My father is the natural villain of this piece. When I first came to know him he was bundled with fresh ex-Marine macho conformity and pettifoggery. His redemption was elsewhere—and it came, eventually. But we will not reach that far tonight.

It is the crest of 1970. I am five years old or very near it. My life then was in the small kaleidoscope—a comfortable wide suburban green backyard, with an unusual amount of trees. I am past the both the injury that made me right-handed (frankly, just now, the old bone in my left index finger is positively singing—as it sometimes does, and I wolf down some aspirin; thanks to now-Father Paddy Wade...) and through the rigors of kindergarten. (Quietly burn in Hell, Mrs. Angleburger.)

My Dad has decided that I am a "sissy" and needing to "toughen up." His solution will wow you with its irresponsibility. He has decided to send me daily to Wickham's Market, to hustle milk, bread, and cigarettes—permission note and Food Stamps included. I will go by myself.

This is not necessarily bad within itself. A 5-year-old ambling alone half a block to the store? Scoring tobacco? Naw, the rub lays on the geographical fact that Wickham's Market and Gainor Avenue are separated by State Route 13—a major thoroughfare in 1970. (Today it is pretty dead.)

At five years old, one has a poor sense of "interval timing"—i.e., if a Chevy is traveling from Columbus at 50 mph in a 30 mph zone, and I can race across its path at 5 mph, how long will it take the Chevy to intersect with my corpse?

I'm wondering if this wasn't my dad's experiment with a "morning after pill."

Can I say how many times I miscalculated, hearing the shriek of hot brakeshoes and a hurdled "You little asshole!!"? What power, divine or diabolic, delivered me daily I cannot say. It certainly wasn't any skill of my own. I spent long quarters of an hour in rushing cold sick fearsweat in debate—now? Now? Now? GO!

The fear never diminshed. Each time was the same uncertain agony. And a real fear of death. And a sneer, rather than congratulation, when I returned to my Father. Even though I had accomplished my mission, I had done so with less than the necessary spezzatura that my father felt was needed.

I was fast and far learning to hate him.

And then came that certain day. I was tiger-toeing along the cement cusp and mulling my fate in inches. Up comes a skinny girl of ten, who wore green cable-knit sweaters and checkered small skirts like Little Dot wore polka-dot dresses, or like Einstein his infinite one suit. She was pretty in this lean gamin way, brown haired, brown-eyed, tawny-skinned. In her right hand she was clasping the hand of a toddling girl.

"Are you trying to get across the street?"

I confessed that I was.

"Here, I'll help you." She took my hand into her left hand.

It was as if all space expanded and contracted at once; it was as if all space cooled. The hurtling metal silenced. The cars slowed to the Event Horizon—constantly moving forward, constantly, infinitely, getting no farther—eternally in the middle of nowhere. Zeno's Paradox delivered sunny-side up by a pubescent waif.

It wasn't love I felt then, but gratitude; gratitude however is one of love's building blocks, perhaps the stone that the builders rejected. Perhaps it is true, as Harlan Ellison has suggested, that Let Me Help are three words more important than I Love You.

Her name was Laura. She came from a house of mystery and scandal. Her family was not in any means normative for bluecollar suburban Gainor Avenue. The parents were often whereabouts unknown. The seeming householder now was an 18-year-old boy named Terry, typically under his car on the street, with friends swarming, drinking, smoking. It was all kids down on—seven kids, mostly boys, eighteen to toddlers. The little ones took care of the littler ones, with littler ones to bite em, ad infinitum...

They had a car and a television and a roof. The random stucco house was amazing. They were set.

How the neighbors gossiped. I didn't know at five what I later found out were snertlings about imagined sexual and drug behavior—the usual projected fantasies of suburban hens. I had absorbed the "they are bad kids" word of mouth; the term "white trash" was thrown around by Church-of-God sniffers.

But the same neighbors had said the same things about Jimmy Hendren. Yes, that was the Jimmy Hendren I attended kindergarten with, the one who intently used his slender fingers to extract a large red splinter from my palm. While Angleburger snickered. Well met, Androclese.

Now it proved that this Lion had another ally.

