Sorry to take so long. October has been a trying month . . . It’s still within Halloween. Come meet Eric and Annie Koss, a yuppie boomer couple struggling to move up and get their lives right - there’s a danger . . . Might want to review previous chapters to catch up.
Chapter Three
Arlington Heights, IL August 1984
“We getting close?” the nine-year-old asked, the oldest of the three children as he knelt on the back seat of the pale blue Malibu station wagon tinged with cigarettes and McDonald’s. The daughter, five, stuck her face between mom and dad’s shoulders, and in an ill-fitting gravel voice, parroted, “We getting close?”
“Close,” Eric Koss said as they cruised the neighborhood and a good move, he thought. Time to take a chance and step over that hill you’ve been climbing forever. Never mind we’re over our heads. It must be so. God wills it. If not, we’d never been approved. A new road and happily ever after . . . and debt . . . Deus volt. God willed it; he would not let them get into trouble. And what does it matter? Who really cares?
You care. Your wife cares. Your mother cares. Your father . . . cared.
Annie – a hand to the dashboard. “You’re driving too close to the curb. Pay attention.”
‘Come to life, boy’ – his mother in his head. Then father – ‘What’s he going to do, grow up and be a priest? Christ almighty, Georgia, hold up in his room pretending to say Mass, make him go out and play.’ ‘I can’t do this by myself. You’re not home. You take him out.’ ‘I wasn’t like this growing up’ He finished a second martini. ‘Watch yourself,’ he said to her, the liquor police, ‘Don’t go too fast. You’re not getting another.’ She dare not question his drinking. He could stop anytime he wanted . . . He could, but just never did . . . Until the illness . . .
Eric squeezed Annie’s knee as they passed under a canopy of oaks and maples on a Depression-era street with pre-World War Two houses – Park School on the left, Our Lady of the Wayside Church on their right; Eric and Annie were married there in 1970. Jake Koss died on their anniversary last year – serendipitous in a macabre sort of manner.
The mortgage made her anxious, but nobody forced her to sign; she could’ve raised doubts at any time. And how many years they dreamed and planned? She must have faith in this life of the ‘80s. How could one not in its ascending tide? The photography business growing, the last assignment a two-week shoot. $30,000 billed. Ten more “shoots” and her head’ll be spinning. He needs to concentrate on the business and stop all this writing crap trying to be Hemmingway. This computer tapping costs money and time he could spend with the kids . . . And his pie-in-the-sky thinking . . . though it attracted her at first, an unconventional spirit, and attracted her now still, she’d not reinforce it – like gas on a flame. He’d no clue. She wouldn’t let him quit as a part-time psych tech at Methodist Medical Center. She worked there too as a recreational therapist. A dangerous pair. Thank god for a sizable trust, which she managed frugally.
Still, with interest rates rising and houses breaking into the six-figure range, time to act became clear. But why Arlington Heights? If spending the money, why not Deerfield? Better humble in Highland Park or Lake Forest than a larger house here. Or Long Grove without the snootiness. No, Eric said, he’d not live his life like a John Hughes movie while the rest of the world’s trying to figure out how to eat – not for their children (how noble). And Annie, in truth, could not disagree; her eight-year-old niece said Lake Forest was better because ‘there’s no fat people there.’
But the street they drove had a Norman Rockwell-feel – lawn mowers, bicycles, Big Wheels, and them no different than other Boomers, lucky enough to get their feet in the door. Truth be told, Arlington Heights was a stretch – one $30,000 assignment and then no more ‘big shoots’ for the next two months. Then the billing. The AR . . . Eric had grown up here – Arlington High School, Class of ’66, college in DeKalb during Vietnam, cramming four years into five before graduating in psychology, an easy major. It was a place to visit his parents once a month, then every two, then Thanksgiving and Christmas, though Eric and Annie were never more than 15 miles away. Not that they didn’t call; during the end of his father’s illness, they came down quite a bit. Maybe that was the reason – a patina of the 50s and 60s. Besides, a big-name photo rep had taken Eric on. Next was to get into American Showcase. Not bad for being self-trained. Good thing he had a propensity for art. Part of the mortgage would be deducted for the studio he’d set up in the basement – a place to practice and experiment.
