It is Memorial Day 1994, and perhaps it is fitting that I dwell on my past. Our past.
I stare out the window, the one facing east. Where dawn will eventually take away the night with cancerous washes of summer sun and lake breezes. The plasma-coloured digital clock blinks in three-second intervals. It is 4:57 a.m.
Celandine snuggles a little closer to me, caught up in her REM dreams. She tells me that she dreams in black and white. We rent an apartment on Wolcott Street, a common area for gangster films shot here in the forties and fifties. I dream in colour, and in my dreams, it always seems to be the hours before dawn. Like now. Streets deserted. My mind alert. I can hear my heartbeat in my nostrils, in my ears.
Celly has the sheets pulled down to her waist. She sleeps in the nude. I wear shorts and an old t-shirt. I hear soft snoring, a peaceful sound. Soft waves. .h.i.tting the sh.o.r.es of Fullerton Beach.
I look over, recognizing the sound. More nasal than Celly"s.
The vestigial twin growing out of my lover"s ribcage is the one who is snoring.
The gentle sounds bring back memories.
I. 1959 Babies The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places-Hemingway Crystal Street in those days was a world removed from the gang territory it is now. There were no burned-out tenements, no need for orange signs in each window of the three-flats telling pa.s.sers-by that they were treading through a Neighbourhood Crime Watch Zone. There were social clubs. But we all saw The Blackboard Jungle and knew things were on the verge of change.
My parents were living off Crystal and Washtenaw when I was born. It was a Polish neighbourhood, the kind where n.o.body ever moved. They just died, and after that, their sons and daughters stayed until they married and moved to a bigger house in Bucktown or Logan Square. Or maybe they died as well.
The summer of 1959 was sweltering. I recall hearing this much later in my life from relatives who had gone to the World Series game to see the White Sox. It was ninety-eight degrees on my birthdate, September ninth.
My mother and two of her friends from the radium watch plant she worked at-painting the dials with the luminous ink, in ten-hour shifts-had gone up and down Division and Milwaukee to the shows to get out of the heat that summer. The Banner, The Royal, the Biltmore; they were all air-conditioned.
My mother had to work into her second trimester; back then, my father was pulling in barely enough to feed a family of two working as a security guard at RB"s, a now-defunct department store on Milwaukee. I fondly remember getting a Whamm-O Monster Magnet and a Rock-"em Sock-"em Robot from the store in honour of kindergarten graduation.
My father let me pick out whatever I wanted, and by the time I was six, the word monster was embedded in my brain.
My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck when I was born, and I"m certain my mother"s exposure to the radium didn"t help. (The factory was eventually closed, after many years of court battles; if you stand on Ogden Avenue overpa.s.s, you can still look down and see the ghoulish lime-green glow in those windows that haven"t been painted black.) In September of 1959, my mother and her friends went to the Biltmore on Division to see the premiere of Ben Hur. I"ve been told that she went into labour with me then and there.
The ambulance made it to Lutheran Deaconess in time. When I made my entrance into the world, my face was blue and there were traces of blood coming from my nose and ears. To give you an idea of how limited we were medically just thirty-five years ago, all the doctors could really tell my parents was that I had a degenerative muscle disease caused by trauma to the womb.
My mother blamed herself for many years.
When I was in grade school, one of the cla.s.s trips was to Ripley"s Believe It Or Not Museum in Oldtown, where there was an exhibit of freaks from the Barnum & Bailey circus. Freaks was actually Phineas Barnum"s get-rich-quick term. His partner later referred to people like me and Celandine as "human curiosities." Me with my bulging head and wrap-around eyes, Celly with the second head sticking out of her ribcage.
One of the displays was for Tom Thumb. His mother truly believed her son"s diminutiveness was caused by grief she held over her puppy drowning while she carried Charlie, the boy"s real name. I went home and told my mother this story, how Tom Thumb became rich and married a woman who told him he was just as beautiful as she, so that my mother needn"t worry about me.
My mother smiled sadly when I told her this, and now I realize it was because she knew how my adult years would hurt me, and that my coming school years would only foreshadow this hurt. She smiled the way one does when they are recalling that the person they are talking to used to be so young and tiny. The sadness of the first recognition of mortality. My mother expected the worst. And so I would still hear her cry at night.
But the school I went to was Childermas Research, one of the Cook County clinics.
During my first year of cla.s.ses, I met Celandine Tomei. Some of the other children and their parents whispered about her.
The ages of the children in cla.s.s varied; some learned slower, others had inhibited body functions and needed to be taught with much patience.
Celly was a 1959 baby, just like me.
She was the first girl I ever saw naked.
Childermas Research was one weird f.u.c.king place. You entered this maze of buildings at Eighteenth and Honore, pa.s.sing a little sliver of what looked like a Philadelphia rowhouse; this building that was the burn ward for the entire county, and the Lighthouse For The Blind. On the northeast horizon, a huge pair of red neon lips, advertising Magikist carpets, beckoned.
The cla.s.ses of reading and spelling lessons weren"t too difficult; our rehab sessions reflected our needs. The therapists were great. Vonnie Llewellyn and Ron Szawlus had the patience of saints, I swear. Rehab mostly consisted of coordination exercises, games to make each person use their right and left sides independently, or in tandem.
