Damien Galeone

It’s late October and in my estimation it’s the best time of year. It’s time to enjoy the simple things, heated beverages, apples; embrace your basic bitch self and go for pumpkin-spiced everything! Candles, drinks, snacks, shirts, underwear – the more pumpkins the better! Tis the time of year to marvel at colors, to wonder at the lives of our ancestors, and to be thankful for modernity. It’s the time when you slap your forehead and go ‘whoa, where did the summer go!’

This is the time of year to break out your sweaters, to enjoy a blustery, wet day only made better by the fact that you end that day by going home. Homes are cozier this time of year. Sitting on the couch all but requires a blanket to snuggle into.

And what better activity to do while you’re snuggled up than read a spooky book or some stories. Spooky, not horrifying. So no news, no updates on the spray tanned colostomy bag inhabiting the Oval Office. Just some good old fashioned scary stories to make you happy that you live indoors and your life is largely void of witches and zombies. So, what to read?

John Langan should be on that list. The book of stories The Wide Carnivorous Sky has some seriously scary tales. The title story among them. This book includes a zombie-esque retelling of Our Town and Mother of Stone, a Headless Horseman tale that you will think about for years (as I have). His novel The Fisherman is cosmically terrifying. You will never look at the woods nor the ocean’s horizon the same way again. His take on the wendigo will make you never trust another human being again – especially one who says they’re hungry.  

Mexican author Mariana Enriquez is another scary tale writer who should be on your October list. I have read some random stories, but her collection Things We Lost in the Fire is very worthwhile. Based in Buenos Aires, a lot of her stories are claustrophobic with elements that are not even the main concern. Soldiers, police officers, rundown cities inhabit her stories like spiders and sea serpents. Her stories are clouded with a sense of unease and doom; it’s as if even if the story works out in some way (they don’t) things still won’t be right. Get it.

After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones should be on your list. Warning: once you get started with Graham Jones, you won’t stop. After The People Lights, get into his Indian Lake trilogy and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Lonegan’s Luck is maybe the greatest zombie story I’ve ever read.

If you like horror short stories, add anything edited by Ellen Datlow to your October list. There are so many ‘best horror’ collections out there, but by far the most solid and convincing are ones edited by Ellen Datlow. If I ever meet her, I am going to thank her for the most enjoyable 6,000 hours of my life.

This is the time of year to enjoy spooking yourself out. These are some that have given me the shivers, the spooks, the creeps, and good case of the look over my shoulders (into the wall behind me, because you are never safe when it comes to scary stories). Feel free to read these. I’d love some feedback if you’re game and if you’d like to leave your own spooky story recommendations in the comments, I would be so appreciative that I wouldn’t even sell you out to a wendigo. Unless it was you or me, in which case, sayonara!

It’s a Friday afternoon and I’m reading on my couch. I’ve come across a random account of a clash between some cowboys and a band of Cheyenne in 1865. Its matter-of-fact descriptions of ambush and violence are so terrifying that even now – on a couch in a locked flat in a European capital 160 years later – I still feel edgy and cast looks behind me into my recently painted wall.  

I hear the telltale signs of Burke getting the dog ready for a walk. But today she has big plans (oh, it’s not Indian ambush big, but big for 21^st century Prague). She is bringing the dog out and heading to a café to read some study materials for a course she’s doing. I admire it; and that is where my emotional involvement in this action ends, because I don’t have to go anywhere and I don’t have to do anything. She steps out with the dog and I snuggle into the couch and read about other people’s misery. Bliss.

This bliss ends about three minutes later when I hear the door unlock and Burke enter the apartment. The dog’s little shih tzu feet tip-tap the floor. Something has happened. I sit up.

“She shit all over herself,” says Burke, answering the question that my silence has asked.

“Oh man.”

A birthday only tends to come around once a year or so. Twice, perhaps, depending on your spiritual bend. More, I suppose, if you’re a grifter who travels a lot or who has a several separate groups of friends who never talk to each other directly. It’s not a bad idea if you want to score on gifts or free drinks, but this level of lying in permanence would drive me to drink – and not in a healthy way.