“I don’t see the truck. You better stop and wait for him,” she said as they drove up Mitchell Avenue.
“Gary knows where it is,” Eric said, his mind racing.
“He might be lost.”
“He’s not lost. He got stopped by the train in town. He knows how to get there.”
He tapped the break. “Home.” 706 S. Mitchell - a quaint Tudor of decorative brick and half-timber framing.
Once in the driveway, Jason, Tyler and Amelia bolted from the car. Eric fiddled with the keys at the stoop and stale air hit them as he opened the arched Tudor-style door.
“Open some windows,” Annie said. “It’s like an oven.”
“It won’t be bad when we get the air conditioners in.”
“Opening the windows will be enough,” she said with a thought of money.”
The children raced, their screams echoing through the empty rooms.
A yellow and dented Ryder truck pulled up, scraping the wheels against a sharp concrete curb (what’s a little more damage?). Gary Rogalski, a friend from the hospital, movie aficionado (keeper of his famous archives) and a bit over fleshed, jumped from the driver’s side. “I really must like you,” he said, his curly hair flattened and beading sweat. “Now, you’re taking my shift next Saturday.”
“Yes,” Eric said.
“And the Saturday after that.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re going to buy me beer.”
“Yes.”
“Lot’s ‘o beer and plenty ‘o it.”
“Yes.”
“Thank yau,” he said in his best Otis P. Driftwood
“Thank yau,” Eric, the same.
Gary snapped open the latch on the truck’s tail gate, the inside packed solid. He balanced of the lip to the hydraulic squeal of the rising ramp. “Hey! Geta you icy cream here – tootsie frootsie.”
Eric’s tongue flattened. There it was – everything Annie had saved since middle school: packs of bound 1950s TV GUIDES, Easter egg grass, doilies – paper Thanksgiving doilies loose and open, every toy . . . every toy, broken or not, the children owned –
“Geta you tootsie frootsie –”
“Give me that lamp.”
“It’a cost you one dollar.”
Annie strode up. “You two finished?”
“We don’t need your help. Just get inside and tell us what room we should put things in.”
“Yes,” Gary quipped, “let’s start the fight and get it over with. This is why I’m not married.”
“You’re not married because---”
“No, wait . . . Because of my looks? Please say it’s because of my looks and not personality. It’s sooo much easier to change your looks than personality.”
“I was going to say both. Give me the lamp.”
“It’a cost you one dollar.”
Chaos the next morning, boxes everywhere with narrow paths trailing from living room to the kitchen to upstairs and Eric’s assignment – a trip to the store for essentials. No doubt there was a box marked ESSENTIALS under a stack somewhere. The way they lived, an unmade bed, everything a place and a place for everything . . . if it ever got there. So off he went, cursing under his breath for kitchen spray, paper towels; toothpaste, toilet paper and drove the streets he knew so well.
On Highland and Kirchoff, pronounced Kirk-Off by the old timers, sat the 1950’s ranch house of his childhood. Ultramodern in its day with straight lines, sharp edges and rectangular horizontal windows like something from Future World. The big house on the little street sorely dated and plopped on its lot like a fat woman in French jeans.
Swizzle sticks, bubbled up from his subconscious, and the sour residue of gin and scotch and cigar. A pinnacle house in their family history, Jake still young then, if forty-five was young in 1959. Him in his dark suits and cap-toed shoes, white shirts with French cuffs. And black cars. Always black cars as a sign of class . . .
Eric turned left onto Central. K-Mart was just down the road and the mausoleum not far. And isn’t this the day, he thought? That this should be the first day in the new house. A year ago, today. He’ll have to call his mother. Was it as hot? He couldn’t recall, the hospital room was cold, that stark white cold of modern medicine.
He bypassed the turn on Busse and drove through the bustle of Rand Road. Central and River was a very Catholic corner with Maryville on the northwest, a Carmelite monastery on the northeast, All Saints Cemetery and Mausoleum on both sides of the south, the way it was thirty years ago, the way it will be thirty years from now . . . He’ll stop, he thought, and just take a moment.
