranch somewhere, is all I remember. A menu from Ricky’s Deli that we had played connect-the-dots with.

I had felt comfortable on Crystal Street, where we grew up. I realized this walking past the casinos and neon signs. Even in Las Vegas, as in Denver, no one thought of me as being different. Hell, I had both my arms, for chrissakes, and wasn’t blocking a revolving door. That’s how it was back in the Humboldt Park neighbourhood.

The older Poles liked us—not just tolerated us—because they weren’t too far removed from the atrocities of Dachau. The kids our age, the normal ones, well, that was an entirely different tune altogether.