Philip Larkin on His Relationships with Women, and Also Certain Disney Films

This poem was composed based on a writing exercise devised by my friend Anna, who suggested everyone in our workshop write a piece based on a Text from Last Night in the voice of a favored writer.

Beyond the doe-eyed fauna that with the princess dance
There lies a land of fragile make that pivots on Romance.
The turn of season, the gust of wind, the rise and fall of sun–
None of this would happen, were not the prince to come.

A talking teapot told me once a tale as old as time,
Backed up by clocks and candlesticks that sang along in rhyme.
I was urged to kiss the girl by a Caribbean crustacean–
I hesitate to call him ‘crab’ for that other connotation.

Some will claim philandering shall be the death of men,
The rest attest that lack of love is what will do us in.
I find myself most sympathetic to the second clique,
And sympathetic to myself I find each Disney flick.

This all explains my text last night, about my recent fling:
When I smeared my cum across her brow, and quoted The Lion King.

The Host Family

At the beginning of 2010 I spent a few months studying abroad in London. I lived in North London in the Hampstead area, with a roommate, in the home of a host family. I’ll call my host parents Clarence and Emma. They were both semiretired doctors in their early 70s; their three daughters had long ago moved out, gotten married, and had their own children. Their (Clarence and Emma’s) home was the sort of sandwiched townhouse you see all over London. Of course, C&E being semiretired doctors and this being Hampstead, within spitting distance of the Heath, it was actually a nice place and, as you might imagine, really, really old.

It was a Victorian building, but had been remodeled several times, with electricity and phone lines and everything. Clarence and Emma bought the house in the 60s, just after it had been refurbished — the right side of it was damaged in the Blitz, and in fact the next three or four houses in the row had been entirely demolished and replaced with ugly, utilitarian flats.

Of course nothing strange happened right off the bat. I arrived at the beginning of January, and the weirdest thing at the time was that London was going through its first snowstorm in 30 years. Being from the rural American Midwest, it was endearing to me to see Londoners struggle with like two inches of snowfall, but that’s beside the point.

I’d never been outside of the country up until then, and never been away from home for more than a few weeks at a time (I’m astonishingly sheltered), so I spent a while adjusting to my new surroundings. Clarence and Emma had been hosting college students from the US for a few decades by then, and I found a bunch of papers a past student (a girl from Arizona, I gathered) had left in one of my desk drawers. One of the papers was a sort of strange checklist of reminders. I ended up taping it to the wall where I could always see it, since it seemed like an odd bit of found poetry. I still have it, actually — here’s what it says:

– notify bank of leave
– passport copies, extra pictures
– Friday!!! arrive at 5:35
– Saturday sightseeing
– Sunday sightseeing
– Monday classes begin
– toilets = restrooms
– plaster = bandaid
– servillette = napkin
– do not tip, considered an insult
– stay with friends when going out
– do not forget things — they will be gone

So yeah I am pretty much a melancholy jackass. But after a while I began to come around, I got used to my classes, to taking the tube in the mornings, I got used to the rhythms of the city. It happened that I had a cousin who was studying in Stratford-upon-Avon, and she’d met a guy there and they were heading over to America soon to get married. I was invited up to Stratford for their sort of pre-wedding reception for all their UK friends, as the sole representative of her side of the family.

About two weeks after arriving in London, the weekend of this reception comes and I head off from Marylebone, have a high time with Stratford, make new friends, be a Shakespeare geek, and so on. It was a cold, rainy day — and remember, it’s snowed in London for the first time in 30 years. Ice all over the damn place is the obvious result. My train out of Stratford was supposed to leave at 9:30, but it ended up delaying until 10:30. Then, while on the train, the rain turned into full-on sleet, and we halted for good at, I believe, Banbury.

