Boys of Life (26 page)

She was always startling me with the things she said. I'd be walking by her wheelchair and she'd sing our, "Have you ever been in Guatemala. 7 I went dancing in Guatemala once. My father's ship anchored off the coast for a month, and we went dancing every night.' 1

I think prohablv most of what she said was true—who'd make up a story about dancing in Guatemala? She was so rich—at least she had been at some time in her life—that she'd prohablv been everywhere she

^he had.

We moved right in on her. After all those sears cooped up in that dingy apartment on Avenue C, it was terrific to be out in the country, and have all this space around you, and green trees and a huge empty lawn with nothing cluttering it up. There were about twelve, maybe

n oi us in all who went up there rot the movie, and we each had ire bedroom. That was how huge Fliulia

Some oi those rooiru hadn't been used in ages. In mine, there was

rhis bouquet of flowers that musr've been there twenty years. All I had

was breathe on it and those flowers tell aparr. The OUtlidc wall

□ PAUL RUSSELL

had leaked water over the years, and the wallpaper—this red velvet stuff, all fuzzy to the touch—had ugly splotches on it.

I rememher the first day we where there, we were comparing our rooms. Sammy was saying how his room had a whole suit of armor in it, and he saw a mouse too, which ran under the hed. Verbena's room had a balcony off it, and a set of secret stairs that went up to a locked door.

"Well," I told them, "I got fungus trom outer space living all over the wall in my room."

Carlos wasn't paying too much attention to us—he was writing things down in his little spiral notebook. Rut when I said that, he perked up. "Let's see," he said. "Let's see, let's see, 1 knew this would happen"—and we all went traipsing up to mv room, which was on the third floor. When he saw that wallpaper, and the big water stains that'd turned the red velvet black and green, he went wild. "It's perfect," he said. "The fungus from outer space. Of course, oi course," he kept saying, and dancing around the room in the way he'd sometimes do when he saw something happening on camera that he hadn't expected, but that once it happened he loved to see.

None oi us knew .it the time what the movie was going to he

about—Carlos never told us anything till he started shooting. His movies always made themselves up as they went along. 1 don't have to tell you how the fungus trom outer space ended up playing .1 major part. In some way, I guess you could say it turned into the creeping bent the movie's name was about.

In the movie, the house is some kind oi way station foi these

nires from other planets, or another dimension, or ma\be they're

just dreams like in ill Carlos's movies, you're nevei sure. It's done with pupj ippets Verbena designed. 1 helped hei sen

them down in Nrw York, sitting in her kitchen listening to salsa musk through the wall from next d

The duns it lb,us whai they are have been passing through It's something Sammy and I. who live there, have gotten totally real to us we ha nations with

them, though tru tly talk back to us. Bui no* somethii

trapped here on then through t< • other | led.

imy and I nevei knem

B O Y S O F L I F E □

rooms on the house. Every morning, Sammy and I find new rooms, or a now staircase where there wasn't one the night before—it leads to a

floor of the house that's impossible to be there, but it's there anyway. The house isn't a hundred times, it's a million times bigger than we thought.

We go in one room and it's the inside of an opera house—we went down to the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie to shoot that scene. Another time we rind a room that, when we go inside it, is like being outdoors in a field—only it's still just another room in the house, and at the other end of the outdoors there's another door that leads you back into another room. And the puppets are everywhere—they're part of the furniture, the walls, they're in the air. When I open up a jar of mustard, the aliens—or whoever they are—come spilling out, inflating up to full size right before my eyes.

It's Carlos's most gorgeous movie, because of the house, which Carlos somehow makes seem to have more rooms than it does, and also because of Verbena's puppets. I wish I could paste some pictures in here of those puppets, because if you've never seen them then you can't know how bizarre and pretty they were. Sort of like huge jellyfish, only decorated all over with seashells and half-moons and old lace. Like somebody's gone and dipped a jellyfish in a vat oi trinkets from a junk store.

