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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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BY NOAH HAWLEY - - - - Way back in the 1970s, before cable television, before pop music, before reality TV, there was a city called Manhattan located somewhere on the east coast of the continental United States. And every year around this time they had a parade. All the freaks came down to the West Village dressed up like the dead. I was 6. I was 8. I was 10. I lived on a quiet brownstone-lined street near Abington Square Park with my parents and my twin brother and my grandmother. Like all New York institutions, the parade started as a small and quirky shout. An artist in Westbeth started making these huge papier-mâché marionettes and monster heads, and sometime after dark on Halloween night, after the drugs had kicked in, or the alcohol had taken effect, the crowd, at first just a few dozen, then later hundreds, would stagger out into the New York night, passing, as they did, my house, where my family and I would sit on the stoop and watch them go. Cities, in general, are not haunted places the way rural areas are, with their wooded grottos and isolated homes that collect ominous auras. Cities are so much bigger than the creepy history of one house, one apartment. With 18 million people in New York, you are never truly alone, and this brings us to what New Yorkers are really afraid of: each other. The haves are afraid of the have-nots. The have-nots are afraid of the cops. My friend Matthew Herzog would come watch the parade sometimes. His parents were divorced and his father lived in a townhouse on West 13th Street. His father was the author of the novels Orca and The Swarm, which had both been made into successful B movies. We were at that age, 12, 13, where puberty is just starting; a rush of wakefulness as the engine of maturity turns over. Matthew's father had a girlfriend, what I now recognize as a trophy girl, beautiful and buxom and given to sunbathing topless on Matthew's father's patio. I remember her breasts in the sunlight, the gentle brown slope of her hair—my first true sexual memory. Matthew lusted for this woman, who was not his mother, but who shared his father's bed. What a strange twist on the Oedipus myth. What an unsettling thing to suddenly recognize your father as a sexual being, and see yourself in his shadow, stalking the same unsuspecting woman. One day after school Matthew showed me the walkie-talkie he kept in his room. Its mate was taped in the "on" position to the underside of Matthew's father's bed, where it would broadcast, loud and clear, the sounds of his father's fornication. Now when I think back on those memories, I picture him lying there at night, the odd, urgent, ghostly sounds emanating from the plastic box in his hand. This was what haunted Matthew, not ghosts or goblins, or city freaks, but the specter of his parents' divorce, the mixed feelings of love and hate he had, and how he was now forced to separate them, to have specific feelings for each parent, as opposed to the commonality of feeling the rest of us have. He was haunted by his own impending maturity, by his own future relationships and their inevitable failure, by the likelihood of following in his father's footsteps. He was haunted by urges he didn't understand, urges that made him bug his father's bedroom, that made him crouch at the top of the stairs spying on his father's naked girlfriend splayed out in the sun. And at night, he was haunted by her cries, cries he probably didn't really understand, sounds of passion and pain, a woman, not his mother, grunting, yelling, speaking in tongues, begging for some kind of mercy.
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