108,256 words
American Witch
by Rosalind Barden
“Yeah, the flyer job is still open, but, you know, I’ve been looking for someone like you and I’ve got a better, or at least, a job that pays better, if you want to give me a moment to explain.” A preppy white guy sprawled loosely behind a folding table desk in a shabby office in one of the last shabby and still cheap old low-rise office buildings in Hollywood.
It’s not a good sign to go in for a job passing out flyers and have the guy bring up a “better paying” job once you’re there. But George was desperate, so he shrugged and preppy man launched into his spiel. There wouldn’t be any nudity. “You get to keep your underpants on.” There would be a couple of other “kids.” “But you’ll only be, like, sitting on their laps, stuff like that. Nothing hard, okay?”
George felt himself sinking into a deep pit of despair.
“Wait a minute, George--you said your name was George, right? Right. It pays a lot. Okay? Four hundred, cash.”
Magic words. Four hundred was exactly what he needed to keep the landlord away. Nothing extra for food, for utilities (they’d been cut off long ago anyway), but to cover rent for another month, that was an achievement.
Preppy man must have seen George’s eyes brightening, but brightening a bit much. “I can’t give you an advance.” Brightness fades. “But, wait, you get the full amount at the end of the shooting day, and it will be only one day of shooting. That’s a lot for this kind of work.”
It was. George knew. This wasn’t the first time he’d been given such an offer.
“I have to line up the other two kids, then I’ll call you. Is there a number where I can get a message to you or something?” This guy was used to dealing with people who’d gotten their phones cut off. George gave him Moss’s number. She was reliable, would remember to pass the message to him and wouldn’t ask him questions about it.
George was stepping down Hollywood Boulevard to his bus stop feeling pretty good. Yes, there was the creeping apprehension about whether “you can keep your underpants on” would turn out to be true or not. But he had rent money. Wasn’t sure when he’d get it, but if the landlord decided to motor up from his abode in Santa Monica to drop hints about how George could pay his past due rent in trade, George had a bone to toss him. He had a job lined up that’d pay the amount needed. Four hundred. Magic words.
George sensed them before he saw them. The feeling crept upon him, making the hair rise on his arms. In his stomach churned the only food he’d eaten in three days, a carrot muffin rudely served to him by F-U at the Café that morning.
In his temporary state of semi-happiness his hand had slid off his tattoo exposing it for all the world. George turned toward what he was feeling and saw them: tourists, dressed in their tourist clothes, their small eyes peering feverishly at his tattooed shoulder, at his face.
Even the guy at the tattoo parlor asked if he was sure he wanted his tattoo so big, so thick, so black. George was a confident witch back then. Before Palmdale. Proud. So what? I’m a witch, aren’t I? The tattoo artist shrugged his eyebrows and needled forever on George’s shoulder, “I AM A WITCH” with a big black pentagram to boot.
“You know, not every place is as understanding as here. You might want to be careful with that,” the tattoo man cautioned as George left. The man was of course referring to Hollywood which back then was Hollyweird and was safe for little witches with bold tattoos.
After George left the parlor on the way to his car, which he owned back then--new and insured and he considered it a huge crisis if it wasn’t washed every week--he ran into an inebriated 12-year-old panhandling on the corner. The boy stared puzzled at George’s new tattoo, then burst out laughing.
Warlock Bob still snickered about George’s tattoo. When F-U first saw it at the Café, he laughed so hard, he fell to the floor. Rigel, the Café’s aging owner, had to tenderly help his employee to his feet again (“Darling! I worried you’d hurt yourself”). F-U and his disbanded Goth band despised little witch boy George so had to torment him when the opportunity presented.
George’s Coven was either polite about his tattoo (Darlene and Anthony), or hugely impressed by his bold honesty (Cheryl and Chuckster), but Moss didn’t say much and seemed concerned. George couldn’t remember if Dimi noticed.
Laughing street kids, mocking Goths. Fine. What George hadn’t anticipated was the darkness, the sheer intense angry hatred. Moss had anticipated it the moment she saw the tattoo. She was the senior member of their Coven, an OG of the witch world. Being older and wiser, perhaps she knew more about the ways of humans than George, at least George as he was back then, ambitious, rolling forward into the future. Back then, before Palmdale, before he changed.