Mrs. Jarique loved the puppets. She'd sit there and applaud when we did scenes with them, and she'd shout things at them. "The Great Wall of China," she'd shout. "Madame Li, 1923. And the spoiled gown. Egg stains. The Great Wall."

Carlos didn't mind, since we never did sync sound anyway. She could veil her head off at those puppets for all he cared. And I think he kind ot liked it that she yelled like that—it got us all in some kind o\ mood.

While we were filming up there, a hurricane came through. What it started out as was this tropical depression in the Atlantic Ocean that Verbena somehow took notice oi. She was always skittish about the weather: she'd lived through a tornado when she was a little girl, and the man who lived next door got killed when the wind picked him up and slammed him Into i tree. Verbena saw it, or that's what she always said. For some reason, she got fixated on this one particular tropical depression; she said she had a feeling about it, nyht from the start. None of us paid it any mind till it got upgraded into a tropical storm and started heading north. When Verbena heard that, she made us

D PAULRUSSELL

keep the radio on the whole day, tracking it while it turned from a storm into a hurricane out over the water somewhere and still kept moving toward New York.

"Just you wait," Verbena said. "We're sitting in a natural hurricane funnel here. The Hudson Valley. You look at any map and you'll see. Storm'll come gusting up that river," she predicted.

What especially worried her were the suspension bridges we S8W out the train window on the way up. Every one of those bridges was going to buck and sway and finally break loose in the storm. Barges were going to get tossed around like toys in a bathtub.

For two whole days, while the hurricane moved closer, she kept us going.

Even Mrs. Jarique got into the act. "Tierra del Fuego," she told us. "Land of fire. We were sick for days. Seasick. Ask him."

Sometimes she thought Sammy was the captain of the ship we were all sailing on.

"It's true," he told everybody. "We were all seasick, every one oi us. But we made it, didn't we. 7 "

"Naked Indians," Mrs. Jarique said. "Go ahead, tell them."

"Naked Indians," said Sammy, like he believed every word oi it.

As the storm got closer, the radio talked about it more and more.

"It it's going tO be SO bad Up here, what about New York.'" I asked the rest of the group.

We all tried to imagine the streets underwater, like Verbena said

I be.

11 Phone boothsil be floating down the streets," Seth said. "Beds with people in them," said Sammy.

"Thousands'll drown m the subway," Verbena told us \\V were

.ill a little x\AA\ with being out oi the ciq artei living cooped up there so long. The opei n to us, and we were doing what I'd nevei

th. Right re missmu New v < .rk

If 1 in the men kC We knew that

h always somethii me up a Ith to

down ui betv net, whethei 11 was thai endless

n during ( kmorrah to And Sammy ■<

e tune we spent with a ( klijfl hoard when we weie mal

h with spmts

When the hiimi .me finall torra thai

down V 1

up the next mOITting ml the lUfl W8J ihi I it was *.(.(»!

□ PAUL RUSSELL

of liked—though probably most people wouldn't. But it made me feel at home, if that makes any sense—a homey smell.

There was this window in her kitchen that looked out across the empty lot lull of bricks and broken bottles where her old building had been. By day it was pretty ugly, but come late afternoon it was an open space that let the light in. I'd sit there, and she'd cook rice and black beans, which I loved, and slice some raw onions to go on top. It was very peaceful, just the two of us and the little TV set that was always running but with the sound off— 44 my fireplace," Verbena used to say. We'd talk a lot, and she'd smoke jimson, this stuti country people used to smoke back in Kentucky when they had colds. Verbena said it was better than pot, once you got used to how strong it was—plus it was completely legal, not that that made any difference to her. She had some cousin of hers send packets up from Alabama, and she kept it in a mason jar on the kitchen table.

Every time I'd go over there she'd roll some and offer it to me, but I never joined in—I'm one oi those people who's never been able to get high. Not that I didn't try over the years. I used to completely disgust Serb when we'd sit up halt the night smoking he'd be SO stoned he couldn't even talk, and nothing happening to me except a headache. The couple of times I tried jimson, it was the same. Verbena always teased me, though: "Shy girl," she'd say, "you're getting high just like everybody else. Your brain's just not tine-tuned enough to know that's what happening to it."

