In an earlier installment of this series I stated that there were around 26 parts to play in The Case of the Giggling Goblin, which I suppose was one of the reasons why it is an ideal play for a grade school class to perform: I forget exactly how many students there were in my 4th grade classroom but I assume it must have been around 24 or so. In other words, everyone had to play a part, my friends included. Maybe I should take a few moments to talk about my friends at that time in greater detail (though sadly, I can no longer remember what parts they played in the production).
My best friend was a boy I'll refer to as J. He was a little shorter than I was, with short black hair and a friendly face, and of Irish-American descent. He was something of a misfit, always getting into trouble and struggling with his grades, and I’m sure that my parents must have seen him as a bad influence, what with my being a good timid Catholic boy and all, but one thing that drew us together was a shared interest in the macabre (we were both talented artists as well). We were obsessed with monsters and horror, though I was always more interested in theoretical horror and abstract gore, whereas J was more interested in the actuality of it (today, one would say that he was an aficionado of Body Horror). He used to collect these Topps Fright Flicks trading cards, and would try to gross me out by showing them to me (as some of the film stills on the front of the cards were quite bloody and graphic). I remember he also used to go to the movies and sneak into showings for films from the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, films that he was obviously too young to be watching. That was one of the big aesthetic differences between us, in that I gravitated more towards the campy Japanese monster movies whereas he was drawn to bloody 80’s slasher films like a night-gaunt to a pharos. I remember that J had a hyperactive imagination, one that was even more vivid than mine; once he found a book on black magic in the school library (Gary Jennings’ Black Magic, White Magic: I briefly mentioned this book in the entry dealing with my grade school's library), and in this book there was a chapter on werewolves, which then became his obsession (another difference between us: as you know by now I tended to favor vampires when it came to the classic archetypal monsters). Once J became so obsessed with the idea that he himself would transform into a werewolf that he became worried that he might accidentally hurt or even kill his friends, so one day he took a red magic marker and drew a crude upside-down pentagram first on the palm of my left hand, then on my right, and he claimed to me that these marks would protect me from him should he ever become a werewolf. When I got home from school that day and showed these markings on my hands to my mother, she freaked out (perhaps she was worried that I had gotten indoctrinated into a Satanist cult) and promptly had me wash them off. I hadn’t known that an upside-down pentagram was a symbol associated with the Devil, and for awhile after that incident I worried that I had opened my body up to Satanic possession.
Another good friend of mine was a boy who I'll refer to as K. He was a tall kid with blue eyes, a freckled face, and long red hair (by high school, he had started tying his hair into a ponytail). He always dressed in black and was super-obsessed with metal bands, even back in his Bernon Heights days. Like J and me K was both a talented artist and pretty morbid, almost borderline fixated on death: he almost always wore black clothes, now that I think back to it. He was something of a juvenile delinquent as well. But he was always nice to me. I remember how we shared an art class in the 9th grade, during our freshman year at Woonsocket High School. This art class was assigned to take part in some kind of Holocaust memorial event, and we were all tasked with creating art to commemorate the Holocaust. One of the girls in the class did a drawing that was a close-up of a young girl’s crying face, and in the reflection of one of her eyes one could see a swastika. Another classmate drew a picture of a Jewish man running a marathon; on each side of the race track were a long line of Nazis with their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute, their hands all touching and thus forming an arch above the Jewish marathon runner (I’m pretty sure that this contribution was the entry that won). Do you want to know what K drew for it? A grisly Bosch-like illustration of Nazi soldiers committing atrocities left and right: executing people by firing squad, loading Jews into vans and then setting the vans on fire, you name it. The centerpiece of the drawing was a tall Nazi soldier holding up a Jewish child by its neck and slicing its throat. That was too much for the art teacher, who told him to change it; so K erased the kid’s lower body so that it looked as if the Nazi were just holding up a severed head.
I never shared any classes with J in high school because, thanks to his poor grades, he had to stay back a grade (I think the same thing eventually happened with K in high school as the 9th grade was the last time we shared classes). I gradually fell out of contact with them as we all drifted away to our own lives. I did bump into J in the early 2000’s, when I was doing a shift at the local Stop & Shop supermarket, where I was working part-time back then. J told me he had converted to Islam after going through a rough patch. He eventually got married, and even had a child at one point. But then he and his wife got divorced and I guess he went through another rough patch as he ended up homeless (I didn’t know all this when I briefly friended him on Facebook in 2012). The last time I saw him was in 2014, when I ran into him hanging outside of the city library. He didn’t mention his troubles with the law but he told me he was homeless and that he was living near the river behind the library. We weren’t friends on Facebook anymore by this point because I had blocked him after I had seen him make a homophobic comment to one of his other friends on there. I wasn’t sure what to say to him, really, and it was all quite awkward. We weren’t kids anymore. The last time I checked out his Facebook page (in 2017) I saw that he had remarried, so hopefully he’s turned his life around.
I also checked out K's Facebook page. Imagine my surprise when I found out that he was married now, with two kids, and working as a dental lab technician. In a way I’m disappointed with him. I was always under the expectation that he’d end up becoming a serial killer or a cannibal as an adult or something. That he’s settled into such a normal bourgeois existence is something of a let-down for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment