Coming home to Uncle Howie

14/05/08 21:50

Ever since we hit Boston a couple of weeks ago, I have had this strange feeling of coming home. At first I thought it was the smell of the ocean or the colors of spring, then the fact that we were staying with old friends from Denmark. Still, none of the explanations that I came up with was really satisfying to me. I simply used them as proxies to avoid getting too bogged down in thought. I knew that when the stars were right, the true explanation would dawn upon me, and with blinding light wash away every little shadow of doubt from the features of my face.

Yesterday - that was exactly what happened.

The place that I call home is not the place or the country where I grew up. It is a certain frame of mind that I associate with my coming of age. It involves imagination rather than physical landscape. It is not the garden where my brothers and I played with the boys next door, nor is it my teenage room where I spent so many hours listening to music, reading, and writing. It is the actual mood that I was in when I did all of those things. The day dreams, the phantasies, the sense that one day it would all become manifest, real. I yearned for other worlds and other truths than the ones I saw in the news and outside my window. I knew my quest was different from all that, and I did not give a freaking fart when grown-ups told me otherwise. "Get real," they would say, and I would just answer: "I'll show you, I'll make it real."

I had to travel halfway around the globe to find the stuff that I am made off. It is right here in the US, in New England, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson spent most of his life in Concord, Henry David Thoreau built his hut at the banks of Walden Pond, Nathaniel Hawthorne conceived some of his most memorable short stories in the Custom House by Salem Harbour, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote his tales of dark and foreboding horrors in and about Providence for almost his entire life. These writers and visionaries are the keepers of my true legacy. They were the ones who inspired my childhood dreams. They were the ones who formed my budding intellect. And today, they are the ones who make old New England feel just like coming home.

Yesterday our current host Luc dropped me off in the Brown University part of Providence. It was late afternoon, and the sun had begun its downward journey towards the horizon. Its rays were warm and slanted, filtering their light through trees and leaves, casting crazy shadows on the walls and windows of old Victorian mansions. Years of reading about the atrocities that lurk behind every facade of every house in this area had told me not to hope for anything but a quick death should someone or something come jumping at me. Calm in the face of my own insignificance and potentially imminent destruction, I started the steep climb up Prospect Street, armed only with my patience and my camera.

There is no such thing as time when you are lost in the land of dreams. Stone fences and iron gates, crooked trees and bursting flowers, warped around me, and drew me into a world of their own making. There must have been loads of college students walking around the quiet streets, frolicking on the lawns, drinking in the sweet nectar of the sun - but I cannot for the life of me remember seeing them. But then again, I am sure they cannot remember seeing what I saw either. The door to the Historical Society that slammed shut in the windlessness of the afternoon as I was about to enter. The pale face quickly withdrawing from the window of the disturbing red stone structure where the ill-fated Charles Dexter Ward is said to have conjured up the ghosts of his ancestors. The impeccable gentleman with the silver-studded cane and the strangely elongated features that kept coming towards me every time I turned down yet another street. "It's all in your mind," the students would probably say, like grown-ups, and my only retort would be: "Too bad it isn't in yours, too."

When I finally came upon the house where Lovecraft spent the last and most prolific years of his life, I found that it had been moved from its original location further down College Street. Up here, surrounded on all sides by monstrosities of brick and stone, it looked somewhat small and unimposing. A gatekeeper's residence, perhaps, but surely nothing on a par with the gargoyled mansions around it. I wondered if this was the reason that his prose, for all its inherent stylistic faults, had come through to me with such power and intensity. The sense of almost aggressive belittlement of man and his endeavours that you often find in Lovecraft's writings seemed somehow intricately connected with this dwarfed latter-day home of his. He had spent the last decade of his life in poverty here, dreaming of the ancient Victorian houses up the street, a thwarted soul spinning yarns of a compromised legacy that he felt was rightfully his.

Leaving the old part of town behind, I set out for Swan Point Cemetery where Lovecraft's headstone is supposed to be, carrying the megalomanic inscription: "I am Providence". From Angell Street I took a left down Blackstone Boulevard, and kept on past Butler Insane Asylum and the mysterious Beth-El Temple of which I could learn nothing more than its founding date of 1855. The sun was hanging low in the sky, and I knew that I had to hurry if I were to find his grave by the light of day. I followed the crooked wall of unhewn stone that lines the cemetery grounds for a mile or more. My pace was up a good notch or two, and I could tell that I was getting impatient. It was the first signs of defeat, and when I arrived at the gates, they had long since been closed for the day. A sign read "Open till 7 pm", and I could not believe that I had already spent three hours or more walking around old Providence. I wrestled with the gods of time, insisting that they give back the hours they had stolen from me. But all to no avail. The ghost of Lovecraft had escaped me, and even though notices like "Trespassers Prosecuted" and "24 HR Security Patrol" might not mean a hell of a lot to those who had already passed beyond the grave, it sure meant something to me, traveling on a Visa Waiver which basically means that I can be kicked out of the country for littering.

But even though I did not get to visit my mentor at his final unresting place, the story is not quite over yet. The gateway to the horrors of the past had been barred before me, but just a few minutes down the road, the gateway to the equally horrific realities of the present were opening up. Somewhere deep in the soil of Swan Point Cemetery, old Uncle Howie rolled comfortably in his grave.

12-05-08 056

I am crossing Hope Street to catch a cab to Manville where Luc lives when a woman literally jumps at me, screaming hysterically. I barely manage to dodge her attack, and put a few feet's distance between us. She is wearing jeans and a scruffy shirt, her face covered in blood. "It's him again!" she bursts out in a high-pitched voice. "You gotta get me out of here!"

