A Grey Place

When I was a child, there was a boy who lived next door to me in North Hollywood. His name was Ricky Jernigan. Our houses were across the street from Colfax Elementary, out in Valley Village. From third to sixth grade we walked to school together almost every morning.  We had an idyllic friendship. Pup-tent sleepovers. Late night walkie-talkie communiqué. Sharing dimes on pinball marathons at the arcade on Colfax Avenue. We even had matching Space 1999 lunch boxes that every kid in Homeroom envied. He was my best friend when I didn’t even know what that meant. I loved him when I didn’t know what that meant either. He was a very pretty boy: Shaggy hair that seemed spun from some fairytale. Sharp blue eyes. An impossibly perfect nose, dusted with a July’s worth of freckles. Teeth that would never see braces. Our friendship was the last good thing I would ever have, before he died.

Valley Village isn’t the same place today that it was in 1973. Nor is Colfax Elementary (it’s a Charter school today). Nor is Addison Street. Or Carpenter Avenue (an alleyway full of carports in shadows under deteriorating 50s-era Valley apartment complexes), where Ricky’s body was found in the summer of 1974.  He was left beside a dumpster, wearing only a sleeved pullover and Wallabees. Word got around that he was “bitten to death to cause insurmountable blood loss.” 

But this isn’t about that.

This is about the week before that.

When Ricky and I were spraying each other with the perpetually crooked water hose in his back yard.

And when we got bored and Ricky asked me if I wanted to see his father’s skin magazines.

And when Ricky and I cowered in the back of a master closet, laughing hysterically, shining a flashlight over the glossy pages of Hustler and Playboy.

And then later, when Ricky left the closet to go turn off the spigot in the backyard, leaving me alone.

And then when Ricky’s mother opened the closet door, fresh from a shower, naked, glistening, discovering me with the magazines. And when we locked eyes, and held it that way for what seemed like forever.

And then when she slowly, intentionally raised her forearm to her lips, and bit into the flesh until her fangs drew blood.