Little Deaths, page 7
My mother was glad that I had found a friendship in Celandine Tomei. Thinking back on it, I don’t recall that they ever met during our days at Childermas. Celly and I would often walk hand in hand through Humboldt Park. She and her mother lived on Division and Hermitage, right next door to a holistic healing house that was usually tenanted by beat poets and abstract artists. Celly’s father, before he died, worked as a steerer, someone who brought in potential poker players and gamers, at Mania’s Lucky Stop Inn, a Polish bar on the other side of their building.
The first time I went over to Celly’s house, I saw a framed quote, this being long before the cutesy arts-and-crafts-stitched logos. The bromide, in simple block letters, read:
HEALTH AND ILLNESS CAN BE
REPRESENTED BY A CONTINUUM.
Celly showed me her mother’s bookshelves, Jan Smut’s Holism and Evolution, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions, there were others. I remember seeing a book on EDTA. Not knowing what it meant, I thumbed through it. The letters stood for ethylene tetra-acetic acid. There were pictures in the book of dwarf-like skeletons and bodies on foetal positions. I read that EDTA chelated the calcium lost in body waste. I started to ask Mrs Tomei what this meant, as she had walked into the room with cherry Kool-Aid, but she quickly took the book away, putting it up out of reach of Celly and me.
I stayed late that evening, because my mother was, putting in overtime at the radium plant. I was supposed to be home before dark, but she wasn’t able to make any calls, and I knew that crazy Anna Banana, the downstairs neighbour who was supposed to check on me, was at the horse track in Cicero.
We watched Walter Cronkite on the black-and-white blond-coloured Philco, talking very seriously about the latest Mercury space flight. And that’s the way it was, July fourteenth, 1967. We changed channels and watched I Dream of Jeannie and Batman. Catwoman shot the Dynamic Duo with sedated darts. Robin said ‘Holy D’Artagnan,’ and they both collapsed. It was Julie Newmar as Catwoman. The television picture wasn’t snowy like our own, the Tomeis had ordered a Channel-Master from New York state (the only place that was marketing them), the first ones in the neighbourhood to have one, I think. You see them all over now; they look like double-sided rakes up next to the chimneys.
That night, after getting a ride home from Mrs Tomei in their 1956 Olds Holiday, I had my first adult dream. It was of an older, fuller Celandine in the Catwoman outfit. My underwear was wet and it was hard to pee that morning. I felt guilty. I did not remember the dream itself until early that afternoon, then I kind of understood.
I went to see Celly that same day, the afternoon after my dream. Celly suggested that we play doctor. Her mother was out shopping at RB’s, and I wondered if she would run into my father and spend extra time gossiping. We went into the back sitting room, the drapes fluttering every time the Paulina Street elevated thundered by like destiny.
Celly asked me if I was going to be afraid. I said of what, getting caught? She said no, and looked away.
I remember it all so clearly. The Westclox ticking a tattoo across the room, both of us bursting with fear and anticipation. We knew we’d never do anything more that day but look at each other naked. Celly’s mother had left a package of Hit Parade cigarettes lying atop the bureau. I never had seen her smoke, and thought that the cigarettes were for her male visitors.
Celly was barefoot, still wearing the flowered dress. I moved forward to take the shoulder straps in my sweaty hands.
Something kicked me. It wasn’t Celandine, unless she was able to lift up her leg double-jointed and plant one right in my thigh. She backed away quickly.
I was concerned that she had changed her mind. Another train went by and I started thinking about the time. I told her not to worry.
Celandine said that she would take the dress off herself.
‘Close your eyes,’ she said. When I had them firmly shut, I heard her whisper, ‘You know I’ve never made fun of your head or eyes.’
I opened my eyes. I thank the lesser gods that my deformity allowed for my eyes to not bug out any more than they already did.
I looked at Celly. She stood away from me, naked, her body hairless. But.
There was a part of a body growing out of her. Like in that book I had been looking at, the one Celly’s mom had moved to a higher place on the bookshelf.
I realized that her rib cage was slightly bell-shaped. To accommodate the head that protruded from below the last of the left ribs. Its eyes were closed, peaceful-like, as if in sleep.
But that wasn’t all.
Celly had a tiny leg growing out from her pelvic bone; that must have been what had kicked me. From the area around her flat stomach, I could see three webbed fingers.
A thumb with no thumbnail protruded from her navel.
