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Surf music plays. A male voice says:
Christopher Gronlund presents Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors. Read by me, the author, Christopher Gronlund.
CHAPTER TWO
“The Big, Orange Hole in the Ground my Grandma Loved So Dearly”
“A station wagon?!” Mom said, puffing on a Virginia Slim. Dad stepped out, not realizing she was ready to drop the gloves and go—in his mind he believed she was complimenting him on the wise purchase of a vehicle that could carry our entire family anywhere his wanderlust desired, in comfort and “style”. All he needed to do was take one deep look into her eyes to see the intensity of her anger, however. The woman lived for complaining, but Dad was seemingly immune to the effects of her constant barrage of insults, and totally clueless when it came to realizing the woman he married existed to do little more than eat, gamble, and argue. I didn’t understand it; he simply loved my mother with all his heart.
“Isn’t it great?”
“No! Where the hell did you find such an ugly thing?” she said, smoothing the wrinkles in her flowered muu-muu, and blowing smoke through her nostrils. She looked like a fat dragon trapped in the clearance bin at a fabric store.
“The used car lot,” Dad said. “But it’s brand new.”
“Brand new and ugly. Take it back! I don’t want this piece of crap trashing up the driveway.”
An overweight, chain-smoking woman with a beehive hairdo standing in a front yard full of plastic, pink lawn flamingos and she had the gall to say the car would look trashy in the driveway? While my father saw the novelty in things like pink flamingos and velvet Elvis paintings, my mother saw them as the pinnacle of high art. She would be the first to criticize my father for buying tacky, roadside novelties, but she owned more ashtrays from Las Vegas than I had baseball cards! She collected matchbooks and decks of cards from casinos; velvet paintings—she owned a small army of drinking birds. I didn’t understand my parent’s relationship until many years later when the obvious finally dawned on me: in Dad’s love of all that was tacky, Mom was the ultimate piece in his collection—he married the Queen of Kitsch! There was no other way to explain the hell that man endured, but if it worked for them, I suppose that’s what mattered.
“I’m not taking the car back,” Dad said, defying my mother in a rare moment of bravery. “I’ve been saving for a car and this is the one I liked best. Please, let me have this one thing, Mary…”
He waited for her answer.
“Are those wood paneled doors?”
“Yes, they are,” he said proudly; thinking—I’m sure—that she was warming up to the Inferno. “They don’t make cars like this anymore. It’s a limited edition.”
“I’ll say! You’re probably the only one in the world who buys one, too,” she said. Then, in her best sarcastic tone, she added, “I’m sure it will be worth millions someday!”
Dad turned and locked eyes with Mom—he was going to fight for this one. As they stared at each other, I sat back, noticing just how different the two were. My old man was a pretty sharp looking guy. To look at him, you’d expect my mom to at least be the mother friends came over to sneak a peek at, and maybe even think about when puberty settled in and they discovered themselves. Dad always reminded me of an actor: he was strapping enough, charming enough, and definitely good looking enough. He had a quirky manner of speaking, as though he were always stating things to a sidekick; his deep, radio announcer-like voice drove points home. He had a swagger to his step that bordered on comedic, but to anyone under thirteen, he simply looked badass and tough. The other mothers in the neighborhood always stopped by and talked with him whenever he did yardwork, which he did sans shirt, wearing only tight jeans and work boots. As he talked to my playmates’ moms, he looked almost posed, sweat dripping from his chest like the condensation from the glass of iced tea or soda he always had nearby. Like every thirteen-year-old, I saw my old man and the top of the heap of coolness, but so did my friends; I had the dad every kid only wished they had—the best dad anywhere!
Why, then, did he marry my mother?
Mom was what happened when you crossed West Virginia with Atlantic City: she was the walking, talking embodiment of tackiness! She spit when she talked and interrupted people. She cursed and told dirty jokes, all while smoking long, pencil-thin cigarettes that she felt made her look glamorous, like a forties movie star. Whereas Dad’s physical match of a wife could have been a buxom blonde leaning against his well-defined chest on the front of a B-movie poster, Mom’s perfect match, physically, would have been a skinny guy in overalls with a piece of grass wedged between his only two teeth, or some bingo hall owner with slicked back hair and a cheap suit, with aspirations of becoming a Vegas pit boss.
