Terror in the Dark

I found the goldfish floating on top of the water before school on a cold Wednesday morning. To be fair, a lot of things were floating on top of the water in that filthy bowl, so the little guy’s fate should not have come as a great shock. All the same, I dumped out the smelly liquid, filled the bowl with clean water, put the fish back in and prayed for a miracle. Nothing happened. I sprinkled in some fish food, but the flakes just sat on its carcass like seasoning. If it had happened the day before or the day after, I doubt I would remember it. But it happened on October 31st. It happened on Halloween.

I was twelve years old. My best friend Dave had moved to Georgia several months earlier and left me his goldfish. It was small consolation. I did everything with Dave. We were practically brothers. And this was the 1980’s so there was no FaceTime, Skype or free long distance. Back then, moving away meant being gone for real. To my young psyche it was almost as if Dave had died.

But he had left me this little, living piece of his life and asked that I take care of it.

Yes, this post is about scary things and not just friendship and aquatic pets, but please allow me a few sentences in way of explanation.

Goldfish are hard. They don’t bark or meow if they aren’t feeling well or need some food. And there’s so much to remember. You have to change their water periodically, you have to feed them . . . and I guess that’s it. But to a kid it does feel like a lot. When I found the little beast floating on top of the water, my brain searched for an explanation. On the one hand, I almost never changed the water in the fish bowl, even when it got so filthy that it made my bedroom smell like a latrine. That couldn’t have been healthy. On the other hand, it was Halloween, the Devil’s holiday.

My verdict? Satan. Satan had killed my goldfish.

Looking back on it now it seems comical, but my twelve year-old self was deadly serious. I’m sure we all have stuff like this from our childhood. Events which we assumed had nefarious or even supernatural causes that, in retrospect, had simple explanations. But what about the stuff that isn’t so easily explained? What about the things that seem eerie or diabolical even after a sober and rational inquiry? Do you have any of those?

I do.

In the spirit of the creepy holiday that is almost upon us, let me share some with you. But be warned: these are much scarier than a dead goldfish.

When I was a kid, me and my older brother Jim used to share a bunk bed. He slept on top, I slept on the bottom. One morning he told me something that left us both a little shaken. He said that in the middle of the night, he heard me talking in my sleep, and then heard another voice responding. Yes, he heard a two way conversation with two different voices coming from the lower bunk where, presumably, I was sleeping alone. Or at least he thought that he did. Who knows, it was the middle of the night.

Speaking of the middle of the night, some years ago I began waking every single morning at exactly 3am. There was a clock hanging on the wall in front of my bed, so I would wake up staring at the time. And since that apparently wasn’t strange enough, on occasion something weird would happen moments after my eyes opened. For instance, one time a figurine that had been sitting on a shelf crashed to the floor, as if slapped by an invisible hand.

Horror fans will recognize being awoken in the third hour as a common theme in movies that involve the demonic. I found that troubling. Not because of its theatrical relation to demons (movies are just movies folks) but because I use events from my real life when I write, and this bit had already been done. If my life wanted to pretend it was in a horror movie, couldn’t it at least come up with something original?

Thankfully[?] my life was up to the challenge.

I do all of my writing in the early morning. In fact, the strangest thing about retelling that last story was the idea that I wasn’t already awake and writing at 3am. Not too long ago I was working on a short story called Voices of the Dead (which you can find on the Amazon link below for a paltry 99 cents). It is a supernatural tale about a child who is convinced that someone evil is hiding in their house. So there I am, in the wee hours of the morning, writing that story when I hear my mother in-law, who lived with us at that time, talking to someone in her room downstairs. A few moments later my wife sends me a text from bed. “My mom says there’s someone in her room. She wants you to go check it out.”

I go to my mother-in-law’s room and she is frantic. She says that a large man walked into her room, sat on the bed and just stared at her for several minutes. I assured her that I had been awake for over an hour and that no such person was in the house. “Oh yes there is!” she replied. “I saw him, he scared me! I asked him what he wanted but he didn’t respond. Find out where he went!” So I look the house over, come up empty and then go back to writing my story about someone hiding in a house. My mother in-law would talk about it for weeks afterwards. She swore it was real.

This is all very creepy, but for me it barely moved the needle. You see, I grew up with a sleep disorder that caused me to have vivid, often horrific dreams on a nightly basis. On top of that, I suffered from sleep paralysis, so I would wake up still unable to move while nightmarish visions followed me into reality. That happened to me hundreds if not thousands of times. So by the time I was an adult I was pretty much jaded. Horror movies did nothing for me. Supposedly scary novels were laughable at best. When you’ve spent night after night pinned to your bed in the dark being attacked by waking nightmares, everything else is kind of a letdown.