The railway people apologized profusely but said we didn’t have a choice for safety reasons. So here I was, stuck at an unfamiliar station in an unfamiliar country in freezing cold rain with about half a dozen drunk metalheads from Birmingham whose train had been stopped going in the other direction. However, the railway actually came through and scheduled cabs to take us to our destinations — but I got paired with the drunk Brummeys, so I ended up going quite a bit in the wrong direction before spending a very long, awkward ride with just me and the driver, all the way back to London. (Not that I don’t appreciate the ride or anything, since it was damn awesome for the railway to do this for me.) The cab dropped me off at Marylebone, since that was my original return destination, and I had to figure out a bus route back to Hampstead.

But remember I just came from a wedding reception, where I had a lot of wine. And also it’s like 2:00 am and I had a really stressful moment where I was stranded in the West Midlands. And also I still hadn’t figured out the damn London bus system.

So I don’t get home until four in the morning, extremely tired and cranky. The house, when I unlock the doors and step in, is completely silent, of course. Now, to give you an idea of the set-up, directly in front of the door and to the left was the stairway leading up to the room my roommate and I shared, which was just off the landing there, along with our bath and loo. The sitting room was another floor up, and Clarence and Emma’s room was above that. On the ground floor, to the right, were doorways to Clarence and Emma’s in-home offices. Meanwhile, in between the stairs and the office doors, heading to the very back of the house, was another doorway: to the kitchen.

The kitchen, of course, was dark and empty.

Wanting very much to go to bed, I kicked off my shoes on the mat by the door and went to the kitchen to drop the sandwiches (now quite smashed and gross) I’d taken from the reception in the fridge. Then I went back and trudged upstairs, intent on going to goddamn bed.

And someone followed me out of the kitchen.

Recall, the stairs are running parallel to the little hall into the kitchen, I could see over the railing out of the corner of my eye, and for one surreal fatigued moment I was absolutely sure that someone had walked out of the kitchen and was looking up at me.

I froze on the landing, soaked and miserable in my heavy black overcoat, trying to get over the sudden adrenaline spike, and looked down at the empty hallway. I chalked it up to being completely exhausted, shrugged it off, and went to bed.

I didn’t think about what had happened over the next few weeks because I managed to successfully rationalize it. When the next thing happened, at the end of February, the events were so distinct and the former incident so distant in my mind that I didn’t really make a connection between them until after the fact.

My roommate talked in his sleep sometimes, you see. Not unusual, and most of the time it was pretty funny. He’s musically inclined, my roommate, and he actually beat-boxed in his sleep at least twice. But near the end of February, after a weekend trip to Edinburgh with some friends, we both got outrageously sick. I got over it before he did, so he ended up spending a few days extra in a medicated haze, sniveling on his bed and popping cough drops. One night he went to bed earlier than I did, and as I was just about nodding off he began to talk in his sleep.

“Where are you going?” he said from the other side of the room.

Imagine an American dude with a head full of mucus speaking. Now imagine that he’s not just talking, but trying to mimic an English accent, and he’s one of those Americans who literally just cannot do an English accent to save his life, but he’s trying anyway and it’s terrible. That’s how my roommate was speaking.

“Where are you going?” he said. “Wait, wait, no. Please, don’t.”

My reaction goes something like surprised to amused to annoyed, since I’m hoping he’ll shut up soon so I can sleep.

“Don’t go,” my roommate says, practically pleading now. “No, please don’t leave.” Then, suddenly, without warning he sits up in bed and turns to me: “It’s really bright,” he says, in his normal if congested voice. “Don’t you think, Michael,” he asks, “it’s really bright?”

It’s almost like midnight so of course it’s not bright, but I go ahead and agree with him since it’s just sleeptalk. “You should close the curtains,” he says to me.

The window in the room is closer to him, so I don’t know why I should be the one to do anything about it, but again, I agree. “Are you closing the curtains?” he asks.

Yes, I tell him, I’m doing it right now. (There were, by the way, no curtains in the room, only blinds.) “Good,” my roommate says, satisfied. “That’s good. Now we can sleep. They won’t find us now.” He giggled as he lay down, as if this were somehow amusing in and of itself.

We went to sleep. Again, I didn’t connect any of this with the overall arc of events until much later. I’ll explain in the end, and even then I might be wrong. This might have just been crazy flu sleep talk.