In the ** years I have spent on the planet as a cognizant human being, I have noticed that people deal with their birthdays in very different ways. There are those who jealously guard the occasion as if it’s a deposit of gold or the location of a store in Prague that has good peanut butter. To address these guys’ birthdays is seen as an insult of high magnitude. Others come in the opposite with a lot of look at me look at me look at me. One girl on Facebook put out a reminder a week before: You guys, it’s my birthday week!

To be honest, this sort of crave for attention draw raises both of my eyebrows. But I lower them quickly. When it comes to your birthday – the one day a year where you are special – then all is game and no holds shall be barred.

I tend to keep my birthdays lowkey. I’d say I don’t like a lot of fanfare, but the truth is, I have trouble remembering names and, should I partake in the whiskey too much, events or ways home. A small shindig means fewer people to apologize to the next day for social faux-pas – if it’s even necessary. This is what I like: a few people who know what they are getting into, who are old enough not to care, who will drink as much as me, and just as likely forget what it is I might be apologizing for. These are my people.

No, if I have a birthday tendency, it’s the self-allowance. It’s the ‘go ahead! It’s your birthday!’  attitude. When I was younger and had more time, better balance, fewer responsibilities, and no ability for good judgment, this attitude would be applied to drinking. Start at noon? Why not! And so days started earlier and ended later. (read: I also had stamina). For a decade or two, my birthdays ended the following morning and often with a double-stacked hangover. Given the right circumstances, it started up again for day two. And in something like a deranged Easter celebration, it might even creep into day three. Why not? It’s my birthday. (i.e. was / three days ago).

This is no longer the case. Sure, there’s a bit of partying and tippling. But it’s mostly contained to a night with friends and the next morning is usually filled with ibuprofen and liquid IV and lots of television. No, now my relaxed birthday attitude is applied to food, relaxation, and the ability to completely avoid the world. You want another chocolate? Sure you can! It’s your birthday! Have three! Read that book. OK! Hey, what’s three chocolates without a fourth!? Maybe I’ll order food to go with my book. This is great. My phone’s ringing. Oh well, I’m reading.

It was glorious.

Were my 25-year-old-self to witness my spectacular birthday plans, he would cry. He would also be drunk, so crying would come easier to him. What a loser, he might exclaim. Then he’d go for a three-day bender that would mess his head up for a month.

Oh, I know it’s an old story: person grows up. But it’s one that feels quite nice to the grown-up. There’s a quiet joy in knowing deep within yourself that you derive joy from simpler things than you used to. While I was younger, a night had to be filled with excitement and people. I was out so often that my apartment forgot what I looked like. Nowadays, excitement is cleaning the flat before bed, resting on the couch after a long day of work and feeling content. It may sound boring – and maybe it is – but it’s absolutely perfect. Especially if you can eat naughty food along with this perfection.

I wake up at 5:30 in a warm, comfortable bed. The air has lost any indication that summer lasted up till ten days ago. It’s crisp and cool. It’s still dark and will be for a solid hour more. I stretch. A small white dog senses my movement and instantly approaches for head scratches. I have had a good night’s sleep, or not bad anyway (only got up to pee once, heartburn stayed at bay). An optimism that can only come from being prone and without a full bladder at the same time allows me to approach the belief that today will be good.

And then I make the fatal mistake of reaching for my phone.

With 45 seconds (at most) I have been inundated with the unbelievably bad news. Not only from the day before – no no no – my phone and Reddit make it possible for me to be filled in on the world’s worst events up to about eight minutes ago. I have been informed of murders, shootings, rich peoples’ attempts to permanently screw those who made the disgraceful move of being born with less money. Before I stand up, put on my slippers, or hit the button on my coffee machine I have heard the day’s threats, complaints, and woes from the president of the United States, I have rolled my eyes at the outrageous lies of those with right-wing political agendas, shaken my head at the mere existence of ICE, and I have balled my fists in anger and frustration at the astounding hypocrisy of the American GOP.

