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The idea of living in a haunted house appeals to me. I like the idea that my home, the boring bricks and warped windows that each day don’t seem to add up to anything special, might harbor a secret past, a secret life, some slumbering memory that is beyond me. Unfortunately, no house I’ve ever lived in has been haunted by anything more than mold and cat hair. The closest to a paranormal experience I can recall was once when my brother’s room started to smell like sulfur, though I think that was less attributable to a Satanic presence and more to an Easter Egg that had been hidden in his closet and never found.
One weekend when I was in high school, a group of us decided to go out to this haunted house we’d heard kids at school talk about. A slanted and peeling farmhouse on the far side of a field on the edge of town, beyond the quarry. My skin prickled at the possibilities. Dark halls. Broken windows with billowing, moonlit curtains. Soft voices murmuring around corners.
It was just then spring and the air was damp and clean. We parked in the gravel lot of a closed warehouse and climbed over a rusty barbwire fence, careful not to cut ourselves. There were five of us in the group. Two boys and three girls. We formed an elaborate quincunx of crushes and rivalries that none of us fully understood, especially not as we crossed a black field under a starless night, as black blobs lowed lazily around us. I could smell deodorant and detergent.
And then, the clouds parted for a moment and through a line of bare Maple trees we could see the house. Slumped and broken but also grand in the way the ruined things can be.
Of course, we were scared. Teeth rattled teeth. Fists clutched wrists. We circled the house twice, building up the courage to make our way inside. When we finally mounted the porch and pushed the front door open, I felt like we would all explode.
Broken beer bottle shards gleamed in flashlight beams and crunched under tennis shoe soles. In the salon, to the left of the foyer, stood a piano, the only remaining furnishing. I wanted to play it, but others said, “Are you crazy? Don’t play ghost music in a haunted house on a haunted piano. Do not play that ghost music!” On the walls were written the names of bands I didn’t like and the names of people I didn’t know. Professions of love and lust 4ever and 4ever, but long since extinguished. I am certain of that.
Standing still and silent, we waited for something extraordinary to happen to us. We listened and breathed and waited. No walls bled. No spirits moaned. No lights capered about the corners.
“Shit,” we said, “This is bullshit. Just another empty house.”
As we were about to head up the stairs to see if the bedrooms were more terrifying, something somewhere fell over with a sudden thud and four frightened Kentucky teenagers fled into the dark night, noticing for the first time that the air in the field smelled like cow manure.
With Gabe gone, Videogum has become a haunted house and you are nervous teens traipsing in, hoping to find something worth having come all the way out here for at this time of night and I am a young ghost hoping that the weak rattling of my thin chains has been sufficient make your cheeks flush and your eyes grow wide, if only for a moment. I hope you had a good time.
(Thanks to Gabe, Scott and Amrit for asking me to do this. Thanks to A Serious Monster for editorial assistance.)
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I had to go through the arduous process of logging in (the ‘new’ commenting system has never worked for me) just to say:
I first learned the word “quincunx” from Mr. David Foster Wallace in “Infinite Jest.”
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <#
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see
That’ll do, mans. That’ll do.
Dear Mans,
You are my favorite.
Love,
njoy
Your teenage years seem a lot like a Scooby Doo plot.
“And I would have gotten away with it, too! If it weren’t for these meddling hordes of Asian people!”
Mans, it has been a pleasure and an honor to have spent this day with you. I feel more thoughtful and careful and grateful now than I did this morning.
Thank you Mans. Keep fighting the good fight.
Mans, today was so crazy at work that the little bits of your guest blogging that I’ve been able to read have been just the perfect antidote to the craziness. Good heavens you’re funny, thanks for the laughs today.
Mans, when you win the Pulitzer someday, make sure you remember the ones who upvoted you before you were famous.
5 teenagers went in.. 4 came out?
Have you notified the police?
5 teenagers when in. 4 teenagers came out. Only one came out a Mans.
And now for the origin of Maggie’s pacifier!
What origin? We got it for $1.95 down at the Safeway!
Very good Mans! Reallytruely!
btw, where are you from?
I’m dying to know that too. Kentucky is my ancestral home. I have a connection with Mans! Sorta!
I am from Danville, Kentucky.
whoops! i meant to upvote RogerVanSant down below me but missed. Sorry, no downvote intended.
