Musings of a Punk Rock Father

I'll take you to a place where chimes are ringing,
     To a place with a chill where souls are singing,
I'll bring you to a state of nightmares clinging,
     Where your innocence dies with lies I'm bringing.     
I'll take you to a place lying six feet below,
     Where bodies lie cowering soft and slow,
Where the song of the chimes keeps ringing,
     And outside the windows, the demons are singing. 1

^{The nightmare comes to me every night for weeks.}

^{I enter my family's house through the front door, which opens to the living room. I might be returning home from another day in fourth grade. I might be coming in to grab more G.I. Joes for the battle taking place outside.  Either way, I eschew the path to my bedroom I would normally take through the kitchen and dining room.  I am unaware of the hallway that accesses this path; I scan the living room and note the absence of furniture, suggesting desertion.  I turn right.  At the far end of the room a door leads to the basement.  The nightmare waits behind this door.}

Our Maryland home sat on the east side of a winding country road that ran from mostly south-west to mostly north-east.  A former auto body shop decomposed in the lot south of our house.  When I was younger, I never thought anything of the boarded up windows, rusted out sign, or gravel front lot littered with garbage.  In back, a concrete wall surrounded what used to be the area that mechanics stood in to work on the cars suspended above their heads; long, metal planks, onto which the cars were driven, still stretched over this wall.  The wall now enclosed unused, rusted auto parts and assorted garbage.

The auto parts served as toys.  My brother, sister and I, along with a couple of neighborhood kids, used the scrap pieces of wood and metal to "build" our own recreations of the five Voltron spaceships, crafted in the Saturday morning cartoon to resemble lions that attached to each other in the final ten minutes of each episode to form a mammoth robot.  My cockpit − complete with steering levers, laser blasters, and other weapons − became the green lion, which I believe formed one of Voltron's legs.  Although I liked the green lion, I couldn't help but think that my fellow pilots assigned me the role because of my resemblance to my bespectacled cartoon counterpart.

Behind the house stood a barn made of concrete blocks.  I dared not enter alone, for you never knew what lurked inside.  Generally, only pregnant stray cats made their home there, but in the darkness I imagined forces far more insidious.  My fear of the unseen continued down our sloping backyard, until, toward the end, a wire fence separated the grass we kept mowed from the weeds that soared over my head.  Who knew what waited down there, in the tangle of vegetation that stood between this fence and the river that marked the end of our property?  I never crossed more than a few inches past the fence.  Somewhere in the weeds, I knew, stood a dilapidated horse barn.  How many years had passed since horses neighed and galloped back there?  For how many years had these weeds controlled the land?  The ground had been lost now, and my parents never tried to regain control.

The house itself looked and felt strange.  Originally, the house contained only the front room, the kitchen, a bathroom, one bedroom off to the right of the hallway and a small basement with a utility room.  The previous owners, who felt they had attained some mastery of carpentry, added a dining room, master bathroom, and three bedrooms to the back of the house, above a two-car garage.  In order to reach the back bedrooms, you had to pass through the kitchen and dining room on the left, an architectural choice that frustrated my mother once she realized how much traffic three kids created while she cooked dinner.

The basement frightened me, starting with a door leading to the stairs.  the door opened onto a small landing, leaving you staring down a steep, narrow stairway.  Past the coat rack and down the stairs, noises spilled forth.  I imagined the same things numerous kids imagine of their basement.  Although told of the furnace, I knew that the whooshing and humming served to cover up the rattling of chains and grinding gears of hidden torture devices, hidden even from my parents.  I never caught them, but I knew that inhuman inhabitants worked in the dark of the utility room.

The doorway between the basement and the garage proved to be the second most frightening part of the house after the door to the stairs.  Small panes of glass in the upper half of the door caught any bit of light and threw it back at me, causing me to think, momentarily, that some hatchet-wielding madman stood on the other side.  A concrete wall separated the garage − which never actually sheltered any cars − into two sections; the frame of a doorway allowed passage, although no actual door stood between the stalls.  Each stall stored Christmas decorations and unopened Allied moving boxes.  A window in the far stall faced out onto the barn.  Someone once tried to break into our house, evidenced by the broken glass scattered below the window frame.  For some reason, the would-be intruder never made it through the hole he created, and during our stay in the house the attempt remained an isolated incident.

When I picture the house now, I seem to picture it in darkness only.  The inside of the house felt dark, due partially to dark woodwork, and unusual architecture, but also to the unsettled feeling I had.  The exterior was no different; large, reaching trees shaded most of the front and back yards.  In fact, trees shrouded most of the neighborhood.  The covering of leaves from the tree rooted in our front yard created a ceiling that blocked out light and multiplied the dark.  The large-leafed limbs gathered the yard toward itself, a mother gathering her children.  Trees stood in various positions out back.  A monstrous pine emerged from the ground and stretched out next to the deck, dropping needles and pine-cones that would end up in arts and crafts projects.  Near the barn, the wind rustled through maple leaves; the wind-chimes and trees shared in a near-daily symphony.  Toward night, the symphony turned dirge as the chimes mourned the setting of the sun, and the ever darker shade of the trees offered condolence.

¹ Project 86.  "Chimes." Drawing Black Lines. Atlantic Records, 2000.

Next: Part II