Here was the darkness again on Hollywood Boulevard beneath the pounding September sun that ate through George’s pale nocturnal skin because he couldn’t afford sunscreen anymore. It poured from the eyes of the tourists wearing their coordinated tourist shorts and toting their tourist fannypacks. Cleaned and scrubbed by the powers that be, Hollywood was no longer Hollyweird, was no longer safe for misfits.
George felt like cupping his hand over his tattoo, hiding it, but even in the sad, sorry state he’d sunk to of late, he couldn’t bring himself to give them the satisfaction. So he shoved his hands in his pockets. Before scurrying away, he smiled at the tourists in a small attempt to lighten the situation.
They reacted badly. Convinced he’d just set the devil himself upon them, they broke out in loud, vehement prayer. A few of the lively ones took up the chase. They were swift, the lively ones. Even George’s tactic of running up a sidestreet inclining steeply toward the Hills refused to lose them. They’d almost run him down when, a miracle, a bus pulled to a stop he was running past. He fled inside. His pursuers followed partly up the bus steps, but then their eyes fell upon the sea of dark, suspicious faces inside. Their energy left them and it was as if they melted off the bus. George watched them through the scratched plastic windows as the bus pulled away. Their eyes, still angry, stared hard at him.
George trembled, his sweat now cold on his skin. Even the quiet murmur of voices swearing in Spanish as the bus rocked back and forth didn’t comfort George. By the time he walked home, he was in a state of high alarm.
His smiling landlord was there to greet him. The man stood under an arch that curved from the side of the building over the walkway leading to the stairs to George’s apartment.
“Ah, it’s my George.”
* * *
George’s landlord was decked out in his summery linen suit, the only kind of suit or clothing period, he wore. “Have you ever been forced as a child into a horrid, itching wool monstrosity just for a drive into Manhattan for ice cream? I hate ice cream to this day. No, George, I’ve gone native. Completely native! What Mother would think of me were she alive, I cannot even begin to describe to you.”
The elderly man leaned jauntily on his blond wood walking stick with a rose mottled white onyx globe as a handle, an accessory he was never without along with a pale silk hankie sprawled faux-carelessly from his linen suit jacket pocket and a Panama fedora. The tilt of his fedora was as jaunty as his current pose under the useless arch curving over the walkway to the stairs leading to George’s apartment, all 1500 empty square feet of it, with decorative fan of colored glass panels topping the front door, washer/dryer hookup included, at $400/month when units next door were going for $2200/month, all because the wool-loathing landlord loved him. Right now it was $400/month too much and the only food he’d eaten in three days was a carrot muffin that had left him feeling sick.
The eyes of the angry Hollywood tourists seemed to follow his back. All George wanted to do was curl up with his blanket that had disappeared strangely a few weeks ago. George suspected Anthony had stolen it to cure his alarming blanket snuggling-thumb sucking behavior, though had merely forced George to curl up on the floor with only his thumb to keep him warm because he hadn’t the funds to buy another blanket. This worried the back of George’s mind because after the hot months of September and October disappeared, Los Angeles would plunge into the bitter damp of its winter. No more was George’s bed; no more was his fine comforter. All were long gone at his last garage sale, leaving him with a vast stretch of empty floor in an empty apartment. But how could he curl up anywhere with anything now that the landlord stood in the middle of the cracked walkway, blocking his path?
The landlord smiled in the happy way he always smiled “because, George, I’ve been a happy, happy man since I left Mother far far behind on the Hudson and went completely native in LA. When was that now? Yes, 1962. I was forty-four--still a young boy, if you think about it, um?”
George wasn’t yet thirty, much less forty, but he didn’t feel like a young boy, or at least not as young as his landlord still felt. George wasn’t sure how he felt anymore, only that he wanted to curl up and hide and be left alone on the cool quiet of his hardwood floor that he worried every month would no longer be his, and then where would he go?
“I’m sorry about the rent,” George managed to mumble to his smiling landlord. “But I do have a job lined up, so as soon as I get paid, I can pay you.”
