Mitch told me all about his childhood. Mitch was this lunatic house painter I would work for from time to time. His life was full of cigarettes and bad days and things in the shadows.
Always bad days.
Everyday, “good morning Mitch.”
“What’s so good about it,” he’d say, and he was never joking. He’d suck on his cigarette and mutter “the misery” and puff out smoke like he was blowing out all the space for joy inside of him.
He said he was traumatized from being raised by hippies.
He talked about it a lot.
He said it started when they moved into this haunted farmhouse.
He said he heard the ghost in his new house only moments after arriving there.
His family had just finished the haul up from the barren mountains near Visalia, California, to this big, old, dilapidated farmhouse in Bethel, Washington. It had been a torturously long journey of road songs and detours to non existent or closed sights and missed turns and extended “tea breaks” for the parents—three days of driving, serpentine. Mitch had hated every second of it. Dreary days. Gas station nights.
The adults were so anesthetized with weed smoke and idealism, they didn’t realize that they played the ‘California Dreamin’ tape for four hours straight on the third day after they got destructively baked before leaving Crater Lake.
Mitch heard it, even though he tried not to. Because it fucked him over and over again with sadness. Because they were no longer in the promised land—the only home he’d ever known. By then they were nearly in Washington, and under dark rain clouds, and tall ominous trees, and he was, for the first time in his life, wishing he was in California.
What he saw out the window seemed a terrible place to live.
He didn’t want to live on a fucking farm where it was always raining.
He looked out the window at the dismal grey and green which was his future and listened to the song as it played over and over and wept silently.
His world had been reduced to his three younger siblings, his psychotic, delusional hippy mother and stepfather, their recovered heroin-addict friend, Chartreuse, her son, and this great big field to plant whatever they wanted in. There was nothing else around.
Only the field.
Mitch never did know why they’d moved to that strange and ugly place. He’d ask himself again and again so many times over the years—years which would not be good to him—and would look back hard against them, so that time folded in upon itself and Mitch Marmont became a lonely, old toothless man and a misguided father and a disconnected boy all at once, always asking himself the same question forever: where did the horror all begin? The story was that his mom and step dad had just bought the house with their ex junky friend on a whim. But that never made sense to Mitch. You don’t exactly find a deteriorating farmhouse in a shithole town states away, and move your family there on a whim.
Especially not that farmhouse. There was nothing good or right about it. As soon as Mitch saw the place, he knew it was a fucked deal. It looked like something out of a horror cartoon—like the place in Courage the Cowardly Dog but in a forest. It was situated between the surrounding trash maples so that the farmhouse never took direct sun. Which was strange, because it looked about as weathered as any house possibly could, the decayed white paint peeled away from rain rotted siding, the chips littered the bare ground below in a ditch that formed where the gutterless, patchy roof spilled rain away. The windows were all either shuttered or boarded up, the porch sagged dangerously, and as the wind blew the whole frame of the house creaked and moaned. Everything about it looked like the kind of place no kid would ever want to set foot in—except for the sake of sheer valor. And yet, it was now his—their—home. An air of solemnity and mourning fell upon the children in the Vanagan as they first caught sight of the place pulling up the drive.
They didn’t look around when they first went inside—didn’t want to, didn’t need to, were too scared, or in the case of the adults, too stoned—they just started moving stuff out of the van and unpacking it on the rough brown carpet of the living room. It was cold and damp in there, and they all complained. So Mitch’s mother sent him down into the basement to start a fire in the wood-stove furnace. Their new sustainable central heating. The other kids looked terrified just by the prospect of going down there, but Mitch didn’t care. Actually, he couldn’t have been more happy at the beautiful opportunity for a moment of solitude. He went down the crooked hallway with the paper peeling off the walls, bobbing his head and making a slight O with his mouth as he went—like he was whistling without noise, the kind of pretend whistling that makes suspicious things look casual—and snuck down the stairs innocently.
