by Tom Bentley
Copyright 2000

These days, I ask very little of life. I keep mostly to myself, only go out to pick up the absolute necessities, to see the doctors, once in a while to look at the sea. No universities call about teaching positions any more. Now, I’m only asking that these memories cease. Memories are supposed to be shadows, gauzy things that recede as fast as you stretch for them. Mine are slaps to the face, delivered by a relentless, pursuing hand. And they are becoming more insistent. It’s the way Amity would have wanted it.

It’s funny, I guess, how the only memories with any teeth to them are all of my adolescence, a time so long ago, some thirty years. It’s a rare thing now when I think of my wife, but she was always somewhat indistinct to me—I couldn’t even tell you how long ago she left. And my sons, so unlike me, so rangy and quick to anger, careless products of my infrequent, pointless lust; I haven’t heard from them in years. But I don’t have any feelings about it, one way or another.

When I was fourteen I didn’t give a damn about feelings. I was coursing with spunk and cheap bravado, and the more scorn I could heap upon any person or thing, the higher I could climb on that heap to look down. I’d lived all my life in Southern California, its middle-class neighborhoods as symmetrical as its neat lawns, as regular as its barbecues, a bland face made up to cover its deeper blemishes. I was just learning to finger those blemishes, see behind that camouflage—and take pleasure in their judgment.

I was a charter member of the jury that mocked that disfigured face, every evening after school at the corner. The corner was just a juncture of two common suburban streets in late-fifties America, but it was our courtroom, where every trite drama of pubescence was scrutinized. More importantly, it also faced directly across from Amity’s house. She was witness, when she chose to drag her bony presence to her windows, to most of our struttings and stormings: the carnage from the rock fights, the clumsy courtings of immature love, and every echo from our homely games of baseball.

Amity’s been dead for many years, but I see her wraithlike frame and sallow face clearly—too, too clearly. I still remember most of the things we called her—witch seems all too appropriate now. But we called her many things, things born of the remarkably creative cruelty of children, just discovering the heady power of spite. Looking back at all that we did makes a man’s throat dry—I’ll pour a little drink. I’ll see these things too clearly all the same, but a drink keeps me company; it’s sociable, in a gathering of ghosts.

The first time I saw Amity we were in front of her house playing work-up, a baseball variation where you move from position to position by outs until you get to bat. It was a typical mid-Fall evening, warm and dry. I was playing catcher, still trying to figure out the pecking order of my new cronies; I’d just begun to hang around this neighborhood after one of my family’s moves to another one of L.A.’s endless suburbs. I’d never had any commerce with alcoholics. I didn’t know they could live in your neighborhood, could change your life.

Our game had just begun when Amity careened out of her house with what I would come to know was a characteristic cry, a trebly squawk of derision that announced that she was in her "you kids are dirt" mood—one that alternated, sometimes miraculously within the same hour, with her dewy "you kids are all I have" mood. One signal trait of her appearances would be ever unchanged: the air round her person was always smirched with drink, and I smelled this painting of the atmosphere before I had even turned toward her.

"Baseball! You kids don’t know how to play baseball!" she shrieked, and while I tried to concentrate on the incoming pitch I caught her flailing movement out of the corner of my eye.

She looked as though she had been designed to be a drunk—forty-five going on several lifetimes of ruin. Tangled, dirt-colored hair, thrown in every direction. Campfire-ember patches of red on her pallid face, blotchy nose crosshatched with veins, skin saddened by the burden of its slack stretching across the spindly body. She wore an improbable gypsy outfit of loose purple.

I turned to look into her bloodshot eyes and recoiled from the torrent of words that gushed from her smudged red lips.

"You’re no catcher. I was captain of the softball team at my girls’ school in Maryland two years in a row." She turned and waggled her stick-fingers at the whole gaping group. "You kids can’t play baseball. You can’t play anything. You’re all a bunch of goddamned punks!" Her emphasis on the last word caused her to totter a bit and her arm snaked out to my shoulder for support. The whole disaster of her face was inches from mine, the sweet-sour breath coating my face, and she whispered to me, "Do I know you? Or are you just part of this trash?"

I can hear the strange fetching in her voice yet, I hear it now, but then I stood gaping, immobile, until Spencer Martin shouted from third base, "For Christ’s sake, Amity, go tell it to the Marines. I think there’s a sale on cooking sherry at Alpha Beta. Why don’t you go for a look-see?"