The mausoleum was massive and stark, something out of H. G. Wells, it rose white and boxy from the forty solitary acres yet to be graves. The sounds of traffic dropped off here, the dead would not tolerate it for they were not neatly underground like their neighbors across the street with life and light passing about, but stacked stories high, husbands next to wives next to children next to strangers, above and below and beside. A condominium of the dead with more community than in life.
Get to the store, Annie’s waiting.
He parked.
O’ woeful man that I am that I do not do the things I should do but do the things I should not do.
He braced as one does when entering a nursing home. Instead of soiled linen, it’s that sweet/sour tinge the air pumps struggled to handle.
Light poured through a great and contemporary stain glass window of St Joseph dying in Jesus’ arms. Mary stood by in a melodramatic pose as Jesus rested his hand on the old man’s heart. Just heal him. Eric would’ve done it for Jake as he lay in the crook of his arm, Eric felt his heart beat away. Talitha koum – Rise, little girl. But not this Christ, this Vatican II pop art Jesus. And the look on Joseph’s face – the same as Jake’s.
Where’s Christ? The old Christ of majesty and power? Catholic – as if anyone should care. One and the same, the modern clergy say – Father Bob, Father Bill, Father Ralph. Jesus hasn’t changed, just expanded – “Since Jesus belongs to all humankind, any understanding of him must fight against exclusivism,” says Father John Shea. And so He is: the social justice Jesus, Jesus the radical, Jesus the revolutionary, the brother, the buddy, the carpenter with his calloused hands and buffed abs like a hippie farmer. The smiley Jesus. The Biff Jesus. Jesus the Mensch. Rock’n Roll Frederick Stewart with his John 3:16 sign behind home plate . . . How the atheists laugh---
Where’s Eric’s Christ? The one of his creation, protecting him since youth? Hadn’t every believer?
He took the elevator down to the Terrace amidst a Muszak of angelic voices – Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, and walked the cavernous hallways of tiered marble squares with names in gold lettering and stick-on crosses. A crypt was open, and so narrow and deep, it could suck the air out of you.
Life size statues stood in the hallways, modern and stark. A faceless Jesus beckoned him with unpolished arms. Unencumbered by a rail, Eric gazed into the space where the eyes should have been and clasped the outstretched hand. No life. No love. No magic. Cold stone. Gives nothing and becomes what you want it to be.
He sat in a loveseat at the end of the Gallery of the Psalms, amongst the rows of narrow crypts. High above on the top row near the ceiling – Jacob R. Koss, 1913 to 1983 in stick-on letters.
How did he make it in here, Jacob Koss – an excommunicated divorcee from back in the 1940s. But that’s what ‘Georgia’ wanted – to be right with the Church. To be right with something. All else was wrong. Why be punished in this life only to be punished in the next? A strange breed, Catholicism, to be so set and to be so comforting, confounding the reasonable on their middle ground. Jake no longer cared. Not in Georgia’s way. Catholicism dies hard. A DNA. Never mind the grand theologies that rarely distill in the common heart. Guilt is neurosis. Pre-Vatican II? They’re dying out. And the absolute Church, in its absolute way, reverses what was absolute – so thought many. Catching up with the times and narrowing the gap between parishioners and cognoscenti. Jake and Georgia had found a loophole in Cannon Law. The first marriage was dissolved, the first wife playing along – if that’s what a dying man wants, though thinking it silly. Jake and Georgia were married, and Jake received the Eucharist for the first time in thirty-five years. Georgia received it for the first time ever. Was this grace? Yes, for her. Jake didn’t think so. Not he didn’t crave it. All the philandering while in hotels and upscale bars and Playboy Clubs . . . God gave him cancer. Just what God should do. Jake knew it. How does one bargain when the deed’s done? You look God in the eye, if you’ve the balls, and be thankful for the time you’ve got. Jake was thankful for any crumb dropped from Christ’s table. This day you will be with me in paradise. That it be true.