Terror, however, was not through with me.

Several years ago I had the most terrifying and disturbing experience of my life. So bad, in fact, that I was unable to talk about it in any detail for months. Even now, all this time later, writing about it gives me chills—and almost nothing gives me chills. Here goes.

I used to work third shift. I had to sleep during the day, and since my wife needed access to our bedroom, I would lay down on the top of my kids’ bunk bed. Using blankets and tape I had managed to cover the room’s large window so thoroughly that, even on a sunny day, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face after I turned the light off.

One day as I slept in the perfectly dark room, I had a dream. In it my son was saying bad things about a childhood friend of mine who had recently died. I told him to stop it, that we did not speak ill of the dead, but he kept it up. Suddenly I woke and heard guttural, indecipherable words being growled into my ear. I couldn’t see anything in the pitch black, but my senses told me that someone or something was standing right next to the bunk bed. It wasn’t easy to get off that top bunk, but somehow I made it to the window in an instant and ripped down the blankets, letting the sun shine in.

There was nobody in the room.

It is hard to communicate how much this affected me. I was shaken. For months afterward I could not sleep in the dark. If even a single corner of my room was in shadow, fear would take me. The simple act of closing my eyes in order to go to sleep was a struggle. Time passed and the fear dissipated, but I’ll ever forget that moment.

All that said, I would like to be clear about one thing. I do not believe in ghosts. When my brother heard two voices coming from the lower bunk bed, it was the middle of the night. He might have been dreaming or maybe I pulled off a pretty convincing performance in my sleep. Likewise, my mother-in-law’s encounter with a man in our house also happened at night. And while she was—and probably still is—convinced that it was a ghost, it was more likely a side effect of the strong pain medication she was taking. As for the most terrifying experience of my life, I think that one’s pretty simple. It was probably one of the many, many dreams that followed me into partial wakefulness. It was horrific, but almost certainly a product of my own cruel imagination. And, as it turned out, useless as writing material. I saw a similar thing portrayed in an Asian horror movie a year or so later. I was crushed.

I have no explanation for waking up at 3am night after night, or things falling over on their own, and I‘m happy about that. I love the idea that there are things that we still can’t explain. It makes life more fun and interesting.

And what about the poor goldfish who had been struck down by Satan? He revived the next day. That’s right, the fish rallied after Halloween was over. Does that mean it played chess with the Devil and won, or that it simply needed non-toxic water in order to survive?

I guess we’ll never know.

Happy Halloween Everyone!

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Not Mister Rogers’ Cat

I was no more than eight years old when the incident occurred. It had all the ingredients of a bad dime novel. There was a dead body frozen in mid scream, a complicated crime scene where the only suspect—or the person who should have been the suspect—chose to go to sleep rather than flee. There was motive, opportunity and a history of harassment and wonton destruction of property. All of which was ignored by dishonest authorities bent on protecting their personal interests. Thus the whole sordid affair was buried and forgotten for more than a decade, until I was old enough to see that the facts simply did not add up. I started asking the questions that should have been asked on the day a member of my household was killed. Shockingly, my inquiries and subsequent revelations were met with laughter. Not because they thought my accusations absurd. No, they laughed because they knew them to be true.

First some background. Readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with an orange tabby my family used to own named George. George was near-as-makes-no-difference a perfect cat. I’m not a cat person, far from it, but George was no ordinary cat. He didn’t need a litter box, but did all of his business outside twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five. He never went to the bathroom in the house. Ever. He still had his claws but never hurt children, even when they rubbed his fur the wrong way or pulled his tail. He ran dogs out of the yard, kept our house free of mice and generally gave the cat community a better reputation than it deserved. When he finally died at the age of sixteen it wasn’t due to a vet’s needle or bad kidneys. George died confronting a car coming down my parent’s street that he didn’t particularly like the look of. George died a hairy chested hero. George was THE cat. The best animal we had ever owned.

But George wasn’t our first cat.

Henrietta was a small black cat of indeterminate breed. My parents named her after the talking cat on Mister Rogers, which I thought was funny, seeing as our Henrietta couldn’t talk and Mister Rogers’ Henrietta wasn’t a terrorist.

George would not have approved of Henrietta. They had completely different styles. Whereas George would catch mice and any other rodents stupid enough to come near our house, Henrietta liked to catch bugs and eat them right in front of us, alive, wings flapping, bodies crunching as they went down. It was sickening. She also lacked George’s skill with children. If a child was unfortunate enough to pull Henrietta’s tail, let’s just say they never did it again. But the area where Henrietta really stood apart from George was the manner in which she approached the subject of going to the bathroom.

