funny stories from when i was little
i'm working on a squillion projects at once and it'll be a while before i post new images, so here are funny stories from when i was little.
*when i was still in my crib i remember my closet door slowly opening by itself on a sunny afternoon, and this white-sheeted thing coming out. it moved over to my crib and looked down at me; there were big dark hollows where its eyes would be under the sheet (i guess a stereotypical ghost description), but it looked like it had a big bone jammed through the sides of its head above the eyes, underneath the sheet, kind of like how pebbles from the flintstones had a bone through her hair. it looked down at me for a while, then kind of dissolved into a mist that got sucked into a little hole in the baseboard next to the closet.
heh. so i was absolutely terrified of my closet after that. the door never fit into the frame right, you'd have to really jam it shut or it'd just swing open all the time. and my bedroom was very drafty, so on windy nights, the closet door would shake, then suddenly crash open and a cold breeze would blow out at me. i can't tell you how many nights i leapt from my bed to the entrance of my room in a single bound, pounding down the stairs three at a time in my one-piece winnie the pooh sleepsuit (with a hole in the foot that my big toe would always poke through----that toe was always cold), shrieking that "the bonehead ghost" had come back for me. i think most nights of my childhood were spent with the blankets over my head, trying not to make a sound or move at all, taking the shallowest of breaths. my eyesight started going downhill in 2nd grade, and there were other nights i'd finally fall into an uneasy sleep, only to wake up thinking that my stuffed animal "oobie the owl" was a severed hand and forearm. pretty horrible. (when i watched "the godfather" years later and saw the severed horse head in the guy's bed, i thought "i've been there, buddy".) i'm amazed my sister and parents got any sleep back then with all my random screaming going on.
sadly, these middle-of-the-night "misconceptions" still occur as my vision and mind deteriorate even more. a few times, i've woken up thinking that carrie's sleeping next to me without a head, or even better, that her head has spread out all over the pillow like a giant melted cookie----very reminiscient of the twilight zone adaptation of stephen king's "gramma" short story. once i get my glasses on i realize i'm not even looking at carrie but at a pillow or lump of blanket. i've since learned: DON'T wake carrie up to ask her where her head is.
and yet, during the day, i'd get down on my hands and knees and peek into the little hole on the baseboard, expecting to see a miniature version of the bonehead ghost sitting inside, maybe reading a book with his feet up on a hassock. i was sure if he saw me looking in at him, he'd fly out of the hole and become man-size again-----i REALLY didn't want this to happen, but couldn't resist looking in from time to time with a flashlight. during daylight hours, i'd spend all my time reading ghost stories, watching horror movies, and drawing dracula, frankenstein, king kong, the wolfman, skeletons and cemeteries-----i still have an 8-panel cartoon i drew in first grade of a guy in a kiss t-shirt turning into a werewolf . (in the last panel when he jumps out the window, a skull on his bookshelf says "hello!" in a word balloon.) but at night i'd pay the price for indulging my spooky tooth while the sun was still up.
*you know how the sun goes down earlier and earlier as winter comes? 4th grade seemed like the sun went down every day at 3:30 pm, the whole year was dark and bleak and endless-------not in a cool spooky halloweeny way, either. i remember that the best part of every single day in 4th grade was taking my socks off at night before getting into bed and checking to see if i had any sock lint between my toes. for some reason my mom and dad always called a piece of lint a "fuzzer".
*i used to stare at the patterns on my curtains at night and see weird faces looking at me. one night i couldn't sleep and ended up staring at the faces til morning. then in the sunny living room, i saw little sections of the rug uproot themselves, float around, and go back into the rug in new places. i told my dad about it, and he gave me some ancient blackberry brandy from the cellar to knock me out for a while. it worked. years later, i saw the same brand of blackberry brandy in a liquor store and bought it for a party i was going to that night instead of beer. unfortunately, i drank it like i would a can of beer (the whole thing) and spent the next day in bed throwing up into a trash barrel next to my head. i had tickets to see unwound at the middle east, too, but was too sick to go.
*when i was little, i'd eat rolls of lifesavers as fast as possible to get to THE RED ONE. one time i threw the red one into my mouth in ecstasy, and it lodged in my throat. i started choking and waving my arms around in confusion, so my dad gave the heimlich maneuver and it shot out my mouth.....and went down the drain in the sink. i started crying, not because i'd been choking but because THE RED ONE went down the drain. my dad tried to calm me down, but when he realized why i was upset, he was like "what the hell's the matter with you?" i also have vague memories of him shaking me upside down by the feet in the basement one summer afternoon, and pennies and nickels coming out of my mouth, jingling on the floor. my dad doesn't remember this one. i was pretty stupid. once i ate a bunch of soap, thinking it was candy....and even though it tasted gross, i kept eating, figuring it'd start tasting like candy eventually. this was on the way home from the grocery store, and i remember my mom freaking out when she opened the back door of the car and saw me sitting on the floor with 1/2 a gnawed-on piece of soap. this was back in the good old days, before kid car seats and seat belts. my sister and i used to sit on the floor in the back seat of my mom's enormous 68 chevy impala, with our legs and feet under the front bench seat. there was a hump on the floor between us, and we'd pretend to be batman and robin in the cockpit of the batmobile, and an icescraper/windshield squeegee was our steering wheel. we also liked to peek out the back window on night drives and pretend that all the cars following us were tie-fighters. we'd shoot at them and make laser noises.
*one time my neighbor mrs. hebb got a new wood-burning stove, and she invited me to "feel how warm it is!"----so i clapped both palms on it, stood there for a couple seconds, then started screaming. i had bright red palms for a few days. duh. now that i think about it, i think maybe i had a reputation for being slow on the draw. my grandparents once gave me some wax fruit, and watched with anticipation as i tried to eat them. they didn't let me try too long, but still....