I was only seven and a half, but you learn fast when you don’t know what the next guy on the street is going to say or do to you. I told Celly that she looked beautiful, strong not vulnerable. Now I understood the reason for the Bohemian-style dresses. She began crying.
Still dressed, I went forward, carefully kissing her face. She responded in kind. After several minutes, I felt a tugging around my waist. I thought it might have been Celly’s hands, working at my pants.
I looked down from the corner of my bigger eye.
The head below Celandine’s rib cage was sucking on my shirt, pulling it into its mouth. Chewing on it.
I heard a noise and panicked, thinking the front door had opened. Celandine asked me if I was afraid. I said yes I was, that her mother might catch us.
Celly looked down and said that her mother didn’t care that someone might see her this way. In what had to be her own mixed-up way, Mrs Tomei was evidently proud that Celly was not afraid to show off her body.
When I backed away slightly, the head bobbed up. The eyes stared at me. The mouth did not relinquish my shirt.
Christ, I’ve looked up so many medical words in the time I came back to Chicago, to Celly. I tried looking up the phrase ‘maternal eclampsia’ and couldn’t locate it anywhere. Finally called the Harold Washington Library, a girl named Colleen told me that it meant that the mother would sometimes bleed to death during childbirth.
Celandine and I remained good friends throughout the next few years. We played doctor several more times when her mother wasn’t around.
More often than not, we would just walk around Wicker Park, and I would sometimes, in the steel shadows of the elevated, lift up her dress, reach under and caress the twin’s head. In the books about circus freakshows, they were called ‘vestigial twins’.
What Celandine’s mother had was a foetal multiple cyst anomaly.
Nowadays, this is detectable by sonography. So Celly is certainly unique, especially that she lived. And the head was not stillborn.
Celly kept the leg, tiny like a chicken’s, strapped around her leg with something along the lines of a Posey gait belt, the kind used to lift patients out of wheelchairs. The fingers were slowly being recalcified into her body, due to the added weight gain of her prepubescent years. Many times, I had read, a vestigial twin never formed because it had actually been recalcified into the stronger twin during the time in the womb.
Ray-Ban invented a paid of wraparound sunglasses about 1970, that fit my eyes perfectly, and Bankers Life Insurance picked up the bill. If I didn’t have a full head of blond hair, I might have looked like one of the most intense punkers still visible in the old north side neighbourhoods. I think of all I know now, that I didn’t know then. All the medical terms that didn’t make a damn bit of difference to me. I loved Celandine Tomei.
You can find Celandine’s anomaly, if you wish to call it something safe, under any book that lists Foetal Monozygous Multiple Pregnancy Dysplacentation Effects. In the Washington Library’s reference book on Birth Defects, it says: SEE ALSO Michelin Baby Syndrome. Page 1433, no shit. Makes me think of John Merrick’s disease and how it became known as ‘elephantitis’ because his mother fell in front of an elephant during a parade in the early days of her pregnancy. I wonder if she ever ran into Tom Thumb’s mother and swapped bad juju stories.
The head growing out of Celly was part of a foetal cyst that had skeletal dysplasia. Larger effusions of the cyst’s organs were beneath Celly’s subdermal region around her lower rib cage. Most thalidomide babies born this way had general effusions in the pleural and pericardial regions, that is, the lungs, heart, and spleen, and polyhydramnios may occur. I seem to recall a child at Childerman like this, the disease itself being excess water in the organs.
April, 1968.
Our happiness was short-lived. The spring after we had first seen each other nude, fames Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. The neighbourhoods around us were burning to the ground. The biggest gang in the area was the Blackstone Rangers, and they vented their frustrations on the Puerto Ricans who were moving in to the west of us. There were daily rumbles with the Latin Kings.
The Friday that Ricky’s Deli, on our corner, was firebombed, my parents broke their lease on the Crystal Street apartment. I had hoped that I would continue to see Celly at rehab classes when this whole thing blew over, but it wasn’t to be. My father quit his job at RB’s and we moved down to Shelbyville, Kentucky to live with relatives.
Celly and I exchanged letters, and she often wrote how bitter she was at how everyone, even the therapists, looked at her. I told her not to worry. My parents said we’d be moving back to Chicago soon, maybe a nicer neighbourhood around Albany Park.
‘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.
1 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.
2. 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 Ray-Bans 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.
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, pre-adolescent 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 Cafe 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.
The bar catered to those who really wanted a thrill, something different. Something obscene.
Amputees, burn victims. Parading on a stage. I wondered if the armless man propped in that doorway all those months ago ever visited Belladonna’s.
