Chapter 1
Grant, Saturday Afternoon: How Green Is My Valley
A day-long pity party where I served myself nothing but Vicodin and vodka left me near comatose last night, so this end of the world shit happened without my knowledge. My soul-sucking tantrum did me in and I slept through the morning and the beginning of the damn Winter Festival and, oh yea, what appears to be a clusterfuck of major proportions.
I had a bad day. Well, a bad week. My girlfriend left me, my art hasn’t sold and, well, you’ve probably heard stories like mine before.
And now, Saturday. The world has gone to hell, it seems. My street is on fire and I think the Brown house imploded. Trees have sunk into the ground, cars are spinning in mid-air and the children – my GOD, the children – they are like roving gangs of catatonic little monsters, stalking up and down the street, letting out high pitched screams, seemingly oblivious to the flames and whatnot. Whatever happened last night or this morning while I was in my pity-me stupor has given the neighborhood children an evil dose of rabies.
My first thought: turn on the television to see what the hell is going on, but I guess when your town is aflame and the sidewalks have buckled, the cable will go kaput. Same for the Internet, and that’s a moot point, as my computer slid off the desk to the floor in a heap of plastic shards and wires. The F4 key shot straight across the room, into the eye socket of my poseable Spider-Man and he appears to be winking a hint to “save as” before it all goes to hell. Too late, Spidey. I step on B, curse a little and that’s when I hear the pounding at the front door.
It’s the kids. They’re feral and screaming and, well, scary. I’m a grown man. A grown man with a hangover and the dulling effects of Vicodin still lingering in his brain, but a man nonetheless. I will not let some children, rabid or otherwise, make me afraid in my own home.
The pounding at the door persists. It’s the kids again and I think one of them is gnawing at the door handle. I decide to be brave.
“What? What do you want?”
“Gunh.Ugnhur.Gnnnarrrr!”
“Come again?”
“GUNHHHHHHURRG!”
And then there’s a high-pitched noise, a sound not unlike the sudden whir of a chainsaw breaking your sleep at 7am on a Saturday. The sound is coming from one of the kids. His mouth is hanging open and this god-awful sound is coming from it and then all little kids gathered around him open their mouths and do the same thing. I feel a sharp pain in my chest, fingers raking around my heart, and even in my stupor I quickly put two and two together and come up with “close the fucking door, Grant.” I slide the deadbolt closed, realizing how futile it is. It does give me a brief moment of feeling like I’ve done something to protect myself, though. I take what I can get.
“Mr. Grant! Mr. Grant!”
Oh, lord. It’s Mrs. Beasley, the old woman who lives next door to the Browns (who, apparently, no longer live anywhere) and who has an unnerving habit of putting a Mr. in front of my first name. I hear her above the cacophony of grunts and whines, her shrill voice tinged with a bit of panic. I look out the small window in my door and I see Mrs. Beasley standing on my walkway, holding this morning’s paper and looking for all the world like the universe isn’t imploding around her.
“Mr. Grant, my Sasha peed on your newspaper!” Sasha being her little fucker of a dog – some small, yapping, obnoxious white piece of fluff that’s supposed to be descended directly from royal dog blood or some shit like that. Mrs. Beasley does not seem to be aware of the Fetterling boy pawing at her housedress, mouth open and eyes blazing. This annoys me more than alarms me. I expect that if I’m going to go into full panic mode about a situation, everyone will panic right along with me.
“Open the door, Mr. Grant. I know you’re home!” She’s staggering up the walk – staggering because she’s dragging the Fetterling boy behind her and he’s clinging to her leg, emitting that chainsaw noise as he scrambles to keep up with her. “I just want to pay you for the newspaper and apologize for Sasha’s incontinence.” The last syllable of incontinence goes up a notch in pitch and Mrs. Beasley disappears from my view. Alarmed, I slide the deadbolt and open the door just a crack. That’s enough to see that the Fetterling boy has pulled Mrs. Beasley to the ground and I think for a second that he’s about to latch onto her face with his mouthful of baby teeth. But he doesn’t bite down on her. He just opens his mouth and lets out a wail that turns the head of every catatonic child and shell-shocked adult brave enough to be walking about. Mrs. Beasley just blinks, otherwise nonplussed by the wailing. However, Mr. Thompson, who has been across the street staring at his broken down house, suddenly starts shaking in his shoes. The louder the Fetterling kid wails, the more Mr. Thompson shakes. Finally the kid gives up his screaming and when he does, a small moan escapes from Mr. Thompson. With that, he falls to the ground and as I silently pronounce him dead, I notice the Fetterling kid smiling. A chilling, crooked smile. This gives me an idea for a drawing, but I lose it when my reverie is broken by a guttural sound. It’s coming from the boy, who is now on the ground. I fling the door open, forsaking my own safety (sorry, I feel the need to point that out, because I look like an ass up until now). Sasha has the kid’s arm in her teeth, dragging him off of Mrs. Beasley. There’s blood, there’s screaming, there’s growling and there’s Mrs. Beasley looking like she just woke up from a ten year coma, surprised to find out gas is four dollars a gallon. She looks around at the boy, her dog, the crumbling houses and spinning cars and asks, “Did something happen here, Mr. Grant?”