Mom and Dad met in 1967 when Dad was traveling cross-country. He wasn’t on a voyage of self-discovery like the scores of hippies traveling at the time—Dad knew what he was looking for. Armed with an Exakta 35mm camera, a notepad and pen, and the dream of becoming a travel writer, Dad climbed into his second car, a ’57 Nomad not entirely unlike the Inferno, and set out from his home in Kansas, to drive up the East Coast in search of old sideshows. While photographing the boardwalk in Atlantic City, he met my mother.
He was taking pictures along the boardwalk, where she worked in a hotdog stand. A morning snapping pictures of old hotels, the beach, and piers filled his stomach with an emptiness only the mismatched insides of slaughtered cattle and swine could fill, so he stopped for a hotdog.
I wonder what it was like the moment they first saw each other—did he look at Mom and think, “This is the woman who will have my children one day!” or did he think, “I wonder if she knows she has a smear of mustard on her chin?” There had to be something that clicked at that moment…or maybe some people really are destined to be together.
Dad ordered two hotdogs and a soda. Mom was always very matter of fact (okay, she was rude!), and rarely made small talk, but she asked, “Where you from?”
“Topeka, Kansas,” Dad said.
“What brings you all the way out here?”
“Just taking pictures.” Dad was very timid and sold himself short, but there was something about Mom that made him feel special. “Actually,” Dad said with a hint of confidence, “I’m writing an article about sideshows and boardwalks.”
“You’re a writer?” Mom said, snapping Dad back to reality. He wasn’t a writer—he only wished he were.
“Well, no—not really. I mean I want to be, but I’ve never written anything.”
Mom smiled at Dad and said something totally unlike her; she said something encouraging! “Well, everyone’s gotta start somewhere, right?”
Dad smiled. “Yeah, I guess they do.” There was something about that plump woman in the hotdog stand spreading relish on his lunch that made him feel invincible.
“How much?” Dad asked.
“Well, if you’ve driven five thousand miles for a hotdog, you shouldn’t have to pay,” Mom said. Her perception of distance was a bit skewed; she’d only really traveled back and forth between Jersey and West Virginia, and usually slept along the way.
“It’s only about twelve or thirteen hundred miles, actually.”
“Still…that’s quite a drive.” She handed him his hotdogs and drink. “It’s on the house.”
“Won’t you get in trouble?”
“Don’t care if I do. It’s not like this is my dreamjob,” she said, pointing to a vat full of steaming water and old, flaccid franks.
Instead of saying “thanks,” Dad summoned the courage to say, “What are you doing after work?”
That evening, as they walked along the Steel Pier where Harry Houdini, W.C. Fields, and Charlie Chaplin once honed their skills, and where—in the forties—young couples in love danced to the Big Band sounds of Benny Goodman and the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the first spark of a lifelong love started between Mary Catherine Mangione and James David O’Brien. A strange love, granted, but love nonetheless.
They stopped and watched the diving horse. Growing up in Kansas, Dad had seen his fair share of horses, but he never saw one leap from a sixty-foot tall tower and into a shallow tank of water with a rider pressed to its back. To Mom, diving horses were as much an everyday thing as people walking their dogs, but to Dad, it was exactly the kind of magic he had left home hoping to find.
Splash! Mom and Dad—standing too close to the tank—were covered in foul-smelling water. Dad thought it was wonderful, but he could tell Mom was far from amused. She stood on the pier, arms outstretched, looking like an angry, dripping beachball in her red and yellow outfit two sizes too small.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Dad said. He pulled some napkins from his pocket and handed them to her.
Instead of yelling, Mom smiled though, wiping her eyes and smearing her mascara so she looked like a two hundred twenty pound raccoon. “Ya know, I already smell like a hot dog stand—stray dogs follow me home, for chrissake! What’s a little water, even if it smells like wet horses?” she laughed.
Dad said he looked in her eyes and knew then and there she was the one.
Back in the driveway, Mom was the one winning the staring contest (she could outlast a statue with her evil eye), and Dad, hoping to stave off total defeat, said, “I’ll make you a deal…“ He sounded like the greasy salesman at the used car lot. “We take it on vacation and if it doesn’t grow on you, we take it back. How’s that sound?”
“Okay, but I’m telling you right now, James—there’s no way that car’s growing on me.” Even if the car did grow on her and she ended up loving it just as much as Dad did—just to prove her point and tear away another piece of Dad’s very being—she would insist he take the car back to the lot when we returned from vacation. She snubbed her cigarette out on a garden gnome in disgust and headed back into the house.