Spencer was almost seventeen, and when he deigned to play with us, we gave him every respect. I admired his quick dispatch of the situation—I hadn’t known you could razz adults directly to their faces. The rest of the players began to chime in as well. From well out in the outfield I could hear Jackie Umgrunt wailing, "Amity’s a bubble-butt. Bubble-Up comes out her bubble-butt." Jackie had wailed the same phrase at every batter that day: her resources were limited, but never withheld.

I wiggled free of Amity’s grip and stood amazed as she turned back to me and said, "You’re hell-bound in a hurry if you take up with these crumbs." Then she made her brittle way back into the house.

The kids quickly spelled out the situation: Amity was our local lush, living alone, unpredictable and half-crazed, always good for a scary kind of laugh. I sensed immediately that she could be a resource; making sport of her seemed like an opportunity for me to get in good with the gang. But behind the chance to rally around taunting Amity, I sensed something else stirring. Even then, though I couldn’t have voiced it, I sensed the fascination of corruption. Amity was repulsive, but it was the repulsion of the dark cave—something in her voice made me want to go inside.

However, I thought nothing of Amity until two nights later when seven or eight of us were having footraces to the big lamppost in front of her house. Jackie and I flashed out toward the pole, both converging on a "V." Heedless of our collision course, I took the worst of a tremendous blow when our heads slammed as we were both reaching for the pole.

I was flat on my back, a heavy thudding in my head, only partially conscious; the sky was a Christmas tree of twinkling lights. The first face I could make out was Amity’s, inches from mine, her bedraggled hair reaching claw-like towards me, the filmy, almost-viscous cloud of her breath settling on my face. She was patting one of my cheeks, murmuring, "That’s my boy, that’s my boy, I’m here, I’m here," while Jackie kneeled with her head in her hands and the others clumped around in a hapless mass. Amity was wearing some garish, low-cut kimono-like thing that let me look at her tired breasts. I closed my eyes.

"He’s going to be all right," she said. "Now you darlings keep him company while I run in the house and get him some Seven-Up."

She went off at a wobbly trot and I raised myself up on my elbows, while the others crowded around like vultures. "Man, that was gory," Eddie Milton said. "She creamed your head royal!"

Amity returned with a green plastic glass filled with Seven-Up and ice. She offered it to me and I drank it greedily; only after I finished it did I register the oddness of its flavor. It had a queer tang, not unpleasant, a soft sharpness that the carbonation couldn’t mask. I stood shakily up and handed her the glass. She stood gazing at me, a wry smile on her face.

"Uh, thank you, thanks a lot, Amity," I said. "Jeez, my head feels like it’s been run over. Hey, what kind of Seven-Up was that anyway? It had a weird taste to it."

She walked up and patted me on the shoulder. "Just some Seven-Up for my boy. Some Seven-Up and medicine for my boy." She squeezed my shoulder and tottered off.

"Ooohh, Amity likes Cory. It’s not a good thing having a witch like you," Jackie said, still massaging her head.

I barely responded to the kids’ ribbing; I was noticing a peculiar sensation of pleasure that was playing counterpoint to my drumming skull. Amity had served me my first drink; my first taste of whiskey, and my body took to it, sang with it, recognized it as Amity seemed to recognize me. I went home with a headache and a vague sense of uneasy curiosity.

I think that old proposition that "had I known then what I know now," is absurd. I see now that it was a linked chain of events that dragged me again and again to the corner. A chain that years later tied up a man who had metamorphosed into a creature, one who dully watched his children and his wife walk out on him. I couldn’t have slipped that chain, no, that’s just crap, just lacy romantic mooning. This I know—your destiny pulls you like a winch with that steel chain, and all your squirming to pull free is just pathetic waste. The doctors told me I wouldn’t hit fifty, but it seems fitting. I welcome it. All I want is for the memories to stop.

I can’t help but give myself a cynical laugh now—me, a former philosophy professor, talking about destiny. The world’s foremost thinkers had so many eloquent approaches to those systems of order, final causes, final purposes. Hah! My hands shook more and more steadily over the years writing out my inane comments on the fatuous papers of my students. My "final purpose" was to flit from school to less prestigious school, and every time I left there was less of me to continue on. I still have two books in print that provide a small income. I looked at one of the books in a store a few years back: ideas caked and powdery, written by a being gutted long ago. I don’t recognize the author who bears my name.

But enough of that. What needs to be told, what has to be told, is what is in these punishing recollections. Then they will stop; they must stop. Perhaps a drink, yes.