“Oh? What kind of job is it? You seem to have a different sort of job every time I see you, George.”
“It’s photography. I mean, someone will take my picture.”
The landlord’s face positively lit up like Christmas at this. “Really? Pictures, um? I’d love to see them when they’re all developed and so on. May I?”
“Well, ah . . . ,” and George’s head dropped, so wanting to curl up, hide.
“Oh, that’s all right. I quite understand.” The landlord paused, his silken palm massaging the rose mottled white onyx globe atop his walking stick. “You’re such a shy boy. A shy, shy boy. You remind me so much of a boyhood friend of mine, Chessy. I’ve told you about Chessy, haven’t I?”
“Yes, I think so. Yeah.”
The landlord most certainly had, quite often as a matter of fact. He and Chessy, short for Chester, hadn’t actually met as boys, but in college, at Harvard or Yale or one of those places--George had trouble paying exact attention to his landlord’s breezy prattlings--“an absolute horror of a prison for young men, a dungeon above ground, truly, where everyone, everyone, hated me. Not Chessy, of course--people were kind to Chessy--just me they hated.” The landlord had been compelled to attend the dungeon-like Ivy League school because Mother’s father had attended, her grandfather, assorted uncles, “Every male thing in the family, the dogs too, I wouldn’t doubt.”
Frail, lovely Chessy, who clung to life by a gossamer thread courtesy of a long, arduous battle with a childhood illness. “He had such fantastic dreams, Chessy had, so vivid. In the mornings we’d have juice together and cookies. Such silly boys we were--cookies for breakfast--what mischief boys get into when Mother isn’t around to watch! He’d tell me what he dreamt the night before. He’d go on journeys to different worlds--I don’t mean other planets with little green men, that sort of thing--but other realms. I’d never be able to describe them how Chessy had. Amazing worlds where all the colors were more vivid than the eye can perceive. Places where the beings never walked, but floated or flew, no, not flew, but drifted, yes, wafted, I think would be the way to describe. Well, it does sound silly the way I say it, but if you’d heard Chessy tell it . . . .”
Chessy’s mother told the youthful landlord that when Chessy was first born, he’d been a robust baby, bawling lustily, thrashing about his crib, cheeks red. But, literally, one morning she came upon a child completely changed. He was quiet and passively let her lift him from his blankets. He seemed lost in thought from that moment, and became a sickly child. “But a poet, from an early age. Chessy’s mother told me she preferred him that way. At first, before he’d changed, she’d so worried he’d be exactly like his father. I met Chessy’s father once. Hated me, I’ll tell you that. Do you know what a Changeling is, George?” Vaguely, George did. “In the old days, George, peasants, and even the aristocracy too because they all were superstitious back then, believed sometimes the little people--you know, fairies, elves, that sort of thing--would creep to a child’s crib ‘round midnight or so and take the baby away and leave a different baby in its place, a fairy baby, a Changeling. That’s how they explained away retarded children, children with birth defects, and also boys like Chessy. Chessy’s mother, and this is no exaggeration, firmly believed the fairies had taken away the original Chester, the Chester who was like his father, and rescued her from a life of suffering under two of them by gifting her with a fairy baby. Sometimes, George, especially the older I get, I almost believe her. Chessy was so different. I know you must think I’m quite the silly old queen, but if you’d met Chessy, you’d have understood. Chessy was beautiful, simply beautiful. Everyone loved Chessy. But it was me, only me whom Chessy loved in return.” The drizzly winter morning when the landlord whispered these words to George while gazing out the French window-doors of George’s bedroom, tears began to stream down the white-haired man’s pale cheeks and he fled wordlessly out of George’s apartment.
