PEARCE HANSEN
Born in SF in the 50s into a train wreck of a family, the subject under discussion came up in Oakland in the 70s and then traveled widely, misspending his youth careening from one terror-in-retrospect abortive learning experience to the next. Cab driver, bouncer, kick boxer, Marine: all the stereotypical noir writer's breeding grounds apply here. Has seen most of the continents, and is not nearly as dysfunctional as his writing might seem to imply. His debut novel, Street Raised, will be published by PointBlank Press in 2006.
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I’ve been in enough hospitals and emergency rooms to know I don’t like them. Pain and fear seem to hang in the air like a cloud, almost overwhelming the reek of medicine – I imagine illness glued to the walls by the industrial paint, or hovering invisible in the air waiting for prey. The only thing that’s never bothered me is the blood, for I’ve seen enough of that. But there’s no blood in my mother’s room: her doom is a dry one.

As I sit here beside my mother’s death bed, she lays festooned by the garlands of tubes and wires that are about all that’s keeping her alive anymore. I search her sleeping face with a million unspoken questions, but no answers appear there: wrinkles obscure the clear youthful features I remember from my childhood, though blurred hints of her old beauty still remain. For she was a great beauty in her youth, and I loved her very much, once.

I think back to a day long ago, the day I loved her most: the day my mother saved me from the Storm Giants.

It happened when I was very little, while we were living in Hayward in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood.

My Dad made a habit of moving us around a lot, and it was usually to neighborhoods where we were pretty much the only white family on the block. I guess we were what some might call white trash, though I never heard that term until I was a teenager. As I recall, I hurt the guy who first directed that phrase toward me, hurt him pretty bad – by that time, I didn’t need his words to know I was eminently disposable. I’m sure I stood out from all my black and brown childhood play-mates like a little Danish-Irish thumb, being the only one around with blue eyes, phosphorescently white skin occluded by mobs of freckles, and a head covered by a mop of carrot colored cowlicks.

We kids were too small to have been indoctrinated by the racism our elders would later so effectively inculcate in us, so all us little ones ran in one screaming pack from dawn til dusk, hitting up one Mom after another for food between bouts of mischief. I discovered early on that PB & J tastes pretty good on home-made corn tortillas, and I still have a taste for it that way.

The day the Storm Giants came for me, I was playing alone in a vacant lot down the street from my house, rolling my beat up old toy Tonka tanker truck in the dirt. I was having so much fun I didn’t notice the storm clouds rolling in until there was a scalding thermite flash of lightning that lit up the whole block. It was followed immediately by the sound of thunder, a boom so close I felt it as much as heard it as it washed over me.

The Bay Area has relatively mild weather, and I was so young I’d never been in a thunderstorm before. As I looked up, the midday sky was suddenly roiling ominously with black clouds so thick, even by the light of day the world looked as if it was underwater. I was very afraid, afraid for the first time in my life of something that didn’t stand on two legs.

Two bigger boys were walking by just as another bolt of lightning lit up the whole sky, bright as napalm purging a jungle ridge line. Thunder cracked the world open once more, but by this time I was on my feet. I remember shivering as the sun’s light steadily dimmed around me.

"What was that?" I asked the big boys.

"That’s the Storm Giants," the bigger one with the round face said. "Yeah, the Storm Giants"" his friend echoed, one missing front tooth showing as he grinned.

I’d never heard of such a thing. "What are Storm Giants?" I asked, feeling very small indeed.

"The Storm Giants live up in the sky, behind the clouds," the bigger boy explained. "Sometimes they like to bowl up there. Then you hear the thunder from their bowling balls hitting the pins." He leaned closer, and his eyes seemed to be glowing like the lightning. "Sometimes they look down and see a little kid playing alone. Then they throw down a lightning bolt, and smash ‘im."

"Yeah, smash ‘im!" his tooth-deprived friend gleefully copied him again, bobbing up and down in excitement.

That’s when I saw an even bigger lightning bolt pour zigzag-wise across the sky in a river of light so bright, it hurt my eyes. Then the inevitable thunder again, loud as a 500-pound bomb landing danger close: Krack-a-BOOM!