Dad stared off in the distance, smirking about something known only to him, then turned his attention back to the Inferno. He stared at it like it was a newborn child full of potential, then said, “Why don’t you go help your mother with dinner, Buddy?” .
“Sure, Dad.” I went around back, toward the kitchen, allowing Dad a moment to bask in his little victory.
Dad bought the car just in time for vacation (he wanted to buy it sooner, but Mom kept hounding him, saying we didn’t need a new car—she said the Gremlin had more than enough room to hold her, Dad, my younger brother and sister, my aunt, me, and all our gear for our road trip!). Dad’s treks were bad enough without being cramped; his annual family vacations were hell packed into a backseat, taking us from the world’s largest Uncle Sam statue, in Lake George, New York, to the La Brea Tarpits, in California, and every roadside attraction, reptile farm, and historical marker in between! For Dad, a road trip was a chance for the family to bond no matter what—his chance to pretend, at least for a short time, that we were a normal, fully functioning family. That particular year we would take a twenty-four hundred mile voyage from our home, in New Jersey, to the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. Going to the canyon was my grandmother’s idea; she loved the place.
Grandma visited the canyon whenever she had the chance. My great-grandfather took her when she was young and the canyon bug instantly took hold. She visited the canyon forty-nine times in her life, and swore she’d visit fifty times before dying. She used to always say, “Someday you’ll have to visit the Grand Canyon, Mikey.”
“Why?” I’d ask.
“Because it’s healing.”
“It’s a big, orange hole in the ground, Grandma.”
“A hole? That’s all you think it is? You don’t understand. It’s so much more than that. It’s healing—“
“You always say that,” I’d say. “What do you mean, ‘It’s healing?’”
She’d stop what she was doing and focus all attention on me, as though I just said something blasphemous. She’d lock eyes and take my hand in hers, as though she were about to say something important; as though she were about to share with me the secret to life. I suppose, in her mind, she was.
“You stand on its edge and something happens,” she’d say. “I can’t explain it—you have to experience it for yourself. You stand on the rim and it pulls your soul down to the river for a cleaning, then puts it back with a little bit of itself. It’s healing, Mikey. Once you experience it, you’ll go back. Everyone goes back…”
Grandma was always my favorite relative (I often wondered how such a peaceful, caring woman had given birth to my mother). I think what I liked most about Grandma was she truly seemed content with everything around her. Maybe that sense of calm came from her canyon visits; I don’t know. I never understood what she meant when she talked about the healing powers of that big hole in northern Arizona, no matter how many times she tried explaining it to me (and believe me, she tried every chance she had). Whatever she saw in the canyon was beyond my grasp of bigger things when I was younger. All I knew was the pull to the rim was strong enough to make her head out west whenever she had the chance. The summer Dad bought the Inferno, we were heading to the canyon, with Grandma…only she was dead!
She died in the spring—she was only fifty five. She was on the phone with Mom, talking about her plans for visiting the canyon, when she dropped dead from a brain aneurysm. She never knew what hit her, but Mom said Grandma knew something was coming (Mom believed my grandmother was psychic, and passed “The Gift” on to her). Grandma drafted a will that spring and she swore she’d never draft her will until she was at least seventy-five. Her last wish was to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the Grand Canyon; her way of giving something back to her old friend, the big, orange hole in the ground.
I made my way to the back door and into the kitchen, where Mom was making spaghetti sauce. Looking around the kitchen, one would think she was cooking for an army, instead of just five people. She didn’t use normal cookware like most mothers; she used stuff purchased from an old friend of the family’s we (even Mom and Dad), called Uncle Mike. Uncle Mike provided industrial cookware to the restaurant industry: huge, ten-gallon stockpots, blenders that could generate more power than Dad’s old Gremlin, and her favorite piece, a two-and-a-half-foot-long stainless steel sauce ladle. Mom was never very demonstrative; cooking was her way of showing affection. In her mind, the more she prepared was a measure of how much she loved us, deep-down, even though she rarely showed it in conventional ways.
Mom looked up from her sauce vat—her face drenched with sweat. “Michael, would you go tell Elvis and Olivia that dinner’s almost ready?”
“Sure, Ma,” I said. She looked back at the sauce and I noticed sweat roll from the tip of her nose and fall into the pot. Still, I would have much rather stood there watching Mom sweat into the food I was about to eat than spending a moment with Elvis and Olivia.