“I saw Jesus in my room,” he told Eric before his death. “You think I’m crazy, but he stood at the foot of my bed and forgave me.” Jake said it stone-faced on his Demerol drip looking like a living skeleton. God’s love in the nick of time. How convenient. And Georgia at his side drunk, but he loved her, they were what they were – she an alcoholic and he played around. But they were Catholic and seeking redemption – “If thy right hand causes ye to sin, better to cut it off then to be thrown whole into Gehenna.” How many are handless and dickless in the Kingdom of Heaven? Such are the ones in need of love and don’t know how to get it. Or worse, can’t keep it once it comes. Even worse, refusing it. “I saw Jesus in my room.” So, he hoped. So, he knew – this streetwise kid, his young Irish mother dying when he was two and his father with a succession of wives thereafter. So too with Jake, he fell in love with every pretty girl who slept with him. How could he not? Mortal sin.
Did Christ save him?
Eric hoped. God lust, a genetic condition passed down through the Koss men just as their eyes are a blue-gray and their hands become arthritic and bent. Just as others are born the with the opposite view and God the silliest notion no apologetics could change. Even on their death beds to embrace Jesus would be a sin. Better to slap the Hand away and settle for oblivion. After all, there are worst fates and they are good men and good women, upstanding husbands and wives, doting parents, hospitable and generous. It’s the weak, like Jake and Georgia, with their womanizing and drinking, who default to God.
“I’m scared,” Jake said when the paramedics took him, and he was Cheyne-Stoking an hour later. Eric and his sister, Betty, were there. It came as a whisper; Eric’s hand over his father’s heart feeling the life beat away and looking not at his father, but at the ceiling, having heard that souls hover above before they go away.
Gone away, Eric thought, looking up at the crypt. He’s rotting. Is the next life easier?
******************
“Where have you been?” Annie scolded. “What’s in your head? We’ve been waiting and waiting. I should’ve known that you’d pull something like this. And now I’m the bad guy. You could’ve gone over there any time . . . we could’ve have gone over there together, but no, you have to act on whatever comes in your head.”
They unpacked in silence. It has its way, a ditch or an arrow. He apologized. He was thoughtless, but should it ruin the whole day?
Mercifully, she said ‘goodnight’ before going off to bed. He stayed up with a second wind. In the kitchen, he set up his new Kaypro 2. He could hear Annie getting ready upstairs over the burps and trills of the Kaypro’s booting. He slipped in a floppy. THE CONFITEOR FAMILIUS – Chapter One and he read:
The spirit of our family has always been bound in stories, a rich oral tradition handed down from both father and mother, which I find I have passed onto my own children. Whether this ability is a product of the gene pool or has been acculturated into our psyches is yet to be seen, but if I attain a ripe old age and have any influence on my grandchildren, I would wish to be the great raconteur and pass on to them these mysteries apocryphal though some may be.
It is in these stories that we see our place as members all - that reciprocity between individual experience and collectivity that has molded our character and fulfilled behavior prophetic when cast in the discerning light of our family history. We are both fruit and seed of the tree from which we’ve sprung, germinating our world, unwittingly, with the pattern we abhor and strive so hard to break. It is then that the notion of freewill seems wistful and most illusionary. And though we have, in rational moments, in our defiance of determinism, decried such sentiments, we cannot shun its conviction as we journey like Dante into our own underworld . . .
He leaned back, hands behind his head, staring at the computer, waiting for the voice, then attacked the keyboard:
I am descended from three nationalities, but it is the Irish in my blood that seeps up from my innermost bones. So I would believe. In truth, I know nothing of that country other than what I imagine it to be. In this I’m most American, wanting to invent myself into anything other than what I truly am, wanting to ground myself into something mystical and ancient beyond my existential despair.
My paternal grandmother was from that country. She died when my father was two. We know little of her and Grandfather Koss, character that he was, could not often get her name straight, at least not by the age we thought to ask him of her. She alone has escaped the scrutiny of the family eye, an enigma; we cannot conject as to what she must have been like.