Anyway, time passed, I had classes, adventures in a new contry and so on. The housing situation was pretty good, and I didn’t have much to complain about. There was one thing that sometimes got on my nerves, though: I’m a light sleeper naturally, and sometimes my host-mom Emma would stay up late watching TV in the sitting room just one floor up.

Normally this wasn’t a problem, but sometimes the sound would get kind of inexplicably intense and it would sound like the TV was right outside of our room, just outside the door. I’d roll over in bed and wake up for a second because like late-night reruns of The Simpsons were suddenly audible, and on at least one occasion I heard Irish folk music, clear as day. More than once, however, I heard the sound of children. You know how kids sound when they’re trying not to be heard — whispering to each other, laughing, walking very low to the ground, almost crawling. I could hear them, almost as if they were right out there on the landing.

This happened often enough that I wondered what sort of crazy late night TV show in the UK would always sound like children playing, but unless there’s something I missed while there, I don’t actually think such a program exists.

I started an internship at a certain arts organization in Covent Garden at the beginning of March. My classload was halved so I had time to work three days out of five, and I had to dress business casual and carry around paperwork, and I was part of the morning commute into work and the evening commute back home, and it was all quite exhilarating and professional. I was miserable, of course, because it was work and work sucks, but really I had a very chill environment. A lot of the time I was just transcribing poems for digital archival, and sometimes if I finished a bit early my supervisor would tell me to head on home.

One day I got out early, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. “So you’re finally home?” Emma called from the kitchen.

Normally she just said hello, so I was understandably a bit confused. “Hello,” I called back. “Did you need me for something?”

Emma didn’t say anything in response.

I walked to the kitchen and found it empty. I checked the offices — also empty. The sitting room, the upper floors, all empty. My roommate wasn’t in, since I was off early. I was alone in the house, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that the voice I had heard — though undoubtedly a woman’s — hadn’t sounded like Emma at all.

Thinking about this, I remembered the incident upon my return from Stratford when something had seemed to follow me out of the kitchen. I began to wonder if the events were somehow related. I’ve maintained, time and time again, that I am not a superstitious man, but when things happen, or seem to happen in certain ways, I am inclined to entertain possibilities. I decided, at the risk of sounding like a doofus, to ask my roommate if he’d noticed anything strange.

I did this by asking him what he thought about the kitchen, which he interpreted as me asking what I thought about the facilities Clarence and Emma provided us. I clarified: no, I mean, what did he think about the kitchen in a more abstract way, like, was he comfortable there?

Well actually, my roommate admitted with some hesitation, he was kind of weirded out by the closet.

Honestly, I had never paid attention to the closet in the kitchen before. It was just beyond the stove, a little alcove beneath the stairs, all Harry Potter-style. What was it about the closet, I asked him.

He asked me if I was serious and said he couldn’t believe that Clarence hadn’t shown me.

Shown me what?

So my roommate showed me.

And now I’ll show you.

This is the closet in the kitchen. The doorway to the left leads to the little entry hallway, the stairs up to our room, and so on.

Graffiti inside the closet, written perhaps in charcoal. The date to the upper right says “30 Aug 40.” The poem, though cramped, runs thus:

Here we sit in comparative comfort
Waiting for Jerry to do his worst
We pray each night for our lads over Frankfurt
And hope our bombs do damage wherever they burst

“Heil Hitler — the rotter.”

The Führer has been thoroughly humiliated — he has a black eye, bandages, and “R.A.F.” tattooed on his forehead. Winston Churchill looks smugly on, puffing his cigar.

Obviously this is a neat little bit of history, something Clarence and Emma had discovered after purchasing the house and immediately lacquered over to preserve it. They’d shown it to my roommate one day while I was out.

Notably, the graffiti is dated a little over a week before the London Blitz actually began — so I guess it was made during the drills in the lead-up, which would have happened probably every night and lasted for a while. You’d need to keep yourself entertained if you spent the whole time in a cramped closet underneath the stairs. So maybe you’d bring along a charcoal pencil.