“Something. Yes.”
She pulls Sasha off the boy and kisses the dog’s nose.
“It would be polite to ask me in.”
“Would you like to come in, Mrs. Beasley?” She smiles at me. You know how sometimes you will glance at an old lady, like your grandmother, or your aunt – the one who smells like death – and you see something in them, just a small, brief glimmer, that makes you think they must have once been beautiful young women? Yea, not so much with Mrs. Beasley. Something in her smile makes me think she was an ugly, sour kid, the kind who was destined to become an old lady walking her incontinent dog in her bathrobe every morning.
I clear the couch of plaster that has been raining down from the ceiling and offer Mrs. Beasley a seat. Sasha is dripping blood out of her mouth, and I think she peed on my rug, but the resale value of this house has gone to shit in the past few hours anyhow.
Another high-pitched squeal from outside, not as feral as the boy’s. Before I can figure out the source of the scream, the front door flies open and there’s Terri Brown, the neurotic high school kid from across the street. She’s babbling about vampires, aliens, robots, the rapture, nuclear war and something about never getting on instagram again. She’s freaking out at a million miles an hour and I let her go until her freak engine has run itself out. She collapses on the floor and curls up into a little ball of Armageddon sorrow. She’s all gangly legs and arms, positioned on my rug in what could be a really difficult Yoga pose. I imagine it’s a pose meant to relax you when the world is ending. Hurry Sundown or something. I silently chastise myself for making a yoga joke because Cherilynn would take offense and then I remember Cherilynn left me a few days ago. I’m about to go see if there’s anything left of the gin when Terri starts hyperventilating and whispering that she’s having a panic attack. Sasha runs over to her, licks her face a few times.
“Mr. Grant?” Mrs. Beasley stands up, smooths out her housedress. “Can you make me a cup of tea?”
I take stock of the situation. Outside: end of the world, screaming, killing-machine children. Inside: An old lady with sudden onset dementia, a teenage girl with a panic problem and Sasha the Incontinent Wonder Pup. I have all the makings of a failed sitcom.
“Terri,” I say. “What in god’s name happened out there today?”
Terri takes a break from her wheezing to inform me “A lot of stuff” happened. Gee, thanks. I let it go for now. I don’t think I want to know what happened yet. My head feels fuzzy and my brain’s not quite working and I don’t think I can handle whatever tale of Armageddon she’s going to tell me.
It’s not just the drug and alcohol hangover that makes me unable to process all of this. It’s that bad things never happen here. We’re in Greener Valley. The happiest place on earth. The place where everything is outwardly perfect.
Let me tell you a bit about this town. It will make you understand my thought process. Maybe. Also, you might now be thinking “how the hell does this bachelor artist dude know all his neighbors? People like that don’t mingle with suburbanites. Hell, people like that that don’t even live in the suburbs. What’s this guy’s deal anyway?”
Anyway, this place. You know that bar where everyone knows your name? That’s Greener Valley. It’s the sort of place one passes through and says “Oh, how quaint,” but rarely stops to investigate the quaintness. It’s charming and cute and old-fashioned, but tourists on their way to swoon over spectacular fall foliage don’t like charming and cute unless it’s complete with faux boutiques selling designer jewelry and specialty clothing stores where you can purchase a $400 tie designed by some aging rock star, with all proceeds going to PETA. We don’t have that here. We have stores that sell second hand Precious Moments and plastic frogs with felt eyes, little froggy hands holding up a sign that says, "I’d croak without you."
Greener Valley is old-fashioned not because it wants to be a tourist trap for people missing their youth, but because it never changed. At least not outwardly.
Back in the late ‘60s, a development company named Grass is Greener – recognizing that empty land was potentially profitable land - planted some grass seeds and broke ground on the hopes and dreams of thousands of nuclear families. As the grass took root and poked out of the ground, houses did the same, cookie cutter enclaves rising up from freshly dug foundations. The streets were paved and made to wind and curve and flow into each other and given names of flowers and trees and dead presidents. The green in Greener Valley was all newly grown or shipped in and there was no valley to speak of, but the powers that be who named the place thought it sounded peaceful and idyllic and quaint and people really dug that stuff in the late 1960's.