Henrietta had no interest in taking her business outside. She didn’t have much of an interest in her litter box either. The way Henrietta saw it, the entire house was her litter box.

I had a captain’s bed, which had drawers for clothes on one side that went all the way to the floor. The bottom of the other side of the bed was open. There was enough space beneath the bed for me to store most of my toys. Then I could just push the bed back against the wall and they wouldn’t clutter my room. I have no idea why, but shortly after the captain’s bed entered our house, Henrietta chose the hidden cavity behind it where I kept my toys as her special place to poop and pee.

At the time, slot cars were my favorite thing to play with. They were the size of Hot Wheels and would run on plastic tracks that you snapped together into different shapes. There was an electrified metal strip that ran through the track, and part of the car would make contact with it to provide power to the motor. If you didn’t have a good contact with that strip because it was showered in cat pee every day and corroded beyond all hope, the car wouldn’t run. None of my cars would run on any of my tracks. I tried everything to clean off the metal strips, but to no avail. They all formed an icky green coating that refused to conduct electricity.

In this day of tablets, smart phones and virtual reality video games it is hard to explain how important those tracks were to me. When I went to the store, I stared at the new sets. Back then, they would also sell individual cars, and I stared at them too. I remember once when my dad bought me a slot car set that I had been wanting for some time, I was sure that we would die in a car crash before I got home to play with it because HOW COULD SOMETHING THIS AWESOME BE HAPPENING TO INSIGNIFICANT ME? If I’d only known that the car crash was already waiting for me at home in the form of a little black cat.

Within days the track was corroded beyond use.

Imagine how much fun it was having a friend visit. They would watch in horror as I pulled the slot car tracks out of discolored and deformed cardboard boxes that reeked of cat pee. Then the questions would begin. Mike, why won’t the cars run? Mike, why is the metal strip green? Mike, why are you strangling that cat?

Henrietta didn’t restrict her business to my slot car tracks. My board games, Star Wars toys and remote control cars—everything I kept behind my bed—was ruined. I had lived eight years on this good Earth and had nothing to show for it. The booty garnered over a lifetime of Christmases, birthdays and begging had been destroyed in a matter of weeks. Why didn’t I move my toys elsewhere? Doing that would have been tantamount to surrender. Henrietta would have won. The. Cat. Could. Not. Win.

That brings us back to where we began: the dead body.

One morning I found Henrietta wedged between the top part of my bed (just above the cavity where I kept my toys) and the wall. She was cold and stiff. I ran to my father and reported my grotesque discovery. After he had put Henrietta’s body in a trash bag and got it out of the house, I asked him what had happened.

“Well Mike, she went back there to die.”

“Really? How did she know she was gonna die?”

“Animals just know Mike. Now get ready for school.”

It wasn’t until years later that I started to question the truth of what he had said. First off, even if Henrietta somehow knew she was about to die, how did she manage to wedge her body between the bed and the wall? And even if she managed to do that, why would she have died with her mouth and eyes wide open as if she had met a sudden, violent end?

Before bedtime every night I usually pulled my bed away from the wall, tossed my toys behind it and then pushed it back. Might I have done so just as Henrietta was climbing out from her latest round of biological warfare? Might I have pushed the bed back into her frail, black, furry little slot car track destroying body and accidentally crushed her to death? It would seem so.

But that begs other, more disturbing questions. How did I not realize I had pushed the bed into the cat? There’s a big difference between hitting a solid wall and hitting a soft body. And how could Henrietta have died without uttering a single sound? And then there’s the fact that her paws and head were plainly visible above the bed. I noticed her dead body quick enough in the morning, why didn’t I see it the night before?

Questions, questions.

The one thing that was not mysterious was my father’s lie. He did it to protect me. He thought that my fragile eight year-old mind would not be able to handle the truth: that I had crushed the beloved family cat against the wall with a single, violent shove. Ha. Ha ha. Hahahahahaha. Hahahahahaha, woooo, hehehehehe! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Oh my. Sorry. Every time I tell that story my emotions get the best of me.

C.T. Clown

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Life as an Underwhelming Dwarf

The memory hangs like a picture in my mind. I am standing in the library at my junior high school wearing my green and white band uniform. Why the memory is in the library and why I was dressed for a concert is now lost to me. All I remember is that it was the time when others began to notice my chronic sleepiness. My parents thought it was mononucleosis. I was checked out, declared free of that or any other sickness, and that was that. But my sleepiness did not go away.