Laura and I were together from then on. She happened to blow the doors off my world, and I found sunshine and rolling fields outside. The world continually expanded forward with her. Underneath the porches, pioneering an alleyway, into dense foliage—"Let's see what's down this way." She put the restless hunger of travel into me. And yes, she whispered erotic secrets to me. She told me the Secret of Life.

My Serpent was the little tomboy in the green cable knit, a questing adventurer, a neighborhood warrior and diplomat. A suburban street urchin. An authority on Dark Shadows. I was her Barnabas, and she my Angelique. We played at that, all the time. She was my Wednesday Addams. When I started regular school, she walked me there, and we were tardy every day. Her shortcuts led elsewhere, and were delicious. Inbetwixt the suburban houses and the suburban school, she found a haunted forest to trespass, full of mists and frost fairy circles.

Looking back into the intervening aeons, it is hard to believe that this could have happened to me. If only my life could have consummated on from this point...

Eventually my Father learned of my elfin friend. Quite naturally, he had to destroy her.

She was "teaching me bad things." She was a "shoplifter" he determined—that was the ultimate evil for my Father, and the accusations need not be sourced. For being a particularly hateful atheist, my Father was prone to stone-em moral posturing.

My Mother was a neurotic weakling. She let him have his way even in extremes, and did nothing. Her redemption lay elsewhere as well—but not tonight. Imagine how enraged Daddy must have been to discover that Junior had outsourced, had found another female force to indulge himself in. To circumvent Daddy's will with witchy splendors.

So we were forcibly separated. I remember my parents snarling like twin Cerberuses on the front stoop, myself locked indoors like a black prize. They denied her. I saw her pained face through the windowscreen, and it will not go from my mind. "Why can't I see him?"

I busted into tears, but I learned that tears have no salvation in them. She was turned away, and that majestic Oz with her.

A few days later, Laura was gone. The entire family vanished. At last their oddness, their house full of books and guinea pigs and cats, dogs, tweety birds and odd turns and rooms was empty and shuttered. They were too different; too free. Suburban antiseptic, applied rigorously.

The long-porched stucco house went up nicely on the block, for a song.

I knew what had happened. My father often threatened to send me to the Children’s Home when I was misbehaving. My fear, terror and hatred of him were fully forged, then frozen. He had sent her away, I knew. With the cackling indulgence of the Gainor Elite. This certainty abided.

Submitted for your approval: a suburban horror story. The Monsters are Overdue on Maple Street.

It was this event that made me strong like my father imagined, after all, but moreso than he wanted. I really do have a heart of stone. I am immune to sentiment. As years passed, he recoiled from the man he made. “I wish you weren’t so cold,” he whispered.

Cold, Daddy? Se habla arctic.

I never forgave him, the natural villain.

But suppose I told you I got it so wrong?

This is the wired age. I have actually written this essay before, and I could end it, I never saw Laura again.  But it took about twenty minutes to find her on the Internet.

I can tell you a little of what happened, because you don’t know who she is. It was her Father. He was a professor—I had no idea—but he was fast with his belt and hard with Jesus. Her mother had enough; they fled to family out west.

That was why the house suddenly emptied out. My father did what he did, but what I lifelong blamed him for, of that he was innocent.

I can say that I have had a hard life; she had her own. Those biographies, unknown for half a century, are now shared and will remain between us. We remembered our early devils together. I remembered the crystal doorknob on that attic door, so long ago, which led to such mysterious places. I remembered all my awe and love for her and how strange it is that we are just two human beings now, with imperfect recollections and so many dark places, more than a few belonging to us both.

Odd that it would be she who freed up my greatest ire for my Father, the man who condemned her. He had freed himself up the rest of the way; I can tell you that the man that died when I was 21 was not the man I had known at all at five.

Laura: stopper of shrapnel automobiles, keeper of the crystal key, builder of forts and author of lands shadowy and bright, trailmarker in the haunted forest. When I first wrote her, she said it made her cry. I did not want that.

But she says my printed email is on her fridge, and she shows it to her grandchildren to, as she wryly says, prove that she was onetime a “good person.”

Yes, I know. If I alone, I know.