Then I pee.

I suppose the saddest part of all this is that if you live in the Western world then my morning probably sounds a lot like your morning. Maybe not the dog. Because of real time news apps, Reddit, and any other number of apps, the worst news in the world is delivered to us at all times of the day: before dinner, after dinner, before we get out of bed, in the middle of a meeting. It doesn’t matter; it gets to us at all times.   

Fifteen years ago, this might have seemed like hell. Who would want to be informed of all the bad things going on in the world at the touch of your finger? But the funny thing is, I look at this information – eat it up, really – on purpose.

On this little box that I find that information on, I can also read poetry, any classic of literature, erotica; I can read the beautifully-poetic and resonant insights of Marcus Aurelius. I can look at any work of art that has ever been discovered.

But I don’t.

I can tell my personal AI assistant to conjure up any kind of comfort, encouragement, or positive affirmations it can think of.

But I don’t.     

I look up the bad news of the day and I spend the rest of my day under the unbearable weight of the shit world being a shit place run by its shittiest people who treat everyone else like shit.

I mean, it’s been worse. I’m sure people woke up with more angst during the Bubonic Plague. The leadup to the sack of Rome probably wasn’t a great time of comfort for its citizens, Vandals bearing down on them with quivers full of comeuppance.

Oh, I know things will get better. They have to. There will be a swing back to reason and hope and kindness. But to be honest, I’d be happy if the American president was not the biggest asshole on the planet. That fact alone would make getting up to pee at 5:31 am an easier thing to do.

Sometime in the late 18^th century, a bunch of French people got it in their heads that rather than walk around, they’d like to fly around. To accomplish this, they looked towards China where inventors in the 2^nd century BCE developed Kongming. Though this sounds like a dynasty of giant apes, it just means ‘sky lantern’. They used hot air to make paper lanterns lighter than air and used them to send military signals. It’s from the idea of Kongming that French wannabe flyboys created the hot air balloon.

Just as space programs sent chimps and dogs into space, balloonists played the same game. On September 19 1983, the Montgolfier brothers loaded the world’s first hot air balloon, a 42-foot-high balloon made of fabric and paper, with a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The sheep was a stand-in for a its perceived nearness to human physiology. The duck was a control accustomed to high altitudes. The rooster was to test the effects of altitude on a flightless bird. We can only hope the rooster enjoyed irony. The flight lasted 8 minutes. There is no record as to the animals’ reaction.

The first manned fight took place on November 21 1783 in a paper and silk balloon. Francois Pilatrê de Rozier and Francois Laurent stood on a circular platform and fed wood into a fire through openings on either side of the balloon’s skirt. The balloon reached an altitude of 500 feet and travelled about 5½ miles before landing in a farm field. However, the sight of a fire-breathing behemoth landing near their homes had startled the locals, and the two Frenchmen were being charged by literally pitchfork-wielding villagers. The balloonists had no choice but to soothe the terrified villagers by offering the champagne they’d brought along. The world’s first in-flight drink was enjoyed a month later when Jacques Charles poured a glass of champagne for his fellow passenger while floating above France. Thus began the era of drinking in the sky.   

In the 1920s–1930s a lot of that sky drinking was done on giant hydrogen-filled airships called dirigibles. Zeppelins. Airplanes existed as an air travel option, but they were unpressurized, turbulent terror machines that flew so low that one could frantically wave to people in tall buildings. Dirigibles offered the day’s elite a much calmer – and much more lavish – experience. Dirigible travel took time (Brazil to Europe took three days) so there wasn’t much else to do but eat, drink, talk, and look out the window. The range of cocktails served on the Hindenburg, the world’s most dubiously famed dirigible, was impressive and categorized under sours, flips, fizzes, cobblers and cocktails. So much drinking was done on dirigibles that the menu offered hangover cures. With the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, dirigible air travel literally went up in flames. It seemed that televised footage of air catastrophe along with the shrieking pleas of a commentator stayed alive in people’s nightmares no matter how much booze they drank.