As time went on, the onset of the condition was forgotten and with it the idea that there might be anything wrong with me beyond laziness and general disinterest. My parents’ concern shifted from my health to my soul. When I fell asleep in church it was because I didn’t care about God. When I fell asleep in class it was because I didn’t care about school. They told me I needed to wake up and apply myself. They told me I was careless and apathetic. That I was lazy. They told me these things so often that I began to believe them. Before my diagnosis, if pressed for a single word that described me during my high school years, I would have probably chosen sloth. Perhaps that explains why I’ve held onto that memory of me in my band sweater for over three decades. It represents that brief moment in my teen years when my tendency to fall asleep instantly and without notice was an object of concern rather than derision.

I would like to make something clear before continuing. My parents reacted the way any parents would react. I don’t blame them for any of this. And just because some of my behavior could be ascribed to an underlying disorder does not mean that I wasn’t quite capable of laziness and apathy.

Moving on.

When I took an advanced placement English class that consisted entirely of reading novels and composing reports of what I’d read, the results were predictable. Sometimes I stayed awake in class long enough to read the assigned book. Other times I would start the hour trying to read, only to be woken by a student fifty minutes later and then hear the class giggle as I lifted my head off my desk like a drunk. And while the circumstances in AP English no doubt served as a catalyst for my as yet unidentified condition, the bane of daytime sleepiness left its mark on every aspect of my high school experience.

It is always hard to explain this disorder to others, but I will try.

Imagine being awakened in the middle of the night during your deepest sleep. It starts with confusion. Where am I? Why am I being disturbed? Then the sleep melts away and reality hits you like a train. It’s not nighttime and you’re not in bed but at your desk in school being summoned by your Health teacher. After your name is called for a third time all eyes are on you. But there’s a problem. Your cheek lies in a puddle of cold drool and beneath that drool is a sheet of paper. How do you lift your head without everyone seeing the dark circle of saliva on the paper? You’ve never been a popular kid, but now you find yourself in a predicament almost as awkward as the ubiquitous dream where you’re sitting in school without pants.

Life for the sloth gets even harder after graduation, so constructing contingency plans is important. These coping mechanisms do nothing for self-loathing but they are key to staying employed. If you sense that sleep is about to attack, you have to be ready. And you can sense it. Muscles lose their strength. Thoughts become muddled and sluggish. One way to deal with this is a bathroom break. You sit down on the lid of the toilet and lean against the wall. If it passes quickly, you’re fine. If not, grab some coffee and do your best. Deep breaths increase oxygen to the brain and help maintain wakefulness, or so Google says. Never worked for me. Same goes for getting more sleep, eating healthy food and turning up the lights. Pinching flesh until it bruised did the trick for short stretches. But that was my idea, not Google’s.

The struggle to survive at work, however, was nothing compared to the perils of getting there in the first place. Most mornings I would fall asleep hundreds of times during the half hour commute. Cold air didn’t help. Music didn’t help. Moments of terror brought on by narrowly avoided death or disaster would revive me for a minute or two. I once fell asleep in the middle of a left hand turn. If that sounds dangerous and irresponsible that’s because it was. But what was I supposed to do? I had been told many times that there was nothing wrong with me. I was lazy, period. I simply needed to apply myself and try harder. You’re not eating right, Mike! You’re not active enough! Why don’t you just wake up?

Watching kids was a challenge. When I got home from work they would want to play with dad, yet every night, moments after sitting down, I would feel my muscles go weak and sleep would descend like a fog. Here I also developed ways to cope, some better than others. When playing hide-and-seek, I would hide in places where I could fall asleep safely, like a bed or a chair. I also invented something called the Sleeping Game where we would all lie down and “pretend” to sleep. The first person to reveal that they weren’t actually asleep (i.e. talking or moving) would lose. I never lost.

My life disappeared into a dreamy haze. I would sleep during breaks at work. I would sleep at home. I would sleep while spending time with my wife and kids. I slept through games, movies, and conversations. At the time we had three children, two within a year and a half of each other. Caring for them was a twenty-four hour a day job that my wife was forced to do alone. At her wit’s end, she begged me to get help. I thought she was out of her mind. Get help for what? It was a question of virtue, not science. As anyone could see, I was lazy. I tried not to be, but trying never worked.

I finally relented and saw my doctor, who then sent me to a sleep lab for testing. I had to stay in the lab overnight. I wasn’t allowed to do anything enjoyable. Coffee, my main coping mechanism, was forbidden. The sudden lack of caffeine brought on a devastating headache so I asked for painkillers. Those were also forbidden. My headache quickly spun out of control.

