Stories From the Plague Years (38 page)

This story, about payback, itself settles a score. A character I renamed Keene gets bumped off in this work. A guy named Michael Marano dies horribly in Brian Keene’s
The Rising
. Coincidence? You be the judge.

“L
ITTLE
R
OUND
H
EAD
”

I sorta don’t want to say much about this one, as a lot of people who have read it have come away with wildly different understandings of it. I don’t mean different understandings of abstract things like themes and symbolism. I mean, totally different ideas of the story’s time, setting and background that are so off from what I’d imagined, it makes my frontal lobes spin. I don’t want to sound like some patchouli-soaked, espresso-sipping jerk in a frayed sweater doing the “mysterious artist” schtick, but I think this one’s a Rorschach test. I left a lot of it ambiguous—even the gender of the narrator, if you squint right—and if I say, “Hey! This is how I wrote it and here’s what it’s about!” I’ll limit how people read it, and maybe it’s the story’s flexibility that makes some people like it. Only one person who’s talked to me about “Little Round Head” read it the way I wrote it, and that’s Brett Alexander Savory.

I’ll just say that John Gardner’s
Grendel
taught me an important lesson: when in doubt, tell the story from the monster’s point of view. It’s just hard to figure out who’s the monster, sometimes.

“C
HANGELING
”

Speaking of Brett, and monsters, he tapped me to contribute to a charity anthology entitled
Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three
, which he edited with M. W. Anderson. “The West Memphis Three” refers to Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin, kids from the Robin Hood Hills area near West Memphis, Arkansas who, if you see Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s documentaries
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
and
Paradise Lost 2: Revelations
, seem to have been railroaded in a fit of “Satanic Panic” onto Death Row for the 1993 murder of three little kids just because they themselves were “weird” teens who dressed in black and liked Stephen King and Metallica. You can read up on the ugliness at
www.wm3.org
. These kids were made into monsters, because others required them to be monstrous. To be “other.” Teratogenisis is an anxious husbandry, a need to grow strange and ugly fruit in other people’s souls in order to convince ourselves that what grows in our hearts is godly and wholesome. In the case of making kids into monsters, you’re swapping out a child for something warped—a changeling. It’s not always wicked fairies that do the swapping.

Mary Shelly kinda got it wrong. We don’t make monsters that are monsters with their first breath. You don’t need atomic fallout or genetic engineering to make a monster. Malignant narcissism and a bit of contempt do the job just fine. Unca Friedrich might have been off too, when he said, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” To
really
become a monster, all you have to do is make someone else a monster.

“B
URDEN
”

The chronology of “Burden” makes no sense, if you think about it. The guy the story is about couldn’t be the age he is, with the past he has, in the era when HIV tests still took weeks to process. Oh, well.

I saw a documentary about the early years of AIDS, and I remember those days when AIDS was a weird and nightmarish rumour whispered out of Manhattan. “Gay
cancer
? You can’t . . .
catch
. . . cancer, can you?” The documentary crew interviewed a guy who was the last man standing among all his friends, and he said that every time a friend dies, a library burns, and that when he dies, there will be no one around to remember him. I thought about my friends who’d been devoured by the virus and said to the TV: “What about
your
obligation to remember
them
?”

“T
HE
S
IEGE
”

Charleston shrouds herself in her own ghost. My friend, Charleston writer Harlan Greene, has described the town as being like Norma Desmond, dressed in her former glory and angry that time has had the hubris to pass her by. A city that wears her ghost might draw ghosts to her who are still living, even while so much of the town’s tourist trade exploits her haunted past. It’s a weird town to live in, and this story grew out of my culture shock when I first moved there. My mother claims that when she was pregnant with me, she toured the plantation where
Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte
was filmed, so maybe I was imprinted to be wigged out by that kind of vibe
in utero
. The kernel of this story is something I was thinking of writing as a novel—but a whole book with protagonists who have lost their souls might be a little . . . I dunno . . . soulless?