Elvis and Olivia are my younger siblings, twins who seem to share a strange, psychic link, even to this day. When they spoke, most times they’d say the same thing in unison, or flip-flop every other sentence. It still creeps me out—it’s something I’ll never get used to. But the strange manner in which they spoke was just the first item in a long list that bothered me about them.
They were evil. There’s no nicer way to say it. They reveled in making the lives of those around them utterly miserable. From family, to teachers, to strangers—they terrorized those around them with their zombie-like stares and strong penchant for mischief. They weren’t normal mischievous kids, content at making fart noises with their armpits for attention, though—that was below them. They calculated every move like Russian chess champions, truly appreciating the depths of their malice when a plan came together as plotted. They didn’t act out of childish curiosity—they acted out of the same cold, calculated cruelty of twisted, would-be world conquerors and serial killers.
I went upstairs to their bedrooms, which were situated directly across from each other. They would have shared a room, but Mom felt that was wrong and sick, so they left their doors wide open so they could see into the other’s room (close one door for even a moment and they instantly suffered from separation anxiety). They pushed all their furniture to the back wall of their rooms so no matter what they were doing, they could stay in constant visual contact. Regardless of how many times Mom rearranged their furniture, they’d put things back the way they liked them.
I went to Olivia’s room, first. She was sitting on her bed, eating from a bag of marshmallows and staring across the hall, into Elvis’s room, where he was doing the same, in mirror image. Even with me between the two, blocking their view, they just stared at each other, as though I were a pane of glass. Olivia’s staring was worse than Elvis’s; the way she stared at things with such purpose and intensity, you expected them to levitate, or suddenly burst into flame. She looked like a creepy doll controlled by evil forces.
Elvis looked like a tiny version of The King of Rock-n-Roll (during The King’s fatter years). I would have been named Elvis, but Mom promised Uncle Mike she’d name her first-born after him. He saved her life with the Heimlich Maneuver one Christmas when she was choking on calamari. I am forever indebted to Uncle Mike for saving me from such a dreadful name.
“It’s time for dinner, you two,” I said
In unison, they said, “Tell us something we don’t already know, four-eyes!”
“I hate both of you, how’s that?” I returned.
“We know—we hate you even more…”
Even though I was three years their elder, they genuinely scared me. “Well, I’m just telling you what Mom wanted me to tell you,” I said. I turned and walked off. A few moments later I heard them say, “He’s so weird,” as they filed out from their rooms together, like robots.
* * *
Watching my family eat dinner, one would think we were never fed. The twins shoveled bite after bite into their mouths as though they were racing. They barely chewed what went in, and that which they chewed was done with an audible, open-mouthed smacking. My mother slurped spaghetti like a kid, the ends of the pasta flailing about like tentacles and slapping the outsides of her mouth and face before finding their way into her maw. The sauce splatters looked like an extension of the quickly applied, bright red lipstick she always wore. Dad at least didn’t make noise, but he ate as though each meal could be his last. He had a quiet way of eating faster than anyone at the table, so he was usually the first one done each evening. Me, I rarely had an appetite while watching Mom and the twins belch and gurgle their way through a meal, so I picked at my plate until Dad was finished and I could rush off to help him with the dishes.
As sloppy an eater as my Mom was, it drove her nuts that my brother and sister were sloppier. She was a far cry from being Miss Manners herself, but she expected better from us.
“Youse two, close your mouths when you eat! Where’d you get those manners… cows?!” she said with a full mouth dripping with pasta and bread. Instead of listening to Mom, the twins defied her by rolling their food around on their tongues and letting it spill onto their plates. Mom acted like she was going to get up.
“Don’t you two make me get the sauce ladle!” she said, spitting tiny pieces of dinner everywhere. The twins closed their mouths and quickly behaved.
My mother always threatened to hit us with the sauce ladle whenever we were bad. I can’t remember ever being hit by either of my parents, but the thought of her meaty arms swinging a two-and-a-half foot long kitchen utensil was always enough to set the twins straight.
As loud as the three of them were when they ate, there was one other family member who put us all to shame. Over their grunts and belches, he was heard chewing on a fork at Mom’s feet. That’s when Dad asked the question burning in everyone’s mind: “Mary. Dear. What are we going to do about Lucky?”
