Listen to Jeremy Scott read Chapter 4 Or click above to watch the video
If you don't see the Media player above, click here to play in a separate window (or right-click and download) 11 We found our selves in front of a house, the last house on the street. It was a piece of shit house. Actually, it was more like a piece of shit mansion.
And it had windows: it had 8 windows where a normal house would have plants. ¡24 freaking windows! Our house had 3 plants.
24 windows, yes sir. And still everything was obscured. I couldn’t tell if the house was made of lumber or cow tongue. It had lamps and it had a television - or a chimney.
-We’re going to buy it -Liv said-. I don’t have any money.
-I can’t buy it, but I’m going in -The obscurity crumbled all around me-. This is a great house. We should dip it in fondue.
We took the escalator to the porch. There was an old woman sitting there. She looked like she was suspicious of us. We did nothing to make her doubt her instincts.
-¡Jesus Christ! -Liv said-. ¿How the fuck did you get here, Grams?
The old woman wisely looked past us, and with the persnicketyness of a podiatrist. There was cold goo all over the many windows, and someone screaming behind every one of them.
It didn’t take a brain surgeon: this was fucked-up.
I stopped and looked down the street.
Every Fear Street house was lit-up like a 2-bit haunted house show.
Maybe I CAN buy this house, I thought. I mean, there’s no tennis courts and, best of all, ¡that sweet piece of meat, Derek, will be impressed!
-We can toke the timber, we can wear galoshes... ¡We can do anything here! -I sounded like Don King.
Toking the timber.
We were like a dog in a car with the window open.
-Nothing here - let’s go -Liv was starting to push on the one nerve I held in reserve so that this trip wouldn’t escalate into violence.
I heard a cricket chirp and somehow decided I wanted to go to Pick-A-Part with a giraffe.
I was daydreaming. The door hit me in the nose on the way in.
-¿¡Hello!? -Liv said sarcastically.
A green hand, attached to a slimy man, took off his hat as we entered, ¡and I’m afraid of mannequins!
-¡Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi! ¡Asswipe! ¡Jesus sucking Christ! -I screamed.
For my screams I received a tire iron shot across my back, but the green hand wasn’t wielding it.
-¡So help me, television! -Now Liv was screaming like Barry Manilow had just walked in.
And then we heard a morbid scream through clenched dentures.
One second later, the green hand was gone. I opened another door and gulped.
-Um, ¿excuse me? -A boy said. He was parading around with an umbrella. He actually looked like my dad, more or less, if my dad was a fragile, basket case. Come to think of it, he looked exactly like my dad - except his eyes. His eyes looked like Pelé had corner-kicked them out of their sockets and Fred Gwynne had plunked them back in - backwards.
In the hands of any other prose stylist, that last paragraph woulda gone better. Hell, a hair stylist coulda kicked its ass.
The boy looked agitated as he saluted me.
-I was just treating my self to some harmless diversion. It is Brutus Night, not Nick Saben Night.
-This I... Yes, we know this -I was getting testy-. We’re actually wearing galoshes. We’re wearing galoshes. We have galoshes on.
-Excellent -The boy responded-. Then again, I say that to all the caramel-colored boys. Boyfriend, you are cue-ooot.
Then he started pin-balling around the room, like Ricochet Rabbit on Slim-Fast.
-I am not going to fuck this guy -Liv assured me.
-Let’s get outta here. Any moment, this guy’s gonna blow. At least he recognized me as caramel-colored, and not just a vampire with a tan -I was a rogue.
Now Liv looked suspicious, but instead of vamoosing, we kept going further into the house.
I thought I had been saving my virginity for the ladies. The old lady librarians were the only girls who turned me on, and now they were really old, so old that I moved to the chimney and started urinating into the fireplace.
¿Did I say “so old”? I meant “I’m so cranked”.
All in all, it made for a warmer climate.
-¡Bull’s-eye!
I had nailed the last burning ember.