I see Amity’s lover, with painful clarity. His name was Walter. He was completely bald, gleamingly pink-skinned, a tiny man who walked with a jerky, stiff-legged gait, sometimes with a cane, sometimes not. He drove a huge late-model Cadillac; the first time I saw him whip up and get out it looked like a puppet, some kind of manikin, was directing this great locomotive of metal. All of this meant one thing to us: He was a target. He was Waldo Baldo, Hopalong Cassidy, Captain Pegleg—we would shout all these epithets at his arrival, with asinine mimickings of a handicapped man, the more grotesque the better.

This low theater was acted out on the parkway strip of grass on the corner, across the street from Amity’s house. We critics only found fault if the depictions weren’t malicious enough. Sometimes, Jill, Jackie’s younger sister, would protest: "You guys are so mean!" But she would be overruled in this courtroom: These jurists were coyotes around a kill.

A few weeks after Amity had given me my first cocktail, a bunch of the corner crew were loosely grouped on the parkway and on the street around the fire hydrant, the lighthouse beacon for the corner. We boys were practicing our spitting on the hydrant while the girls stood in the background exclaiming in disgust. The evening before we had blasted Amity’s mailbox to flinders with a couple of M-80s, and had hidden behind the McGovern’s fence next door while she came out and tore the sky with curses. We could see the faint outline in the paint of where the mailbox had been; it was a much crowed-about satisfaction.

We were determining whose spit hung longest on the hydrant when Walter and Amity came booming down the street in his car. Eddie and I popped out further to taunt Walter, but he veered sharply towards us, firing the big bullet nose of that Cadillac at us with enough sincerity to make Eddie and me vault to the safety of the parkway. I could see his little head, eyes fixed and jaw locked, as he wheeled by. He jerked the car to a stop in Amity’s driveway and they both got out, stared at us for a moment, and walked into her house in silence.

We were thunderstruck. But children have fine reaction times—the plotting of vengeance was swift and uncomplex. Eddie, Pearce McGovern and I galloped over to Walter’s car commando style, jumped up and ran on its vast bulk, springing up and down the length of the great machine, shouting our slanders out at Walter.

He was out on the porch in an instant, livid, his pink skull gone to high color. "You goddamned kids get off that car! You’ll regret it, you goddamned little monsters!"

He was spluttering, choking with rage. Amity appeared behind the screen door, carrying some long, thin object. Jackie, not far from the car, screamed, "Amity’s got a gun! She’s got a gun!" We all bolted in several directions. Eddie, Pearce and I locked ourselves in the McGovern’s garage, silent except for our ragged breathing. A few minutes later, I could hear Amity out on the sidewalk. I felt her presence before she even spoke.

"Cory, I need to talk to you," she said in a throaty, hushed voice. "Where are you, Cory? Come out now."

We stayed put, shaking with suppressed laughter and exquisite fear. Long after they had gone inside and we had regrouped, Jill took some of the flourish off our triumph by telling us that Amity’s gun was a broom. But I could only wonder why she called to me. It took some years to see how fully I answered her.

There are memories that burn much brighter, that scald the skin. Months after these events, after countless hateful pranks pulled on Walter and Amity, after a hundred spewings of vileness from Amity back at us, she continued to treat me differently than the other kids. Not particularly nice, but searchingly, in some indefinite way. She unnerved me, and I never felt balanced around her.

One Saturday morning I was down at the corner with Neal, our resident troubadour. His father had been some cut-rate entertainer in dive clubs in the hinterlands of Los Angeles. Neal had picked up some of his father’s bad habits. He’d strum an acoustic guitar and sing corny Sinatra songs—"Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry"—and weepy ballads. He knew all of the words to "Tom Dooley." No amount of sneering could get him to get off it. He wouldn’t do Elvis Presley on a bet.

Anyway, Neal was walking through some Nat King Cole number on his guitar, "Unforgettable," I think, and I was firing dirt clods at the globe of the big lamppost in front of Amity’s house.

Amity walked out and stood with a mooncow smile on her face, her hands drawn dramatically up to her bosom. I pretended not to notice her. She issued these wracking sighs, and then she dashed into her house and came back with something wrapped in crackling cellophane and handed it to Neal. I stopped throwing clods to listen to what she said to him.

"...and it’s just the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. My father used to sing in our house when I was a young girl! I have to leave for a while, but please promise me you’ll come back to the house this evening and sing a few songs for me. But you can’t come without Cory," she said, glancing quickly at me. "Please promise."