The handwriting on the poem seems to indicate an adult woman — the second bit of writing, over the cartoons, seems to be a different hand, though not as feminine. It might belong to a younger man, perhaps a teenager, a little angry that he couldn’t be the one to give Hitler those bruises.

I don’t think there was an adult man in this closet when these drawings were made — and this makes sense, to a degree, at a time when most able men were enlisting. However, something that I think is particularly notable are the bits that aren’t poems or doodles, the random lines and scribbles in between the drawings. The kinds of things children make.

There are no further doodles in the closet. When the Blitz properly began a week after the poem was written and the danger the Luftwaffe presented was fully understood, the children, both young and teenaged, were probably evacuated for safety, staying in rural abbeys or the country homes of the gentry. The adult woman — their mother, I imagine — went with them.

But later on, I remembered that one whole side of the townhouse had been wrecked by German bombs. I remembered that all the neighboring houses were long gone, and the ugly building of flats next door had, like sediment, settled into the cracks of history.

Clarence did not mention to me that their house was haunted until a few weeks before I left. I’d seen two ghost-centered plays (The Woman in Black, an old standard, and Ghost Stories, a new play that I saw in Hammersmith, but it’s recently got a West End transfer). Clarence, being a bit of a theatre aficionado, wanted to know how I’d like them. At some point during the conversation he said to me “You know, we had our own ghost here when we moved in.”

I certainly had not expected him to say this — he and Emma were, I thought, fervent atheists and were constantly railing about the government paying for the Pope to visit — but I was also further confused by his remark — had a ghost. I asked him what sort of ghost this was.

“A man,” he said. “A man in a black overcoat. He would stand on the stairs, actually, just on the landing outside of your room.” Clarence had seen this man several times, and so had their daughters, when they were young girls. Emma, for her part, had never glimpsed it, but Clarence swore he’d always caught this man just out of the corner of his eye, or just as he walked into the house. A tall, lonesome figure in a black coat, standing on the stairs and, as Clarence described it, seeming incredibly sad.

I asked what had happened with this ghost. Nothing much, Clarence told me. He (the man) had just stood there. Personally Clarence had never had a problem with him, but it bothered the girls terribly — they didn’t like how sad he seemed.

So, again, what happened?

“Well,” Clarence said rather matter-of-factly, “we had him exorcised.”

Again, Clarence had told me time and again he was an atheist, but in retrospect I knew he was also really into that James Lovelock Gaia thing, so maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me so much.

The exorcism had apparently broken down like this: Clarence knew some people who knew some people. A psychic investigator had been hired and confirmed the presence of an entity on the stairs, a man in black whose primary aura seemed to be one of sadness. As Clarence explained it, the man in black felt like he had left something behind. The investigator had then walked up the stairs and began to speak to the thin air. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can leave. It’s not here anymore, whatever you left. There’s nothing here for you now.” There were, apparently, a few minutes of stuff like that.

And I guess, somehow, it worked.

“We never saw him again,” Clarence said.

And I never saw him at all.

I never told anyone expressly about what I thought I had seen, and especially the things I thought I’d heard. The things I sometimes still heard, or thought I heard, when I woke up in the middle of the night; the sensation I always had when, alone in the kitchen, I felt as if someone were standing very, very close to me.

It wasn’t until the end of my stay in London that I started to put things together.

I thought about the man in black, and his loss. The things Clarence told me the investigator had said. There was nothing here anymore.

I thought of all the able men, all the men of age, enlisting to fight the encroaching might of Germany, leaving behind their children and families, not knowing that soon the Axis would be at their very door.

Surely some of the soldiers lived, but returned home to find their houses and their neighborhoods decimated, family members missing. How sad they must have been, how alone.

And I thought of the families left alone, hiding in closets, waiting for the inevitable, passing their time in the dark. England had, after all, been under a blackout to make the cities harder to spot from the air. I remembered what my roommate had said in his sleep, about it being too bright, that we should close the curtains. I had assumed he meant bright outside, but what if he meant the opposite? And I remembered his pitiful pleas for someone to come back — not to leave.

It occurred to me, in time, what I had looked like on that January night, seemingly forever ago, when I’d stumbled into the house at four in the morning, rooted through the kitchen, and started up to my room.