When he got down into the basement, he waited and looked up at the doorway above to make sure he wasn’t being watched or followed. A single, naked lightbulb hung from a bare wire and threw warm light on the aged framing of the staircase above him. The bulb rocked back and forth slightly, creaking rhythmically like a metronome, as though in sync with the motion of the house in the wind—Mitch’s pendulum. Suddenly it stopped and held rigid and straight and the stillness in the staircase became this tangible and almost overwhelming thing. Mitch wasn’t paying attention anymore, he was looking too intently past the light to see if he might be followed.
He didn’t really know why he went about with the sneaky charade. What were they gonna do if they caught him anyway? They were just insane hippies after all. If they were letting his ten year old sister get stoned from time to time, how could anything be off limits?
He shrugged, walked out of sight of the stairs, pulled the packet from his breast pocket carefully, and checked the precious seeds. He grinned. They were still intact. Soon the field would be full of stinking, billowing waves of green-gold Sinsemilla. He could see it in his head already: acres and acres of weed. Hundreds upon hundreds of plants. He couldn’t wait to get them in the ground. He stroked the packet lovingly, placed it with care back into his pocket, and began to start the stove as slowly as he could.
There was a little woodpile beside it, and he threw a few pieces of the old dry maple in—sloooowwwly—taking as much time as possible so as to avoid unpacking whatever skrewy antics his unbalanced mom and step-dad would undoubtedly try to rope him into. He found a piece full of pitch and took his time knocking chunks off it with a hammer on the block beside the stove, put them into a pile of kindling with a little paper under it and lit a match. And as he closed the cast iron and glass plated door, and stared into the orange flames bursting and sputtering on pitch pockets, it almost looked as though there were a face staring back at him in the flickering ash stains on the glass. He shook his head, looked back and it was gone.
He watched it for a while until he was really sure that the fire was going and that there was no face in there, and then he started to walk back up the stairs, but s-l-o-w-l-y, glacially slow, like he had to consider the purpose of each step before taking it. So slow he actually lost himself in thought, his head cocked slightly to the side, staring at his feet, thinking about the insanity of his life, lamenting the inequity of his circumstances. That, of all the times and places and people the world has held and will hold, of the glorious infinitude of possibility, he, Mitch Marmont, had been dealt the cosmic injustice—the almost incarceration—of being stuck with a bunch of deranged hippies. What a joke! He wished desperately he could have only been born to Republicans. To normal people who had normal things. Instead of just beads and crystals and dream-catchers, masons jars and patchouli oils and exotic rugs and fabrics, huge bunches of desert sage “in case they didn’t have any up in Washington,” and….
He stopped abruptly at the top of the stairs, snapped out of it, scratched his head. Had the piano down there just twinkled? Or was he imagining things? He went back down the stairs to look. A little quicker this time. Nobody there. He crossed the dirty concrete floor, beams of cloudlight from the slit windows spotlighting through the dust before him, over to the piano, a dusty old Spinet covered in cobwebs and mouse shit. It didn’t look like it’d been played in centuries, every key covered in dust and grime. He decided to pull down the keylid, just to be safe. But as he did, it caught in its tracks—he had to pull hard. It was making this terrible scraping noise. He winced, pulled harder. It scraped and screeched. But there was more than just a scrape. It was punctuated by a quiet peripheral regularity, a muffled—thud, thud, thud—,the distinctly indistinct sound of unrushed footsteps going up the basement stairs. He crossed the floor again back over to the stairs quick as a bunnyrabbit, looked up them. Nobody there.
“Oh fuck this weird old farm. I hate this place.” Mitch muttered and started doing the math for how long it would take for his seeds to produce, headed back up the stairs.