There exists but one photograph of her taken over 90 years ago. A pretty woman with auburn hair mounded delicately upon her head and secured by a lace ribbon. Her lithe neck pours down from behind her ear, like cream into her shoulder as she looks at us with a reticent smile, needing not to part her lips as the sweetness is in her eye. She is flawless in her young death like a rose pressed between pages. I fancy I see myself the twinkle in her gaze and delight in her, I have the perfect parent whose image will never decay, who is all I will ever imagine her to be, who will never betray. I have the freedom to invent myself in her unknown line and fantasize I am her sole heir. We must have our Madonna, for it is rare to find a woman to mount that stage, and I dare not sully her with inquiry. After all, she did marry Grandfather.
Father’s childhood is also a mystery. Like his mother, there are scant pictures. I’ve seen a few: one an infant when she was alive, the other is when he was five with a scowl and a grasping stare. How different he might have been if she’d not been taken. As an adult, he had no conscious memory of her and yet as a toddler, two years is a lifetime. The cause of her passing is unknown though fraught with speculation – kidney infection, influenza, food poisoning? A back-alley abortion was rumored.
With her death, and other maternal figures of short duration, father was cast from pillar to post while Grandpa and father’s older twin half-brothers traveled in the prizefighting racket. This most likely caused his instant attachments; he fell in love with every girl for whom he had an eye.
There is a story my father once told me. I can’t explain why, a confession maybe, but it framed his childhood and in turn, his development. When he was eight years old, Grandpa’s third wife, the only mother Jake ever knew, left Grandpa because he was so bad tempered; I’ll not default to the current fashion of ‘abuse’. Let us say, she left for her sanity, which resulted in father being packed up to cousins he didn’t know in Southern Illinois.
He had a dog he loved above all things, a shaggy mutt named Flash (I saw an old picture of Flash standing up on his hind legs with his paws leaning on a wire fence, his tail a wagging blur as he was trying to get over to my father no doubt while Grandpa took the picture). After father was told that he was losing yet another mother, that he had to move away from his father and brothers, he was told that Flash could not come with him; he had to be given away. To whom? Where? The Pound! The Gas! With his young mind in a rage, he went out back with a baseball bat and struck Flash in the head – the strongest, meanest, kindness blow. He beat him to death . . .
Stillness as he read his words. Stillness in which silence is a crash. Eric, palms sweating, thought of Jake cold in that crypt and Jesus forgiving him in the eleventh-hour. Busy, busy Jesus, like Santa on his sleigh . . .
It haunted the old man as he spoke, hearing the words as revelation. “I was angry,” he said, and I thought he might weep; afterwards he could not speak.
I wonder if it is easier to murder what we love than to continually suffer its loss.
My father always loved dogs and I never saw him raise his hand against one. We always had a dog and would suffer their ill-temper, disobedience and inability to be thoroughly housebroken rather than give them up. My father never seemed to be able to pick the right dog since Flash. Or rather, he never knew how to care for one or for anyone else for that matter, but he must have them . . .
On the edge of the chair, Eric hit ‘save’.
******************
The kitchen appeared overly white especially when compared to the dark outside the windows. Was it that it was so bright or the night so black the exterior seemed to vanish? An exhaustion of the eyes heightening their sensitivity? But he didn’t feel tired with his fingers on the Kaypro and a mug of coffee to the right.
The keys he tapped had their own music, a muffled click, click, click, nowhere near as grand as a Corona, more so his father’s mechanical Olympia – a moving voice they had, a rhythm in the keys as you heard the composition birth, the bell and ratchet to advance. It smelled like a living thing with its black and red tape - an odeur of making. It took strength to write then - strength of the wrist, strength of the fingers and a solid grasp of craft; one could not be timid, no ‘save’ and no BACK SPACE, and packs and packs of paper. Writing had physical weight. You could hold it in your hand, and it would not vanish in a power surge or a miscalculation – the work before you, a ghost and, hopefully, it would rematerialize on command---
A wisp of smoke curled in the center of the kitchen and swirled up and around on itself, an ether struggling for visual form. It roiled and stretched, the cloud at first vacuous, when, in the center, a figure formed. How gray and thin with the odor of the mausoleum.
Jake Koss.
Not just Jake Koss, but an old leviathan entrapped in wires, tubes and sharp barbs tightening when he moved. Hard stick, Jake Koss. ‘O the pinch in each stick, the veins rolled, and his tissue-like onionskin bloody, purple, and bruised bespoke of active suffering.