“. . . A
ND
THE
D
AMAGE
D
ONE
”
and
“E
XIT
W
OUND
”

When you write about someone who has died, you’re appropriating that death, which is a trespass. Maybe mourning is itself a trespass. But I do grieve for my friend Marian, and everyone who knew her I’m sure still grieves. She was born in 1968 on the Friday the 13th that the Beatles recorded “Sexy Sadie” and “Yer Blues” and Soviet tanks rumbled toward Prague. She died on a Sunday in 2001, while the steel at Ground Zero still burned. As a homeless and formally homeless teen, she was the subject of two short documentaries: “Sadobabies” and “The Loser’s Club” by Nancy Kalow. And she’s the subject of a full-length documentary in the works,
Last Fast Ride: The Life, Loves and Death of a Punk Goddess
by Lilly Scourtis.

Marian lived down the street from me in Oakland, and she used to cat-sit for me when I was out of town. Part of “The Loser’s Club” was filmed in Marian’s apartment, and in one shot you can see my old building through her window. It’s weird to see a room you know artfully framed, even through the “true and non-fictional” medium of documentary film-making. I used to hang out with Marian in front of that window, talking about music and horror . . . written, filmed, and lived. Talking to Marian was a terrible and wonderful gift, because she never broke eye contact. When you talked to her, only a small bit of what she said was spoken. Most of her voice was in her gaze.

This was in the days that she was the lead singer for the now-legendary punk band, The Insaints, with Daniel DeLeon of Rezurex and The Deep Eynde on guitar. The art of the documentarian’s eye intrudes on my memory of Marian’s apartment and that window. The posters on her wall. The dolls she had everywhere. Her LPs, the sleeves of which were used as scratching posts by her cats. The way light hit the place in the afternoon and how that light touched her eyes and changed how she spoke with them. Which makes me wonder, what about my eye as a writer? Is that gaze an intrusion? How about your eye as a reader?

I don’t know if I have the right to mourn Marian, to intrude on her death by writing about her. We had a really shitty falling out, and if I wouldn’t have been welcome in her home while she lived, why would I be welcome into the situation of her death, and drag you with me?

But the dead intrude on us, too. When a friend dies of an overdose, it throws a shade over places you’ve walked. Under that shade, landscapes take textures, detail, an awful richness that has always been around you, but that you’ve never seen. Drugs are so all-pervasive, you can’t see them until your experience of them is immediate. Poe . . . Baudelaire . . .
Bukowski . . . Hunter S. Thompson . . . Cheever . . . the spectre of drugs haunts all their work, and in the vein-blue dusk of a friend’s overdose, their writings change . . . to the point that re-reading them seems like reading new works. The weight of drugs and how they thieve people from us is something you don’t feel until you’ve lost someone to them. The voice of drugs is something you don’t hear in music except in the shadow of that loss. So many songs of addiction and loss changed after Marian died. Songs like “Suicide Child,” “I Don’t Want To live This Life,” “This City of Vice” cause me physical pain, a folding behind my throat and ribs. The intrusion of Marian’s death has rewritten them.

In writing these stories, I hope I haven’t stirred her ashes. That I haven’t rifled her memory. Yet it’s a thing I couldn’t not do, because of how she has rewritten me.

“W
INTER
R
EQUIEM
”

This was my first fiction sale, solicited by Janet Berliner for an anthology themed around unicorns and immortality. I bled it out during one of the worst times of my life. My best friend, Lee Marshal, was dying of AIDS. Family members were being sliced, sutured, gutted like fish on operating tables. Someone I loved teetered on the verge of madness and suicide, while her supposed “best friend” couldn’t be bothered to hear her pain, ‘cuz she was . . . like . . . being such a
downer
, y’know? I tried to get from Oakland to where Lee was on his deathbed in Buffalo by cashing in all my frequent flyer miles, but a fuck up at the airline delayed my departure a few days, and Lee died while I was in the air, just hours from landing. There were more deaths, more illnesses, not to mention the loving company of my dear old friend emotional cruelty, to the point that acquaintances stopped me on the street to ask if I was OK. All during this, Janet guided me through rewrites and went to bat with the powers that be to keep me in the anthology. I’ll always be indebted to her for that.