Though I do like the idea of there being someone out there who just really has it in for Danville, Kentucky.
If you’d spent the first 22 years of your life there, you’d downvote it for sure.
Excellent choice. Good selection!
Mans, I had a snow day today and loved reading all your posts. Write more! I would totally buy your book.
I took would purchase your book.
Though somehow I read all these posts as an americana documentary narrated by Ken Burns.
Thank you Mans… you are definitely doing it right.
Beep Boop
Boop Beep
Sound like Mans
Is going to sleep
Nice work today.
Or a robot is making a call at the UCLA library.
Ching Chong
Ching Ching
I made a call
To Lisa Ling
I hope everyone watched that video, or I’m in for a shitstorm of downvotes.
Maybe I’m just dumb, but where’s the I’d Hit That column?
You must’ve missed the David Foster Wallace post.
Bye mans. Thank you for this magical blog day. I’m just going to reread all these posts and listen to this now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKmldYSDJaM
Great stuff Mans. Great stuff.
Really excellent stuff today. Yay mans!
Aaaaahhhh! It’s the turtle that ate Col. James Harrod!
You’re the Mans now, dog!
Best guest blogger so far, and that’s far from an insult to any of the others.
Indeed, everyone has done a great job so far in the short history of guest bloogers, but the bar has risen, from now on. Take note, Joe Mande!
Good job mans! I salute you.
Can we get another picture of you, but with your eyes hidden?
I think at some point soon this evening I’m going to curl up with my laptop and reread your posts, because it’s probably higher quality than anything else I was planning on reading tonight. And then I will invent a way to give you a hug over the internet.
Mans, the portion of your face shown above is remarkably similar to the same portion of mine, except my eyes are green.
Cool story bro!
As the air swells and moves in ways that resemble a silent ballet, a performance for a solitary viewer, a wanderer of sorts, hidden behind doorways and fields, there are things that once danced in the gleam of a small boy’s eye, resting now until one final firing of the synapses, a spasm clenching to an amalgam of memories created and recreated. The filed sparrow’s song has vanished once more in the constant rhythm that permeates the skin, and flesh, the pale reflection vibrating on the surface. But below, a silence, as if a moment after a distant whisper, an image caught in the corners of another life, a truer life, a life who’s eyes watch from beyond the horizon, a place we can not see, but a place we can visit again, and surrender to the hum we tried to to bury for so long, now closer and clearer, it is but a childhood song. OK BYE MANS! BYE!! BUH-BYE!! C YA!! WOULDN’T WANNA B YA!!
Great work, Mans! A really interesting departure from the other, more openly (is this a good way of phrasing it?) humor-oriented writing styles around here! I’m honored that we follow each other on Twitter!!
I said how awesome I think all of your posts have been in the Battle: Los Angeles thread which means it’s only fitting for me to say here that I never showered after PE either. I was lazy and lucky that only a few girls bothered to do so at my school so no big deal.
I still love Gabe, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also appreciate the change of pace!
During the last round of guest blogging, I was bummed that there was no Mans. So I’m thankful for his turn. I’ve been admiring those pieces of prose on Mans’ website for a long time. And he really classes up this joint.
Mans, I like your voice. Your writing has wit with substance and integrity without condescension.
I could not read all of yesterday’s posts at work without it being obvious that I was not working, what with the laughing and crying and hollering “MORE! MORE!” (If I still had my job at the Oscar factory, though, I totally could have gotten away with it.)
So I am late with the commenting, but, dag, yesterday was solid gold. I am sure there is a gif that would illustrate my sentiments more articulately, but I am not sure that I can find a picture of a baby sloth wearing a big foam hand that says “YOU’RE #1.” Let’s just pretend I did and that, while we appreciate the gesture, we all know that Mans is exponentially more awesome than the baby sloth, the big foam hand, or the combination of baby sloth and big foam hand.
Today’s posts are off to a commandeble start, too. See what I did there? Yep.
I read every day because Gabe is the best, no doy, but I rarely leave a comment because I don’t have that much to say. But! I wanted to comment to let you know that I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed your writing style. Just wonderful! Should you start a blog of your own (or if you already have one?) I would definitely follow it.
Thanks for covering for Gabe for the day!
Thank you very much. I do have a blog of my own: cavecitysink.tumblr.com. And also, thank you very much again!