Neal muttered something noncommittal and she went into the house. He was staring at the stuff in the cellophane. I walked up as he opened the package.

"Wow," he said, pulling out some strands of what looked to be strips of dull, greenish-black plastic or leather, "Amity said she bought this licorice to give to us a while ago. It’s gotta be fifty years old!" He flung a piece at the street. It shattered like peanut brittle.

"The old hag," I said. "Listen, normally I wouldn’t go into Amity’s house if you paid me, but I just thought of an idea of how we can celebrate Pearce’s birthday tonight in the treehouse. We need to go into Amity’s. Meet me back here just when it’s getting dark."

I knew Neal would go along with it. He was goofy enough to want to sing those mushy songs to an old bat. That night, Amity met us, very unsteadily, at the door. She was a good deal more drunk than usual. She patted Neal on the back as he walked in, but she grabbed both of my shoulders and stood staring at me in the dim light of her grubby house. All the furniture was covered with what looked like the shabby cassocks of poor monks, ragged and dark like Amity’s strange old dress. She looked awful, ghoulishly pale and caked with makeup. She peered into my eyes and said, "You’re very close to me, Cory. You’re not a nice boy—you’re just like me. You don’t know how much you’re like me."

Her breath was like a pungent fabric, a sweet-sour cloth that draped my face. I drew back in near agony. Neal began singing "Let’s Do It," and Amity hovered close to him, fixing him with a rapturous stare. Her hands fluttered from her face to the décolletage of the shabby, out-of-date gown she was wearing. She made some whimpery, girlish squeaks. It was appallingly obvious that she felt that this was a sort of serenade.

I stood aghast, but then I went to work. While Amity sat gooey-eyed on her ragtag loveseat and Neal sloshed out songs that begged for retirement, I scouted in Amity’s kitchen. It was a mess, dishes splashed in haphazard piles, and a sulfurous smell like an old mineral cave. In a narrow, deep cabinet I found the booze, bottles and bottles of the same cheap brand of whiskey, a testimony to raw need. I know now that there is some style to personal pollution: if you are going to hell, go then, but go gracefully—don’t arrive in a Rambler. Good whiskey rolls down your throat, with a sweet firecracker at the end. Bad whiskey does the job, but coarsely.

Bad whiskey it was, though, and as I slipped a fifth under my coat, I heard Amity say behind me, "There’s no reason to drink alone, Cory."

My heart pounds now when I think of it, I am there, I am there now, the hair standing on my neck. I turned to her, thrust out the bottle and croaked, "OK."

Neal walked into the kitchen just as Amity filled my half-full glass of whiskey to the brim with Seven-Up.

"Hey, Cory, I completely forgot that I’m supposed to shop with my dad at the hi-fi store tonight for a new reel-to-reel. We’re going to make some recordings together. I’ve gotta run. Goodnight Amity."

He walked out. I don’t think he even noticed the liquor bottle. Amity had never taken her eyes from me while Neal was talking. She handed me the glass and said, "Come into the living room and sit down, Cory, we need to talk."

She put her hand on my shoulder, and though she was barely taller than me, and cadaverous besides, it felt like a huge hand was directing me forward, pushing me down. But I felt an odd eagerness as well as fear.

She sat me down on the loveseat, handed me my drink, and then sat perpendicular to me, leaning back on the arm of the couch, so that her bare feet were touching the side of my thigh. I was conscious of their soft pressure. I gulped at my drink as though my insides were aflame. I finished two-thirds of it in one stinging swallow. It felt like my spine was tingling, and I sensed a muted popping in my head, like from a yawn on a descending plane. I began to sweat.

"There’s no need to hurry, Cory. Everything is better when it’s done slowly," Amity said, curling her toes against my leg. She had her head cocked sideways and down so that her serpent hair covered one of her eyes; a small smile was on her swollen, purplish lips. I looked away from her and quickly finished my drink.

"You’ve run a little low, Cory. I’ll fix you another. My boy is going to get what he needs." She rose and went into the kitchen. Her billowing gown made it seem as though she floated darkly through the air. I sat with my fists clenched in my lap, but the rest of me was sunk like a heavy weight into the deep cushions of the couch. I had a conscious thought that I should go, but I felt like I couldn’t get up. My ears were buzzing; I realized that I was humming one of the tunes that Neal had sung earlier.