This version is not the one that finally appeared in the anthology. It’s the penultimate, longer draft that was serialized by Seth Lindberg on
Gothic.Net
a few years after the anthology came out to coincide with the release of the paperback edition of my first book,
Dawn Song
. “Winter Requiem” has the same backdrop of “The War in Hell” as
Dawn Song
, and in this version there’s more of that background on display.

“S
HIBBOLETH
”

A lot of this is taken from my reading of history, especially about 14th century Europe. One of the main inspirations was Hans Koningsberger’s
A Walk With Love and Death
, about a poor student and his noble girlfriend wandering the smoldering shit-heap of France in 1358, during the Jacquerie uprising. I’m not convinced those swell gems from 1358, epidemic, class warfare, starvation, aren’t milling offstage, waiting for their cue to visit us again. I feel the need to say up front that this isn’t a joke, seeing as my hometown of Buffalo is so often the brunt of jokes, but . . . watching a major city contract, wither and fall to ruin is humbling. There was a point in the Dark Ages when Rome shrank back to the 7 villages atop the 7 Hills it had been originally, and when I read about that, I thought of how when I was a kid, older kids would go to the abandoned train station downtown to make out. When what had been the hub of transport for a major industrial center gets used as a lover’s lane, it makes you think about the future
and
the past, and what kind of Shibboleth we’ll have to speak to slip past those cruel and monolithic sentries.

I’d like to thank my wife Nancy for the gift of her love. The late William C. Nenno for allowing me to be his son. Dietmar Dath for reminding me there’s a point to staying in the game. Devin Grant, Derek Judson and Nancy Santos for the times in the trenches. Gabrielle Faust for being a friend and for the beauty of her artwork. Monica Sullivan and Steve Rubenstein for giving me a break in 1990. Larry Queen for crash pads and talks about art. Brett Savory for edits and Hannah Wolf Bowen for slogging through the slush with me. Cori Crooks and Ed Brubaker for memories of the Oakland years. Kamela Dolinova for wonderful breakfasts and saving me from a really crappy job. Alison Novak for being a loving friend,
Buffy
sing-a-longs and loaning me comic books. Geoffrey H. Goodwin and Nick Mamatas for taking me along to The City of Eternal Darkness, among other things. Lisa Morton for locking horns and throwing down. Larry Creesey for long nights of beer and horror talk. Janna Silverstein for throwing me tethers of hope, now and then. Staci Layne Wilson for junket tips. RiN and the Metal Monday crowd for getting me to sing. Michael Rowe, Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick for tapping me on the shoulder. Seth Lindberg and Mehitobel Wilson for the 56.6 K baud days. My colleagues at Grub Street and my “Page-Turner” students for helping me remember stuff I forgot I knew.

M
ICHAEL
M
ARANO
is a former punk rock DJ, bouncer, and the author of the modern dark fantasy classic
Dawn Song
, which won both the International Horror Guild and Bram Stoker Awards, and which will be reprinted by ChiZine Publications in 2013, to be followed by two sequels. For more than 20 years, his film reviews and pop culture commentary have been a highlight of the nationally syndicated Public Radio Satellite System show
Movie Magazine International
. His non-fiction has appeared in alternative newspapers such as
The Independent Weekly
,
The Boston Phoenix
and
The Weekly Dig
, as well as in magazines such as
Paste
and
Fantastique
. His column “MediaDrome” has been a wildly popular feature in
Cemetery Dance
since 2001. He currently divides his time between a neighbourhood in Boston that had been the site of a gang war that was the partial basis of
The Departed
and a sub-division in Charleston, SC a few steps away from a former Confederate Army encampment. He can be reached at
www.michaelmarano.com
.

“Displacement” appears here for the first time.

“Little Round Head” originally appeared on
Gothic.Net
, July 2001 issue.