Silent Terror Read online

  Being loved in a vacuum was like a reverie; street noise sounded like music. But abrupt movement from within the room, or the clatter of books on the hallway outside would turn it all bad. Pieter, the tall blond boy who sat next to me grades three to six, would go from adoring confidant to monster, the noise level determining the grotesqueness of his features.

  After long frightened moments, I would seize the front of the room, zero in on either the blackboard writing or the teacher’s monologue, and if I thought I could get away with it, interject some sort of comment. This calmed me and elicited full-face looks from the other children, sparking a part of my brain that thrived on producing swift, cruel caricature. Soon pretty Judy Rosen had Claire Curtis’s big buck teeth; booger-eating Bobby Greenfield was feeding snot balls to Roberta Roberts, dropping them over the cashmere sweaters she wore to school every day, regardless of the weather. I would laugh to myself, only occasionally out loud. And I kept wondering how far I could take it — if I could refine the device to the point where even bad noise couldn’t hurt me.

  As for hurt: only other children were then capable of making me feel vulnerable, and even as early as eight or nine that queasy sense of being captive to irrational needs for union was physical — a prescient jolt of the terror and despair that sexual pursuits result in. I fought the need by denial, by sticking to myself and affecting a truculent mien that brooked no nonsense from other kids. In a recent People magazine article, a half-dozen of my old neighborhood contemporaries offered comments on me as a child. “Weird,” “strange” and “withdrawn” were the adjectives used most frequently. Kenny Rudd, who lived across the street from me, and who now designs computer basketball games, came closest to the truth: “The word was: Don’t with Marty, he’s psycho. I don’t know, but I think maybe he was more scared than anything else.”

  Bravo, Kenny, although I’m glad you and your cretinous comrades didn’t know that simple fact when we were children. My strangeness revulsed you and gave you someone to loathe from a safe distance — but had you sensed what it was hiding, you would have exploited my fear and tortured me for it. Instead, you left me alone and eased my discovery of my physical surroundings.

  From 1955 to 1959, I charted my immediate topography, coming away with an extraordinary collection of facts: the red brick apartment house on Beachwood between Clinton and Melrose had a pet burial ground in back; the strip of recently constructed “bachelor hideaways” on Beverly and Norton were built out of rotted lumber, cut-rate stucco mix and “beaverboard”; the apocryphal “fuck pad” was in reality a bungalow court on Raleigh Drive, where a U.S.C. prof took college boys for homosexual liaisons. On trash-collection days, Mr. Eklund up the street switched his gin bottles with the sherry bottles from Mrs. Nulty’s trash two doors down. The reason for the switch eluded me, although I knew they were having an affair. The Bergstroms, Seltenrights and Monroes had a nude pool party at the Seltenright house on Ridgewood in July of ’58, and it sparked an affair between Laura Seltenright and Bill Bergstrom — Laura rolling her eyes to heaven at her first glance of Bill’s outsize bratwurst.

  And the projectionist at the Clinton Theatre sold “pep pills” to members of the Hollywood High swim team; and the “Phantom Homo” who had cruised the neighborhood for young boys for over a decade was one Timothy J. Costigan of Saticoy Street in Van Nuys. The Burgerville stand on Western served ground horse in its chili — I heard the owner talking to the man who delivered it one night when they thought no one was listening. I knew all these things — and for a long time just knowing them was enough.

  Years came and went. My mother and I continued. Her silence went from stunning to mundane; mine from strained to easy as my mental resourcefulness grew. Then, in my last year of junior high, school officials finally noticed that I spoke only when spoken to. This led them to force me to see a child psychiatrist.

  He impressed me as a condescending man with an unnatural attraction to children. His office was filled with a not-too-subtle arrangement of toys — stuffed animals and dolls interspersed with plastic machine guns and soldier sets. I knew immediately that I was smarter than he.

  He pointed to the toys as I sat down on the couch. “I didn’t realize what a big fella you are. Fourteen. Those playthings are for little kids, not big fellas like you.”

  “I’m tall, I’m not big.”

  “Same difference. I’m a short fella. Short fellas got different problems than tall fellas. Don’t you agree?”

