Celandine snuggles a little closer to me, caught up in her REM dreams. She tells me that she dreams in black and white. We rent an apartment on Wolcott Street, a common area for gangster films shot here in the forties and fifties. I dream in colour, and in my dreams, it always seems to be the hours before dawn. Like now. Streets deserted. My mind alert. I can hear my heartbeat in my nostrils, in my ears.
Celly has the sheets pulled down to her waist. She sleeps in the nude. I wear shorts and an old t-shirt. I hear soft snoring, a peaceful sound. Soft waves hitting the shores of Fullerton Beach.
I look over, recognizing the sound. More nasal than Celly’s.
The vestigial twin growing out of my lover’s ribcage is the one who is snoring.
The gentle sounds bring back memories.
I. 1959 Babies
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places—Hemingway
Crystal Street in those days was a world removed from the gang territory it is now. There were no burned-out tenements, no need for orange signs in each window of the three-flats telling passers-by that they were treading through a Neighbourhood Crime Watch Zone. There were social clubs. But we all saw The Blackboard Jungle and knew things were on the verge of change.
My parents were living off Crystal and Washtenaw when I was born. It was a Polish neighbourhood, the kind where nobody ever moved. They just died, and after that, their sons and daughters stayed until they married and moved to a bigger house in Bucktown or Logan Square. Or maybe they died as well.
The summer of 1959 was sweltering. I recall hearing this much later in my life from relatives who had gone to the World Series game to see the White Sox. It was ninety-eight degrees on my birthdate, September ninth.
My mother and two of her friends from the radium watch plant she worked at—painting the dials with the luminous ink, in ten-hour shifts—had gone up and down Division and Milwaukee to the shows to get out of the heat that summer. The Banner, The Royal, the Biltmore; they were all air-conditioned.
My mother had to work into her second trimester; back then, my father was pulling in barely enough to feed a family of two working as a security guard at RB’s, a now-defunct department store on Milwaukee. I fondly remember getting a Whamm-O Monster Magnet and a Rock-’em Sock-’em Robot from the store in honour of kindergarten graduation.
My father let me pick out whatever I wanted, and by the time I was six, the word monster was embedded in my brain.
My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck when I was born, and I’m certain my mother’s exposure to the radium didn’t help. (The factory was eventually closed, after many years of court battles; if you stand on Ogden Avenue overpass, you can still look down and see the ghoulish lime-green glow in those windows that haven’t been painted black.)
In September of 1959, my mother and her friends went to the Biltmore on Division to see the premiere of Ben Hur. I’ve been told that she went into labour with me then and there.
The ambulance made it to Lutheran Deaconess in time. When I made my entrance into the world, my face was blue and there were traces of blood coming from my nose and ears. To give you an idea of how limited we were medically just thirty-five years ago, all the doctors could really tell my parents was that I had a degenerative muscle disease caused by trauma to the womb.
My mother blamed herself for many years.
When I was in grade school, one of the class trips was to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in Oldtown, where there was an exhibit of freaks from the Barnum & Bailey circus. Freaks was actually Phineas Barnum’s get-rich-quick term. His partner later referred to people like me and Celandine as “human curiosities.” Me with my bulging head and wrap-around eyes, Celly with the second head sticking out of her ribcage.
One of the displays was for Tom Thumb. His mother truly believed her son’s diminutiveness was caused by grief she held over her puppy drowning while she carried Charlie, the boy’s real name. I went home and told my mother this story, how Tom Thumb became rich and married a woman who told him he was just as beautiful as she, so that my mother needn’t worry about me.
My mother smiled sadly when I told her this, and now I realize it was because she knew how my adult years would hurt me, and that my coming school years would only foreshadow this hurt. She smiled the way one does when they are recalling that the person they are talking to used to be so young and tiny. The sadness of the first recognition of mortality. My mother expected the worst. And so I would still hear her cry at night.
But the school I went to was Childermas Research, one of the Cook County clinics.
During my first year of classes, I met Celandine Tomei. Some of the other children and their parents whispered about her.
The ages of the children in class varied; some learned slower, others had inhibited body functions and needed to be taught with much patience.
Celly was a 1959 baby, just like me.
She was the first girl I ever saw naked.
* * *
Childermas Research was one weird fucking place. You entered this maze of buildings at Eighteenth and Honore, passing a little sliver of what looked like a Philadelphia rowhouse; this building that was the burn ward for the entire county, and the Lighthouse For The Blind. On the northeast horizon, a huge pair of red neon lips, advertising Magikist carpets, beckoned.
The classes of reading and spelling lessons weren’t too difficult; our rehab sessions reflected our needs. The therapists were great. Vonnie Llewellyn and Ron Szawlus had the patience of saints, I swear. Rehab mostly consisted of coordination exercises, games to make each person use their right and left sides independently, or in tandem.
What was weird about Childermas was my classmates. Not all of us were allowed out on class trips, like the one to Ripley’s. Sometimes I felt as if it was a prison. I was never treated badly, but I felt as if all of us were being manipulated in some way that I could never hope to comprehend.
Juvenile Rehab—where we were—was Room 18, big black numerals on an orange door. Room 20 should have housed the burn ward, but there were people of all ages in there, hooked up to various machines. I heard several orderlies grousing about having to work the Pain Detail, which was kat-corner to Room 20. A blank blue door.
I never saw any of what went on in that long corridor of sub-rooms. But I heard the screams. Several times over the years, I have vomited into my palm or my garbage can, whichever is more convenient, when I recall those damnable, high-pitched, keening screams.
Once it had nothing to do with memories. In a medical magazine, I came across photos of stillborn thalidomide babies like Celandine.
One of these “stillborn” children was nothing more than a nerve column wrapped around bone in the placenta.
* * *
I come back into the bedroom, my hands washed fresh. I can still smell the vomit in the faint spring air. May 31st, Chicago’s first real breakaway-fromthe-throes-of-winter days. It is not a bad smell. It will go away within a few minutes, like when me and Celly were kids and sneaking smokes on the back porch of the Plichtas’ two-flat.
Celandine is sleeping soundly. The sun will rise soon, the sky already aqua. Her breasts rise and fall, rise again. The head beneath her left breasts lolls to the side.
As Celandine breathes, the head looks like a buoy bobbing off Fullerton Beach. Its eyes are open, and it is staring at me.