The summer after their freshman year of cookies for breakfast, Chessy died, finally succumbing to his beautiful, frail body. The landlord was far away, and didn’t know until weeks later, apart from an unsettled feeling that plagued him as he strolled the foggy shore of Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles. A friend of Mother’s had insisted she travel to Catalina after her doctor cautioned she needed a change to a “healthful climate for the summer” to “rest your nerves” which had been perpetually in a state since her husband, the landlord’s father, failed to return from a business trip to Brazil after the Great War (“I’ve been to Brazil many a time, my dear little George, since I kissed the East good-bye, and believe me, I quite understand”). Only as they packed to return home did Mother casually drop that Mrs. Makerbane’s son (she had only one--Chessy) had passed from pneumonia during the summer, leaving her “completely unreasonable, crying all the time,” so no one could invite her anywhere. The landlord cast himself out the nearest window, so overcome he was with the news of Chessy’s death and the fact that his mother had withheld it until the last moment (“She knew what Chessy meant to me”), but it wasn’t much of a drop and a soft landing on a tangle of large, water-swollen jade plant bushes.
He refused to leave Catalina. Then he refused to board the plane leaving Los Angeles. Ultimately he did both and ended up completing his years of study at the dungeon-like school Back East, and suffered an existence on Manhattan he only vaguely described as a “brokerage cog chained in a wool suit,” because “I didn’t have the strength to stand up to Mother.” Not until his forties. Then, like his father, he went on a business trip, though to Los Angeles instead of Brazil, and never returned.
He met a man who, “took care of me from then on and understood that I could only ever love Chessy, truly love, and, you know what? He came to love Chessy too, just from my describing him. Chessy had that effect on people.” Eventually, Mother passed away, and not long after, his older lover, leaving him with a combined fortune that was quite substantial and he became a landlord.
He’d taken a sudden fancy to the eccentric little apartment buildings dotting the hills of the then terribly unfashionable Silverlake. He’d been driving up Glendale Boulevard from downtown Los Angeles where he’d gone to meet an attorney regarding his two inheritances, otherwise he never set foot near “downtown suits,” when he suddenly noticed a street rising up an impossibly steep hill crowded with shabby old apartments. Like many Los Angeles apartments built in the 1920s, these were fantastic structures, with weather vanes shaped like Spanish galleons, cone-roofed towers, and purposeless ornamentation such as the arch curving over the walkway. It looked to him like a fairyland movie set.
“I don’t know why, George, but I thought to myself, “That’s where Chessy would be living today.” The landlord had never heard of the neighborhood before. He asked native-Angeleno friends about Silverlake, but no one knew much, other than vague notions about hippies living there, “but certainly no one we know.”
Unfashionable though Silverlake was at the time, he impulsively (“My attorney was shocked, and so angry at me, I can hardly describe”) bought a dozen of the apartment buildings which back then could be had cheap. With only basic repairs to keep them livable, he kept the strange aging structures as they were. Elsewhere in Silverlake, owners tore out original French windows, and hammered green shag carpeting over magnesite floors. It upset the landlord to think about it. “So violent.”
The landlord didn’t live in Silverlake anymore. “I can’t take the heat--not the young boy anymore, that sort of thing.” He lived in Santa Monica, along the cooling ocean. But, in his mind, Chessy still held down the fort back in the Silverlake Hills, at least according to a long-time tenant who lived in the building when George moved in.
The tenant was an ancient musician who’d played violin in an orchestra that performed only for movie soundtracks. He confided to George that the landlord was rumored to keep a unit vacant in one of his buildings so Chessy would have a place to live, or rather, waft, in his disembodied state. “Of course, George, maybe it’s not a vacant unit after all. Maybe Chessy is floating around in my unit. Or maybe your unit, eh?” The ancient musician died before George could pencil in the time to quiz him for details, so George was left wondering.
“The style of the buildings here is the closest I’ve found to how Chessy described the structures in his dream world,” the landlord often explained to George. “Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t enter another realm after all. Maybe in his dream-state, he traveled to California, and the floating people were other dreamers like him, dreamers trapped Back East in lives not suited to them. Dreamers longing to find freedom elsewhere. You never know.”
On this particular afternoon, under the hot September sun tempered by the fluttering leaves of the many overgrown trees on the property, the landlord spoke no more of Chessy, and only looked away dreamily and sighed.