So, we moved on to drinking on airplanes. The Douglas DC-3 pressurized cabins in the mid-1930s, but things really changed when the Civil Aeronautics Board regulated prices and seating. This limited airlines’ competitive strategy to offering luxury services – i.e. good food and alcohol. Airlines created unique menus and signature drinks. Pan Am went luxury with coursed meals and fine wines. Delta’s Royal Service offered free Champagne, canapés and cocktails. Mini-liquor bottles became ubiquitous in the home bars of businessmen all across America. Others went slightly more off brand. In the 1960s, Mohawk Airlines places were decorated like rail cars, with stewardesses dressed as dance hall ladies serving free beer, cigars, and pretzels. Western Airlines served Margaritas on Mexico routes. Continental Airlines became the tiki-lounge in the skies, serving passengers with Mai Tais and Dungeness crab. The jet age brought lounges and piano bars. The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser featured a spiral staircase to a downstairs cocktail lounge. American Airlines even installed a piano bar. From 1969, the Boeing 747 could fit more than 1 ½ passengers than any plane up till then, potentially getting 400 passengers shitcanned in their 30,000-foot-high bars and lounges. The party ended with the Deregulation Act of 1978, which removed price and route controls. And from there it’s a slippery slope to Ryanair charging passengers for carryon bags and, no doubt at some point, to be on planes with windows.

It’s great when a plan comes together. And terrifying. We decided a while ago to get our place painted. I guess there’s something about white walls with occasional patches of ‘who knows what that was’ that doesn’t quite shout ‘home.’ We needed some color.

Well, that’s the fun part. You get to look at swatches and imagine what the flat looks like in yellow or maroon or light green or the kind of blue that looks like a nice day even when it’s raining. But the thing is, you can do that forever. You can pitch, snoop; there’s an app wherein you can apply paint to a picture of your living room. And so Burke sent me 540 pictures of me sitting in my armchair reading an e-reader and sipping a coffee with the orange, yellow, blue, and gray walls. It was like the Civil War.  

Finally, we found a company online and, after a few texts, there was a man standing in my living room suffering through my bad Czech and zapping my walls with an electric tape measure.

“Probably October,” he said.

“That’s fine.” And I meant it. For there’s nothing better than doing something and getting things into motion. But if there is, it’s doing something, getting things into motion and then not having to do anything about it for a while. I went back to my John Langan horror stories, lived my life, and breathed a sigh of relief.  

A day later a text came: How about Tuesday?

This Tuesday? As in six days from now, Tuesday?

Yeah, that one. Tuesday.

OK! Sure!

I went into panic mode. Now, I had to do things.

In the last year, the first number in my age became a 5. Now, I have not had the reaction one might think I’d have. I didn’t run out and get my lips bee-stung and while I can comb my hair with a towel, I have yet to put in an order for Propecia. It’s just getting older and it’s not too bad as long as you don’t mind permanently sore hips and the fact that you may end up in the ER if you sneeze while doing math in your head. Otherwise, I’m good.

We have so much more information these days than when my dad became first-number-5. When he did that back in the late 1990s, his doctor probably introduced his forefinger to old Mr. Rectum and told him to keep up his calcium levels. If such tests were done in the early 1970s, I’m sure the doctor even put out his cigarette to give a similar test to my grandfather. Nowadays, medical advancements help us avoid some terrible outcomes that were otherwise a fact of life for older people. And there seems to be a much more informed online peanut gallery in terms of how to age well. We now have several thousand people telling us how to be a 22-year-old 60-year-old and a 30-year-old retiree.

As far as I can tell, I should eat loads of spinach, one steak a week, chicken like it’s going out of style, and fill my mornings with flax, grapefruit, vitamins B, C, D, magnesium, and zinc. In between shovelling those things into my mouth, I need to run, lift, do palates, and as many push-ups as I can without dying on the floor. I can have one soda a year, one beer a decade, and if I so much as look at tobacco my face is going to explode.

