[Listen]
Surf music plays. A male voice says:
Christopher Gronlund presents Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors. Read by me, the author, Christopher Gronlund.
CHAPTER FIVE
“The Genetic Puddle From Whence I Crawled”
We pulled off the interstate, and soon four lane highways turned into narrow two-lane roads as we made our way into the hills. The narrow roads gave way to a dirt road Dad turned onto and carefully navigated. There were deep ruts and holes cut by past storms everywhere—it looked more like the practice grounds for an army artillery unit, than a trail leading up to a residence.
“Hey, kids! Look up there!” Dad said, pointing at a treetop where a large bird was roosting. “A red-tailed hawk!”
As we chugged up the trail, careful not to fall into craters along the way, the hawk took off, annoyed by the occasional revving of the engine as Dad maneuvered the Inferno from one pothole to another. Further up, we saw a white-tailed deer sprint toward the woods and leap into the trees to safety.
“Isn’t that great?” Dad said. I think I was the only one impressed. I loved seeing all kinds of different animals on our trips: bald eagles in the Northwest, armadillos in Texas, alligators in Florida and Louisiana, roadrunners in New Mexico, and the moose we once saw in a marsh on a trip to Minnesota. Even more common animals, like hawks and deer, were a welcome sight. We had plenty of wildlife back home in Jersey, but right in Atlantic City—aside from some birds—all we had were rats.
“It’s just a deer and a bird, James,” Mom said, petting Lucky. “They’re nothing compared to Lucky. Isn’t that right, Lucky-Boy?” The little dog, which reminded me of one of those rats back home, vibrated with excitement.
I let Dad know I at least liked seeing animals in the wild. “That’s cool, Dad. Thanks for pointing out the hawk.”
Even though I had to put up with Mom and the twins, I always considered myself fortunate to have seen so much of the country by the time I was thirteen. We really had been just about everywhere in the lower forty-eight states on Dad’s trips. I appreciated the geography of each area, the subtle things that made each section of the country different and special. West Virginia may get a bad rap, but it’s a gorgeous state. The mountains roll on and on and never seem to end. All the wildlife, the wildflowers—I thought Aunt Margie was lucky to live in such a pretty place…then I saw her house!
The front yard was littered with old, mismatched appliances and beat-up, rusty cars, all with FOR SALE signs on them. Suddenly a yard full of pink lawn flamingos didn’t seem so tacky. If it was a piece of scrap metal that once drove, cleaned clothes, or kept beer cans chilled, it was for sale in Aunt Margie’s front yard.
When I finally caught sight of the house, I was surprised it wasn’t up on blocks, like most of the cars scattered about the property. Calling it a house is giving it too much credit—shack might even be too kind. It looked liked a gigantic fort built from scrap lumber and tar paper by clumsy kids. The only things giving a hint people actually lived inside was the coal bin beneath the front porch and a big TV antennae on the roof. I’m sure one good shove would have been all it took to bring the whole place down. It suddenly dawned on me looking at that shack on the side of the hill: I was related to Hee Haw!
Outside my immediate family, Grandma, and Aunt Margie, I didn’t know much about my relatives. Dad’s side was pretty normal—at least this is what I’ve gathered from hearing his stories; my grandparents died before I was born. Dad’s mother and father lived on a farm outside Topeka, Kansas and were as Whitebread America as they come: Grandma baked pies and cleaned house while Grandpa took care of the fields and talked a lot about “the good ol’ days.” They were a tight-knit family and supported Dad’s dreams. Dad was an only child, and even though Grandpa needed him around the farm, when Dad decided to head out and see the world, my grandparents supported him. When his writing career never took off, they didn’t say, “See, we told you so;” they encouraged him to keep trying. When he gave up the dream to move to New Jersey to be with Mom and sell insurance policies, they gave him money and their blessings. Dad was pretty normal, except for one thing when he was growing up: he thought he was Superman.
He didn’t just pretend to be Superman like many kids—he was convinced that just like the genuine article, he crash landed in a field in the Midwest after his birth parents placed him in a ship and sent him light years across galaxies to the safety of Earth. He was convinced that one day his “earth father” would take him out to the barn, show him the ship he arrived in and the spot where he crashed, and his life would never be the same again. His mother would make a costume from the blankets from his home planet that were found in his ship, and he would leave Kansas to fight crime not just in the big city, but all over the world, making the planet safe for mankind.
Even after an episode resulting in injury, he still held on to his belief that he was Kal-El, the super kid from another planet. When he was ten, he tied a red tablecloth around his neck and climbed out his bedroom window, onto the overhang that kept the front porch safe and dry during summer storms. He took a few deep breaths and ran as fast as he could toward the edge, jumping with all his might before going over, throwing his arms out in front of him for even more power. He fell like a stone—straight into the dirt below where he broke his nose, knocked out four teeth, and broke two ribs. For most children that would be proof enough that he was powerless, but it only convinced Dad to try harder. He was more like Wile E. Coyote than Superman.