Mine own eyes seemed to be hovering outside one of the myriad windows. And now they were tapping on the glass and making faces. Nobody’s eyes were as strange as mine eyes. And now they were ¡on fire!
-¡Fire! ¡In the eyes! ¡It’s the apocalypse! -Liv cried.
-Yeah, yeah -It was just mine eyes on fire, big deal-. Put on your galoshes.
I had been doing crystal all day, and it was finally starting to pay dividends. The sky was violet and red and below it, the moon was limping towards Las Vegas.
But the more tenuous my relation to reality, the more I kept reloading on crank. I’d reload at the dinner table, but Mom and Dad had their rules, and no snorting cocaine was #2, right behind NO LIBRARIANS.
There was too much tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock...
Umbrella boy was certainly high, parading around amidst the methadone-dead. I was going to ask if he was holding, but I didn’t want to hear, “¡Nice try, guero!”
-So, ¿do you go to Shadyside Primary College? -Liv axed the boy, trying to establish a mundane conversation.
-Nope. Goin’ to a private college -The kid responded, with asparagus in his voice-. My name’s Ricky and my dicky is biggy.
It’s too bad, I liked Ricky. He had an appalling pallor that was so pale you could see his veins and what seemed like blood pumping through them.
-¿Do you have a name by which you are called? -Now he was quizzing Liv in Brechtian English.
-I... am Liv -Liv said a little too dramatically, rubbing her rabbit’s foot and then yelling-: ¡Let’s get outta here, yo!
-I’m Greg, and I’m getting pissed off -I told Little Ricky-. ¿Truthfully? I’m trying to get my galoshes recognized as a friend of mine.
-I think I can help you with that -A voice replied, its missives pointed my way.
It looked like a vest and pants, with eyes as greasy as they were old.
It was a vest all right, with a shirt underneath and a large, fake telescopic nose. If it was a mannequin, it was a stylish mannequin, complete with a gold lamé bracelet.
It was short and squat, even shorter and squatter than Ricky. Its pallor was greasier, its cold goo gooier, and I’m not even going to mention its personal hygiene (it was hygiener).
Everything in this fucking place was old, except this vest’s voice. Its voice was clear and futile.
The oldness surrounded us like the ghost of Robert Creeley. It moved extraordinarily fast, especially for a concept, and a dead concept at that.
I slapped the base of my galoshes with my hand.
-¡Hey! ¿Where the fuck did you do that? -The vest asked, unsurprisingly incoherent. But then it left the room without another word.
Ricky started hitting the sofa with his tire iron. He hit it and hit it and then he sat down on it.
He would sit down no more, forever.
All this lunging around seemed to bring out the dandy in him.
-Greg, I want you... to go... -He started talking to me, but he was looking at Liv. And then he tried to distract us with an old trick-: ¡Look!
We “looked” in every direction: from the mirage that was the wake of the vest and pants, to the pair of eyes that were still hovering outside the window.
But we didn’t breathe anything.
We watched the hovering eyes.
Then I had to say something... anything.
-No one is more than the sum of their lunch money -A less coherent sentence would’ve sent the watch to see the pendulum.
-I think that milk is intelligent -Liv mumbled.
My turn.
-It doesn’t matter what you believe, Liv, you’re embalmed.
-¡I - just - want - to - go - you - miserable - fuck! -Liv was regressing to her milk-is-intelligent self, her fingers dancing above her head maniacally.
For me to at least appear to be sincere, I can’t talk. And I can’t be in a house where vests talk, and I can’t begin to tell you how much a lobotomy would help, right about now.
-¡ALL - FUCKING - RIGHT! If old people don’t see elves inside of us, we’ll go...
-¡Shhhhhh! -Liv interrupted my rump roast rant-. ¿Do you hear that?
I heard a song.
In my heart.
A song in my heart and a banjo on my knee.
I have got to start paying attention. Okay. I hear a voice, an extremely old and strange voice, but I ain’t tell what words the voice is saying. It’s babbling along, in some idiom or other, or language or other, but, ¿who cares?, I can’t hear it anyway.