I had stood there on the stairs, and I was sad and scared but I was also glad to be someplace that felt like home. And someone or something, seeing me in my black overcoat I got on sale at Kohl’s three years ago, had mistaken me for someone else, and come out to welcome me back.

Foucault discusses breakfast

From Michel Foucault’s masterwork, Bacon & Eggs:

The ease with which these foods [bacon and eggs] are prepared, combined with their atemporal deliciousness (they are good to eat at any time, really), ensures that they are often prepared in the morning when one is groggy, uncoordinated, and above all, hungry.  This has given rise to the discursively formed notion that they are, always have been, and always will be “breakfast foods”.  But this is of course untenable in the long run; breakfast — or what I have renamed “the breakfast-function” — is only a signifier that floats partially, its signifieds (in this case, bacon and eggs) being constantly and perpetually malleable.  How often do we have pancakes for dinner, or perhaps an omelete for lunch?

The existence of breakfast, and in fact of any other meal, is far from immutable.  We can easily imagine a culture where the discourse of mealtime has been done away with altogether, and we are free to eat all delicious foods, whatever their status, form, caloric content and regardless of whether or not they are really sandwiches or maybe roasts or casseroles, without the need of an arbitrary label based on the time of day we are dining.  When someone decries that he or she is hungry, no longer will we have these tiresome exchanges:

“I am really in the mood for an Egg McMuffin.”

“Dude it’s like three in the afternoon, McDonald’s stops serving breakfast at like 10:30 or 11.”

“But I really want a McMuffin.”

“Then wait until tomorrow.  Right now if you wanna go eat we’ll have to hit up like Subway or something.”

“What about Wendy’s?”

“The only good thing at Wendy’s is the Frosties and you know that and I only eat ice cream after dinner.”

“Fuck it, I’ll microwave some pizza rolls.”

Instead, in this new world, we would need only one sentence to spell out all our possibilities:

“Hey, let’s go to Denny’s.”

 

Excerpt uncovered with the help of noted Foucault scholar Jeremy Miller.

The Slasher in the Rye

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll want to know is where I was born, and what deformities I had, and how my parents didn’t help when the townspeople burned me alive in our house after what I did to those two little girls, and where I got my mask, and all that Jason Vorhees kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.  In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my fans would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything that made my backstory even more complicated and nonsensical than it already is.  They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially the fat ones.  They’re nice and all — fans generally don’t run away when they see me, at least until it’s too late — but they’re also touchy as hell.  Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything.  I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around that summer camp just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and lay low.   I mean that’s all I told J.C. about, and he’s my producer and all.  He’s in Hollywood.  That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every weekend.  He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe.  He just got a Hummer.  One of those retired army jobs that has chains and everything in the back for holding back bombs and junk, but I bet I could break them.  It cost him damn near an arm and a leg.  At least that’s what I would’ve paid.  He’s got a lot of dough, now.  He didn’t use to.  He used to be just a regular writer/director, he used to be small-time.  He made this terrific film, Dark Star, in case you never heard of him.  The best scene in it is with the alien.  It has this alien that looks like a beachball with feet and claws, it’s like a mascot, and the main character chases it around the spaceship and slaps it with a broom.  It killed me, which most things can’t really do, considering the number of sequels. Now he’s out in Hollywood, J.C., being a prostitute.  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies.  Don’t even mention them to me.

Brief Interludes with Invidious Muggles

For the past week or so I’ve been digging steadily deeper into the inimitable David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.  I know, I know, last summer was the so-called Infinite Summer, but I missed out on that because I was recovering from wisdom tooth extraction and therefore reading something much lighter on the brain.