  His questioning was easy to follow. If I said “yes,” it would be an admission that I had problems; if I said “no,” he would launch a spiel about everyone having problems, then share a few of his own in a cheap empathy ploy. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said.

  “Fellas who don’t care about their own problems usually don’t care about themselves. That’s a heck of a way to be, don’t you agree?”

  I shrugged, and gave him one of the blank-eyed stares I used to keep other kids at bay, and soon he was fading to a pinpoint as my mind zeroed in on a teddy bear off to my right. Within a split second the bear was aiming a plastic bazooka at the shrink’s head, and I started to giggle.

  “Daydreaming, big fella? Want to tell me what’s so funny?”

  I did a perfect segue from my brain-movie to the doctor, smiling as I accomplished it. I could tell he was disconcerted. My eyes caught g stuffed Bugs Bunny toy, and I said, “What’s up, Doc?”

  “Martin, young people who are very quiet usually have lots of things on their minds. You’ve got a swell mind, and the grades in school to prove it. Don’t you think it’s time to tell me what’s bothering you?”

  Bugs Bunny started waggling his eyebrows and taking playful nips at the headshrinker’s neck. “The price of carrots,” I said.

  “What?” The shrink took off his horn-rims and cleaned the lenses with his necktie.

  “Have you ever seen a rabbit with glasses?”

  “Martin, you’re not following me, you’re not being logical.”

  “Isn’t good eye care logical?”

  “You’re talking in non-sequiturs.”

  “No, I’m not. A non-sequitur is a conclusion that doesn’t follow its known inferences. Good eye care follows eating carrots.”

  “Martin, I—” The doctor was getting flushed and sweaty; Bugs Bunny was hurling carrots at his desk.

  “Don’t call me ‘Martin,’ call me ‘Big Fella.’ It sends me.”

  Straightening his glasses, the doctor said, “Let’s change the subject. Tell me about your parents.”

  “They’re carrot-juice addicts.”

  “I see. And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “That they have good eyes.”

  “I see. Anything else?”

  “Long ears and fluffy tails.”

  “I see. You think you’re a funny man, don’t you?”

  “No, I think you are.”

  “You nasty little shit, I’ll bet you don’t have a friend in the world.”

  The room became four walls of hideous noise, and Bugs Bunny turned on me, forcing an awful kaleidoscope of half-buried memories to flash across ray brain-screen: a tall blond boy telling a group of kids “Farty Marty asked me to watch traffic with him”; Pieter and his sister Katrin rebuffing my attempt to get them to sit next to me in sixth grade.

  The shrink was staring at me, smirking because I had shown myself vulnerable; and Bugs Bunny, his secret pal, was laughing along, spraying me with orange pulp. I looked around for something stainless steel, like my father’s slingshot. Seeing a brushed-steel curtain rod leaning against the back wall, I grabbed it and hacked off the stuffed rabbit’s head. The shrink was looking at me with amazement. “I’ll never talk to you again,” I said. “And no one can make me.”

  4

  The incident at the shrink’s office had no external repercussions — I was passed into high school without further psychiatric/scholastic abuse. The doctor knew an immovable object when he saw one.

  But I felt like a malfunctioning machine; as if there were a stripped gear inside me, one that could roam my body at will, troubleshooting for ways to make me look small under stress. When I played brain-movies in class, substituting faces and bodies, boy to boy, girl to girl and cross-gender, it was like an obstacle course, sex images assailing me without rhyme or reason. The randomness, the indiscriminate power of what I was making myself see was staggering; the need that I sensed behind it felt like an oncoming tidal wave of self-loathing. I know now that I was going insane.

  I was saved by a comic-book villain.

  His name was the “Shroud Shifter,” and he was a recurring bad guy in “Cougarman Comix.” He was a super criminal, a jewel-thief hit man who drove a souped-up amphibious car and snarled a retarded version of Nietzsche in oversize speech balloons. Cougarman, a moralistic wimp who drove a ’59 Cadillac called the “Catmobile,” always managed to throw Shroud Shifter in jail, but he always escaped a couple of issues later.

