The Happy Gothic Invasion

Cassadaga is built around a beautiful lake. I took a drive to Cassadaga Beach and almost passed it. Was it really that small, I thought? When I was a kid it was on par with Daytona. What I saw was a tiny strip of sandy grassland with a gazebo, swingset, and a boarded-up snack shop. Just like everything else in town, it seemed to have shrunk. It was pretty funny.

David had given me the okay to go see his parents, who live just up the street from my old house, but they don’t get home until 5. It was still early, so I went to May’s Place, which used to be Henry’s Tavern, for some wings. People outside the Buffalo area, I’m sorry, but you have not had wings until you’ve had wings here. May’s is right next door to my old house. My bus stop was in the parking lot. My parents used to go there for wings and I loved to play the jukebox. My favorite was Stevie Wonder’s "Just Called To Say I Love You", which was a new song back then.

At the bar I ordered a Yuengling and asked the bartender, a middle-aged lady with a t-shirt that said "Save the drama for your mama!", a million questions about the town. Her name is Kim Coon and she actually remembered my parents! I grabbed a picture of my family and she said, "My, look at that! Your brother had gotten so big! Y’know, I remember when your mom had him on that bathroom floor!" Yeah, that incident made our family near-legends at the time. My poor mom went into labor and delivered in 25 minutes flat.

She asked if I remembered her daughter, Mandy, and when she said the name I did. Mandy was "dating" the boy next door, who I had a crush on, when I was 6 and she was 8. I was heartbroken. I remember crying to my mom when I caught them kissing in the treehouse and her trying to comfort me by saying, "Well, I guess Mandy and Jason are just meant for each other", while trying not to laugh. Mandy came into the bar, to start her shift, not long after and we laughed about that, especially since Jason grew up to be a juvenile delinquent.

It was finally a kosher-enough time to go see Dave’s parents, the Kotars, and I recognized their house by the big "K" on the garage, just like the Special K cereal one, except black. His dad, John, was on the riding mower and waved as I came down the drive. I knocked on the door and hugged his mom, Debbie. We caught up for awhile, looking at photo albums. I was surprised to see pictures of me in David’s baby book, but then again it’s no surprise considering how close we were.

I told Debbie all about my adventures in big city living, cross-country travel, homelessness, and hitch-hiker-picker-upping, and she just kept shaking her head. It was hilarious! We went for a walk around the lake and I was as amazed by the scenery as I was as a kid. The sun was setting as we made our way past the town cemetery and Lilydale, which is a tiny community on the lake separate from Cassadaga that is "The World’s Largest Community of Mediums". My parents took me there when I was two and were surprised when I saw the ghost of a dog in the pet cemetery. (I don’t remember this, but my mom swears to this day that I pointed to a dirt patch and said "Look at the doggie, mommy!") Debbie told me a few stories of the people that lived in the houses we passed, and I asked her about the water plane. When I was little, a man in town owned one of those tiny planes that landed in water and I loved to watch it splash down. Debbie thought he sold it because she hasn’t seen it in awhile.

Walking around the lake I remembered how my father and I had taken my mom on the same route in June 1986, trying to induce her labor of my brother by getting her good and tired. Looking back, it didn’t work quite the way we planned.

Debbie and I had parked at the Astry’s house (Ace-try) and before heading back up to Debbie’s we stopped in to see Roxanne and Bill. The Astry’s son, Andy, was the third musketeer, the final part of the David-Jessica-Andy trinity that was us when we were kids. He and David stayed friends, were roommates in college and everything, inseparable until Andy got married and moved to Tucson last year. I always carried a torch for Andy when I was little. Trying to get him to fall in love with me was the one thing, besides Care Bears, that got me out of bed every day between the ages of four and seven. Debbie, Roxanne, and I looked at pictures of the wedding and caught up for awhile. I filled Rox in on my parents and my little brother, who survived the humble conditions of his birth only to become a mountain-dwelling goth kid with no job who subsists on ramen noodles and spam.