Modeled after the successful Long Island suburbs, Greener Valley took the shape of a sprawling community, but stopped short of being a connected one. While the ‘burbs down on Long Island are a hundred different towns stitched together with highways and strips malls, Greener Valley stands on its own, isolated from neighboring towns by apple orchards, man-made lakes and a lot of wasted land.
So families like mine moved into Greener Valley and it became one of those places where people make root, another way of saying they never leave. Kids grew up, graduated, got married and bought houses three blocks from their parents and had children who went to the same schools they did. I went to school with people named Fetterling and Freeman and Weiss and Hoffman and then there would be a Freeman-Hoffman merger, making little Freeman-Hoffman children who would grow up to buy the same kind of house their parents owned, in the same town. Or they would be like me and actually buy their parents’ house. My folks did the proper old person thing and moved to Florida when Dad retired. They said it was because they no longer wanted to deal with New York winters, but at one point Dad pulled me aside and said “We just need to get the hell out of here,” which was odd and unsettling and I never questioned him further because I was kind of wrapped up in the business of falling apart. He even tried to talk me out of buying the house from them, but in the end he said it would be “safer” with me and again, didn’t know what he meant, didn’t care. My parents can be strange.
Greener Valley grew, but it only grew within itself, if that makes sense. Houses expanded; larger kitchens were added on, sky-high dormers were plopped down on top and driveways were widened to fit the Suburbans and Navigators that dot the roads of Greener Valley like dinosaurs. But mostly, everything remains the same. The Shelley house still has the wishing well out front and the Paulson house still has the shag, olive-green carpet in the family room and the Robertsons still have their Dodge Dart with the AM push button radio. Well, last I looked. For all I know they all went the way of the Brown house. By which I mean, gone.
Inside the homes, behind the walls, life lives out in current ways and kids hover around the TV playing video games and married men pick up lonely housewives on the internet and the dishwashers and central air conditioning are all state of the art. But on the very surface of Greener Valley there remains a thin layer of nostalgia, as if the residents can’t quite escape the grasp of the past. Or don’t want to.
On Saturdays, Greener Valley works and plays in unison - at least from 10 to 6 - to the sounds of Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy. He’s what Greener Valley has in the form of celebrity – unless you count Sharon Weiss, aka Sharon Cummings, who went on to become internet famous by performing sins upon herself on video for the low, low price of $14.95 a month, Visa, Master Card, Diners Club. Stu’s radio show plays nothing but oldies; cheesy pop records from the ‘60s and ‘70s about love and loss and bubble gum. Everyone in Greener Valley listens to his show and they love it all in a completely unironic way. Stu’s voice and those records are everywhere on Saturdays. Stu also does the weeknight 6-10 shift but the Saturday gig, that’s special. From every garage sale, every store and home, everywhere you go in Greener Valley, wafts the smooth baritone of Stu and the soundtrack that keeps Greener Valley firmly cocooned in a world that has yet to outgrow bellbottoms and transistor radios. You can go from store to store and home to home without missing a beat, starting with “Oh ho, ho, it’s magic” at the corner of Main and Petunia and ending up with the fade of “never believe, it’s not so” at the open air flea market at Main and Kennedy. I stay here because of this. The life of an artist is never stable, never consistent. But here in Greener Valley, stability and consistency are the hallmark of living. What seems stale to an outsider has become pure comfort to me. You know how some people eat grilled cheese and tomato soup when they want to feel comfort? That’s what Stu McLundy and the rituals of this town give me. They feed my soul when everything else about my life makes it want to shrivel up and die. Ok, sure. The alcohol and Vicodin also provide that, to an extent.
If you come out to Greener Valley on any holiday, you’ll understand. The Fourth of July town picnic with its school marching bands and corn shucking contest; the way Main Street is dressed up for Christmas. It’s the Halloween parade and the fall square dance and New Year’s Eve ball that make one feel lured in by the simple life; the place in the past where people weren’t so busy and inattentive that they couldn't all get together on a Saturday morning in December to decorate Main Street and drink the gallons of hot chocolate and marshmallows provided by the Greener Valley Women’s Civic Club.
A hand carved wooden sign at the entrance to town declares Greener Valley to be “The Happiest Place on Earth.” That the town has yet to receive a cease and desist letter from Disney always amazes me. Is Greener Valley really the happiest place on earth? Are the shag rugs and Christmas pageants and Dodge Darts in the driveway enough to swallow up whatever loneliness or despair or frustration goes on behind the drapes and mini-blinds?
Probably not.