He was convinced a stress-inducing event would bring out his super powers when puberty hit. He tried racing trains (almost getting hit twice!), and took running leaps at the barn, convinced his powers would suddenly kick in and he’d fly over the weathervane atop the roof. He got a lot of concussions and facial lacerations, instead. He ordered the Charles Atlas system from a comic book, going from a ninety-seven pound weakling, to Topeka’s most perfectly developed teen, but the superpowers never came. When he finally accepted that he was, in fact, born of terrestrial parents and was little more than a dreamer trapped in the middle of nowhere, depression set in and he decided the best way to put it to rest would be by seeing the world. That’s when he packed his bags and went off across America to find who he really was.
I’m glad Dad was a weird kid—I think growing up convinced he was the Man of Steel drove him to think big. Most of those big dreams never came true, but he at least gave them a try, which is more than most people can say. While he never saved the world from evil—while he never jumped into a phone booth to change into costume and fly off to save the day—to me, he was still Superman.
Mom’s side of the family is where the real fun begins. Her side is chock full of everything from stage magicians, to backwater hillbillies! The only people I really knew on my mom’s side of the family were Grandma and Aunt Margie. I knew my grandmother very well; she came for visits a couple times a year, and even when she was traveling, she always called every Sunday to chat with Mom. Aunt Margie came for visits now and then (either my Dad paid for her to come out East, or my grandmother paid). I always knew Aunt Margie was—for lack of a nicer way to put it—a backwards hick, but seeing where she came from drove that point home.
Aunt Margie always reminded me of a cow—I mean that in a good way. She had huge, brown eyes like a cow, and a kindness and calm that went to her very core; a strange, almost Zen-like aura. Like a cow, she had a faraway look about her, always deep in thought about not much at all. She was her father’s favorite daughter, and I always got the impression Mom was jealous, not because she wasn’t as loved as Aunt Margie, but because—in Mom’s mind—everything between her and Aunt Margie was a competition and it was the one area Mom knew Aunt Margie had an edge. There was no denying my grandfather liked Aunt Margie better; they were very similar.
I always wondered about my grandfather growing up. Mom spoke of Grandpa in the past tense for as long as I can remember—all I knew about him was he died about a year before I was born. If I asked Mom to tell me about him, she’d say, “Your grandfather was a coalminer,” as though that explained everything.
Grandma met my grandfather when she was sixteen. By the time she was seventeen, she had given birth to fraternal twins: Mom and Aunt Margie. I figured my grandfather had to be a special guy to have married a woman as neat as my grandmother. Years later, I found out they were never married; in fact, they had never even lived together or spent more than an evening in each other’s company. My grandfather was little more than a horny teenager working in a coalmine who happened to win the affections of my grandmother one evening during a chance encounter.
Some family history: my great grandfather (Grandma’s father), was a magician based out of Atlantic City (The Great Gazpacho—he thought it was a catchy name; he didn’t realize he had named himself after soup). He trained Grandma to be his assistant and the two traveled all over the country doing their act (the first time he took Grandma to the Grand Canyon was on a drive to LA, where he was hoping for a chance to break into movies—it never worked out). My great-grandmother died giving birth to Grandma; my great-grandfather was a single father in a time raising children was still considered “women’s work.” On a trip to Chicago in 1945, he decided to take the “scenic route” and show my grandmother the mountains—this route took him through West Virginia, where his car broke down not too far from Clarksburg.
While waiting around the garage to have the car repaired, my grandmother met Earl Webb, who was stopping by to say hi to his friend, Bertham, a mechanic at the shop. I’ve only seen one picture of my grandfather, an image of him standing with a group of coalminers. In the photo, Grandpa is standing in the center of a group of hollow-looking men leaning on shovels, all wearing head lamps like big, psychic third eyes allowing them to see in the dark. Looking at their blank stares made me think something was taken from them, something important from deep inside them that they all missed dearly. Grandpa, though, was smiling, his arms wrapped around the two men flanking him, both looking proud to know him and stand in his presence. It’s an old black and white photo, but Grandpa’s ice-blue eyes shine through the monochrome image and the grit covering his face. I was amazed a human could get so dirty: every nook and wrinkle in his face full of soot, the ridges in his knuckles black with coal dust. I guess he cleaned up well, or Grandma didn’t mind getting dirty.