Later on, back at the Kotar’s, Debbie showed me an album just of pictures of Andy’s wedding. "It was the first time in a long time that we had all the kids together," she said, meaning all the friends from when David and Andy were growing up. I wasn’t in it.

Debbie and John were nice enough to let me stay with them that night. They are such great people. We stayed up watching sitcoms and eating popcorn until I went back to David’s sister’s old room to crash. The next morning we watched the news and drank coffee until it was time to go. They went to work, I went to Lilydale for some psychic guidance on where to sleep that night and how to get some money.

If you want to see one of the most beautiful towns in the world, go to Lilydale in June. Better yet, go before 9 in the morning, when the sun is bright but not oppressive and the place has yet to stir for the day. You may not be able to get your cards read, but you can still appreciate the quiet, homespun beauty just walking down the narrow roads. The houses are all very old and colorful, Victorian-style and cheerfully decorated. Most have signs out front with a name or two on them, and underneath it says "Medium". Debbie said the night before that you can get pretty much anything read - your palm, Tarot cards, tea leaves, and even rune stones. My friend John used to read my stones and was always spot on. I love that stuff.

There is a park in Lilydale that boasts having a labyrinth in the back, a series of wooded paths in the back that are meant to bring the traveler to a higher understanding of self. The sign in front of the mouth of the labyrinth asks the walker to ask a question in their head and then concentrate on different aspects of the question depending on their position within the labyrinth. The point is to come to an answer within yourself with the help of spiritual guidance. I tried it, but two things stood in the way of my spiritual enoightenment - the path was blocked, presumably not ready yet after the winter overgrowth, and I had to pee really bad. I was afraid of peeing in the ghost woods, lest the ghosts take it as a defacement of their forest, so I turned back and held it like my life depended on it until I found a bathroom. That need sated, I realized I was starving.

At Grandma’s Kitchen I talked with a girl a few years older than me. She knew David and Andy and told me stories of some other kids I knew, but she mostly told me about her weekend, which she spent at the Nascar race in Dover, DE. It was cute how excited she was about it. She told me that Fiddlewood Farms was hiring, and I said, "That’s awesome! I’d love to work on a farm!"
"No, honey, that’s the ice cream factory. It used to be called Dunkirk Ice Cream."
I knew the name well - my mother had worked there through college and regales me with horror stories about it every now and then. It’s not a very nice place to work.
"Well, I’m desperate, but I’m not stupid," I said.
"Yeah, it’s nasty," she agreed.

After polishing off two eggs and homemade rye toast - homemade bread!! - I took a ride to a few motels in the area to compare prices. They were either too expensive, or too smoky, or too far from Cassadaga, but I finally found a good one in Dunkirk, two towns north. It was smoky too but the guys assured me they could "clean it up real nice" and have it smelling fresh. It’s a little efficiency with a big closet, a mini-fridge, a sink, cabinets, and a two burner stove. I paid for a week’s stay, which means I’m here til next Tuesday. I drove around Dunkirk and the town of Fredonia, in between Dunkirk and Cassadaga, while they went to work on the room.

Fredonia is a cool little town. My mom graduated from SUNY Fredonia and stayed in the area. My dad moved up here when they got married, that’s how we ended up in Cassadaga. I rode through the campus imagining my mom as a young woman walking to class in bell bottoms and a t-shirt, an outfit I’ve only seen her wear in pictures. I picked up a course catalog, hoping to cash in on her alumni status if I ever applied there, but they don’t offer the post-graduate program I want. Darn it.

Dunkirk sits right on Lake Erie, and I walked the pier for awhile, watching the silvery minnows dart back and forth right under the surface and remembering the old "Saturday Night Live" commercial parody for Swill, the bottled water dredged from Erie that had sand and pollutants floating in it. I was glad to see that the water looked a lot cleaner than it had when I was a kid.