I ran for my house, and for my Mommy.

The lightning kept up with me my whole endless slow motion way down the block, lighting up the sky and crashing down again and again. I kept expecting the very next lightning bolt to hit me, the expectation so strong it made my back hurt. But they kept missing.

As scary as the lightning was, each following thunder crash was even worse. It roared so loud and hard, it felt like it was going to knock me off my feet. And as I’d already learned in my short life, once you were on the ground you were gone, for there was no more running. I though I could hear the Storm Giants laughing and shouting every time the thunder boomed.

I felt like it would never end, and that I’d never reach my front door. But finally I did, and was I one happy little camper to slap my hand on that knob and send the door crashing inward against the entryway wall! Mom stood up from the couch, where she’d been watching the soaps and having a smoke.

"What’s wrong, son?" Mom asked as I ran in the door.

"Storm Giants, Mom! There’s Storm Giants out there! You’ve got to close the door before they get us!"

"Storm Giants?" she asked as she shut the door after me.

"Yeah, Mom, Storm Giants!" I felt like I was ready to cry now, the lump in my throat was so big, but I told Mom what the older boys had told me, and how the Storm Giants had chased me home with thunder and lightning. Finally, I did begin to cry, the tears pouring hot down my cheeks. I had hit the wall, I had had quite enough.

Mom kneeled down next to me and took me in her arms. Her cheek was pressing against mine, and I slowly stopped crying as she crooned to me: "Hush, baby – hush. Mom knows how to deal with Storm Giants."

I pulled my head back and looked at her. "How?" I asked, less scared now. At the time, despite all, I still thought the sun rose and set on my Mom. If she said it, I knew it was true.

"Just watch," Mom said. Then she took my hand and led me to the kitchen table.

First Mom took a piece of newspaper and folded it into an admiral’s hat as I watched closely. "This is a magic hat," she explained solemnly as she placed it carefully on my head. Then she wiggled her fingers over me as she intoned in a loud, spooky voice: "Hocus pocus, Abracadabra, the Storm Giants cannot hurt us, now and forever!" Then she smiled and touched my cheek with cool fingers. "Now you’re safe, baby. The Storm Giants can’t touch you."

I laughed and clapped my hands. Mom made hot chocolate, and we played Chutes & Ladders together as the storm went on outside. The thunder kept crashing out there, and the lightning kept pulsing at the windows – but I wasn’t afraid anymore, I was safe inside the magic circle with my Mom. Eventually the storm ended, as all storms do, and its death was magical as that whole day had proved to be: a strange, beautiful golden glow filled the sky outside, backlighting all the storm clouds until they shone from within, as if pregnant with the seeds of their own destruction. Then the clouds started to break apart as they began a slow cringing run toward the horizon, and I could see blue sky again. My Mom had beaten the Storm Giants, and I knew that I’d never be afraid of them again.

That’s the warmest memory I have of my mother. It’s actually pretty strange that I ran to her for rescue from the Storm Giants. I wasn’t the kind of child to be afraid of things unseen, or anything supernatural. I know I was never afraid of the dark, or of being alone, even as a little kid. In the dark, no one could see you to get at you. When you were alone, there was no one there to hurt you. I didn’t waste my time being afraid of ghosts or the monsters under the bed, either. My bogeymen were worldlier, and were always there even in the daylight.

I saw my first knifing there in Hayward. I must have been about four or five; I know I hadn’t even started kindergarten yet. I was playing with another neighborhood boy, and these two guys came up and started rousting us, looking for this kid’s older brother. I was very scared, even as a little boy I could tell these were some serious guys – at the time I saw them as grownups, but they had to have only been teenagers. Anyway, my friend’s big brother came out of his house, walked up to these two guys without a word, and cut them both through their T-shirts and into their guts with his knife right there in front of our little boy eyes. SNIK-SNIK , the blade went: the first time I’d heard the sound cold steel makes cutting through living flesh. The blood flow was immediate, profuse, and right at my eye level. It soaked their shirts, and their pants (at the time, I thought it looked like they’d peed themselves, and perhaps they did as well) and dripped onto the sidewalk in spatters and puddles. It was like a window between two worlds had shattered, and all that blood was pouring through the crack. The blood was redder than red, seeming to stand out from the background more real than anything else there (when I was older and started dropping acid, I would have described it as psychedelic – and that it was). The two would-be bullies stood there, hunched over and dripping as they pressed both hands to their respective wounds holding their guts in, begging my friend’s brother not to cut them anymore with tears and snot pouring down their faces. He showed mercy and let them go, and I never saw them again. I didn’t bother telling my parents about it – it never even occurred to me to do so.

