Sleep with One Eye Open (A Splice)

Sleep with One Eye Open

I had a small Gaggle of girlfriends in elementary school who stuck throughout much of junior high. Through growing pains, birthday parties, awkward school photos, pimples, perms, cafeteria lunches, crushes, school dances, even the big hair/hammer pants phases. Perhaps we were nerds of epic proportions in our own individual rights, but we were ‘Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants’ cool. The kind of cool like JH who choreographs a dance routine with you to Stacey Q’s ‘Two of Heart’ and then climbs on a stage to perform it while lip-syncing it in front of the whole student body for the talent show. We were all very different, but we stuck together like glue for a short period of time. I mean, because of them, I graduated to that kind of cool. Prior to having friends like them, I was the hermit with the headphones, poking protruding frog bellies in ponds, running through the woods without a care in the world about my hair, about make-up, or boys. And, to be honest, I still don’t think I care about boys. Such as they are.

One Saturday night, many moons ago, the Gaggle got together for a sleepover. Father Mine took me to Chickens (aka Lloyd’s Supermarket) so I could gather treats for my pals and rent a movie from the video store. I arrived at SM’s house with my pillow, a blanket, toothbrush, and pajamas in a big black garbage bag and joined them in her rec-room. I was the last to arrive but was greeted with cheer since I held all the provisions and our evening’s shenanigans. SM’s parents ordered us pizza. We each sat on our makeshift beds with giant pizza wedges flopped on paper plates gabbing about everything and nothing. Those were the things that made sleepovers great. Making your bed on the floor next to your best buds. The camaraderie, the ease. Well, for the most part. I don’t know about them but as a kid with a poop problem, I was also a pre-teen/teen with one too. I prayed to be constipated until my arse got home and met my own toilet seat again.

So yeah, pizza, monkeyshines, girl talk, music, dancing, and then finally it was time to curl up with our movie. When asked what I rented, I knelt up gleefully, produced the clunky black VHS case and said, “Feast your eyes on this! Evil Dead.” Nothing but shrieks and groans from the peanut gallery. CR ceased fishing something stuck in her braces to hide her head under her pillow in protest and let go of a muffled, “Noooooooo!” AS grumbled under her breath that her Mother would kill her if she found out she watched that kind of movie. I had to wait to press play until every one of them emptied their bladders out of fear they’d pee themselves from fright. For a Gaggle of cool gals, they were wusses I thought.

To refresh your memory, ‘Evil Dead’ (now a shagged-out horror trope) was a low-budget wonder of the early 1980s. A group of young people hike to a deep-woods cabin for a weekend getaway where they find an old book, ‘Necronomicon’, whose text reawakens the dead when read aloud. And, guess what, they read it aloud! Inadvertently releasing a flood of evil. If I remember it correctly, the single girl, maybe even the fifth wheel of the group is the one violently pillaged by the insidious trees. When her friends realize she’s three sheets to the evil, they lock her down in the cellar and chain the hatch door. Afterward, horrors abound. And continually, near shits, giggles, and gross-outs permeated the dank rec-room. I traumatized my pals. And, even though I didn’t admit so, I distressed myself. I played like I was unaffected, an Oscar-winning performance no less. Truth be told, it was a near-cauliflower pants incident. To this day, I still have creeped out flashes of the possessed friend railing against the cellar hatch, opening it enough to stab an exposed ankle with a pencil. I didn’t have any use for erasers anytime soon after that sleepover. My stomach pained like the dickens. I was constipated for days after. LP puked so I guess I wasn’t the worst. CR whimpered in her sleep, and SM ended up sleeping in her own bed, safe and sound under the protection of her own covers. It was a little unfair that the rest of us had to toss and turn enduring the stale stench of well-brought up pepperoni pizza and sour cream and onion chips. I was lucky they still loved me the next day. I mean, I think they did. I hope.

Speaking of scary movies, Rock Star Brother brought me to the brink of sheer terror twice in my young life. The first was when he made me watch the 1979 film adaptation of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. I remember it like it was yesterday. Our living-room was pitch black except for the eerie TV glow and the smolder of dying flames in our fireplace. I was wearing a new nightgown, fleecy white with a frilly collar, laced up in the front with bright red silk. Rock Star Brother and Most Beautiful Girlfriend were snuggled up on the chesterfield. I was sitting, quite literally petrified, in the rocking chair that was not rocking unless you counted my extreme trembling after witnessing Marlene Usher’s crazed white hair. I can’t say what it was about her demented appearance exactly that crippled me with fear. I pretended not to be scared in front of the Royal Couple but when I went to bed, I was sure she was slinking down our hallway, the shadow of her wild hair growing bigger and bigger with each tiptoe. I let out a scream in the dark that sent my Mother running in, “Lord Moses, child! What’s the matter!?” I told her Madeline Usher was in the hallway and was coming to get me. She sighed, “You’re going to curdle my blood into a Jesus clot! My kidneys are too close to my eyes for this!” She told me no more scary movies with Rock Star Brother and scolded him for letting me watch in the first place. I could hear him chuckling all the way in in my room.

Of course, Rock Star Brother was a bit of a rebel and didn’t heed our Mother’s warning. It wasn’t long after that he sat me down with a cold glass of chocolate milk, a bowl of popcorn, pulled the TV in the basement inches away from the downstairs chesterfield and fired up the ‘The Exorcist’. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I agreed to his suggestion of snacks and a movie. No idea. There, in the darkness of the bottom level of our house, I watched an innocent girl take on a Demon that made her snarl and spit and growl and levitate and stab herself in the bird with a crucifix. I almost cried when she spewed, “Your mother sucks cocks in helllll …” I looked at Rock Star Brother, wide-eyed and mortified, “What the HECK did she say!? Sucks a what!?” I was aghast, scared stiff, certifiably horror-struck; all Rock Star Brother could do was laugh. Looking back now, it is as plain as the nose on my face, his goal was to scare the living hell out of me. Also, I spilled half of my chocolate milk on my housecoat so there’s that. It didn’t help that he had the volume turned alllll the way up. He had rock ‘n’ roll ears even back then and he was just as much of a spring chicken as I was. It might be one of the greatest horror films of all time but even to this day, after ‘Insidious’ and ‘The Strangers’, the possession of Linda Blair and the subsequent exorcism still chills me deep in my bones. As an adult, I’d see it on the TV grid while channel surfing and consider it a defiant act to dare turn it on for the quick fright I knew would come. No one wished more than me, even now, that I could be just as oblivious of her possession as she was in the end.

The power of Christ compels you …

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Another wee bit for my creative non-fiction project. I really wish I had time each day to sit and write a little bit on it. I guess I do, I just have to make sure I make the time. It's been hard of late, but I should be better, for art's sake. Right? Maybe I'll write tonight before bed instead of reading. Although, reading is helping me sleep now that a small bout of insomnia has set in. 

Until the next installment! 

In propinquity,

Nic