No problemo.

I head into the living room at 6:20 pm. I take up the rocking chair. I warm up with some Phillies pregame. At 6:40 pm my dad comes in and takes up the armchair on my right. The game begins.

My schedule when visiting home is pretty open, but there are a few scheduled events. Dinner is at 5:30 every day, the house is more or less empty of young people by 8 am, and I am expected to be in the living room for each Phillies game.

I am fine with each of these rules – especially the game. Nobody else in the house enjoys baseball besides my dad and I, so game time is more or less quiet time. Each game time I arrive at my rocking chair like the at-heart octogenarian I am. I have my water and pretzels. My dad has a water and whatever kind of chocolate he found on his way in.

Baseball is one of the few visual media my dad and I can watch together without ending up in prison. His taste and mine has deviated greatly since I was four months old. My dad likes Korean pop dramas and I like Columbo. It was never going to work. But with baseball, we become the commentators nobody can hear. A thing for which I am enormously grateful.  

We discuss actors, movies, books, lakes in Geneva, the good points and failings of each player. And hoagies. And when it’s over, we mosey on with the rest of our day.  

After a five-day roadtrip, I return to the rocking chair. It’s quiet. We’re both a little under the weather. Then I get a lot under the weather. He adjourns to the kitchen, which is right next to the living room separated by a window with two shutters. Our banter continues, but it’s louder.

‘Hey, nice play!’

‘Are there any pretzels in there?!’

Two days later. I am watching the game. Schwarber is up to bat. The count is 2–2. The crowd goes quiet. The sound of a clap comes from the kitchen. The pitcher throws a ball. 3–2. A kitchen table rattling under a hand slap. Schwarber strikes out. The next inning, Realmuto is down in the count 0–2 when a cheer comes from the kitchen. Three seconds later, Realmuto hits a homer into the upper deck.   

It’s not a crystal ball he’s got; it’s a TV that’s three seconds ahead of mine. While this wouldn’t have an effect on me in general – I don’t care if Junwoo kisses Jiwoo under the eucalyptus tree before he meets Jiho near the enchanted forest of Gly-ho. But the excitement and enjoyment underlying baseball is sort of predicated on not knowing what is going to happen until it does. When you have the human spoiler alert watching the game twenty feet away, it sort of gives it away.

I let him know about this and the struggle becomes clear instantly. You see, my dad can’t keep a secret. He thinks he can, he says he can, but he cannot. This goes hand-in-hand with my dad’s movie-watching habits. He will directly give away a movie ending – in the middle of a movie. ‘No, it’s not him, it’s his sister who’s the killer.’ At the very least, he’ll let you know he knows something. ‘Just watch this. This is a great scene.’ If he picks up a throw pillow, someone is about to get eviscerated onscreen.

So to tell him not to give away the next play is a tough ask.

That evening, Bryce Harper is up and the bases are loaded. Harper’s got a 2–2 count. The pitcher starts his windup. A groan from the kitchen. It’s quickly followed by a strangled cheer. Harper strikes out. An inning later, the third baseman for the other team grounds to second. As the second baseman fields the ball, I hear my dad say ‘Oh fucking God-yay!’ The second baseman throws the ball into the stands.

‘Did you see that?’

‘Yeah.’

Despite these attempts to silence his radar, it’s too hard for him. The game for me becomes a series of grunts, yells, table slaps, cheers, claps, and hurrahs. I find an old pair of bombardier headphones and affix them to my ears. This seems to do the trick. Then I remove them and it’s still quiet. I head to the shuttered window and watch my dad bite his tongue to avoid broadcasting his disappointment in the last batter of the inning.

The fix comes when we put masks on. We talk through them and look like two guys playing birds in a movie. He pulls down his mask to take a bite of a popsicle. I fit a few pretzels under my mask.

‘I knew he was going to strike out.’

‘Yeah. What a jerk.’