After hours of doing absolutely nothing I was summoned by a nurse who attached sensors to my body and sent me to a room with a bed in it. She made it clear I was not allowed to lay down yet. That was not a problem. Sleep was the furthest thing from my mind. The headache was my one and only focus. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so uncomfortable.

A camera mounted on the ceiling turned in my direction and a disembodied voice ordered me to lay down and close my eyes. Lowering my head to the pillow only made the headache worse. How could I sleep under these conditions? It was like being ordered to write inspired poetry while simultaneously watching a Michael Bay movie. They say that if you can fall asleep in less than five minutes then you have a sleep disorder. I was certain it had taken much longer than that. The results came back a few days later. I was out cold in less than a minute.

The technicians at the sleep lab were impressed. At my next appointment my sleep specialist explained that the extreme drowsiness and loss of muscle strength were caused by a condition called Narcolepsy. It had probably started in my early teens and would likely be with me the rest of my life. Most importantly, it was treatable.

That diagnosis changed my life. I was no longer Sloth, one of the seven deadly sins listed in the Bible, but rather Sleepy, the most boring of the Seven Dwarves. It hasn’t been easy. The medication that keeps me awake also makes me nervous and irritable. Sleep attacks still take their toll. I don’t take the medication after work due to the side effects, so many nights are lost in the fog. But I don’t fall asleep driving anymore and I no longer have to pinch myself at work. I’ve made peace with the fact that I will spend the rest of my life as an underwhelming dwarf with narcolepsy. People, however, are still just people, and for some of them no explanation for my drowsiness will ever be enough. I could try to make them understand, but I think I’ll take a nap instead.

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Enter Bad Bozo

What came first, the fear or the clown? That this can be one of the central mysteries of my life may beg questions about my childhood. Was I raised in an asylum? Did a mad circus performer abduct me as an infant? Was I forced to watch Jerry Lewis movies at a tender age? I am not here to address such ridiculous questions (the answers are no, no and yes) but I can tell you that this all started very early in my life.

Let me say from the outset that this is all true. The things I write about my life often sound fictional, but in reality they’re just screwed up and twisted. Blogging about it is therapeutic, so moving on …

My earliest memory is of being in my crib, crying for my mother. I had been scared by a bug that seemed to be wearing a blue and white mask, like a clown face. Of course no such bug exists (chanting those last four words over and over can help one get to sleep at night, or so I’m told) but I was a baby and that’s how my mind interpreted it. When the bug was killed only the mask remained. As first memories go, kind of hard to top.

I grew up afraid of my own shadow. Being alone in a room could freak me out, even in the middle of the day. My imagination was such that if we returned to our house after sundown I would peer into our darkened kitchen from the front door and see the devil jumping up and down on a trampoline above the sink. I saw it. And I know that all children suffer from nightmares, but mine were on a whole other level. There must have been something in the water on Perry Street, because my sister Sandie’s were just as bad.

My mom used to wear this yellow-ish nightgown with red coloring swirled through it. My sister had a dream that my mom was floating in the air next to her bed in that nightgown, saying that she was going to kill her. Not to be outdone, I had a recurring nightmare where my father was a monster with fangs, stalking me around my house and yard. We had good parents, mind you, but our imaginations were out to get us. I lived on the edge of panic. It was just a matter of time before the wrong dream on the wrong night pushed me right over the edge.

Enter Bad Bozo.

I can’t tell you for sure how old I was. Probably five or six. I don’t remember what was going on in my life at the time. I don’t remember what happened the day before or the day after. I just remember the nightmare and the few insane seconds after waking up.

The dream took place in my living room. It was daytime. My sister Sandie was on the couch which sat in front of our large picture window and my mother was in a rocking chair next to it. I was on the floor watching tv. My show was interrupted by a news bulletin: Bad Bozo had escaped from prison.

To help you get the visual here, Bad Bozo looked exactly like Bozo the Clown, except with a black beard.

I got to my feet and looked out the window. To my horror, Bad Bozo was coming down the sidewalk by our house. “Mom!” I screamed, looking towards the rocker. She had the newspaper open in front of her, blocking her face. “It’s Bad Bozo! He’s here!”

“That’s nice,” my mom replied softly.

Bad Bozo walked into our yard and climbed up on the large planter in front of our window. He looked down at my sister with malevolence, but her back was turned and she had no idea of her peril. As if by magic, he was now holding Sandie’s blue and yellow plastic doll house. He lifted it above his head, and I knew that he meant to smash it through the window and kill my sister.

