Wide Eyed Read online

  I wasn’t writing you a suicide note—if I wanted to die, I’d be dead already. I wouldn’t be wasting my time corresponding with elves. Here’s why I wish fantasies could become reality: because they’re so much more interesting. Manticores and mermaids are more appealing than goldfish and rats. In daily life, even if you see something you’ve never seen before, it can’t beat a minotaur shooting arrows into a mushroom cloud. I wish an army of skeletons would swordfight me like they did Jason in Jason and the Argonauts. What would be the most surprising thing that could happen to me today? A spider biting me? Big deal.

  Writing to you gives me great consolation, I must say. I am not accusing you of being a fraud, I’m only telling you that you’ve got options. Have you ever visited Los Angeles? You are welcome here. I live in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, so bring a Spanish dictionary. In Spanish, you are El Duende. If you come, you are invited to my house and can stay indefinitely.

  Do the Claus’s have an heir to the throne, or is Santa supposedly immortal? How many old geezers posing as Santa live among you? I ask you these confidential details only because you volunteered information in your previous letter that shocked me and confirmed the reality of this correspondence. No false elf would have the mind or the brazenness to concoct a story about toy quality in Santa’s workshop. I guess if Santa found out, you’d be fired. Your confidence leads me to believe you are high in the Order of Elves, and Santa favors you. Do you perhaps tend to the reindeer barn and otherwise govern animals? I have a set of reindeer antlers hung on the porch above the front door to greet visitors.

  Truthfully yours,

  Human

  Dear Noble Viking,

  Thank you for your invitation. I do frequently visit the reindeer barn because I’m a veterinarian and physician. I am Santa’s personal doctor. (He gets several colds per season, and is gout-ridden.) Since I hold a degree in Ancient Chemistry, I brew my own medicines and curatives and am licensed to operate when necessary, using elf laser procedures far superior to your techniques. Santa is a hemophiliac; when he bleeds, his blood is a dark, thick red that fascinates me and makes me want to taste it. Do you drink blood, Viking? I imagine your chalice dedicated to that ceremony. What if an elf drank human blood? I have heard vampires drink blood and live at night. Pagan elves believe vampires are cursed elves doomed to eternal suffering.

  No human has ever invited me into her home; only Santa receives that sort of hospitality. You and I are not as far apart geographically as I envisioned. I can hop the southbound sleigh easily. I’ll stow away in the red velvet pockets that store Santa’s maps, handkerchief, and whiskey.

  I have no real family as I boasted before. All I am bringing is my medicine bag, spectacles, and a few wool sweaters. I can bring you elf wine as an offering. I am comfortably fed with a mouse steak, halved green peas or grains of rice, and other small, healthy foods. I will be useful for tasks like locating lost earrings in the carpet or removing bee stingers. I can do anything gnomes do but with more accuracy. Elves are more intelligent than gnomes.

  See you soon,

  Elf

  CHRYSALIS

  Four girlfriends and I stayed up watching Nightmare on Elm Street until the first pink streaks in the sky appeared. Then we dressed in sweats and headed out to TP the church down the street. I had fun throwing rolls of Charmin over the trees, but the chapel was much too large to huck toilet paper over. I’d planned to do the giant cross; I’d envisioned it littered with white, soggy streamers when churchgoers arrived Sunday morning, and the image was beautiful to me. It made a festive statement, as if church wasn’t just a deadly boring place that sucked ass and hated children. Since we couldn’t throw the TP high enough to lace the cross, we took pictures of ourselves making out on the church lawn, thereby defacing the sacred grounds with homosexuality.

  To prepare for the attack, we snuck bottles of Malibu and Bailey’s from the liquor cabinet, stole a jar of whole cloves off the spice rack and smoked them in rolled-up post-it notes, then applied slut makeup to wear on the journey. I owe it all to Freddy Kruger.

  Six of us were lying around on the floor, watching a girl walk down the upstairs hall in her dead friend’s house, opening each door slowly to check for clues. I was half watching the movie and half hating my pre-algebra teacher. She had poodle hair and a huge ass that disfigured her polyester pants.