Lucky was Mom’s pet Chihuahua. He was 2,358 pounds of absolute evil packed into a three-pound body! His head looked like a tiny bruised apple with black marble eyes, fleshy bat ears, and razor sharp shark’s teeth. Lucky shredded everything in the house not belonging to Mom—as though he consciously knew what havoc he was wreaking on our belongings, while sparing hers. Mom babied him more than she ever babied any of us. She wouldn’t allow a soul to say bad things about the tiny beast; even if he shredded something important (like homework, papers in Dad’s briefcase, or our shoes), we were expected to act as though we loved him as she did. Couple that with a variety of health issues (stomach problems, rheumatism, and asthma, to name a few), and it’s easy to see why everyone but Mom hated the dog.
When I say his head looked like a bruised apple, I’m serious; Lucky’s biggest health issue was the fontanel on the crown of his head. Chihuahuas, like humans, are born with a soft spot. Normally, the skull grows together, but in some cases, the dogs go through adulthood with a section of their brain protected only by a thin membrane of skin and short fur. This condition is known as a molera. To shield his brain from danger, Mom carried Lucky cradled on her left forearm, with her right hand covering his head. It was like she believed the moment she left the top of Lucky’s head exposed for even a millisecond, everything from bricks and cueballs, to pinballs and shotputs would rain down from the sky and bruise his delicate little brain. When any of us came within ten feet of her precious Chihuahua, she’d scream, “Be careful with him! For God’s sake, don’t touch his molera!” Elvis once poked the top of Lucky’s head and had he not been faster than Mom, I think I would have grown up with only a younger sister.
As much as Mom worried about Lucky’s molera, it didn’t stop her from using it to her advantage. She discovered when she pushed in at just the right place on his brain, he froze, momentarily paralyzed until she let up. It was like an on/off switch allowing her to control the little beast’s temper whenever he got out of hand.
Perhaps the main reason Mom was so protective of Lucky was she believed he was sent to her with a purpose: to make her rich. The day Mom bought him, she won a thousand dollars on a lottery scratch-off, and the following weekend at the casinos, she came in big on the slots. She attributed her luck with the purchase of the dog, so she named him Lucky. The only thing lucky about him was the rest of us hadn’t put him to sleep!
Mom looked across the table at Dad; she was worried. “What about Lucky?”
We can’t take him with us,” Dad said. “He’s got his stomach problem and all.”
The twins flip-flopped, “Yeah-he-will-shit-and-puke-on-everything.”
“Youse two, watch your fuckin’ language! I don’t know where you picked up that shit!” Mom said. The twins laughed and Mom pretended like she was going to stand again. “Don’t make me get the ladle—!”
They straightened right up.
“I’m not leaving this house to travel halfway around the world without him,” she said. “Especially the way you drive, James. I’m gonna need all the luck I can get on this trip. He’s coming with us—no one will take care of him while we’re gone. You should have thought of something sooner—“
“We could take him to a no-kill shelter!” I said. The twins nodded their heads in agreement; the first time they were ever on my side. “We can say we found him in the street, then pick him up when we get back.”
“Something tells me even a no-kill shelter would make an exception in Lucky’s case,” Dad said. As much as he liked my idea, he was very pragmatic; he knew if we returned to a dead Lucky, Mom would never let any of us live it down. “There’s gotta be something we can do, though…”
Mom picked up the little ball of hate. Around his mouth, Chihuahua slobber mixed with blood from cutting his gums on the fork, making him look like he was eating cotton candy. Mom kissed him on the mouth, not caring about the pink drool. “Don’t listen to them, Lucky-Wucky. You’re coming with us.” She looked at Dad and locked eyes again. “He’s coming with us, James.”
Dad stood up, leaving his plate behind. “Okay, Mary, he can come along on the trip! But I’m keeping the car, no matter what you think of it. Deal?”
“Deal!” she said while letting Lucky lick spaghetti sauce from the corners of her mouth. She was in rare form and I couldn’t take anymore—she and Lucky were making me ill!
“May I please be excused,” I said.
“Sure,” Mom said. “And make sure you’re all packed before bed, all right?”
“Okay.” I grabbed my plate and my father’s, cleaned them, and went to my room.
* * *
Surf music plays. A male voice says:
Thank you so much for listening to Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors–it really means a lot to me.
Theme music is provided by Belgium’s best surf band, Pirato Ketchup.
And if you want to know a little bit more about me and the other things I do, check out ChristopherGronlund.com.
Stay safe, and take care…
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