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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: Less than two weeks before the Ludic Log goes on vacation! If you're interested in writing a guest column, please drop me a line. "dingo eats baby" "what's red and goes 200 miles an hour?" "Superman's dick" "LUNCH WAIVERS" "Romeo costume" "Daley bodyguards" "I'm a loner a rebel" "Swamp Thing the cartoon series t-shirts" |
07.26.2004
I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first time. Having little money in my pocket and a freshly minted degree in physical education but no wall upon which to hang it, I made it clear to all and sundry that I would teach the gentlemanly arts of baseball and the shot put to anyone in any location, provided they paid promptly. I had planned to go directly from ancient Harvard to fair Michigan State, from whence my father's family was derived, but upon discovering that the availability of employment there was far sparser than I had imagined, took it upon myself to take up however temporarily a situation teaching basket-ball to the students at Innsmouth High School. Outside of the advertisement in the Globe I had never heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town with no hotels or restaurants listed in the Guide Michelin would have interested me, or the odd manner of allusion of my friends at the Grafton Street Bar when I announced my newfound employment, roused something like real curiosity. What was it about this place, to which none of my acquaintances -- a cosmopolitan and well-traveled lot to be sure -- had ever visited? Who were "those people" that my neighbor Roger Shakely, an economics grad student, said overran the town? What manner of antediluvian village would have no decent health clubs, art galleries, or Mongolian barbeques, as the agent who booked my rental car assured me was the case in Innsmouth? Surely a town so able to inspire such dislive in its neighbors, I thought, must be very unusual and worthy of a curious fellow's attention. Before packing my Louis Vitton with a few contemporary novels, squash racquets, and gym shorts, I asked my dry cleaner, who had a reputation as a worldly fellow. "Innsmouth?" said he. "Queer sort of a place. Use to be quite a city -- a big port back in the 19th century. Civil War took its toll on the place, though, and it lost a lot of population in the early part of the century from smallpox. This was after the vaccine, mind -- an early shipment of the stuff got stolen by some train robbers what thought it was heroin, and then the mayor, who wasn't the brightest star Massachusetts ever birthed, plumb forgot to reorder any, so you had a few hundred people a year dying off until around, oh, 1972. Sort of unusual in that regard, I guess you would say. Also it was around that time that they lost their biggest industry, which was an electronics plant. They made black and white televisions and the owner refused to switch to color because he thought it was just a fad. Anyway, it was around that time that all the best people moved away, or at least the best people who remained in a town where the mayor forgets to order smallpox vaccine for twenty years. After that, the only ones who'd live there...was them." Who were they? No one would say, and after a time I simply learned not to ask. There was a curious reticence amongst my friends and peers to discuss the bizarre residents of Innsmouth, a reticence which served only to pique my already-heightened curiosity. Many of them expressed a guarded dismay when even mentioning the subject -- halfway between fear and embarrassment. It reminded me of the tone in which my parents would discuss how much to tip our housekeeper at Christmas when I was a boy, and something told me that Innsmouth was not populated by short Honduran women named Rosarita. But what could it be? What was this secret so vile that it dare not say its name? I would find out the first day I arrived, when my rental car pulled up to the curb and I emerged into the gray sun of the smoky little town and met the principal of Innsmouth High. He was a youngish gentleman; there is no possibility that he could have been more than thirty-five. But his temples were streaked with a premature gray, and the hair itself was my first clue that this was not a man as other men. It was wiry and short, and of an ebony hue that I had scarcely encountered outside of the turtlenecks of some of the literature students. There was a texture to it that I could not identify -- it was neither straight nor wavy, and it contained not even a hint of red or even blond. Most startling of all was his skin: he was covered from head to toe in the most curious tint, a discoloration that I had never seen except half-glimpsed in nightmares or on the bodies of some of the shadowy figures who mopped the floors after hours at my father's law firm. What sordid past lay behind this unheard-of disfigurement? What had happened to Principal Quentin, that he would be so cursed and misshapen? What could possibly explain this inexplicable taint, this genetic happenstance that made a normal man seem as if he were a Celtic? "What the hell are you lookin' at, boy?", he asked me. Alas, my mind had drifted as I peered into those hideously non-blue eyes and I had forgotten my manners. So involved was I in the mystery of my new employer, who seemed to lack the pale pink skin and lank, thin hair that marked him as different from every other person I had ever met or known, that I had forgotten professional courtesy. I made my introduction good and vowed that, come what may, I would get to the bottom of Principal Quentin's curious case, and perhaps even be of some service in curing him of this unusual affliction. I soon discovered, though, that he was perhaps the best of a bad lot. I shall write more of the bizarre, non-white-skinned residents of this town later tonight, after the nurse has brought me the Seconal that is my only way of coping with the unnameable horrors I witnessed during my thankfully brief sojourn in Innsmouth, but for now I will leave my indulgent readers with this ominous portent of what is to come: all of the town of Innsmouth was peopled with this strange, dark-skinned creatures, with their degenerate argot, their curiously primitive rituals, and their unsettling willingness to drink coffee that costs less than four dollars per cup. My very own basket-ball team -- the young bodies and minds I was charged with forging into a unit that worked together to win games and become responsible men -- was comprised of these folk, they who showed little or no appreciation for Friends, who frequently danced in their locker room to a primitive rhythmic music that shook me to the depths of my soul, and who displayed the disturbing ability to grow to more than six feet in height. Rejecting my pleas to acquire good canvas shoes, they paraded about in highly sophisticated leather basket-ball shoes emblazoned with frightening logos, shoes which looked as if they were forged by some race of horrible elder gods for feet bigger than anything in my training had prepared me for. When I asked them if they knew if there was a Banana Republic outlet store anywhere in Innsmoth, they inevitably replied "Shit, coach, shut up, man." What had I done? Dear God, what had I done? |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue -- you sell him a whole new life." (Christopher Morley) |