  I loved him for his car and for a supernatural ability that he possessed — one that I sensed I could realistically emulate. The car was a gleaming angularity — all brushed steel, all mean business. It had headlights that flashed a nuclear death ray that turned people to stone; instead of gas, the engine ran on human blood. The upholstery was made of tawny cat hides — the flesh of arch-enemy Cougarman’s martyred family. It had a steel hangman’s pole sticking out of the trunk. Every time Shroud Shifter claimed a victim, his vampire girl friend, Lucretia, a tall blonde with long fangs, would bite a notch in the wood.

  Ridiculous trash? Admittedly. But the artwork was superb, and Shroud Shifter and Lucretia breathed a stylish, sensual evil. S.S. had a cylindrical bulge that extended almost down to the knee of his left pants leg; Lucretia’s nipples were always erect. They were a high-tech god and goddess twenty years before high tech, and they were mine.

  Shroud Shifter had the ability to disguise himself without changing costume. He got it from drinking radioactive blood and from concentrating on the person he wanted to rob or kill, so that he soaked up so much of that person’s aura that he psychically resembled him and could ape his every move, anticipate his every thought.

  S.S.’s ultimate goal was to achieve invisibility. That goal drove him, pushed him beyond his existing gift of psychic invisibility — being able to fit in anyplace, anywhere, anytime. Being physically invisible would give him a carte blanche ticket to take over the world.

  Of course Shroud Shifter would never achieve that end — it would destroy his potential confrontations with Cougarman, and he was the comic book’s hero. But S.S. was fiction, and I was flesh, blood and brushed-steel reality. I decided to make myself invisible.

  My transits of silence and brain-movies had been a good training ground. I knew my mental resources were superb, and I had cut my human needs down to the bare minimum provided by my cipher mother: room, board and a few dollars a week for incidentals. But the quiet-outsider image I had carried as a shield for so long worked against me — I had no social graces, no sense of other people as anything but objects of derision, and if I was to successfully imitate Shroud Shifter’s psychic invisibility, I would first have to learn to be ingratiating and conversant on the teenage topics that bored me: sports, dating, rock and roll. I would have to learn to talk.

  And that terrified me.

  I spent long hours in class, my brain-movies quashed as my ears trawled for information; in the boy’s locker room I listened to lengthy, and lengthily embellished, conversations on penis size. Once I climbed a tree outside the girls’ gym and listened to the giggles that rose above the hiss of showers. I picked up a lot of information, but was afraid to act.

  So, admittedly out of cowardice, I retreated. I convinced myself that, although Shroud Shifter could get away without disguises, I couldn’t. That limited the problem to the procuring of suitable body armor.

  In 1965 there were three sartorial styles favored by middle-class L.A. teenagers: surfer, greaser and collegiate. The surfers, whether they actually surfed or not, wore white Levi cords, Jack Purcell “Smiley” tennis shoes and Pendelton’s; the greasers, both gang members and pseudo “rebel” types, wore slit-bottomed khakis, Sir Guy shirts and honor farm watch caps. The collegiates favored the button-down/sweater/penny-loafer style that is still “in.” I figured that three outfits in each style would be sufficient protective coloration.

  Then a fresh wave of fear hit me. I had no money for purchasing the clothes. My mother never left any cash lying around and was stingy to an extreme fault, and I was still too afraid to do what my heart most desired: break, enter and steal. Disgusted by my cautiousness, but still determined to put together a wardrobe, I seized on my mother’s three walk-in closets full of girlhood clothes she never wore.

  In retrospect, I know that the scheme I concocted was undertaken out of desperate fear — a delaying tactic to put off my inevitable crash course in social dealings; but at the time it seemed the epitome of good sense. One day I ditched school and took an assortment of sharp kitchen knives into my mother’s bedroom closet. I was hacking a cape out of one of her old tweed overcoats when she came home from work early, caught me and started screaming.

  I put up my hands in a placating gesture, still holding a serrated-edge steak knife. My mother screamed so loud that it seemed that her vocal cords would snap, then she managed to get out the word “animal” and pointed to my midsection. I saw that I had an erection, and dropped the knife; my mother slapped at me with clumsy open hands until the sight of blood trickling from my nose forced her to stop and run downstairs. In the course of ten seconds the woman who bore me went from cipher to arch-enemy. It felt like a homecoming.

