J. Gonzalez - They

Mike turned to Frank. “Are you sure you can hear all this?”

“You’re talking to a guy who once wrote a scene in a horror novel about a man who was pulled through a quarter-inch drainpipe,” Frank said, waving for Mike to go on. “I’m fine with it. Really.”

The trouble was, Vince didn’t feel one hundred percent fine with it. It was already gearing up to be grim. Mike Peterson continued: “By this time I was living out here as well, in Anaheim. I was married, and my son was born two months after Frank. In fact, I was in Jesse’s wedding, along with another old buddy of ours who’d also moved out to the West Coast. A guy by the name of John Llama. Anyway, the three of us were so busy back then with raising our families and getting started on our careers; John was a lawyer and had just gotten a job at a pretty prestigious firm downtown; I was teaching; Jesse was working his way up the corporate ladder. Our wives were able to stay home and raise the kids, be housewives. Back then it was financially possible for young wives to stay at home and raise kids while the husbands worked.” He paused, as if coming across the first rocky bump of the narrative that would take him down to hell. “Jesse didn’t tell me anything about what happened between him and Gladys, what caused her to… do what she later did. He didn’t tell me anything until years later. In fact, what I’m going to tell you is what John and I have been able to piece together throughout the years, with the help of Frank’s aunt Diane, Jesse’s sister.” He paused again, choosing his words carefully. “It seems that at some time when Frank was between the ages of one and two, Gladys met a group of people that we can simply call ‘hippies’.”

Vince was nodding slowly through all this, listening carefully. Mike continued: “Gladys had some emotional problems before she and Jesse were married. That was all Jesse confided in me. Her mother had been an alcoholic, her father wasn’t much better; buried himself in his work to escape the mother’s drinking. Needless to say, there’s probably more that went on in that household that Jesse didn’t let on. With what we know about dysfunctional households, there was probably a great deal of abuse that went on. I’m sure Gladys suffered quite a bit of it. How much, we’ll never know. But Jesse loved her, and he was determined to do everything he could to make her life better for her and Frank. He started working longer hours so he could afford to move his growing family to a small house in Hawthorne. It was at this point that John and I assumed that Gladys met the hippies—and I’m sorry to use that term, because that’s the only word I can think of to describe them.”

“They were hippies,” Frank said, taking a sip of iced tea. “It was the sixties. They were fucking hippies.”

Mike nodded, a slight smile on his features creasing his face at Frank’s outburst. “Okay, they were hippies. Maybe they weren’t normal hippies—the kind that were largely benevolent, into the peace and love movement and all that pacifist bullshit. But they surely dressed like them. John and I think they might have lived next door to Jesse and Gladys and were nothing more than college kids. Gladys would have had a lot of time on her hands during the day and through most early evenings.” He glanced at Frank. “Frank himself doesn’t remember any of this period, but from what we’ve been able to gather, the hippies turned Gladys on to LSD and pot. They also introduced her to some weird spiritual stuff that probably didn’t amount to much at the time, but which soon got worse. Did Frank tell you about The Children of the Night?”

Vince nodded.

“We think they may have been early members. Of course, everything they involved her in was drug related and mixed with some of their teachings. Whatever it was, it was attractive to Gladys. She began neglecting Frank, and Jesse noticed quickly. This led to fights between them. Jesse’s mother, who used to fly out from El Paso frequently to visit, tried to help out. She was very troubled by it. At one point, Jesse took Frank to his in-laws during a brief separation.” A slight grin cracked Mike Peterson’s features. “Jesse didn’t care much for Gladys’ folks, but he also didn’t think her mother was that bad. Maybe she wasn’t. He certainly seemed to trust them with Frank more then he trusted his own wife.”

Vince and Frank waited while Mike drank some iced tea. “To make a long story short they reconciled, moved out of the house and bought a place. I remember that house. It was in Gardena, right off Sepulveda and Vermont. It was a small two-bedroom place and the garage had been converted into a den. A nice place for a young couple to get a start. Jesse had been promoted to shift supervisor by then and was still working a lot. But he was doing it to build a nest egg for him and Gladys. He said they wanted another child.”

He stopped at this point, his eyes flicking to Frank as if dreading to go on. Frank nodded at him, encouraging him. Frank’s features were stony, almost cold, with a faint underlying of dread.

“Jesse tried to keep things going as normal as possible, but the influence of Gladys’ friends was strong. They kept showing up when Jesse was working, and it was then that she began having affairs.” He cleared his throat, looking down at the table. “Sometimes she would engage in sex in Frank’s presence.”

Vince looked at Frank, who didn’t meet his gaze. He turned back to Mike. “How could you know this if Jesse never told you anything?”

“It all came out during my therapy,” Frank said softly. He looked at Vince. “Trust me, I went through a lot of regression therapy. My earliest memory was when I was three, which corresponds to around the time Mike is telling you about now. Only my earliest memory is of San Francisco, after we moved there. Not Los Angeles. I had to be taken back through my memories to remember what… I saw my mom doing.”

A worm of unease began to gnaw at Vince’s belly. He took a sip of iced tea.

“Gladys didn’t move to the Bay Area until she left Jesse. I was the first person Jesse called when Gladys left. He was scared and angry; he didn’t tell me anything about Gladys having affairs, or anything else that had been going on. Just that they’d been having problems again and that she left. He tried to get Frank from her, but Gladys won a court order placing Frank in her custody. She was also pregnant.” Mike lapsed into silence for a moment and Vince felt his heart pounding. She was also pregnant .

He glanced at Frank, who didn’t return the look. Frank sat motionless, stony faced. He looked like he’d heard this story many times, but hearing it again was just as gruesome as hearing it for the first time. Vince swallowed a lump in his throat and tuned back in to Mike’s narrative.

“She moved to the Bay Area, taking Frank with her. He’d just turned three.” Mike spoke slowly, his voice lowered. “She went to San Francisco with a group of people she’d met in L.A. They settled into the Haight Ashbury scene quite easily, and it was there they met core members of The Children of the Night, who had infiltrated the hippie scene very successfully.” He paused. “They got Gladys into the group somehow and this was where she met your mother, Maggie Swanson.”

Vince didn’t feel anything as Frank took over briefly. “From what we’ve gathered, Maggie got involved with the group from a guy she met at UC Berkeley, a guy named Tom McDonald.”

The name clicked and Vince placed the name with a face. That smiling Dad Face of his youth in California. “My dad.”

Frank nodded. “We don’t know if he was your real father or not. There were a lot of orgies and love-ins going on at the time. Plus, about a year before you were born your mother and other members of the group went on a spiritual pilgrimage to the Middle East. They were there for almost a year. It’s possible you weren’t even born in this country; we haven’t been able to pinpoint your exact birthplace. If your mom became pregnant with you there, your father could have been one of the male members of the group. But anyway, that’s where our mothers met, at one of these gatherings that was, in reality, a Children of the Night meeting. They encouraged the orgiastic behavior, the drugs. It was hippie heaven.”