What was weird about Childermas was my cla.s.smates. Not all of us were allowed out on cla.s.s trips, like the one to Ripley"s. Sometimes I felt as if it was a prison. I was never treated badly, but I felt as if all of us were being manipulated in some way that I could never hope to comprehend.
Juvenile Rehab-where we were-was Room 18, big black numerals on an orange door. Room 20 should have housed the burn ward, but there were people of all ages in there, hooked up to various machines. I heard several orderlies grousing about having to work the Pain Detail, which was kat-corner to Room 20. A blank blue door.
I never saw any of what went on in that long corridor of sub-rooms. But I heard the screams. Several times over the years, I have vomited into my palm or my garbage can, whichever is more convenient, when I recall those d.a.m.nable, high-pitched, keening screams.
Once it had nothing to do with memories. In a medical magazine, I came across photos of stillborn thalidomide babies like Celandine.
One of these "stillborn" children was nothing more than a nerve column wrapped around bone in the placenta.
I come back into the bedroom, my hands washed fresh. I can still smell the vomit in the faint spring air. May 31st, Chicago"s first real breakaway-fromthe-throes-of-winter days. It is not a bad smell. It will go away within a few minutes, like when me and Celly were kids and sneaking smokes on the back porch of the Plichtas" two-flat.
Celandine is sleeping soundly. The sun will rise soon, the sky already aqua. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rise and fall, rise again. The head beneath her left b.r.e.a.s.t.s lolls to the side.
As Celandine breathes, the head looks like a buoy bobbing off Fullerton Beach. Its eyes are open, and it is staring at me.
Silently staring.
So many deformities in one cla.s.sroom. A boy who looked like his skull had been caved in with a lead rod, another with one bug-eye, as if his head was a bubble being blown from a plastic pipe. Many could barely stand. I was able to, but the weight of the excess blood in my brain made my head slump down. My chin often touching my chest, I"d stare up, my eyebrows framing my view, at the lovely Celandine.
There was nothing visibly wrong with her. Compared to the others, at least. Her spine was curved to the right; I heard Ron Szawlus mention that it might eventually realign itself. She always wore billowy, flowered dresses. Of course, this was 1966, and all girls dressed in clothes that covered every possible aspect of their young s.e.xuality, the flowers exuding innocence. These days I see the same patterns on women wearing maternity outfits.
By the middle of 1967 the schedules of many of my cla.s.smates changed. Both Celandine and I, as well as several others, had improved enough with our mobility and coordination that we only had to come for therapy three times a month. This would continue until I was thirteen. The therapy offices-a two-flat on Aberdeen-were closer to our respective houses.
Gone were the memories of the boy in the burn ward, the one the nurses in the pain detail talked about. His mother had left him asleep on the top of a coil heater. Instead of doing skin grafts, the doctors had peeled away several additional layers of skin from the boy"s b.u.t.tocks and performed experiments involving the injections of T-lymphocytes.
Gone, too, were the strange people kept in the psychophrenic ward, as I called it then. I now know that Jimmy Dvorak, Frankie Haid, Billy Bierce, and other infamous Chicago killers of recent past were diagnozed as schizophrenics. But this was a word my parents did not know, and I had to make do with phonetics.
I only saw Celandine during therapy cla.s.ses. Celly went to Wells public school, which was a lot closer to the therapy clinic.
I learned a lot about her. The fact that she was a child of thalidomide, that wonderful sedative that pregnant women were given until 1963, when it was banned. Her mother had been prescribed the brand name Kevadon and was herself eventually diagnozed with peripheral neuritis. Being young, I thought that was really keen. A drug that back-fired. In therapy, Celandine and I both practised the FeldenKrais Method. This was something invented by a former judo instructor to help improve posture and self-image. The latter was something I certainly needed. Celly was getting more beautiful by the day. I would long for the first, second, and fourth Wednesday of every month that summer. I found out that her mother was into holistic therapy, and that she gave Celly daily injections of aconite, which was really wolfsbane, no s.h.i.t, and this presumably acted as an adjuvant of her "Vagus nerve," which was an ideal pain inhibitor. I often wondered later how much pain she had actually been in. Pretty, but still wearing frilly dresses instead of shorts and a blouse like most everybody else in Wicker Park, even the fattest of the girls.
And she liked me a whole lot.
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-st.i.tched 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 s.m.u.t"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 in 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 s.p.a.ce 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 antic.i.p.ation. 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 G.o.ds 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 freak-shows, 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 prep.u.b.escent 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 pair of wraparound sungla.s.ses 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 d.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.t. Makes me think of John Merrick"s disease and how it became known as "elephant.i.tis" 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 Childermas 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, James Earl Ray a.s.sa.s.sinated 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 cla.s.ses 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.
I 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.
II. 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 RayBans 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 s.h.i.t! 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sed out in the revolving door. No one inside seemed to care. We kept walking, amused at kids pitching pennies between the legs of b.u.t.t-ugly wh.o.r.es. 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."