However, despite all this, I can’t help but feel that IJ is a bit overrated.  And by a bit, I mean a lot.  Seriously.  It’s far from DFW’s masterpiece — that spot, I would wager, is reserved for his never-for-legal-reasons-officially-published piece of Harry Potter ‘slash’ fanfiction, “Brief Interludes with Invidious Muggles (Draco/Harry, mm, teen, rom, dub!con)”.  For those of you unaware, slash fiction refers to fanfiction written for the purposes of tossing male characters who are either enemies or serious bromantic partners into sexual relationships.  Yes, it sounds low-brow, it sounds tacky, it sounds terrible, I admit!  But in the meager 100,000 words and 85 footnotes of BIw/IM, DFW manages to say everything he had to say in Infinite Jest and more, in addition to shedding new light on the intricacies of one of the greatest fantasy series of all time.  To prove it to you, reader, I provide here an excerpt of a single sentence from this magnum opus.  Enjoy.

Desperately Draco pulls Harry to him, and their boyish lips and surprisingly rough tongues — like a group of old friends, like army buddies who haven’t seen each other in a while, presuming these old army buddies are covered in papillae and maybe suffer from a condition that causes them to sweat constantly, thus explaining the saliva, and maybe like maybe one of them wears spearmint aftershave or something — these theoretical guys, they embrace in the same way Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter’s mouths lock into a passionate and, once the gestalt of the whole thing sets in for the kids, emotional oral bear-hug, Harry’s gold-flecked green eyes widening in surprise, his pale hands, Harry P.’s pale hands, scrabbling for purchase outside the vicinity of his (Draco’s) shimmering silk Slytherin robes, which are honestly and awkwardly the closest things within reach at the moment, and if you think old D.M.’s not realized there’s nothing but his lonesome self within reach for H.P. to grasp then you certainly are not an astute judge of character, no sir.

What a day

So shortly after I posted that last entry about Uzumaki, there was a tornado.  (This is intensely ironic if you’ve read the manga.)  Anyway, don’t worry, I’m okay!

But I also just got word that the first short story I’ve sold to the fine folks at Dark Recesses has gone live!  Yes, I sold a story, that was the big news I mentioned a few weeks back.  It is called “Empty Houses” and you can read it here.  It is a story about a robot, and some other things.

Anyone who’s wandered this way from Dark Recesses — hello!  Uh.  If this were me welcoming you into my house, at this point I’d offer tea or lemonade or something, but as it is I’ll just say feel free to poke around and see what sort of inane stuff I ramble about.  If this were me welcoming you into my house, this would be like you going into all the rooms and digging through my stuff — that would be bad, but since this is the internet it’s the way we have to do things.  Read some of my essays I’ve written or follow me on Twitter or something.  Okay?  Cool.

The Army Man

During my senior year of high school I got a job working at a large department store that I will not name (but if you think for even half a second about ‘large American discount department stores’ you can probably guess what it was).  I ended up working in the deli.  You know how things go when you first get plopped down into a group of people who’ve known each other for a long time: it’s pretty uncomfortable because they have lots of in-jokes or catchphrases that you have no hope in hell of understanding.  That’s what I thought the Army Man was, an in-joke.

You see, whenever there was some sort of accident — like, say, a woman working in bakery knocking over a stack of boxes, or one of my coworkers in deli dropping an entire eight-piece chicken on the floor — it was customary to jokingly grumble “The Army Man did it” and then restack the boxes or throw away the chicken.  I never bothered asking for an explanation since the only thing that makes you feel like more of a loser than not getting an in-joke is asking what an in-joke is all about.

After a while, though, I began to understand a little of what the crack meant.  Sometimes whenever anyone blamed something on the Army Man, they would put their arms out in front of them and do a sort of pantomime of an on-your-belly-under-barbed-wire boot camp crawl.  I took this to mean that that there was an imaginary solider crawling around on the floor of the store, causing all sorts of elfish mishaps, and some past joke to this effect had spawned whatever meme my coworkers were perpetuating.

But I’d been working for a few months when I finally decided to ask what the Army Man was all about.  I was in the break room when one of my coworkers, let’s call her Betty, happened to go on lunch.  She was about my mom’s age and took a motherly interest in my current affairs, so she asked me about how my grades were and if I’d been accepted to any colleges, what my plans were, and all that crap.  I humored her while she ate and then, about five minutes before my break ended, asked her about the Army Man.