"I've always been .1 clod," I admitted.

me clod," she said. "This clod is definitely high heels .ill the

It didn't matter to me th.n I couldn't gel high, though n might've n tun to gel buzzed with Verbena once in a while. Bui by the time I was hanging out with her, I was pretty much straight all the time. It was like I'd had tins othei life we could both sii and look back on

told me u knou how we u.»s all o( us pulling

•

• ing in tins bright bhu used to wear, and hei

haii was pulled ba< I from hei he.id in this tight bun I he jimson imoke null like some field had |usi been mow, "Pulling fc* me h< m l 1

"1 t nust

BOYS O P LIFE D

"Through to the other side," she said. She sort of cocked an eyebrow while she looked at me.

I understood how it meant "through to the other side of Carlos."

lUSe there were people who didn't make it through, and they tell

away, they got lost. But it von made it through to the other side, like

Netta And Sammy and Seth and Verbena had done, then you were

there tor \:ood.

metimes 1 want it to he like it used to he. Before I made it through."

""ton miss him," she said.

"I miss getting tucked, if you want to know the truth." I'd always been able to he completely open with Verbena. Part ot it was just who she was—the most generous person in the world. And part ot it was remembering her shooting tire out oi her hutt, because it you can't talk to somebody like that about getting tucked, then who can you?

Most ot the time we didn't talk about Carlos—but it was like she was sitting up with me till missing him wore off. It was like some assignment he gave her to do. In the meantime, she kept me entertained telling me all about herself—which could he pretty wild, at least when I was in the mood to believe what she was saying.

"I was raised up on conjure," she told me one night. "My daddy

was Doctor Jim Jordan. Don't pretend you never heard about him—he

was the most famous root doctor in the whole South. Even in Kentucky

they heard about him. And he was growing me to follow in his foot-

5."

"So can you really do spells?" I asked her. I thought there might be some use tor a spell or two to throw on Carlos.

"Anybody can du spells," she told me. "Making them work— that's where the living's at."

could you make them work.'"

"I used to help," she said. "I used to stand around with the slop bucket when people came to be cured ot lizards and Such like th.it would get in their stomachs."

"People would really have lizards in their stomachs?"

"That's wh.it they thought they had. So who's to say they don't,

rrin^ rid ot fh.it lizard's going to m.ike them teel better. My daddy'd conjure that lizard out, ,\nd usually what'd happen was, they'd commence to vomiting. 1 was there with m\ slop hi* itch it. Then I'd be out the door fast SO I could throw that nasty stuff ,iu,i\."

D PAULRUSSELL

"Was there ever a lizard in it.'" I could never tell how much Verbena was playing with me.

"Sometimes when I was already out the door, my daddy called me back. He'd say come on back here and let's see that lizard that came on out of there."

"And would there be one?"

"Sometimes there was a lizard in there," Verbena said. "Sure there was a lizard sometimes. I remember it." She smiled her smile that had three or four teeth in it—she always looked sly even when she was telling some kind of truth. She lifted her jimson cigarette to her lips and took a drag. She had these big costume jewelry rings on every one of her fingers.

"Daddy was fighting of! dirty work all the tune," she reminisced. "We had each one of the rooms in that house all papered with newspaper to keep busy the witches that were coming there."

"What're you talking about, newspaper.'" I asked. It was something I always thought black people did because they couldn't afford regular wallpaper.

"How'd you live so long?" Verbena asked me. "Anybody knowing the first thmjj about conjure can tell you—you put newspapers up on

the walls, witches have to count every Single letter up there before the\

can start their work. And it von can keep those witches counting till

dawn, well then that's all she wrote. Ain't no more dirty work there.

Same reason to wear .1 checkered shirt. My A.k\A\ was rtevei without

his checkered shirt, summer or winter t0 keep them Witches count