I scan the street for potential cultists and disguised monsters, but my third eye has apparently dosed off to sleep. For a moment I consider screaming and running, too. For all I know, she could be the ominous deity herself. Too late. She grabs me by the arm, and starts raving about a safe heaven at her girlfriend's somewhere in Providence. At this point, whatever is following her, I am pretty sure it is following me as well.

I wave down the cab that I was going for myself, and open the door for her to get in. She is halfway through the door when the driver turns around, and sees her bloodied face. He immediately steps on the gas pedal, and shoots off into the darkness, sending the woman flying right back into my arms. I grab her by the hand, and drag her quickly down the street. Another cab comes by, and this time I manage to explain the situation somewhat before we get in. He continues reluctantly down the street, but soon starts talking about driving us straight to the nearest police station. Well, what do you know! Lady freaks out again, and less than a minute after actually getting into the cab, we are back out on the street again. And this time she is even crying. I precipitate a long and troubled night.

The third cab is our lucky cab. The driver is a young Mexican with a closely shaved head and a white shirt embroidered with threads of gold. Upbeat Latino music rattles every little nut and bolt of the car. He looks in the rearview mirror, puts on a disgusted face, and casually asks me what happened to my woman. Once again I find myself in the rather complex situation of trying to explain to a complete stranger what I do not know happened to another complete stranger. Luckily, being our third cab driver and all, he buys in.

As we roam the seedy-looking southern parts of town, my eyes shift from the woman's face to the meter ticking away my own cab fare home. Her voice quivers somewhere between tears and intelligibility, and to be honest, she is not making much sense. The story that I do manage to piece together is about her having a bad time with her boyfriend in Providence, going out to somewhere in Connecticut to get away from him, and then ending up returning to him, anyway. Apparently, her beaten up face is the result of that unhappy reunion.

When she finally yells out for the cab to stop, we are in a partly industrial area at the far end of Washington Street about a half-hour walk from the city centre. She blesses me with the mercy of whatever god she believes in, then scrams out the door, and disappears into some derelict apartment block. The fare is up to around thirty dollars, and I only got a few bucks more on top of that. I guess I could have just told him to drive me to the nearest ATM to pick up some more money, and then get me back home. Unfortunately, however, the damsel in distress has drained up most of my sanity, and shaved my mind down to where it could almost compete with the driver's balding head.

Just about this time I realize that I have been away long enough for people back home at Luc's place to start worrying about me. It is night, and Washington Street is long and straight and empty. I jog down a couple of blocks, more concerned about the guys back home than about myself. Only after noticing a couple of street kids hanging out in the lamplight, and a police car cruising down a side street, do I start to think that all this jogging around - done by a skinny out-of-shape white guy in a black hood - might make me seem more suspicious than necessary. I slow down, and arm myself with what is left of my patience. My camera, on the other hand, has long since run out of battery.

I make it down to the central Kennedy Plaza in good shape, and decide to check out the bus schedule, knowing as I do that bus 54 only runs every one-and-a-half hour. Magically, the next one is less than five minutes away.

It is a slow and bumpy ride, reminiscent of many a good experience aboard Romanian busses. My mind starts to trail off in the direction of Transylvania, so I quickly shuts it off, and take in what is around me instead. A couple of exchange students are sharing Ipods and bitching about not knowing where the fuck they are. I soon realize that I do not either, and decide to find a more cheerful seat closer to the driver. He has never heard of Sayles Hill Road, or even Manville, but I am way past the point of concerning myself with anyone or anything.

The bus enters a darkened parking space the size of Brown University, and pulls up in front of a mall with only the bars left open. A couple of old geezers climb on board with their walkers. They sit down next to me, and continue what appears to be their usual doomsday conversation. "This country's going down the drain," the man with the thick, combed-back gray hair and the Packer's bomber jacket says. "I don't trust any of the candidates left. Obama, Hillary, McCain - they're all in it together. Wanna give up the whole damn country to the government, and not let us decide anything for ourselves anymore." The guy with the quilted shirt and the bad breath nods in agreement. "Only good thing about it, though - we won't live to see it. Our children and our grandchildren put us in this mess, and now they're gonna have to sort it out for themselves. Suits them right, if you ask me."

I am almost reluctant to get off when a jet black woman with a big smile on her face pulls the yellow cord that runs down both sides of the bus, and tells me that she is getting off at Sayles Hill Road, too. A stop sign appears on the display at the front of the bus, and the driver pulls over. I step out, and begin the two-mile hike back to Manville. I have never been down this road before, and it is not really as if there are any sidewalks or anything, but I know the general direction and the acute sense of triumph that is growing within me. I smile at the sky, and wink at the stars, all happy to have had the cosmos play one of its little Lovecraftian horror jokes on me.

Half an hour later I am sitting at the porch with Luc and Kristian, enjoying a beer and a cigarette in the dead quiet of night. Suddenly, Luc almost jerks out of his seat. "Shit!" he says. "I just saw a meteor! All plutonium green, and whatnot!" I pretend that I am looking, but really I am not. I have had enough for one day, and I know that all the stuff I experienced today will be there again tomorrow - or any day of the week, for that matter. Providence is just that kind of place. To me it is, anyway. A phantasy home more real than I had ever imagined it to be.

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Dreaming in the Land of Dreams.

Coming home to Uncle Howie