He was fascinated with my grandmother because she was from “the big city,” and she was fascinated with him because he wasn’t. By the time the car was repaired, my great-grandfather thought it was too late to head back out on the road and decided to spend the night in town. Grandma and Earl made plans to meet later that evening; one thing led to another, and they did everything parents tell their children not to do before marriage. The following morning, Earl showed my grandmother where he lived and gave her a piece of coal to remember him by, but that wasn’t all he gave her. For the next nine months, she carried around more than just the memory of Earl Webb wherever she went.
When Grandma began showing signs of the pregnancy, she knew who the father was right away. She may have been loose that evening in West Virginia, but she was no floozy—Earl Webb was the only man she ever allowed to know her in such a manner. As Mom and Aunt Margie grew in her belly, she could no longer contort and fit inside secret compartments in magic boxes, and not many crowds wanted to see a pregnant girl in a tight outfit keep trying. With no assistant, my great-grandfather’s act went belly up and he turned to his weakness for making money: gambling (at least I know where my mother gets it). He spent all his time at Garden State Park, betting on horses, and before he knew it, he was in over his head, owing money he didn’t have to people you don’t want knowing your name. They found his body in an alley not too far from the track.
With her father gone, Grandma had no choice but take odd jobs to make ends meet. She did everything from selling concessions on the boardwalk, to housekeeping duties at the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Racquet Club on the fifteenth floor of the famous hotel. She sold tickets to shows, and even tried doing her own magic act, but no one wanted to hire a woman about to bear something illegitimate. She did everything she could to earn a buck, right up until things changed inside her and she knew something big was about to happen.
She bought a bus ticket to West Virginia, making it to Clarksburg on Christmas Eve. As she neared town, her contractions hit hard and it was just a matter of time before babies came into the picture. The bus driver, noticing she was in pain and about to deliver, offered help, but she gritted her teeth and told him to keep driving. When she reached her stop, the driver offered help again, but Grandma told him it was her problem, not his. With a smile, she let him know the sentiment was appreciated, then she stepped from the warm bus into the bitter, snowy night. As the bus pulled away, her water broke, spilling onto the surface of Highway 50. With a blanket slung over her left shoulder and her suitcase in her right hand, she trudged off into the woods where she and Earl Webb had their fling nine months prior, and gave birth to my mother and aunt on the very spot where they were conceived.
She didn’t rest long before cleaning them up, swaddling them in the cleaner part of the blanket where they were delivered, and taking them to Earl Webb’s house. She crept up to the front porch, tucked Mom and Aunt Margie in an opened suitcase, then knocked on the door and ran for the tree line where she hid to make sure someone answered. When lights came on in the house and the front door opened, she made her way back to the highway to thumb a ride out West. I don’t know if the Webbs could even read the note she left behind, but Mom still has it:
Dear Earl Webb,
You may not remember me, but we met about nine months ago when my father’s car broke down in town and we spent the night. That evening, you and I came together in a union that resulted in the birth of these two precious girls. I am not abandoning them, just asking that you care for them for the time being—I have every intention to provide for them.
Unfortunately, the line of work I’m involved with calls for a lot of traveling, and raising two girls on the road is no life for growing children. I will mail money to contribute to their support every two weeks—please consider the included funds my contribution until I can get on my feet. When I am in a more stable position and able to provide for them, I will return and we can discuss their future.
Sincerely,
June Mangione
P.S. The baby on your right is named Mary Catherine, and the one on the left is Margaret Rose.
I wonder what the Webbs thought, receiving such a package on Christmas Eve; my mom and Aunt Margie sitting there like little gifts. For all I know, they may have thought they were good eatin’. Grandma also left a fistful of cash—probably more than the Webbs had ever seen in one place at any given time. But most of all I wonder what Earl’s face must have looked like seeing something he gave to Grandma come full circle and return to him late one Christmas Eve.
Grandma stuck up to her end of the bargain, sending bi-weekly support payments when she landed a gig as a magician’s assistant in California. She later broke off and did her own act, touring nightclubs and learning ventriloquism on the side. Six years later, she was back on the East Coast, doing shows in Atlantic City, where she had her own place. She was finally ready to return to West Virginia, to discuss Mom and Aunt Margie’s future with the Webbs.
It had to be very confusing for a six year old; the mother you never knew coming out of nowhere, to see if you wanted to go live with her in the big city. The Webbs could hardly afford to feed one child, let alone the pair, but Aunt Margie wanted to stay in the hills. Mom, however—even at such a young age—had decided she was destined for far better than a life in Appalachia, and was ready to leave. She took Grandma’s last name and went off to live far from the hills.
When you think about it, Mom’s life was actually pretty neat: born behind a bus stop in the hills, raised by hillbillies in the impressionable years, and later, a strong-willed, female magician. Still, her childhood had to skew things somewhat; my mother was far from normal, and when you factored Dad into the equation, things became even stranger. But no matter how weird my immediate family could be, I was about to see we were far from backwards…
* * *
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.
Leave a Reply