What exactly is a monster? Is he (or she?) an ogre that drools and slobbers all over his victim? Does he speak in garbled mouthfuls like the Tasmanian Devil on Bugs Bunny cartoons? He is a molester that looks like your Average Joe, not monstrous at all but a horror to those who've experienced his filthy thoughts, advances, and touches? Is he a rabid dog, frothing at the mouth ready to rip your throat apart? Is it a garden spider whose web you've just walked into and now, from a distance, we see you doing that universally common 'spider web on the face-neck-and-head' swipe-dance? Is she an evil teacher who scared the bejesus out of you day after day in grammar school?
Mine was my cousin. A monster. A schizophrenic psychotic monster who lived in our house with our family. A child-monster who was not medicated for his mental disease probably because it was not an option as it is today. He lived with us and his two younger brothers under our roof mostly because our grandparents couldn't handle him and his own mother was incapable at the time.
This occurred eons ago, during the Viet Nam war. This was years before psychiatric medicine made clearer determinations that many schizophrenics begin experiencing their 'break' when they hit adolescence or early teens. He was 12. I was three and a half. Everyone else was in-between those ages.
When he arrived, rather, dropped off with his two brothers at our beach house, I felt uneasy. Not one to shy away from most events, I actually watched him with my head gently turned as if to gaze peripherally, like a full-on frontal view was impossible; side-view must've indicated the truth. I stood near my mom who was equally as surprised at my grandparents unexpected visit to our beach house and the arrival of the three boys -- and their suitcases.
Immediately, they hollered and begged to go down the stairs to the beach where my brothers and sister were busy busting waves or digging tunnel cities in the sand. From the ocean front window, I watched them run down to the water's edge. My chin rested on the sill, finger tips tucked over the edge as if gripping onto the situation: not a movie, but real life. All three ran through the ankle deep waves near my brothers, stopped, hurled their shoes up the beach toward the house, rolled their pant cuffs up, then went deeper. Stomping, splashing; the middle one backed out when the Monster scooped up water in his hand and hurled it towards him.
My mom turned to my Grandparents and inquired of their visit. It was their beach house, after all. Grandpa built it thirty feet back from the sea wall in the 1930s at a time when only flowing strands of long sea grass reached to the ocean. Now this same multi-mile, west-facing stretch was lined with weathered houses and motels, all faded from the salty air and wretched Pacific storms and blinding western sunlight.
Grammy and Grandpa thought it would be good for the boys to get some fresh air. I loved my grandparents and stood near them; they warmed me. Grammy protectively, instinctively put her hands on my shoulders. Over the crashing waves, we all heard a whoop and yell out on the beach. Back to the window we directed our attention stared out and saw the source of the cacophony: in his hands like a rodeo cowboy, the Monster whirled a long lariat strand of kelp towards his middle brother and my second-eldest brother. The Monster held in his hands the golden yellow bulb and with a clean whip of his arm, he snapped the kelp back in a quick S-shape then zinged it at my brother. He made contact and whether it smarted or not my brother retaliated and charged at the monster who leap-frogged over the knee-high waves while howling with laughter and snapping his whip into the water as he attempted to escape.
This was only the beginning. Before Mom could ask them to take him back home, Grammy and Grandpa had already zoomed out of the driveway in their white Ford station wagon leaving a sandy skid mark and the three boys under my Mom's parentage, as if taking care of five children wasn't already enough.
The Monster's perspective was appropriately skewed. The next morning, she awoke to the scraping sound of match sticks on rock. The beach house's fireplace was built of various melon-sized river rocks. The house's interior was a sheen of shellacked knotty pine walls and a more modern addition with walls of unfinished plywood. It was built of wood inside and out, even the garage floor was oil-stained wood plank.
The Monster was busily lighting wooden matches then tossing them into the wood bin, another shellacked cupboard alongside the hearth that contained inches and inches of twigs and sawdust and dried firewood. He would ignite a match, stare at it as its flame burned down the stick's fueled shaft, then drop it into the wood bin and watch it burn, catch a few errant wood bits, and fortunately, die.