  “You know,” I said, “having a teacher that isn’t butt ugly would really improve math class. Fat teachers should be illegal.”

  Everyone ignored me. “Why do they always do exactly what I wouldn’t do if Freddy was in the house?” my friend asked.

  “I know, it’s not even scary. She’s so stupid you want her to die,” another girl said.

  “Um, does that mean you guys like math?” I asked. “You like looking at Mrs. Ferret’s big-ass ass?”

  “Stop talking about asses,” someone mumbled.

  Blood splattered on the camera lens.

  By then, we had seen Freddy kill one too many people. The moon was bright, and it lit the shrubbery while we gazed out windows to devise a plan.

  “We could go skinny-dipping,” one girl said as she looked out at the dark swimming pool.

  “Oh yeah, let’s stare at each other naked,” someone snapped back.

  “You are so lesbian,” I said.

  “Well then, let’s dress up like lesbians and sneak into the church,” someone said. No one disagreed, so we did.

  The first time a slumber party actually turned bad was when this skinhead, a friend’s older sister’s boyfriend, locked me in the bathroom and told me to strip. He was teaching me how to chop lines. He pressed me up against the mirrored wallpaper and I felt like there was someone behind me, sandwiching me in, because his reflection showed up in my peripheral vision. His breath smelled like he’d been drinking B.O.

  “Come on, let me feel them,” he said, forcing his hands up my shirt.

  “It’s 3 in the morning, and your girlfriend is out there sleeping. Don’t you think this is a little weird?” I asked.

  “She doesn’t care.”

  “I’m too young for you,” I offered. I was thirteen, he was twenty.

  I thought of my sleeping bag, covered with Snoopies and Belles, Snoopy’s twin dog girlfriend, and how it should have had me inside it. It should have been keeping me warm that very minute. Instead, a guy was pushing me against a towel rack.

  “Ow! You’re hurting me. Let me go,” I said through my teeth.

  “Be quiet,” he said. I could feel his hard-on on my hipbone.

  “Let go or I’ll scream,” I said finally.

  I wandered back down the hall and crawled into my sack, happy to be surrounded by my sleeping girlfriends. Picturing Snoopy and his gentle female companion, I petted my sleeping bag’s flannel lining in the dark.

  Another time, two years later, I went to a super lame slumber party where the mom tried too hard by making bowls of “brains” out of cold, cooked spaghetti, and “eyeballs” out of frozen grapes. Theme parties were out of style. To plan anything out, especially if it was supposed to be scary, was the most uncool thing ever. We watched Halloween and took turns in the kitchen making English muffin pizzas. During my solo muffin shift, I was spooning on tomato sauce while imagining it was bloody guts, and I got the idea to set one out on the porch as a snack that would attract killers. The party needed a boost.

  I made an extra muffin, put it out on a paper towel behind the potted petunias on my friend’s porch, and went back inside to watch the movie. Michael Myers wandered stiffly through backyards on the screen. Once in a while I looked out the window to see if a man in a mechanic’s suit was feasting on the pizza.

  “What are you looking for?” my friend asked.

  “I’m just seeing if anyone’s out there,” I replied.

  “You’re afraid!” They all laughed.

  “I’m just bored. Let’s go out or something. I’ve seen this movie a million times.”

  We got
dressed and drove the parents’ car up to the Haunted Forest, an abandoned estate at the top of a street that dead-ended at the beginning of mountainous foothills. Wrought-iron gates guarded the world where an eccentric millionaire had lived during Victorian times. There were relics, like the house’s crumbled foundation and random bricks scattered in the dirt, and it was a great party spot.

  The moon was out, not full but bright enough to help us reach a hill above the old house. We had some wine coolers and a joint to smoke. Sitting around on the rocks, checking out the view, we were pretty chill until two dark human shapes appeared on the trail we’d just taken. Then two guys stood in front of us, blocking our way down.

  They made conversation with us—where we were from, what school we went to, what we liked to drink. They wouldn’t really leave us alone. They were our parents’ age—bearded, gruff like bikers. By the time they started getting creepy, only one girl was still talking to them, probably because she was afraid to shut up.

  “Do you girls have underwear on?” one guy asked.

  We all giggled nervously, and said yeah, duh, of course.

  The other guy was silent now, but he had the most evil energy. His silhouette in the moonlight was darker than his buddy’s. His shadow was longer on the ground, too.

  The evil guy said, in a lowered voice, “If you show ’em to us, we’ll let you girls get back to your party.”

  I offered to show him my underwear, but nothing else. You can’t even touch it, I said. I wanted them to go away, and this was the quickest way. We made a deal, and I presented from under my long skirt a pair of dark pink satin underwear that had small ruffled fringes around the seams. Small white polkadots, too, that glowed in the dark. I’d just got them at the mall a few weeks before. They’d looked so cute in the store, but now the dots took on this sickly appearance, as if the panties had measles.

  He took the underwear from me and rubbed the back of his hand on them. We all sat quietly, waiting to see what he’d do next. He spat in them, a big loogie, not just spittle, then rubbed it around and handed them back.

  “Put ’em on,” he said firmly.

  I pulled them halfway on, thinking he’d never know, but he told me to lift up my skirt to make sure they were pulled all the way up. He brushed his paw against my crotch to make sure the spit was touching it. I was so pissed, but totally quiet. After all, I could take a shower when we got back.

  The next day on the phone, in hushed tones behind locked bedroom doors, we talked about how twisted those guys were, how disgusting and perverted and pathetic men could be, and how desperate they must have been. There was no real issue of whether or not I was all right, because he hadn’t hurt me. I just kept thinking about how slimy the spit was, and I tried not to picture it—brown and dark yellow, like men’s loogies are when they smoke. I pictured my underwear out in the road where I’d tossed them from the car window. I saw them being driven over by car after car. I thought, if I ever saw that underwear on the rack at a department store I’d rush to the bathroom. Worst of all, I pictured the guy home alone afterwards, thinking of my crotch and getting busy in his loser armchair.

  It’s not that I was afraid to watch horror movies after that, but we just got out of the habit because we were always sneaking out to get drunk instead of staying home in our pajamas like a bunch of pussies. Sleeping bags are like cocoons—teenage girls are the pupae. We lay around in warm sacks awaiting metamorphosis so we could buy bras with bigger cup sizes.

  As an older teenager, I thought back to the slumber party days and wished we’d done more things at home that we’d seen in the movies, like have pillow fights in our lingerie. But we didn’t even have lingerie. Did polka-dotted pink panties count? I didn’t think so. I didn’t understand what steps I’d missed. We went straight from watching gory movies to getting bored with gory movies to getting drunk or high because we were bored. But now that I wanted the innocence back, I couldn’t get it. Pillow fights were fake and stupid. Flipping through yearbooks was fine, but it wasn’t a Friday night activity. Mostly, I just wanted to hang with my girlfriends, smoke weed, and not be harassed.

  Now when I watch Slumber Party Massacre or The Last Slumber Party, and I see girls chewing gum with their tits bobbing up and down beneath their cropped T-shirts while wearing their whitest, cleanest panties, I trip out on how they seem so carefree and cheerful while getting their lives interrupted by men who can’t control themselves. I think of a reverse chrysalis— like they’re kids who come out of a paradisiacal state only to enter their own personal hell. I didn’t like being ensnared, but now I appreciate watching it happen on screen—I feel pleasantly satisfied knowing the girls’ fates ahead of time, almost as if I’m the killer. I know that he wants the same thing I do, to see girls at their cutest.

  TILES

  Did you ever see that picture of the mouse with a human ear stitched onto its back? The sight of bloodied tiles can be abhorrent like that. There’s nothing like something beyond disgusting, something that scars you mentally.

  I.

