Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

I went for a drive downtown. Bright lights. Messages. A movie-house marquee spelling out: I Married a Monster from Outer Space . I had to get out of the city. I kept driving. I didn’t know where I was. There was a bright light in the sky. Following me. I had that same feeling that I’d had when I saw the saucer over the Hollywood Hills. A message beamed into my brain from the spaceship. Except that it wasn’t the Space Brothers. Oh no.

Oh no.

It was the Greys.

They had come for me. I drove faster but the light kept up with me. Hovering. Waiting. I knew then that I had to get out of the car. I swerved off the road and got out. I was in the desert, running, running. Then I fell. I blacked out.

I woke up three days later in Camarillo State Hospital. I was told that I had been found wandering by the side of the highway by a state trooper. I had been examined by a doctor and was diagnosed as suffering from ‘involuntary psychosis and paranoid-type schizophrenia’. I had been sedated and brought to Camarillo as a mentally ill person.

It was awful there. I was kept in a locked ward. They fed me with liquid medicine that made me feel like a zombie. They gave me electric shock treatment. They were trying to make me forget what had happened to me. I found out later that one of the doctors there was a memory expert and had been a chief psychiatrist at the Nuremberg trials where he tested these top Nazis who claimed to have clinical amnesia. He was part of MK ULTRA, a secret CIA research project into mind-control techniques. It all came out a couple of years ago, in 1975. A congressional committee revealed that the CIA had experimented on ordinary citizens in state institutions without their knowledge or consent. They used truth drugs and brainwashing techniques on them. I was one of these guinea pigs, I’m sure of it.

But they didn’t stop me from remembering what had happened to me before I had been found by the side of the road. You see, there was all this time unaccounted for, twenty-four hours or so. It came back to me slowly, like all these memories do. There was a beam of light. Then I was inside the alien ship. I was naked and on this sort of platform. All around me was a group of Greys. God, I was scared. The chief Grey came forward and spoke to me telepathically. He told me that they were going to do some tests. They put tubes in my mouth and in my ears. They put these suction cups over my breasts. They stuck probes in my vagina and in my anus. Then the chief Grey picked up a long needle and pierced me right through my navel. I screamed with pain, then he put his hand in front of my eyes. The pain went. I blacked out.

I was in Camarillo for three months until Larry came to take me home. I was released on ‘extended home convalescence’, given some drugs and a prescription to take to a doctor. When he drove me back Larry said: ‘I can’t go on, Sharleen. It’s all too much. I’m the one who should have been committed, not you.’ He was a weak and useless man in so many ways, but at least he was honest about it.

We finally divorced in 1960. By then Larry was a big success. The paperback edition of American Gnostic was a best-seller. I saw the cover everywhere. A mock-up of that famous painting of the farmer with a pitchfork, standing next to his spinster daughter, their heads replaced with those of aliens. So Larry could afford alimony. It took a while, though, before I got regular payments, so I had to find work to make ends meet.

I was in my late twenties and already getting a bit too old for the glamour game but I decided to use it while I still could. Besides, I knew little else.

I met Cato Johnson when I was working as a go-go dancer in a seedy club on Sunset Strip. He was a guitarist in the house band. Cato acted cool and confident when he was with the other guys but he was shy and nervous really. Sensitive. Beautiful. Such smooth skin that seemed to be pulled tight over his forehead and cheekbones. Bright, sad eyes and a thick pouting mouth that was always slightly open. I’ll admit that I was attracted to his blackness, but he was drawn to me in the same way. I’m so white, after all. It was an electrical charge, you know, magnetic. We were like opposite polarities. And it was a natural thing. I think nature wants us to mix, I really do.

But society always wants to keep us apart. And the atmosphere in LA at that time was pretty bad. So much race hatred below the surface. I hardly noticed this before I went with Cato. Things were supposed to be getting better but they weren’t. There was just more hypocrisy. That’s the problem with Los Angeles: the people there pretend to be sophisticated but they can be just as prejudiced as in the South. Especially the LAPD.

When Watts went up in flames in the riots of 1965, I feared for his life. And though Cato acted like he was some kind of soft-spoken tough guy, I knew that he was scared too. Scared of me. It’s a deep-down thing. Going with a white woman can give a black man a little bit of power but a hell of a lot of danger. And besides all that, he thought I was a touch crazy.

Getting pregnant by Cato was a big mistake. But it was the best mistake of my life. I never resented Cato going away, because he left behind such a wonderful gift. Martin Stirling Johnson was born on 13 June 1966. For the first time I had a real purpose to my life. A gorgeous baby boy to bring up. And having Martin to take care of took care of me too; it gave me a centre to my existence.

And I just about managed to make ends meet. The alimony cheques now came in regularly from Larry; he even offered to pay me a little extra. We got back in touch with each other and found that we could actually get on quite well as friends. He was living in this sort of commune in Venice Beach. Larry’s books had become a big hit with the hippies and he became one of them. He was well into his forties but the look kind of suited him, an ambling figure in beads and baggy clothes, long hair and a beard. He was with this young woman called Wanda. Half his age, yet he seemed the child of that relationship. Happy though. He wasn’t taking speed or downers any more; he was a lot calmer. He still smoked dope, though, and had been experimenting with LSD.

Larry loved Martin and he was very good with him. He confided in me that he was sure he couldn’t have kids of his own (something about side-effects from the mumps he’d had as a child). He asked me if I wanted to move into the house in Venice, saying it would be easier than bringing up a child on my own. But I couldn’t do that hippie thing. I mean, it works for guys because that style can suit any old slob but it’s not a very flattering look for women. It’s fine for the young chicks but I didn’t want to look like an old witch just yet.

You see, I never got back my figure after Martin was born and I put on a bit of weight. It was a relief, to tell you the truth. People didn’t look at me in that way any more. It made me feel much more relaxed about myself. So, no more glamour work. I certainly didn’t miss it much. When Martin was old enough for school I got a job cleaning houses and apartments. It was simple, easy work that I did part time.

Now I just had to get used to the looks I would get when I was out with my son. The cold stares that fall upon a white woman with a black child. I started to worry about the world he was growing up in. Poor Martin was only eight when we heard that his father had been shot dead by the police in Detroit. They said that Cato was part of a bank hold-up but I wasn’t sure about that. I think he was involved in something political. Muthaplane, the funk band he was in, recorded songs with secret messages in their lyrics, signals to a mothership from some distant planet.

I started to get scared again. I didn’t want the fear to get the better of me. I felt that if I didn’t find the right path, the devil might come for me once more. I had managed to keep one step ahead of him for a few years but now he was catching up with me again. Martin would soon be a teenager and I dreaded him getting into trouble and ending up like his father.