  Three days later, she gave me my formal reprimand: six months of silence. I smiled as my sentence was passed; it was a reprieve from my awful fears regarding the invisibility mission, and the opportunity to screen unlimited brain-movies.

  Although my mother only intended for me to remain silent at home, I took her edict literally and took my silence everywhere I went. At school I would not speak, even when spoken to — I wrote out notes when teachers needed answers from me. This created a stir, and much speculation on my motives, the most common interpretation being that somehow I was protesting the war in Vietnam or expressing my solidarity with the Civil Rights movement. Since I was getting excellent grades on exams and written reports, my lack of speech was tolerated, although I was subjected to a battery of psychological tests. I rigged each test to show a completely different personality, flabbergasting school officials, who, after many failed attempts to get my mother to intervene, decided to let me graduate in June.

  So now my classroom brain-movies were accompanied by the outright stares of my classmates, a number of whom thought I was “cool,” “trippy” and “avant-garde.” Breaking through seemingly impenetrable objects was the main theme, and the awed looks I was getting made me feel I could do anything.

  Along with that feeling grew a bitter hatred for my mother. I took to prowling through her belongings, looking for ways to hurt her. One day I got an impulse to check out her medicine cabinet, and I found several prescription bottles of Phenobarbital. A light snapped on in my head, and I tore through the rest of her bedroom and bathroom. Underneath the bed, in a cardboard box, I got the confirmation I was seeking: empty prescription bottles of the sedative, scores of them, the dates on the labels going back to 1951. Inside the bottles were stuffed small pieces of paper covered with a tiny, indecipherable pencil scrawl.

  Since I could not read my zombie-mother’s words, I had to make her speak them out loud. The following day, at school, I passed a note to Eddie Sheflo, a surfer who was rumored to “think Marty’s act was bitchen’.” The note read:

  “Eddie—

  Can you cop me a dollar roll of #4 Bennies?”

  The big blond surfer refused the dollar bill I was holding out and said, “You got it, strong silent type.”

  That afternoon, I substituted Benzedrine for Phenobarbital, and replaced the light bulb over my mother’s medicine cabinet with a dud. Both types of pills were small and white, and I hoped the dim light would add to the confusion.

  I sat downstairs to await the result of my experiment. My mother came home from work at her usual time of 5:40, nodded hello, then ate her usual chicken-salad sandwich and went upstairs. I waited in my father’s favorite left-behind chair, absently perusing a stack of “Cougarman Comix.”

  At 9:10, there was a thumping on the stairs, and then my mother was standing in front of me, sweaty, bug-eyed and trembling in her slip. I said, “Hitting the carrot juice, Mom?” and she grabbed at her heart, hyperventilating. I said, “Funny, it never affects Bugs Bunny this way,” and she started jabbering about sin and this awful boy she slept with on her birthday in 1939, and how she hated my father because he drank and was a quarter Jewish, and how we have to turn the lights off at night or the Communists will know what we’re thinking. I smiled, said, “Take two aspirin with a carrot-juice chaser,” and about-faced out of the house.

  I prowled the neighborhood all night; then, at dawn, returned home. When I flicked on the living-room light, I saw red liquid dripping from a crack in the ceiling. I went upstairs to investigate.

  My mother was lying dead in her bathtub. Her gashed arms were flopped over the sides, and the tub was full to the top with water and blood. A half-dozen empty Phenobarbital bottles were strewn across the floor, floating in inch-deep red water.

  I skipped down the hall and called Emergency, telling them in an appropriately choked-up voice my address and that I had a suicide to report. While I waited for the ambulance, I gulped down big handfuls of my mother’s blood.

  5

  The Rosicrucians got the house, the car and all my mother’s money; I got a custodianship hearing. Since I was within six months of high-school graduation and my eighteenth birthday, a formal foster home was deemed a waste of time, and my twelfth-grade guidance counselor told the juvenile authorities that I was “too inward and disturbed” to be cut loose as an “emancipated minor.” My refusal to attend the funeral or contact my father in Michigan convinced him that I “needed discipline and guidance — preferably a male figure.” So the Juvenile Housing Board sent me to live with Walt Borchard.