He heard the sounds starting before he got all the way up. And the dread settled in him like a great boulder in his belly weighing him down, making the last steps feel impossibly heavy. He thought he would like to just lie there on the stairs rather than face the horrors which he knew would be waiting for him. Those sounds. He had to swallow his fear and face the music, and take the impossibly heavy steps. With lifeless eyes, he walked up out of the staircase and into the hallway, down the creaking floorboards to the living room, where his parents and friend (Chartreuse) had stopped packing and begun to form a drum circle. His siblings looked up at him like a group of hostages, a deep and timeworn exhaustion casting strange shadows across their youthful faces. Chartreuse had produced a massive joint from somewhere in her drapey cardigan and was now beginning to hum, her eyes closed, one hand arhythmically slapping the drum between her legs, the other arm, which held the joint, raised above her head, swaying back and forth like a pendulum.
“When the valley went dry…..” she moaned.
His mom and step-dad, Paul, had their drums ready and joined in: bum ba-dum bum bum-bum bum ba-dum bum bum-bum. “WHEN THE VALLEY WENT DRY….” they cried, harmonizing.
“To the fields they roamed!”
“TO THE FIELDS THEY ROAMED.”
“And the love that they shared!”
“AND THE LOVE THAT THEY SHARED.”
“In the plants they sowed!”
“IN THE PLANTS THEY SOWED.”
Chartreuse sprang into chorus: “Oh what a lovely, peaceful dream….”
Mitch was frozen in horror. He was overwhelmed with a sense of disgust. So much so that he did nothing to aid his helpless younger siblings as his parents enthusiastically gestured at them to join into the chorus. Only stood there, his mouth agape, his shoulders slumped. What could he do? These people were clearly delusional.
He turned back down the hall to go find a good place to hide but stopped immediately. He suddenly felt cold, so cold, an oozy, sticky, nauseous feeling crawling up the back of his throat. A sensation of terror clouding over all his thoughts.. He felt weird, and bad, and stuck, like there was something in the hallway that his body was reacting against. He could almost feel a cold breath on the back of his neck. One of the many cats they’d brought with them walked past the drum circle and stopped abruptly to look at Mitch there at the mouth of the hallway. Then, the strangest thing happened. The cat hissed and jumped five feet in the air like in Looney Tunes and ran full-tilt the other direction. Mitch took that as sign enough. Time to go somewhere else. It was a farm full of hippies and ghosts.
He ran out the house without a word or a question from the drum circle, which had fallen to them beating the drums at random and singing “Our House” by Crosby Stills and Nash in unison. Mitch ran out the house after that little calico cat, and pulled his bike off the rack on the back of the van. And just as he was about to ride away a thought occurred to him. Yes, he thought, why not? Why shouldn’t I? He turned back to the van and checked under the passenger seat. And found, just as he had expected to find, a massive bag of pot. The sun fell in a beam below the trees and into his face. He squinted his eyes, and his face fell into shadow, an evil grin hooking across one side of his mouth, and he nodded slowly—very pleased. And then hopped back on his bike and rode down toward the main street, the bag of weed dangling from his hip pocket.
He rode down along the poorly maintained back roads, whistling a tune—he thought it might have been Jim Croce but he didn’t really know and he didn’t care either way. The air was crisp and the trees actually looked kind of pretty and he stood up from his seat and peddled with everything he had. His body felt good even after the long journey in the car. He lowered his head and shoulders, raised his hips up into the air, legs pistoning. He imagined himself riding like that, a rush of desperate speed, his long unwashed blonde hair blowing unhelmeted in the wind, a liberated smile on his face, and his family chasing and shouting behind him with tears and looks of horror on their faces, and the frontier ahead, with dreams and fantasies and french women to find, as he rode off into the sunset never to return. He peddled as hard as he could and tried to make the scene real. He closed his eyes tight and tried to make it real.
He crashed.
He got up off the street and held his bloody elbow and then picked up his bike. And started riding home.
He dreamed and dreamed of running away to somewhere beautiful and regimented, to a place where nobody believed in spirits and mystical things, and instead believed in taxes and retirement plans and the stock market and stuff like that, but he was always too afraid to take his dreams seriously, to leave what he knew. He never believed in anything enough to really see it. It was safer to just stay haunted with the hippies. “The 60’s were too good to me,” is what he’d say.