“Mom! Help!” I screamed again, and again she answered from behind her newspaper.

“Everything’s going to be fine, honey.”

Bad Bozo brought the doll house down through the window and I woke up.

Leaping from my bed, I ran across the hall into my parents’ room screaming, “Bamboozles! Bamboozles!” over and over. Fyi, “Bamboozles” is what “Bad Bozo” sounds like coming from the mouth of a child in the full grip of panic. I dove into their bed and crawled under the covers between them.

They sat up and my father looked at my mother with bleary eyes. “Bamboozles?”

That’s my one and only nightmare containing a clown. Which makes sense because, despite the kabuki themed bug attack in my crib and the dream involving a grease painted kids’ show host, I’ve never been afraid of clowns. Far from it. I write under the name C.T. Clown, my gaming name is Chuckles, the Joker is my all time favorite comic book character, and I even collect clown figurines. This wasn’t about a fear of clowns, it was about fear AND clowns.

Which came first?

I still don’t know. Near as I can tell, they entered my life at the same time. And though they arrived together, they are not one and the same. Not since the clown-bug anyway. (No such bug exists, no such bug exists, no such bug exists, no such bug exists …)

This might take a while.

CT Clown

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Four Legged Shark

What if Jaws had four legs and stalked the yards and sidewalks of the street where you grew up? For me that isn’t a what if, it is my childhood.

One of the many reasons I chose to write horror was because I wanted my stories to physically affect the reader. I wanted them to have the visceral reaction brought on by fear, yet without any real danger, like riding a rollercoaster. But you can have too much of a good thing.

After watching Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho some people were so freaked out by the shower scene that they never took a shower again. Indeed, the actress in that scene, Janet Leigh, reportedly stopped taking showers for years afterwards. Surely this is an overreaction by weak minded individuals. No rational human being would alter their life because of something as trivial as a movie.

Unless that movie is Jaws.

Will I swim in the ocean? What a stupid question. Of course I won’t. There are sharks in the ocean. Real ones. With massive mouths and razor sharp teeth and huge heads with black eyes, like doll’s eyes. They are swimming in the same water—THE VERY SAME WATER—that you are, except they swim significantly faster. And they eat meat. You are meat.

What? You say that’s no different than avoiding showers after Psycho? Let me stop you right there. Norman Bates isn’t and never was real. Sharks ARE real and they hide in the water waiting to eat you. Don’t believe me? That whole insanely terrifying story about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis that Quint recounts in Jaws wasn’t made up for the movie. It was true. And so is the story I am about to tell you.

Back to my childhood.

I grew up in the suburbs of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Low crime, no gangs, no murders. But the streets weren’t safe. Tiger was out there. Now I have to be careful because when I start to describe this creature you’re probably going to think, “Yeah, that’s a bulldog, we’ve all seen those.” No, no you haven’t. Not this one. Tiger was breeding gone wrong. He had a massive, beach ball shaped head, with a jaw that seemingly hinged in the back of the cranium, like Pac Man. Speaking of beach balls, I once saw Tiger open up his massive jaws and bite a large beach ball to death.

That mouth was huge, and Tiger’s body was nothing more than a vehicle to carry that huge mouth wherever it wanted to go. I wouldn’t say the body was small by bulldog standards, but it was truly dwarfed by the head. And this wasn’t one of those scary looking dogs that was sweet and harmless either.

Jaws destroyed Quint’s boat by ramming it over and over until it sank. Tiger had a move like that too. He would charge into you at full speed and knock you over. My clearest memory of this was in my back yard. MY back yard. Tiger’s owners apparently didn’t believe in using a leash or a fence. Or maybe they did and Tiger ate the fence and leash and trotted away. Whatever the reason, the thing roamed freely about the neighborhood.

I had a cat named George who was fearless. I once watched him chase a large German Shepherd out of our yard. One day I was with my friend Dave when Tiger wandered into my driveway. I watched in horror as George immediately ran over to defend his territory. He arched his back, bared his teeth and hissed for all he was worth, but unlike the German Shepherd, Tiger didn’t even flinch. Rather, he opened his mouth and prepared to devour my cat.

You have to understand, I loved George. He was part of our family. I am not a cat person, but George transcended the usually feline categories. He was smart, tough, kind and utterly flawless. He was also about to be eaten alive by a monster and I was fully prepared to watch it happen without the slightest intervention. To my amazement, my friend Dave jumped between the two animals and screamed at Tiger until the dog trotted away, saving my cat’s life. It was without a doubt the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. I hadn’t heard of the Darwin Awards at that point in my life, but maybe Dave had and saw this as his chance to win one. I dunno.