Betty froze up completely, holding her lips really tight, and just shook her head.  She refused to say anything about the subject, not even trying to be subtle about it, but Betty was always one for melodrama.  I mean, Betty had made the joke along with everyone else; I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t talk about it now, unless she was being intentionally childish.  I dropped the subject and went back to work.

A few days later I was in the break room again when Ruth, one of the women working in bakery, happened by.  This time she brought up the subject with me, asking if I’d spoken to Betty about the Army Man.  I figured it wouldn’t make any sense to say otherwise so I admitted I had, and that Betty refused to say anything about it.

Ruth just nodded said, “Well, you know how Betty is.”  When I said that I didn’t Ruth held her hands in front of her and began to flap her lips in a silent imitation of prayer.  Betty was an ardent Pentecostal, I knew, and instead of swearing had a habit of yelling out “Help me, Jesus!” whenever she got hot grease on her hand, but why this meant she didn’t talk about the Army Man, I had no clue.

So Ruth explained:

Sometime the year before one of the unloaders working third shift had been moving pallets into the large freezer where we kept all frozen goods; it was common practice to keep the freezer door open for most of the night while the unloaders took stuff from the truck and moved it in.  This particular unloader had surprised his coworkers when they found him outside the freezer with the door slammed shut.  When they tried to open it he begged them not to and, when they ignored him, he tried to fight them.

At first they thought it was a joke, but soon it became obvious that this guy was desperate for them not to open the freezer door.  He refused to tell them exactly what had happened; from the way he talked it sounded like he’d seen an animal sneak into the freezer, though why this would freak him out they couldn’t guess.  They got the managers on duty that night, explained the situation, and against the unloader’s protests, ventured into the freezer.

There was nothing in there but boxes, though a few of them had been pulled down from their shelves and smashed, ruining quite a bit of merchandise.  The unloader was fired, since it was assumed he’d done something wrong and was trying to shift the blame onto someone else.  But before he left for good he worked a few more days, Ruth told me, and it was during this time he mentioned to some coworkers exactly what he had seen: a shape like a man on his stomach, naked and pale, just disappearing between the plastic flaps that hung down over the freezer door.

Of course the unloader could have mistaken a reflection in those same plastic sheets for whatever it was he claimed to have seen, so he was generally laughed at even after he was fired.  It became harder to joke when other people began to see and hear it, though.

It was just snatches of conversation you might pick up, Ruth told me.  The women working the returns desk, for instance, would mention that they thought they heard someone moving on the other side of their counter, but since they couldn’t see anything it must have been something on the floor — though they didn’t bother looking, because of course it was nothing.  Cashiers had similar stories of hearing something move through their checkout lane when there were no customers, something too low to the ground to be glimpsed over the edge of a counter.  Coupled with the description the unloader had given, this was when people began to think of the thing as a person trying to be covert, pulling himself around on his stomach by use of his forearms.  This was why they started calling it the Army Man.

Betty saw it — really saw it — in the deli.  We had a hot case, a metal and plexiglass display where we put warm food such as chicken and what-have-you under heatlamps; the top half of the case was filled with pans of food, french fries and so forth, while the bottom half was filled with boxed eight pieces and rotisseries that the customers could grab.  One night while closing, Betty bent down to clean the glass windows on this section of the hot case.  She screamed her all-purpose curse — “Help me, Jesus!” — before promptly tumbling back on her ass and twisting her ankle.

At first the people working with her thought she’d just slipped, since the deli floor was covered in grease pretty much all the time.  Betty was having trouble standing up again so they called in management, who quickly arranged a way to transport Betty to the hospital.  While they waited, Betty explained to them what she saw: on the other side of the glass, out on the floor of the store, was a thing looking back at her.  That was what she called it, Ruth told me, not a man but a thing.  Betty was out of commission while her leg healed up — it wasn’t broken, but twisted badly.

A few weeks later, a guy working in electronics insisted he’d seen someone crawling around on the merchandise shelves at the back of the department.  Thinking it was a customer’s kid, he ran over to straighten them out, just as a few plasma TVs were knocked over and shattered.  When he told management his story they of course didn’t believe him; there was barely enough room on the shelves for the TVs themselves, let alone a person, child or not, to climb around.  The employee was fired.

