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JUMA MUSIC

Aunt Love’s House

So I figured I’d keep it light for my first post and share a short story about one of the many crazy adventures I’ve had with my father — check it out!

Aunt Love’s House
Aunt Love I tend to forget dates, but I’ll never forget October 8, 1997. I was living in Charlotte, NC. My grandfather on my mother’s side of the family in Boston had passed away. My father was living in Fayatteville, NC with a random girlfriend. Arrangements were made for him to pick me up in Charlotte and drive me to Boston for my grandfather’s funeral.

We rode for miles and hours until the front passenger-side tire of our 1991 Chevy Corsica went flat, 20 minutes away from the New Jersey Turnpike. It was around 10:00 PM. The breakdown lane is a lonely place; it gets lonelier with a dead cell phone and no charger. We had a donut in the trunk but the lug nuts on the wheel, with rust and age, had grown resistant to the tools of common men. We needed a mechanic.  After sitting for an hour, having been passed by several cars and even a state policeman, my father spoke words I wouldn’t soon forget: “I have an aunt that lives not too far from here.” Sweedsboro, NJ, the town where she lived, was just beyond the turnpike. We soldiered on.

The remains of our tire ripped and writhed in agony between the metal rim of the wheel and the concrete of the Jersey Turnpike. Sparks erupted like pyrotechnics – interrupting what was otherwise a perfectly black night – as the rubber finally gave way and the metal and asphalt were forced to dialogue without a mediator. We made it to the turnpike, took the exit to Sweedsboro, and stopped at the first house we saw.

The gentleman of the house was gracious to help us. He had the tools we needed to successfully get the tire off and the donut on, and even allowed my father into his home to phone Aunt Love. Her house was a five-minute ride from where we were.  Nothing could prepare my father or myself for where our misadventure would take us next. The darkness swallowed the world behind us as we journeyed the short distance to Aunt Love’s.

She greeted us upon arrival with the warmth and embrace of a grandmother. I’d never laid eyes on her my entire life. I just assumed Aunt Love was another one of my father’s many aunts, uncles, cousins, or mothers he’s assumed over the years. Having been a drifter for most of his early life, he had a penchant for adopting nearly anyone that cared for him growing up. His mother died when he was 15; diabetes and alcoholism were a fatal mix. He moved to Baltimore to stay with his biological father, Henry Pollard, where he would be shifted from pillar to post.  Mr. Pollard and Aunt Love were first cousins, and her house was one of my father’s many transient homes.

While he and Aunt Love exchanged memories and anecdotes, my mother was in Boston losing it. The funeral was the next morning and I was supposed to be a Paul Bearer along with the other grandsons. I stayed on the phone with her nearly an hour, strategizing ways to get me out of there in time for the funeral. Sweedsboro was the town that time forgot, isolated from certain amenities of the age like taxi services and modern building structures.  While my mother and I ran through a plethora of impossibilities to get me to Boston before daybreak, reality had captured my father’s ability to wonder. There was nothing that could be done. We were stuck until morning.

Preparations were made for us to stay the night.  At this point, I began to tune in to the environment. The house was big and old. Its structural integrity, much like its interior décor, was exhausted. If the walls could speak they would tell a story of fatigue in the race against time. I’ll never forget the air. It weighed the emotional weight of the world, but was physically light, and alive with the absence of life. Pictures of Aunt Love’s three children adorned a mantel adjacent to the half-bathroom downstairs. They looked like a yearbook picture from the 70’s – complete with Afros, plaid shirts, and wide smiles. They were the only smiles in the house. But there was something deeply unsettling about these photos. While the atmosphere harbored a morbid quiescence, the faces in the pictures were full of spirit. They breathed like actual and present people, not images of the past.

Curious, I asked my father who they were. He told me they were Aunt Love’s three children, and that they had all died in the house. Two of the sons died of drug overdoses in the very bathroom their pictures sat across from, while the third son died of a heart attack in the kitchen. I was numb. There are times when you hope for unfounded intuitions to find supporting evidence and, clearly, times you don’t…

It was after 1:00 AM. Aunt Love gathered blankets and pillows and prepped the living room couches for our rest. My mother, seldom willing to accept defeat, had a last-ditch effort up her sleeve via a friend of a friend that allegedly lived not too far from Sweedsboro and could pick me up. Right. The capper involved me staying up by the phone and waiting for a call to confirm whether contact had been established with the person. Aunt Love, true to her name, obliged to stay up and keep me company until the call came through. I didn’t realize she suffered with severe Alzheimer’s, and I can’t remember being forewarned of it either. She seemed fine earlier when her and my father spoke, but for some reason – perhaps the sheer nature of the sickness – her coherence evaporated, leaving her nearly bereft of the ability to form a clear sentence.

I tried my very best to decipher, to understand, and to respond. Every few sentences she would ask, “Do you know Buford?” and every time I’d reply, “No Aunt Love, I don’t know Buford.” He was a long lost nephew of hers. I struggled to keep my voice tuned to the key of concern, but with each response a decibel louder, I’m almost sure that was lost. After about forty-five minutes my brain began to interpret everything she said as gibberish until four words navigated their way around the Alzheimer’s, past the damaged neurons, out of her head, and finally, out of her mouth. “…This old haunted house…” The world stopped. I quipped, “What did you say Aunt Love?” She asked about Buford again. I knew exactly what she said, and believe she did too. My deep unease matriculated to full-blown fear in an instant like a time lapsed video of the sun setting or rising. It all connected, it all made sense: the atmosphere, the photos, and the gut feeling of another kind of presence.

The phone call never came. Morning drew neigh and we had to sleep. I haven’t the slightest clue where my father disappeared to while Aunt Love and I kept watch, but he remerged in time for bed. She ushered us to the living room where we’d take our slumber. Few words were shared between my father and I at this point. There was no need – it was all felt. We had made our bed in the mouth of fear.  The living room light shined as if it were our last beacon of hope. We agreed to sleep with it on.  We laid silent – my father positioned on his side so as to look away from it all, and me on my back with my eyes closed, headphones on and the music high, hoping to “See no evil, hear no evil.”

We laid for about fifteen minutes when we noticed Aunt Love’s arched, Lilliputian, silhouette muddling back toward the living room. She approached the lamp and said the unthinkable: “Lights out!” And with the pull of a lamp string, did the unthinkable. My father had been in countless street fights, two gunfights, prison, and anything else that came with New York City street life in the 60’s and 70’s. By that time, I’d had my fair share of schoolyard scuffles and once almost jumped by half of a college football team. None of that mattered. With the loss of light, we were utterly enveloped in all of the dark the house had to offer. Fear transmogrified into terror and confidence melted into tears. We were mortals, and I did what any other logical mortal would do in the moment — pulled the blanket all the way over my head like a child and turned my music all the way up. An obscure remix of Jamiroquai’s, Cosmic Girl played. I have no idea what my father was doing, and I didn’t care.

The next morning, with our tire repaired and Boston ahead of us, we talked and verbalized our shared feelings of unease, unbridled fear, and now relief. He confessed to seeing human figures walking around the living room last night, ones that belonged to neither him, myself, or Aunt Love.

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