Amity glided in and sat down as she had before. She had brought the bottle, which she set on the chipped coffee table in front of the loveseat. She was now drinking straight whiskey out of a big tumbler. The dim floor lamp above the loveseat cast a mellow glow through the liquor. She had made my drink much stronger; I had to sharply inhale after my first gulp—it felt like a big, electric river with branching tributaries was leaping its banks through my body.

"Thanks, Amity. It’s good. Everything’s good." My voice sounded to me like it was coming up through the floor. I was sitting with my feet up on the table, and Amity arched her back and slipped her feet under my leg so that her soles were against the inner thigh of my other leg, her heel butting up against my crotch. Surprised, I instantly brought my legs down, which only pressed her foot tighter to my crotch. I still looked straight ahead. I felt paralyzed, except for one part of me: my stiffening penis was pushing back against the pressure of her foot.

"Try and relax, Cory. Amity knows what’s best for you. Amity knows everything." I didn’t look at her; I took a big swallow of my drink. "That’s right. Drink deeply, my boy. You’ll always drink with me, even after I’m gone." I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I nodded; it was like I was hypnotized.

She began to softly massage my testicles with her foot, rhythmically, insistently. Involuntarily, I pressed my hips forward, my eyelids lowered, my breaths shallow. I stretched out my arm to grip the bottom cushion of the loveseat, but Amity grabbed my hand and put it between her legs. The heat and dampness shocked me, but I left it there; she pressed my hand against her and I pressed back.

I’d never touched a girl, much less a woman. I’d never even touched myself much, except to ineptly grab my stiff penis in bed at night when I thought about the budding breasts of my classmates. No wet dream had ever dampened my sheets. This was a new world to me and I could barely breathe its air, but I gulped at it thirstily.

Our movements became more urgent, more rapid. I shudder now, I see it so clearly. Me on that faded loveseat, looking straight ahead, eyes glazed, drink in one hand, my other hand between Amity’s legs, deep in her warm wetness, her feet rubbing relentlessly against my organ, her hand gripping the neck of the whiskey bottle....

It may have been only a few moments, I don’t know—time was twisted—but I came with a convulsive gush and a small scream and Amity lifted her hips from the couch, gave a loud, quaking gasp and then fell back. I swallowed the rest of my drink and got up. I barely looked at her, but I saw that her eyes were closed and her lips drawn back in a stiff rictus over her mottled teeth. She didn’t move. I took the bottle from her outstretched hand and mumbled a goodbye. I almost ran out of the house.

But I felt no shame, nothing like what I feel now. I left that house half-drunk, but somehow ordained, defined. I can see my eager, happy face as I headed to meet my buddies. It’s been said that a man’s character is his fate; I dove headfirst, happily, into fate’s waters—I didn’t slip, there was no accident. I realize now that she knew, she had planned.

That night Eddie, Pearce, my brother Larry and I got drunk, in the Milton’s big treehouse, where we were all spending the night. I hadn’t even bothered to clean myself up; I just pulled my t-shirt down over my pants. Larry and Pearce both got sick, mostly because they were drinking vodka and Grape Crush and eating Cheetohs. I drank unwatered whiskey: steadily, proudly, victoriously. Thoroughly drunk for the first time in my life, and it felt like a snug set of tailor-made clothes.

When we came fuddle-eyed out of the Milton’s backyard the next morning, we saw the two ambulances and the police car at Amity’s. We ran over just as they were loading her body into the back of an ambulance. She was covered by a sheet, but one veiny, discolored hand dangled over the side, its bony fingers vaguely pointing towards me as we approached. People around said that she had apparently died of a heart attack in the night, but I knew more, knowledge I never shared. Walter sat on the front porch crying. He looked so tiny, a broken doll.

It didn’t take long for the astonishment of it all to wear off, and for our instincts for cruelty to take over. We gathered on the corner, speculating whether they served drinks in Hell, whether it was her taste in licorice that killed her. We were just children, ignorant, it’s true, but it seems to me that there is a native blackness, a turn towards evil, in all our hearts.

I rambled through my adolescence, not unlike any other child, though I seemed to drink a bit more than most of my buddies. It wasn’t really even clear to me that I was a drunk until I was already teaching at a community college in Long Beach, taking shots of whiskey between classes and not giving one good damn that Plato thought that virtue was teachable. I was concerned with vice.

I don’t miss Amity, because she’s in every bottle I drink, a presence. I drink greedily, but still I thirst. I have nothing left to build on in this life. I only have these memories, and they have me.