Four months or so before I started working, one of the mechanics in automotive refused to let a customer take their car back.  The customer was naturally pissed and called the department manager, a man named Rick.  As the mechanic later told anyone who would listen, he’d been working on the customer’s car when he had to take a leak.  Upon returning he saw something like fingers poking out from the vehicle’s undercarriage, curled around the bumper.  They withdrew before he could do anything about it.

He searched the car and found nothing, but when the customer came back he still had his doubts about letting the automobile leave the garage.  He explained the situation privately to Rick, who volunteered to test drive the car first and explained it away to the customer as some new quality control policy.

Rick drove fifteen feet into the parking lot before one of the front wheels of the car let out a groan and fell off completely.  Needless to say Rick was very much embarrassed and there was a tangle of the usual insurance issues, with the customer blaming the store for tampering with his car.  Somehow this was all settled out of court.

Rick killed himself two months after the car incident, though no one could say why.  He hadn’t seemed particularly depressed and he’d been working as hard as ever, but one night he went home and (from what Ruth heard) overdosed on sleeping pills.  Ruth had her own ideas, of course, and she was only too eager to tell me: the Army Man had gotten into the car with the intention of leaving the store, but Rick foiled its plans and so, instead of following the customer home, had chosen to follow him home instead.  This naturally raised more questions than it answered: what the hell was the Army Man, then, and how had it gotten to the store to begin with?  Ruth just shook her head and said something like, “Don’t ask me.  I just bake French bread.”  And that was that.

I quit the deli a few months later to head off to college.  In the intervening time I had begun to wonder why people continued to joke about the Army Man, if it ever existed in the first place and if it was half as serious as Ruth made it out to be.  Was it just some way of relieving stress, trying to make it seem less important than it really was, or were they fucking with me?  It occurred to me that if Ruth was right, if this Army Man could somehow pass between people and places, then there was a chance, however small, that it might come back to the store, or worse, that Rick had brought it back before he killed himself — and if either of those had happened, it could leave again with someone else.

Perhaps it was done out of fear, as a superstition.  I’d been doing it too, I realized.  It was just part of the atmosphere of the deli, part of working with people for an extended period of time: you adopt their references, their in-jokes.

I work in the campus library currently.  Whenever I’m not paying attention while stacking books on a cart, a practice that inevitably leads to a bunch of them falling over, or when the network goes on the fritz and we can’t figure out why, I often find myself muttering, “The Army Man did it.”

I think a few of my coworkers have overheard me, because they’ve started to say it, too.

Heh heh heh, as the Crypt Keeper would say.  Happy Halloween.  This story was originally written for one of the Ghost Story threads on a forum I frequent, and which you may also frequent if you want to waste ten dollars.  What you see here is a version with some redundancies removed, spelling checked, and various other tiny errors corrected.

Cthulolita

Cthulolita, loath of my life, fear of my lexicography. My syllables, my sanity. Kuh-thoo-lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a temerarious trip of five steps down the palate to tap, timidly, on the teeth. Kuh. Thoo. Lo. Lee. Ta.

It was Tulu, plain Tulu, to the Tcho-Tcho people, standing four feet ten in their squalid jungle. It was Q’thulu in Quechua. It was Kutulu in deep Y’ha-nthlei. It was Dread Cthulhu in the archives at Miskatonic. But in my darkest dreams it was always Cthulolita.

Did it have a precursor? It did, indeed it did. In point of fact, there might have been no Cthulolita at all had I not read, one summer, a certain incantation in a certain aged and worm-eaten manuscript. In a princedom on the shores of dim Carcosa, lost Carcosa. Oh when? About as many years before the blasphemous bubbles crawled out from beneath the thumbs of their five-lobed southern lords and loped on the shores in the shape of an ape. You can always count on a madman for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, again I say, I do not know what has become of Clare Quilty, though I think — almost hope — that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. Look at this tangle of tentacles.