Devil House(98)

The same is almost true of our street in San Luis Obispo, but not quite. It’s not a long street, though, to me, it once seemed nearly endless; but all streets must seem fairly long to children, whose short legs take longer to walk from one end of the block to the other. Just past our house, it dips sharply; then it loops right onto a parallel street, which itself has another street in parallel just past a second loop, three streets like tines of a fork. Anything beyond there registered as elsewhere for me, even places just a block or two farther on. They repaved it at some point in my early years; I remember the day they did it, but I can only recall how the street looked afterward. The before-time is lost.

I recognize all this now as mapmaking. Improvements and modifications come and go, and all terrain shifts; we reconfigure our coordinates. We make erasures to accommodate new data; these erasures are permanent. We left this neighborhood sometime after I turned five, though my father remained; the streets I see in memory are almost certainly the streets as they looked just before the divorce. Most of their features were once new—this is California—but to me they still smack of the eternal. The plum tree, its fruit rich and sweet. The willow on the corner, whose rubbery strands we skinned and used as whips. The slope of the hill in our backyard, wild honeysuckle climbing it to the pasture beyond. And the house of the Mean Man, with its dry lawn out front and a rusty horseshoe in a yellowed window facing the sidewalk, halfway down the street.



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GAGE CHANDLER LIVED OVER ON RAMONA, on the middle tine of the three-street fork that made up our neighborhood. His family moved in when he and I were toddlers. The Chandlers were old California stock, and arrived to our street fresh from the other side of town, where they’d been living the simple life until, as their only child grew larger, their bungalow began to feel cramped.

My mother remembers their arrival; she was on the local welcoming committee, which delivered gift baskets. Realtors do that now, I think, and nobody does it at all if you rent, but old habits still held sway back then. Mom, Judy Miller, and Lydia Caporale gave the Chandlers a week’s time to settle in, and then they all walked over and knocked on the door one morning, fresh pastries and coupon books in hand; I tagged along, as I always did.

I was two and a half, Mom tells me. Gage was my size, and only a few months younger. We spotted each other immediately through a forest of grown-up legs, and were inseparable for the next few years. He was my first best friend: there were other kids on the block, but we played together almost every day—first in parallel play, as two-year-olds do, and, over time, learning what interests we shared: windup motorcycles, climbing hills, digging with shovels. The last of these got us into trouble once: we’d wrangled a spade from a gardening closet, and dug in my backyard til we hit water. We must have gotten into some trouble, but I remember the incident of the big hole in the backyard as mainly a success: Gage got excited watching the water bleed in as we dug. It was contagious.

It was Gage who, when we were a year or two older, passed on the legend of the Mean Man to me. I suspect that the reach of this legend ended about three blocks away from Gage’s door, but it held the allure of ancient myth: when we’d walk past the Mean Man’s house, Gage would find some detail to indicate the threat that lay within. His gifts for locating new features in a relatively drab landscape were considerable.

The house itself was unremarkable—California ranch, like almost everything else on the block, slapped-on stucco in simple earth tones: sun-bleached yellow, mustard-brown. The lawn in front was also brown: creeping dichondra was popular on our street, and whoever lived in the Mean Man’s house had gone with the flow at some point, but hadn’t kept it up. The dead vines made a sort of fairy-tale carpet leading to his door.

We all knew about the White Witch from talk on the playground. But the White Witch was two towns over and a world away. The Mean Man, on the other hand, was practically right next door. If a threat could be conjured, then that threat would seem real. We avoided stepping on his dead lawn; if I was walking alone, I’d cross the street to avoid it.

Whatever specific acts of meanness were supposed to have earned him his reputation were shrouded in mystery; the meanness was a specific threat in itself, an energy that might land on you if you failed to take precautions. Don’t trick-or-treat at his house. Don’t dip your bike in and out of his driveway like you might with any other wide driveway on the street. Don’t try to read the bumper stickers on his car. I was a bookworm; telling me not to read something guaranteed that I’d read it: GET U.S. OUT OF U.N.! the sticker said. Gibberish; a profound mystery.

I was afraid of him. Everything about his address throbbed with menace. Every time Gage would reveal, or invent, some new detail—he yelled at me for stepping on his newspaper, it was right there in the middle of the sidewalk; a baseball rolled into his yard and he came out through his door in a robe, picked up the ball, and went right back inside with it—the tension between the Mean Man’s aura and the mundane nature of his malevolence would rise. Fear, at the right reach, is delicious. Once, through the front windows, I saw someone inside, possibly in a reclining chair, watching television. I averted my eyes and quickened my pace. I had this idea that Mean Men hate nothing more than finding that someone is staring at them.

Gage and I were fast friends, sometimes almost inseparable, and I luxuriated in his visions of shadowy threats never farther off than our voices could carry. If you let Gage set the terms of engagement, you could ride currents of myth all day, and dream terrifying dreams when you fell asleep. It was a fun way to be a kid on a sleepy street.