Over and over he did this, his eyes wide with irrational excitement showing my Mom how incredible it was that sometimes the sawdust or tinder caught fire and lit other little pieces.
Thanks in part to her working on her Master's degree and a recent psychiatric disorders class, Mom quickly realized he was obsessed with fire and, immediately applying some semblance of educational application, gave him a box of matches and reinforced his pyromania by sending him down the beach. "Go make as many fires as you want on the beach! Come back when you're done.' Hours later, he returned, 11 fires he showed her. 11 bonfires, some large, some small.
His obsessions continued once we arrived at home: with a bus pass, he rode the bus all over the city, taking one, then another, then another. Somehow, he returned home. He picked and picked on his middle brother to the point that the latter began to tug out little clumps of his hair: a half-dollar bald spot formed above his right forehead that made his hair stick up like a frontal cowlick.
He tormented my father, his biological uncle until Dad exploded and chased him like an Olympic hurdler over the front laurel hedge. He ripped off Santa Claus's spirit gummed-beard after berating him and pestering him with machine gun questions. He hammered interrogations at our live-in babysitter about money, her boyfriend, her breasts, and her promiscuity.
At some point, he directed his obsession on me. The worst of the monstrous behavior caustically seeped out and contaminated our home, endangered our lives.
Because I was so young, it was expected that I'd take a nap each day. I was never really fond of naps already, since it seemed that all the best parts of the day -- swing set time, kickball, pill bug searching -- occurred during that hour. No matter, it was expected. And, as a result, the Monster learned of this daily standard.
It happened unexpectedly. Because it was still summer, Mom was home. She happened to our live-in sitter, a heavily mascaraed, black-bouffanted nineteen year old where the Monster was. A shoulder shrug indicated he was not favored nor someone she opted to keep an eye on. Mom began the search, noticing in part that our neighborhood was far too quiet for him to be around. He was a whooper, his questions poured out in repetitious, staccato, slightly-tenored rapid fire. Nothing was subtle. He badgered the Special Needs boy who lived up the street with the same animosity and non-sequitor, breathless questioning as he did my father.
Mom scoured the house from dark basement to back yard to main floor then to the upstairs. It was there that she saw the beginnings of an unusual scene: my bedroom door was closed. My sister's and my bedroom door was never closed. None of us ever closed our bedroom doors.
She turned the loose glass knob, swung the door open wide, and there, sitting on the edge of my baby blue framed bed, she found the Monster leaning over my prone body with a pillow across my face. My legs and feet kicked from underneath my Winnie-the-Pooh blanket. "What are you doing?!" she screamed. "Geoff! What?! Are?! You?! Doing?!" Despite my Mom's horrored yell, he didn't look up, he didn't pause, he maintained his suffocating position.
The Sitter rushed into the room just behind Mom, perhaps because she heard her shriek. The two of them wrestled and peeled the monster and the pillow clutched in his hands off of me and spun him out of the room. The door slammed. He stood in the hallway, pillow in-hand.
Mom scooped me into her arms but I didn't want to be held. I just wanted to be away. She kissed my sweaty, reddened forehead and clutched me as I hyperventilated. She rocked me back and forth, then turned to the Sitter. "Go get him. Put him in the t.v. room and shut the door. Do not let him out. Take the pillow away from him."
Our t.v. room was a bare-bones room adjacent to the kitchen. It was decorated with a wavering bookshelf, brown davenport, a wall-sized print of painted subway scene, a simple, one-drawered maple desk that held our massive black and white television, and a rolling crate that held wood blocks. One door, two windows that were 12 feet above ground.
Mom interrogated him. Reamed him for his actions. Livid. Scared. She yelled at him. He was unemotional. Unattached. Unfazed by her outrage, her explosion. He did not understand. He'd already moved on to the next thought process in his mind -- the birds outside, life beyond our house. 'Do you think they make all that noise when they go to other neighborhoods? How old is Mrs. Pritchard? She looks old. Where's Uncle Wayne?'