“Well then,” abruptly the landlord came back to the present, “pay me whenever you can.” He smiled and rubbed his fingers through George’s hair before he sauntered away, murmuring, as he often did, “Chessy had hair just like yours. Dark, curly. So soft. Changeling hair, is how I think of it. You know, his mother told me that when he was first born, his hair was much lighter, and even his eyes were blue-ish. But then they weren’t. Ummm. Interesting, isn’t it?”
Chessy and the thought of his spirit lurking somewhere in Silverlake, maybe even in his own building, maybe even in his own apartment, more and more terrified George, yet more and more fascinated him.
It was head banging time. That’s how bad today was. Head banging up and down, up and down on the hardwood floor. Underpants and whether he could keep them on + angry tourist eyes chasing him in the afternoon, and then his aging landlord babbling about ghostly Chessy, making George worry that where Chessy lurked in Silverlake was where George knelt right now, banging his head on the floor.
George never used to think much about Chessy. But now he did. Since Palmdale, he did. How did Chessy feel about George? Did he like him, pity him, hate him for being alive when Chessy wasn’t?
George remembered a morning shortly after he’d moved into his apartment when the landlord stopped by “just to see how everything’s going, George.” The landlord opened one of the sets of French window-doors lining an entire wall of the living room, and pointed to the rotted, collapsing balcony outside. “So be careful. Don’t accidentally step through and fall, fall, fall. I couldn’t bear to lose both of you.” Both of you? George was confused at the time, then later unnerved when he realized “both of you” meant him and Chessy.
Head bang, head bang, up and down on the hardwood floor, cool and smooth in the unpleasant muggy September evening. Fading light seeped through the fan of colored glass panels crowning the front door and painted a dim pastel kaleidoscope about the living room and across George’s back.
Was Chessy, slowly, stealthily sucking the life from George’s little witch body so he could waft with Chessy? George was now certain Chessy’s dreams weren’t about the fairy world or suit-chained souls needing escape, but were about death. The beings wafting through the fantastic buildings were depressed, dead people trapped in apartments they couldn’t afford, apartments empty of all books all possessions, sold to buy beans, three cans for 99 cents.
“George, I don’t pick up anything negative in your apartment,” this from Darlene earlier that month on a broiling evening in the Café after George tentatively asked if she’d felt an evil entity lurking about his apartment.
“Did you ever ask your Channeler?” George had bothered her several times already about consulting her Channeler.
“George, Running Bear has a lot on his mind! I have to be selective what I ask him. But really, I don’t feel any negative entities in your place.”
“Hey, George, I think the negative entity is you,” laughing from Chuckster.
“Chuck, don’t say that to George. He’ll take you seriously,” Anthony, admonishing.
“Yes, let’s not tease George today, okay, everybody? And let’s not fight,” Moss, exasperated, rubbing her eyes like a headache was coming on.
“Okay, George,” Chuckster smiled, “Why not ask Warlock Bob to put a curse on Chessy? Then he’ll leave you alone.” Chuckster was eating a bearclaw, so he must have fallen off his and Cheryl’s perpetual diet again. He and Cheryl were a dieting team. He’d make it up next week by vomiting.
“Warlock Bob doesn’t do curses,” Anthony whispered furtively since Warlock Bob was sitting in the back of the Café laughing with Rigel, who waved his heat damp face with a faded floral paper fan he picked up during his last Mardi Gras fifteen years ago. When Rigel was young and beautiful, rumor said, he was given cars and apartments by all the wealthy white boys up and down the East Coast. After moving to LA, he lived with a television celebrity. But that was a time long past for Rigel. Now his world was the Café, where he watched F-U going about his chores, swishing his long black hair indifferently to Rigel’s dreamy stares.
Chew, chew, chew, swallow, big lump traveling rapidly down Chuckster’s throat. “Oh, sure he does,” not trying to be quiet, “Warlock Bob does everything.”
“Are you talking about me over there?” chuckles from Warlock Bob and a shriek of laughter from Rigel (“Do you really do everything?”).
Chuckster laughed and choked on his bearclaw as Anthony frowned and Moss rubbed her eyes and Darlene pointed out, “George, I thought you felt close to this Chessy. I thought you’ve been trying to talk with Chessy. Haven’t you?”
And, yes, George had. Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.
* * *