Eric looked at his writing and said without alarm: “Dad.”
Jake with hollow eyes, his face gaunt and his stippled skin like rags on bones, lifted his chin. A hospital gown sagged below his neck while I.V. tubes protruded from his arms.
“Dad,” Eric said, thinking he’d conjured him.
Jake murmured something.
“You’re dead,” Eric said. “I know that . . .”
“I hurt.” Jake’s voice hollow.
“Where are you? In heaven?”
“Hurt so bad.” He touched his blotched arms. “Can’t breathe.”
“Can you see God?”
“Can’t breathe,” Jake said, Cheyne-Stoking for breath. “Help me, son. I’m in pain.”
“Didn’t Jesus take you?” Eric’s voice rose.
Jake shuttered, his chest rising and falling in great slow waves as his mouth gaped open.
Eric’s nostrils flared – the cancer smell. The dying smell. “You’re dead. Sick still, but dead.”
Jake couldn’t hear.
“Where are you?” Eric shouted.
Jake’s eyes, the sclera strained purple and red and his irises pinpoints fighting to remain, became like gauze, the details on the wall behind him appearing through his skin.
“Don’t go.”
******************
“You snored all night,” Annie said sitting up in bed. “And then you stopped and didn’t twitch – like you were dead. I’ve been shaking you. Didn’t you feel it?”
“What are you talking about?” Eric said in a drugged-like state. “I just woke up.”
“Yeah,” she said, “after I was shaking you and saying your name.”
“I dreamt about my father.”
*****************
AP wire - CHICAGO, — The manufacturer of Tylenol today announced a nationwide recall of all Tylenol capsules, Regular and Extra-Strength, and said it was halting production of the capsules since the seven deaths last week in the Chicago area from Tylenol capsules contaminated with cyanide.
In Chicago a Federal, state and local law-enforcement team continued its methodical hunt for a suspect, described as a ''madman'' and ''random killer,'' who the authorities say removed the Tylenol powder and substituted cyanide crystals, killing four women, a girl and two men.
Attorney General Tyrone Fahner of Illinois, heading more than 100 agents, said today that his team has completed over 1000 interviews since the investigation began and that he was encouraged by its progress. “We are on the right track,” he said.
Mr. Fahner said they have virtually ruled out any accident in the manufacturing process.
Meanwhile, hundreds of relatives, friends and strangers moved by the bizarre medical mystery attended a triple funeral today for members of the Adam and Stanley Janus families. Adam Janus, a 27-year-old postal worker in Arlington Heights, died last Wednesday afternoon after taking a contaminated Tylenol capsule. Hours later, while family members gathered to comfort one another, his 25-year-old brother, Stanley, took a poisoned capsule from the same container on the kitchen table. Moments later, Stanley Janus's new bride, Theresa, 19, also took a capsule.
The other three victims were buried last weekend. Tests continued today on Tylenol collected from stores and homes in the Chicago area. Mr. Fahner said that the team had tested 200,000 to 300,000 Tylenol bottles and that so far the only ones found with cyanide were those removed from the Woodfield Mall last Friday.
The Cook County Board voted unanimously Monday to require all over-the-counter drugs and medicines to carry manufacturer's seals. Many such medicines, including Tylenol, the nation's largest selling nonprescription pain reliever, have only a wad of cotton beneath a snap-on cap, making it easy to tamper with the product without detection. The ordinance, which takes effect in 90 days, requires a seal of plastic, paper, metal or cellophane “which restricts air into the product and which, if broken, would be evident to an observer or consumer.”
LOVE Tim Osner's writing!
Fascinated by the mausoleum scene and the descriptions of the different versions of Christ. Hilarious and profound.
After ruminating about all of the different versions of Christ...Eric is greeted by the one that is perhaps the most true:
"A faceless Jesus beckoned him with unpolished arms."
The scene where Eric was typing his story and was VISITED by the ghost of his dead father was riveting.
"Can you see God?"
"Didn't Jesus take you?"
"Where are you?"
That was some HAMLET level spooky ghost writing!
Can't wait to read more!