Remember the da-dum da-dum, da-dum da-dum sound they used in Jaws to announce the approach of the killer shark? Tiger had his own version of that. His head and mouth were so enormous that his jowls would flap open and shut involuntarily as he trotted, making a guttural wowf sound. He was perpetually drooling, so there was a wet, slobbery quality to it as well.

One day I was riding my skateboard and heard wowf, wowf, wowf, wowf getting louder and louder. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I turned to see Tiger chasing me. I instantly sped up, pushing the skateboard as fast as I dared go. The cadence behind me also quickened. Wowf, wowf, wowf, wowf, wowf, wowf. The dog was gaining. I was going to be caught. In desperation, I jumped off the skateboard and onto railroad-ties stacked two high at the front of an elevated yard. Without hesitation, Tiger picked up my large blue skateboard (which fit easily in his cartoonish mouth) and trotted home triumphantly.

Let’s stop here a second. This deserves some emphasis. If you’ve never seen a dog run down a sidewalk with the ends of a large skateboard jutting out of either side of his mouth, let me tell you, it is a sight to behold. And the feelings: fear, spectacle, loss, the realization that you might be living inside a movie or comic strip, it was all there.

Naturally I wanted my skateboard back. I waited until Tiger was safely away from his own backyard lair and went looking for it. What I saw astounded me. His area, back by a tree, was littered with trophies. Things stolen from yards and children, things he wanted and took. It made me feel a little better. Apparently he was after my skateboard, not me.

I don’t know what happened to Tiger. At this point he disappears from my childhood memories. They say that dogs bred to such odd proportions often have short lives. Even if he lived to a ripe old age, this all took place at least three and a half decades ago, so there is no doubt that Tiger is dead. But he’s not gone. I still think of him from time to time, most recently when watching the remake of Stephen King’s It. Attacking children. Collecting trophies. Hunting in the middle of a neighborhood. It’s all there. But you know when the movie really makes me think of the monster bulldog that haunted my childhood? The first time Pennywise opens his mouth unnaturally wide in front of a kid who is scared witless. That’s real fear. That’s pure Tiger.

–CT Clown

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Dying at a Funeral

I enjoy writing supernatural horror-fiction, but in real life I am not a scary person or even an intimidating one. Over the decades I’ve learned that I can inspire terror in a very small number of situations. I can scare cats when I take them by surprise. A camcorder might have been employed once or twice when that happened. There’s also my life-long friend Dave who lives in fear of being trapped in a car with me when I order fast-food at a drive thru. Never figured out why. He doesn’t like to talk about it. And then there was the time I sang at a funeral. I actually sang at two funerals, but only once with horrific effect. What follows is that story.

Before I begin, let me apologize in advance to Sandie, my dear sibling and frequent accomplice, for enshrining this story on the internet. Just kidding about the apology. You used to get me in trouble just for the fun of it when we were kids and this is what revenge looks like, sis. Hope you enjoy the story.

Anyway.

I have no idea why my sister Sandie and I were asked to sing at the funeral of a relative. I suspect that my mother suggested it. My sister was twenty and I was nineteen and neither of us was a performer on any level. We had little desire to sing in front of a large group of relatives, especially at a funeral. But we did.

The first performance was a small miracle. I can’t sing. At all. I have perhaps one octave of range and that entire range sounds abysmal. I therefore have no rational explanation for what happened that day. Maybe my sister sang loud and covered up my voice. Maybe the key of that particular accompaniment track was perfectly calibrated to my impoverished vocal cords. Maybe the family was so emotional that nobody cared how it sounded. Maybe all three. Whatever it was, it happened and we were a huge hit. We were adorable. When somebody else died shortly thereafter, it came as no surprise that the family clamored for an encore.

I hadn’t wanted to sing the first time and I certainly didn’t want to sing again, but the family insisted. The accompaniment tape from the previous performance had been lost so we bought a new one. We couldn’t remember the key we had sang in before but figured it wouldn’t matter much. Had we bothered to practice even once using the new track we would have realized that we figured wrong.

The day came. We performed. The key was higher than it had been at the previous funeral, way higher. From the first note of the accompaniment track (which we were both hearing for the first time) I realized I was in trouble. But what could I do, standing in front of a crowd full of mourners, holding a microphone, mere seconds away from my cue? As I saw it, I had only two choices: I could be brave, dig deep and simply sing the song to the best of my ability OR I could drop the microphone and run.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, I chose bravery.