He tried again the next day and the next and for weeks to follow. Obviously, he either got caught or outsmarted. He failed to satisfy this homicidal need in his psyche.
During the week, when all of us were playing outside, he tried to grab me and pull me down. I squirmed away numerous times. I learned how and where to run in the woods behind our house if he was following me. When Mom took us to the public pool for swimming, he'd find me in the shallow end and hold my head under water. I learned to pinch his pudgy gut as my only defense. I quickly learned how to swim and if I saw his blurry face or body headed in my directions, I went in the other.
Once, when all of us were with Dad at our family grocery store on a Sunday, the day it was closed, the Monster followed me downstairs to the basement where all of us were playing hide-and-go-seek among the dim-bulbed aisles and aisles of crates and boxes.
He grabbed me and shoved me down the aisle that towered with cases of ice cream cones, Halloween candy, and school supplies and pushed me into the deep freezer. This was a sub-zero freezer an eight inch wooden door sealed it with a palm-sized steel plunger opening. He slammed the door shut and held the lever on the other side: the plunger wouldn't depress from my side. My voice melted into the frost.
Doug, the freezer guy, always kept a pair of gloves inside and I put them on, rubbed my ears, and jumped up and down. I repeatedly hurled my body against the door, leaned my back against the plunger pushing the toes of my blue Keds into a stack of gallon ice cream tubs for resistance. At some point, I gave up and stared at the door, not knowing what to do.
I never thought the worst, whatever that could have been. I only thought that I hated the Monster. That he was incredibly mean.
During nap time, Mom began to scan my room before putting me down. She opened the closet I shared with my sister and, occasionally found the Monster hiding behind skirts and dresses, his dirty PF Flyers squashing my sister's fancy shoes. She found him under my bed, his head resting on top of his hands as if he was taking a nap himself. She found him in the next room, leaning against the wall like a cat burglar ready to pounce. Every ten minutes, she would send someone up to check on me. The Sitter discovered him holding a pair of my socks over my eyes and mouth and nose.
Outside our house one Autumn day, he again tried to grab me. Fortunately, all of us neighborhood kids had been playing whiffle ball that day and, per usual, left our equipment out on the sidewalk and grassy strip. Again, I squirted out of his clutches, spun around and grabbed the yellow plastic bat we'd used earlier then took a home run swing at his head. I clobbered him with full power as best I could, then said, "Yea! I got him!" He was stunned and didn't move. I ran away, bat in hand. For once, he didn't follow.
The Monster and my cousins lived with us for two plus years.
When I was about nine, at my Grandparents 50th Wedding Anniversary party, all of us headed down the block to the our store to pick up more party supplies. The Monster tried again to shove me into the cooler upstairs in an attempt to suffocate or freeze me to death once more. Fortunately, I knew enough about this one -- it was the soda and dairy cooler. On the other - internal - side of the cooler's plunger door that he leaned upon, a thick wall and inner door separated the back stock portion from the shelf or retail portion, the stood a wall of glass doors where customers grabbed their six-packs and sodas. I crawled out over the Pepsi and Coke bottles, pushed the heavy glass door open and found warm air and safety. I left the store through the basement door and jogged back up to Grammy and Grandpa's.
When the Monster died a few years ago from a combination of prescription narcotics, alcohol and asphyxiation from his own spit, I was finally relieved. For years, I've not napped. I've slept on my stomach. I have nightmares. I don't wear turtlenecks. At times, as much of a swimmer I've always been, I've hesitated getting into a pool. I never stepped into the deep freeze at our store even if I was asked to retrieve something for a customer.
A Monster was hidden behind a boy's face, within a 12 year old's mind. He was academically brilliant therefore coveted. Yet he was diabolical and evil. He felt no morality, no shame, no sense of right and wrong. He attempted murder on numerous occasions that I know of and was never held accountable other than admonishment or a sentry on guard.
A Monster lived in our house, under our roof. Worse, a Monster was in my family.
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