Going back to the motel I caught the lady in the midst of finishing up. The manager had washed the curtains and the maid had sprinkled deodorizer all over the thick, brown carpet. It was 100 times better. I moved in my stuff and everyone came out to see the new girl. Most of the people in the motel actually live there, and pay rent month-to-month. At first I thought that was weird, but the more I think about it, it’s just like living in a studio apartment in Manhattan. They all introduced themselves and now I have a whole new cast of characters to love. There’s Kevin, the middle-aged divorcee who babysits his adorable 3-year-old daughter while his ex is at work; Jolene, the cleaning lady who lives there and takes care of Rodney, the Vietnam vet who is wheelchair-bound and admits being addicted to painkillers; Jojo, the goth kid, and his motley band of friends; and Emmie, a sweet older lady who hangs her laundry on the line in the side yard. Together, they are the misfits of Dunkirk - people who constitute the magma of society, churning just below the upper crust. It makes me mad that some people take one look at someone like Jolene or Rodney or Jojo and write them off as white trash. To me, white trash is the trust fund brats and vacuous party kids in LA - the ones so stuck on themselves that they’re incapable of having even one real friend. These people are the truth - the ones who live hard lives of poverty and abuse and still find a reason to smile, however small.

After settling into the room I set up my folding chair in the shade outside my door and settled in to write. Jolene walked over at one point with a notebook. She is very pretty for her age, lean with long, wavy brown hair. Shyly, she handed me a torn-out piece of notebook paper. "You’re a smart girl, I can tell," she said nervously. "I wrote this for my son for his birthday. Can you tell me if you think it’s dumb? The guys over there laughed at me when I showed them."
"Of course," I said. The bubbly handwriting read, "To you, my son,". What followed was a whole page of how proud she was, how happy he made her, and how she wished him all the happiness in the world. She stood over me, watching inquisitively as I read and re-read it. It was beautiful - I don’t dare paraphrase it here but it was beautiful. "Is it stupid?" she asked, eyes wide like a child’s as I looked up, handing it back.
"No, sweetheart," I answered, misty, thoroughly touched that she would share this with me, almost a complete stranger. Looking up at her, her long hair pulled into a messy bun and hard-life wrinkles under her eyes, she was so beautiful to me.

She showed me pictures of her son and her daughter, ones she keeps in a pocket on the inside cover of her notebook. It was sweet how proud she was. I loved talking to her. After awhile she went back to her room and I went back to writing. I made some beefaroni - which I ate with a spoon, not a comb, thank you very much - and watched some expose on Latoya Jackson before being distracted by some yelling noises coming from outside my back door. Not scary drunken-fight yelling, but laughing and happy yelling. There were some teenagers having a water fight, Jojo and a girl of about 14. The other kids that made up The Permanent Fixtures In The House Of Jojo were watching. The fight continued until Jojo ran out of water and went in for more ammo. I grabbed my little pot and filled it in the sink, then dashed back outside and tried to hand it to the girl. She laughed but didn’t take it so I stood with my back up against the wall beside Jojo’s back door and waited. The kids were all laughing hysterically at this point and one said, "Hey, Jojo! Come on out here!"

As he came out the back door with a two-liter soda bottle filled to the brim, I got the side of him perfectly. The kids fell to the ground laughing as I scampered back into my room to escape retaliation. Jojo called after me, "You got me good! That was good! Truce!" I peeked around the door sill, giggling. The kids, two girls and two boys besides Jojo, all said, "Come out here! You’re cool!" They introduced themselves as we stood around in one of those big circles that strangers stand around in while they’re getting to know each other, even though I was the only new kid. They were all goth kids. There was David, the tall one with big green eyes and a nervous but friendly way about him; Vanessa, the quiet brunette; Audrey, the Puerto Rican tomboy; and Scrappy, the short, baby-faced one. I liked them immediately.

They asked me about the guitar they had seen me bring and soon we were jamming around the fire pit out back. "We have fires here every night," they said proudly. They listened to me play John Lennon and sang along to Peter, Paul, and Mary before asking me if I knew any Marilyn Manson or Insane Clown Posse. I hated to disappoint them.