  When I was five, my mom and I kneaded two loaves of bread. It was my job to find a place on the hall floor where the dough could rise in peace. It had to be a spot where my basset hound wouldn’t find the oiled pans full of salty dough and eat them. It had to be away from foot traffic because too much noise could stunt the fluffy, white, sticky bundles I was aiming for. My mom told me to hide them overnight and check on them periodically. I didn’t sleep that night because every twenty minutes I was jumping out of bed to make sure they were safe.

  I was sitting beside my loaves, trying to watch them rise, when I heard a loud thump in the bathroom and ran in. My dad was lying on the floor, head propped up against the bathtub. There was blood on the sink and smeared in the basin. Trickles of blood ran down my dad’s face and neck. His black hair looked matted like a rabid dog’s. There were blood squiggles on the floor tiles, too. It wasn’t pink like in cartoons, it was brown. Brick-red and streaky.

  Years later, my mom told me Dad had come home drunk from a bar and slipped on the bathroom’s slick floor. After that, we got lots of bathmats and those rough vinyl flowers called flower daisies that stick on your shower floor. Nothing was ever slippery again.

  II.

  My brother’s old house was a partially converted laundromat. He and about ten other college-aged guys lived in the warehouse area behind a fully operational laundromat. They paid rent by working shifts, watching customers and collecting quarters, making sure dryers were lint-free and running hot.

  Their kitchen was never used. Mice lived in the stove. Beer cans, cigarette butts, and bottles littered the countertops, and the pantry was stocked with jugs of cheap wine. It smelled like hobos lived there. When I asked my brother why the kitchen reeked so bad, he told me it was because they used the sink as a urinal.

  The shower worked, but was mildewy. Between the tiles, the caulking was black. Maybe the tiles had been white, but they were moldy now.

  One of his friends was taking a shower, scrubbing with a bar of soap and making lots of suds. He aimed his piss stream down into the drain, and the combination of hot, bitter liquid and massive soap residue caused a mutant salamander to emerge. It had been living in the drain, shower after shower, month after month. Soap scum and other human skin chunks had built up on its back, and it had bumps that looked irregular like warts, or like someone had sewn on genetically fucked-up appendages.

  The boy rinsed off in a panic as he watched the amphibian creeping toward his feet. It was ruddy and black-green, like a four-inch-long crocodile. It might have been poisonous. He was afraid to touch it, but it was too quick for him. It crawled onto his foot. Reflexively he shook it off and squished it, as if it were a cockroach. But after the stomp, he had to hit it again with the shampoo bottle to fully kill it. Its flesh, blood, intestines, and textured skin mixed with his dirty suds, creating a crimson wash that forever stained the shower floor. No one got anywhere near those tiles again.

&nbs
p; III.

  My friend Rick was in medical school. He’d returned home from his anatomy class, preoccupied with upcoming assignments revolving around dissecting his first human cadaver. He was studying to be a doctor, so this was something he looked forward to. Still, you can imagine it might induce a few nightmares, or at least some apprehensive thoughts. He decided to run a bath. It was late autumn and the air in his apartment was chilly. To alleviate stress, he poured three capfuls of Avon’s Skin So Soft bath oil under the spigot, which is surprising since it’s not a very masculine product.

  He took his bath like a Calgon model: soaked himself and closed his eyes, leaned back, submerged his head momentarily, rubbed his hairy chest with bath gel. His towel was laid out on the floor next to him, ready to grab. As he stood up and was bending over to get his towel, one foot flew out from under him. (Mineral oil, if you’ve never used it, leaves a film on your bathtub that can only be removed with Ajax cleanser.) He lurched forward, grabbed for the faucet but missed and fell, and was stabbed by the hot water knob. His rib cage caught on the knob, and not only did the handle pierce the skin, it was torn out again as he fell down, breaking his bottom left rib.

  The water hadn’t drained yet. Blood smeared down the faucet and tinted the water pink. The worst part, he told me, was that the oily patches on the surface of the water absorbed more blood and floated around him like red lilypads. He said he felt like he was suspended in his own blood stream, surrounded by erythrocytes. A doctor’s perspective, certainly.