*i was a slow eater and on busy mornings, my mom would get frustrated. so she'd set the timer on the stove, and would tell me that if i hadn't finished my cereal and banana by the time the timer went off, the fridge would pull itself away from the wall and eat me. i imagined the big door opening and the inside being filled with rows of teeth instead of groceries as it lurched across the room, chomping through the kitchen table in its eagerness to get at me. so i would freak out, and begin humming the william tell overture ( or "the lone ranger song", as i called it) as i kicked my feet back and forth under my chair a hundred miles an hour, shovelling food into my mouth. i was so scared of the fridge. and when i took forever to eat at my grandmother's house, she told me the same thing about HER fridge! i remember thinking in bewilderment, "jesus christ! do all fridges eat people? and is this fridge the mother of my fridge?"
*this is actually from a summer between college years, but i remember falling asleep reading a book in my old bedroom at my parents' place. a really horrible animal-in-pain screeching woke me up and i leapt off the bed in some weird ninja-like kip-up, then sprinted down the stairs and outside to see if some poor animal had been hit by a car or something. as i ran toward a black, writhing lump by the side of the road, i realized i'd forgotten to put on my glasses-----and without them, i'm almost totally blind. so, barely thinking, i bent over, all worried, with my face like 6 inches from.... 2 SKUNKS FIGHTING. i remember thinking very, very clearly, "shit."
i turned around and sprinted away back towards the house and as i jumped back inside, a nearly solid wave of horrible stinky skunk spray came through the open kitchen windows. i couldn't believe i had missed getting sprayed point blank in the face by either of them. and once i got my glasses on, i realized that when i did my crazy jump to my feet from the bed, the crotch of my pants had blown apart at the seams.
sidenote: a few years ago, i bought a bunch of really comfortable dickies brand carpenter pants on sale. not only would none of the zippers stay up without the aid of a small rubberband connecting the button and the zipper, but all the crotches of them just basically dissolved over time. goddamn them! they were so comfortable and useful aside from the whole exposing-me thing.
*i'm kind of a dumbass regarding nutrition. there are plenty of days when i wake up and eat some candy and then suddenly, it's 4 in the afternoon and i realize i didn't eat breakfast or lunch. one 4th of july, a bunch of us went to the burlington town reservoir to swim. my friend john lived there, and though swimming wasn't allowed, people had set up a tire swing from a tree on the edge of a big drop. there was a huge 4th of july parade downtown so no one was at the reservoir except 4 middle school kids. my friends all lined up to do the tire swing and it was taking them forever to just DO IT. i jumped in the water, sick of waiting. it felt great, and i decided i was going to swim all the way across the reservoir. now this was during a summer heat wave where i'd basically consumed a couple ring dings and a pepsi in 24 hours, and i'm not a great swimmer, i just like swimming.
so i start swimming across the reservoir. it was probably a 20-minute swim to the other side. near the middle, i suddenly got tunnel vision really fast and things sllllllloooooooowwwwed down. i decided to just chill out for a while. i've never been a great floater, but i can tread water and dog paddle. unfortunately, i wasn't doing either of these, though i thought i was. but everything was really peaceful. eventually, i remember looking way up towards the surface of the water; the sun made it a much brighter green than the deep blue-green water i was currently descending into.
and i have a bad habit of thinking of funny or embarassing things at inappropriate moments, ususally when someone's talking to me about serious stuff. it's gotten me in trouble before. i either start smiling or outright laughing and then have to apologize a million times.
so as i'm dropping like a rock through the water, i realized that the evening edition of the local area papers would say "Haverhill Man Drowns in Burlington Reservoir", and i thought it was wicked funny. technically, once you hit 18, the newspapers call you a man. i think i was 19 and didn't feel like A MAN. i pictured men being, like, clint eastwood or robert deniro. or hairy old guys. i was still pretty skinny and, i guess , boyish. i certainly acted pretty juvenile. my sense of humor was DEFINITELY juvenile, and still is. so i thought "the haverhill gazette's going to say i was A MAN, that's hilarious." and at that point, some total last resort alarm thing went off in my head and i panicked. i managed to swim to the surface and back to land. my whole body was shaking uncontrollably, i was puking and gagging and just a total mess. but i was like a robot, i had to get out of the water. i kept thinking "holy shit, holy shit, ...." over and over and just kept swimming. once i was on my knees in the sand, my friends noticed me.
and when i think about it, i'm amazed i even tried swimming across the whole reservoir. i've been so scared of "jaws" since i saw those movies, that i seriously have had weird freak-outs, even as an adult, STANDING IN THE SHOWER. i'll suddenly get panicky and wipe the shampoo out of eyes and look down, just to make sure the huge shark isn't flying up at me from below with his mouth wide open. even though i'm in a house, in a bathroom, and my feet are touching the tub. i've read about how bull sharks can swim from the ocean into freshwater rivers, they're THAT adaptable. and they look like slightly smaller great whites, and supposedly have the most testosterone of any known animal. anyways, my point is, there totally could have been crazy freshwater bull sharks in that reservoir! what was i thinking? i know if carrie reads this, she'll be all," you worry about the most ridiculous, most implausible things." but if i had a nickel for every time i saw some stunned next-of-kin on tv, stammering "this is a nice town! bad stuff like this just don't HAPPEN here! what's this world coming to?", i could retire. in your face, carrie! when someone gets eaten by the bull sharks in burlington, i'll try hard not to be all "i told you so".
back to work! lots of new pictures coming soon