That’s what I had to fear – what I saw most every day on the streets of the neighborhoods I came up in. I didn’t need play monsters to have nightmares about.

My mother saving me from the Storm Giants stands out for another reason as well: it was the only time I can remember her saving me from anything. My home was no haven from the dangers outside – exactly the opposite, in fact.

She once looked on without protest as my father forced me to eat my own vomit at the dinner table. She chewed and swallowed mouthfuls of her own dinner, watching with every evidence of satisfaction as Dad made me gag down my own puke over and over again until I finally kept it down. She watched, and chewed, and swallowed, as if it didn’t bother her a bit.

Another time she hung me on a coat hook in the laundry roo and left me to dangle there thrashing and strangling on the stretched out neck hole of my tee shirt. I remember looking at her back in mute resignation, my vision going black as she walked away out that door. But she must have thought better of her deed, for of course she had to have come back and taken me down after I passed out – or did I just slip off somehow myself? I’ll never know, for we never discussed it, afterward. There was much that went undiscussed in my parent’s house.

The Day Mom Saved Me From The Storm Giants . . . that one shining moment stands out from between the parentheses of hell that came before and after it. I don’t know how to reconcile that one instance of mother love with all the things my parents did to me. It’s confusing at best – I can’t tell what was wrong with us, what lay curdled in my family’s heart to lead us down into the funhouse horror show that ultimately sent us spinning away from each other into the void like pieces of a broken machine. I’m still haunted by childhood memories I will spare you, memories beyond looming coat hooks and tureens of cold vomit, memories that glint in my mind like shards of a broken mirror that once seemed to guarantee me a lifetime of bad luck (before I entered onto my present, more financially successful path). Suffice it to say that I still wake from dreams of my childhood.

Until being called here to my mother’s hospital room today, I haven’t seen any member of my family for decades. A blur of years have passed since I left home at 13: guns & motel rooms, the promise of easy cash and the endless search for the Perfect Score dominating throughout. A youth encompassed by ‘the Life,’ by the natural viciousness one learns when pain & fear are as natural as breathing, and by the hopelessness of the cornered rat.

I was weak, then, an automaton of crime, finally surrendering completely to the despair of drug addiction, descending ultimately into homelessness and suicidal self-destructiveness. Now I’m stronger, of course. I had to remake myself into the tight unit I am today, my game is currently unassailable.

But I’m unable to share this wealth with my Mom, as she lays here before me here before me in a doped up sleep she will never awaken from. Just another harmless, dying old woman who once bore me in her womb, and showed me that single act of love once, so long ago.

Still, even a man such as I’ve become can say goodbye.

"Abracadabra, Mom," I whisper. I stand up, kiss her on her unresponsive cheek, and walk away from my childhood forever.

Later that night in my motel room, the phone rings. It’s the hospital, calling to tell me my Mom has passed. I get up, pack my bags, and I’m on the road within five minutes.

Driving down that desert highway toward my destination, my Mom’s face looms before me filling the sky, strong emotions contorting her face as she looks down at me. Is it love she’s conveying? I can’t tell with the Storm Giants laughing behind her, even if they can’t get past her, can’t get at me.

Perhaps it’s time for a change, I muse as I drive. Perhaps my mother’s single act of love redeemed something in me without me even knowing, and it’s time for me to re-approach the human race.

There’ll be time to think about that later, for I’m already committed right now: there’s a man in Salt Lake City that needs to be dead, and I’ve been paid good money to make it happen.

Copyright© 2006 Pearce Hansen

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