Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

To them, we were freaks. There they go, the freaks. Some offered the opinion that my mother had fucked something in the gorilla house at Lincoln Park Zoo. And though Celandine’s defects weren’t easily apparent, she did have a slight stoop, like the older women who cleaned office buildings in the Loop after the rush hour ended.

The other thing that made Celandine a freak in the eyes of the other kids was that she hung around with me. This was before I got the black sunglasses and I looked like those creatures from Spider County on that Outer Limits episode. Celly kissed me in public. Those awkward, preadolescent kind where it’s like kissing your sister. The saddest memento I had of Celly was a photograph my mother had taken, with white borders and the date printed on the right-hand side. When everyone from St. Fidelus was out on a class trip, my ma took the colour photo of Celly and me in front of the yellow brick entrance. To show off to relatives and coworkers who were never told that I was in actuality enrolled at Childermas. Ever. Always in a real world. James Trainor and Celandine Tomei, February 1967. Here in the real world.

* * *

In the real world, I graduated from college and left town. Found a job in a bookstore in Streator, then moved on to Navaoo, near the Mississippi. I was going west, too, you see. One night in the latter town, I came home from my job at the International House of Pancakes to find my place ransacked.

The memories of Celandine gone. Everything else didn’t matter. I left the state that night. Carthage, Missouri. Colcord, Oklahoma. Whoever would have me. Not many places would. And the ones that did eventually found excuses. I was The fucking Fugitive, all through the early eighties. Just like in the tv show, I’d have some menial job, be there a few weeks, and then some self-righteous person or group would make up a rumour to get the funny looking bug-eye out of their safe little hamlet.

* * *

Until Denver. It was pure luck that I heard about the ADAPT program for handicapped people while I was passing through Sedalia, Colorado. I don’t know why I shucked it for the dj gig; guess I liked the nights better. Denver’s compact skyline, the Flatiron Mountains invisible until the grey of false dawn.

Best yet, I found a friend in Norm Brady. I was at the Wax Traxx on Twelfth Avenue in Capitol Hill, hunting down a copy of Robert Mitchum singing “Thunder Road” for one of the bar’s theme nights. Norm had retrieved the last 45, seconds before I walked down the aisle. We struck up a conversation about Elvis and actors who should have never recorded albums, all the while walking down Colfax On The Hill. Norm lived in a studio apartment above the Metropolis Café on Logan; I was three blocks over on Galapago. Norm tended bar at a place on Wazee, over near the viaduct, in addition to bouncing at The Lion’s Lair.

Living there was the best time of my life. Waking up to those beautiful and hypnotic blue mountains to the west, always covered with snow, even in July. Until we went to Vegas on a whim and I saw what the city and the real world had done to Celandine Tomei.

* * *

Our curiosity had gotten the better of us. We had gambled; breaking even, more or less. Neither one of us drank much. Alcohol has adverse effects on my health and I get massive headaches. So our decision was a sober one. A man dressed in lilac, a bargain basement Prince impersonator of the wrong race, told us where to find this … zombie tongue.

I was feeling natty; dressed in non-touristy black with an olive green jacket. Thin lapels, flowered tie, but mellowed out with a button of Elvis Presley playing the ukulele in Blue Hawaii

. Norm was dressed in jeans and a Road Kill Press t-shirt he picked up back in Arvada, at The Little Bookshop of Horrors, topped off with a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap.

The directions were not that difficult. Maryland Parkway connected with Rue H Street past Eleventh. In the middle of the three-way intersection, cross-hatched in shadows, there was a white building, railroad flat-styled. The logo was a woman in teal wearing a low-brimmed hat.

The name of the place, also in teal script, was BELLADONNA.

* * *

Celandine says she doesn’t remember much about those days in Vegas. Hell, she doesn’t remember much now, with the drugs she’s still taking, trying to forget. A staff sergeant at Nellis Air Force Base tipped Celly to a way to make money, the kind of shuck you read in any of the Chicago classifieds. Celly knew that she’d never be working as a waitress in some greasy spoon off Flamingo Road.