It must have resembled a comedy sketch. My sister straining to hit the notes and stay in key with mixed success; me standing next to her, voice cracking, missing every note except for the few places where I fell completely silent for a moment or two. This went on for nearly five soul-crushing minutes. I don’t mean to imply that we were equally awful. In terms of proportion, if my sister’s performance was a train wreck, mine was total global annihilation, minimum. At one point Sandie leaned over and whispered, “Please stop singing.” I didn’t even hear her. Embarrassment overload had been reached and my brain was in safety mode. According to the video my sister made of the event (yes, there’s a video) I stared forward and continued to sing like a man cursed, butchering every note that came my way.

It might have been good for a laugh, if not for the open casket a few feet to our right. Speaking of which, as those minutes ticked slowly by, I couldn’t have been the only person in the room who began to envy the deceased. If I could have snapped my fingers and disappeared forever, I would have done so without hesitation—no doubt to rapturous applause.

It was total and complete failure, in front of family, at a funeral. If there were angels present, they were either laughing or crying. No way that spectacle left anyone unmoved.

If it had been up to us, we would have stopped after the first funeral. We would have dropped the mic, walked out and left them wanting more. We would have been eternally adorable. “Remember that time Sandie and Michael performed at so and so’s funeral? That was great. We should have done that again. They were adorable.” Ah, what a pleasant fiction. In reality, the next time someone died, nobody clamored for my sister and I to perform. Ours is a large family and we have lost many loved ones in the ensuing decades, all without a single invitation to sing. We don’t take it personally. It’s not like we perform anywhere else. Mostly though, it just feels right. After all, the most upsetting thing at a funeral should not be the singing.

–CT Clown

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Twitter, Year One

I’ve been on Twitter for a year. As far as I can tell nobody has noticed, but l will celebrate it anyway. Good, now I’m done with that and we can move on to the secondary thing that is actually the primary thing. You see, I didn’t join Twitter because I wanted to tweet. Far from it.

My first exposure to this social media mammoth was an e-mail from a friend who was inviting me to join. When I read the short blurb explaining Twitter I thought it was a joke. How could it not be? An app that had the sole purpose of broadcasting your every waking thought to the world in short snippets all day long, every day, forever? It was brilliant, timely sarcasm. A biting, satirical look into the dark heart of a society obsessed with artificial social connectivity. This is The Onion, right?

Right?

The years passed and Twitter became a part of the landscape, but I never warmed to it. When I was young and foolish I believed that everybody needed to know my opinions. By the time Twitter came along to agree with me, however, I had successfully recovered from youth and saw the premise as perverse. Thus Twitter went its way and I went mine, and that was that.

Fast forward twelve years. I’ve got a novel and several short stories that I am looking to publish. I decide to drop the short stories on Amazon, mostly to see if it will be a viable avenue for releasing my novel. Of course, you can’t just drop a story on Amazon and expect it to get viewed. I googled for help and most of the advice boils down to a few steps. First you need an author page. It’s a short introduction to you and your work. Helps if you include a photo. Okay, done. Next, you need a blog to answer questions about your book. This step seemed a bit presumptuous to me, so I skipped it. Why start a blog dedicated to a book that nobody has read? The third thing you absolutely had to do was get a Twitter account. That way you could put a link to your books in your profile, converse with readers and generally put your awesome literary talent on real-time display. Ugh.

I had to admit it made sense. While a blog would assume that I had actual fans waiting for my explanations of this or that, a Twitter account assumed nothing. I was there as a person, not an author. An anonymous person with a fake name and vague profile, but a person nonetheless. If people found out I was a writer, that was fine. If they didn’t, no harm done.

Now that it’s been an entire year, I’m gonna have to go with no harm done. I have seventeen mostly inactive followers. I don’t post much, and that’s because my tweets would be viewed by seventeen mostly inactive followers. When I do tweet it feels awkward, like I’m doing a speech in an empty room. My daughter’s there, yeah, and my friend Joe, but that’s about it. Before you tell me I’m doing it all wrong, let me do it for you. I know that Twitter is not to blame.

Although I spent hours mining Google for ways to gain traction on Amazon, I never did a single search about gaining followers on Twitter. Maybe I will. The few times I’ve made comments that garnered a lot of views seemed to coincide with selling a couple of books on Amazon, so the potential is real. But I don’t like marketing myself. An oxymoronic view for a would-be author, but it’s who I am. And if despair is creeping its way into any area of my hopes and dreams, it is in the possibility that the means of achieving my hopes and dreams is at odds with who I really am.

No matter, whining never achieved anything. I pulled up Google and searched, “how to build a twitter following.” The first answer on the list? Start a blog.

Yeah.

–CT Clown

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The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton