HEAD-ACHE
I was 13 years old. Seinfeld and X Files were the top shows on television at the time. My time was divided by going to school, skateboarding after school, hanging with friends, and going to Zuma Beach in Malibu on the weekends to bodyboard. I had also just began taking guitar lessons, so I guess I also practiced that some, but not near enough. This was an innocent time for me. A time before I was introduced to weed. A time before I became a meth addict during my high school years and post high school years. A time before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age seventeen. A time before when the sun went down meant going out to bars and chasing women and chasing trouble. No, this was a time of light and laughter and unbridled innocence. A time of following rules and regulations and still believing what your parents told you. A time when every Sunday morning meant crawling in bed with your mother to watch the night befores Saturday Night Live. A time of light and laughter, indeed.
There was a boy at school who all the kids never really paid any attention to. He was one of those kids who had strange stories connected to him growing up. A boy who you could say was on the fringe. He was strange, but not so strange that he was made fun of. He was, instead, simply left alone by the rest of his schoolmates. "Billy is strange", they would say. "Stay away from him."
The only story I ever heard, and one that I believed, was that he lost his father at a young age in a horrific car accident. An accident that left his father beheaded. I remember this well because it was the first time I had heard the term 'decapitation'. Looking back on it now, it is rather surprising, because I had been reading Stephen King novels since the third grade. But somehow, that story of his father's bad luck was enough to keep the kids away from Billy. I was the type of child who was open to being friends with anyone: the jocks, the nerds, the hippie types, the skaters, and yes, even the fringe types.
It was mid way through the school year in 1993 when Billy Willoughsby invited me to his house for the first time. The only time. It was a crisp yet sunny day in December. The fallen leaves covered the streets of the San Fernando Valley, blown around slightly by the light Santa Ana winds that were now well known in my half childlike half teenage mind. Billy lived in West Hills, just west of Bell Canyon where my mom sold houses as a real estate agent. My grandmother had agreed to drive me to his house. It was a Saturday. She kept true to her word, as loving, doting grandmothers often do. We pulled up to his house with the agreement that I would be picked up in a few hours. I stepped out of my grandma's white Chrysler and walked to Billy's dark wooden front door.
He opened the door instantly, before I got a chance to knock. This was a trait of the eager ones, I have found. A trait of the fringe types. Once in, we played Super Nintendo for some time before I had to go to the bathroom. Billy's mother, your average cookie cutter type suburban single mother, had been occupying the front downstairs bathroom for sometime now. Probably talking on the phone and doing makeup or preparing for a date that evening, I didn't know. So I walked up the stairs looking for the upstairs bathroom.
The upstairs of the Willoughbys house held two rooms, both bedrooms-Billys and his mothers. There was clearly no bathroom in Billy's small bedroom so, as weird as it felt, I entered his mother's room, where I could clearly see a bathroom. And I had to pee. Badly. As I passed his mother's bed to the bathroom, I noticed something strange. And shocking. I took a double or triple take because I couldn't wrap my teenage mind around just what I was seeing. It was a glass jar filled with a clear and light yellowish liquid. But that wasn't all. It was a true to scale human head. Perfectly preserved. Adorned with flowers and what looked like prayer beads at its base. The eyes were closed, flakes of skin peeling off here and there. The face still had a beard, the hair waving back and forth slightly in the yellowish liquid. The lips were drawn back, almost to a partial smile, strangely. My stomach turned and turned. I guess all the stories were true. But why would his mother keep the head? Now knowing that I was in a very private place and seeing something I should not see, I ran out of the room and back downstairs. No one saw me. No one knew I had been up there. No one knew what I had seen. I never brought it up to anyone until revealing it now. I was picked up from Billy's a little later that day. Suffice to say, I never went back. That is, except, in my mind. That place you go back to from time to time to label what's fiction. And what is...non fiction. And to remember the memories you almost don't want to remember.