-¿What is this half-assed shit? -I asked Ricky.
Ricky didn’t respond. I guess he didn’t know what this half-assed shit was. That or he had opened the door and gotten a whiff of it.
This boy had moved way past nervous, so, ¿why wasn’t he babbling? I was so close to tearing his throat out through his mouth that I actually couldn’t understand why I hadn’t.
I picked up an old book instead. It was old and it claimed to cure herpes.
-Oooh -Ricky finally spoke when I read him the title. Then there was silence. And then there was Liv’s snoring.
In big, gastrointestinal letters it read: M A G I C
-¡That’s it! -Liv said, waking up-. The fuck outta here, let’s go.
It felt like we were having a pissing contest with our talons.
Then, suddenly, there were ancient blocks of sound between us and the door.
¿How come I hadn’t noticed that before?
-¿Can we get the living fuck out of here - pronto? -Liv asked-. I can’t take any more of these gastrointestinal letters.
She said it and the words ran together like a Technicolor nightmare, complete with a Border Collie herding the words into place.
-¡Hey! ¡This isn’t a Technicolor nightmare, it’s my own bull crap! ¡It’s my own, personal bull crap! ¡And it’s aromatic!
I looked down. ¡My galoshes! Someone had buried my galoshes, and they weren’t even dead. I saw a fresh pile of dirt, but it turned out to be an anthill. And there were tiny little ants on it.
¿Who would have balls big enough to fuck with my galoshes? ¿And fuck with my caramels?
I was quickly losing it.
-¡I’ve got glands the size of Glasgow! ¡And my caramels are...!
-¿¡Will you take it easy?!
I turned around to see who had taken my hand. It was Liv.
-I need you to focus, Greg. And then, when you’re focused, I need you to write a history paper for me, ¿mmm-kay?
I was saddened to see Liv’s labia-inferiority complex extend itself into my neuroses. And, in the sudden darkness, we were now making our way through the house using sonar.
Fortunately, I had a Timex Sonar-Watch. It was tan-chillin’, bing-bong, bling-bling.
Liv knew I could hear her drumming her fingers, and she also knew how much that pissed me off.
We’re talkin’ lab rats pissed.
But the jury was still out as to when my inner voice was going to completely cancel out the world around me.
The old door was down and salamanders were crawling through the doorway. And they were screaming like they were lab rat pissed. Liv had a way of stirring up amphibians here on Fear Street.
-¡Salamanders! -I screamed-. ¡We’ll never get out of here! ¡And this old house has robbed me of my galoshes! ¡We must call Junior Seau! ¡If we don’t, I’m gonna piss my self!
-You’re too late -Liv griped-. The Chargers traded him to Miami ten years ago. They got Joaquim Andojar - ¡and a pair of galoshes!
-¡You bastard!
Liv had good reason to be a bastard. She’d been born ten years too late, and came out of the womb bad - that and four feet tall.
She looked like someone had taken a 4th grade girl and poured afterbirth all over her, cleaned her up, stamped “US CITIZEN” on her forehead and pointed her toward primary school.
Ah, the good old days. You could still see the “IT” in “CITIZEN” on her forehead if you looked closely.
Liv and I somehow got our sorry asses out of there and back home. And there was Derek, passed out on my porch.
-Great, Dreamer -He said when he came to and was urinating off the side of our porch-. ¡It’s time to call the coroner about your galoshes!
-Yeah, yeah -I mumbled. I couldn’t believe Derek Whatsisname was urinating off of my porch. I’d never water those daisies again.
Note to self, I told my self as we entered the house. Note to self: don’t eat the daisies.
Hurrying into my room, Derek zipped up his fly as if my room were full of camels.
When everyone was in, I grabbed my caramel-colored bong and cried out:
-¡Let’s toke a bowl!
I sure knew how to suppress the pain of purloined galoshes.
-¡Lady Di shiver-shots!
My high-voltage incontinence couldn’t contain my calm, and I pulled out a razor blade.
-- on to chapter 5 or back to Halloween --