MORE TALES OF

UNCLE MIKE

by P.J. O’Rourke

  

"Tales of Uncle Mike” began as the editorial for the March, 1977 issue. If you didn’t see that, you’re shit out of luck, and have to send us $1.50 to get one. Or send us a picture of your wife or girl friend in flagrante delicto with a pony. That won’t get you a March ‘77 National Lampoon, but it will make your life more interesting later on when you’re rich and respectable and you remember that we have the photograph in our possession. Anyway, these particular “Tales of Uncle Mike” aren’t about Uncle Mike at all. But it’s the same_____, Ohio, where I went to college a dozen years ago or so, and where Uncle Mike was a math instructor, and where we both had more fun than we’re likely to have again soon, says the doctor.

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 The Haunted Garage

    Friends of mine and, later, Juanita and I, came to live in the haunted garage because of Bill Forrester and a job he had tending bar in the little town of MacGonigill, about two miles from school.

     There are plenty of stories about Forrester himself, though they have nothing to do with the haunted garage. He liked to have people drive him around in his old Volkswagen while he stood up through the sun roof, naked except for an Army surplus parachute and a pair of ski goggles. He’d ride around at night like that, shining a big flashlight at pretty girls. One night he saw a girl who was prettier than most. The prettiest girl he’d ever seen, he claimed, and he pulled the rip cord. The car was going about forty when the chute opened, and Forrester was pulled out the sun roof in a cloud of rotted silk. There was a lot of explaining to be done in the emergency room, and the police were plagued all night by local reports of a man from Mars.

     Then there was the time Forrester had too many drugs and too much liquor and thought he was a woolly spider monkey, and climbed to the top of a neighbor’s TV antenna before he remembered that he wasn’t. It was an awful job getting him down. The more so since spider monkeys have no sphincter control.

     And then there was the time we had an indoor bicycle race and Bill missed the turn at the top of the stairs and went through the closed window, bike and all, and walked away without a scratch—something that very often happens to drunks, fools, and people in stories, and, of course, Forrester was all three. Fortunately, it was a stolen bicycle. But none of that has anything to do with the story of the haunted garage.

     Esther’s Wagon Wheel, the bar that Forrester worked in, was owned by a rich hillbilly woman Esther Bengey, who was about eighty years old. Back behind the building, in what must have once been tourist cabins, was a whorehouse operation run by her brother Jake, who was even older. Jake and Esther hated each other, and argued constantly. They were so old that they couldn’t remember from one minute to the next what they were arguing about, but that didn’t stop them. One night, Jake walked into the Wagon Wheel with a 30/30, and Esther pulled the shotgun out from behind the bar. He emptied a whole clip and she fired both barrels and neither one of them hit a thing. They did wake up a bum who was dozing outside, however, and he ran out into the road and was killed by a car.

     Forrester got killed, too, six years later, flying a scout plane in Vietnam. But that’s not a very good joke, is it? Seemed funny enough with the bum, though.

     Anyway, Esther Bengey had a big house back in_____, on the outskirts of town. Behind this house was the haunted garage. The house itself was haunted, too. A wealthy farmer had built it about a hundred years before, and then some awful fate befell him (I never did quite get the story), and ditto for the next six families that lived there—wife murders, child starvings, incest, suicides, and a headless Episcopal minister or a sea chest full of human thigh bones locked in the attic, depending on who you listened to. But the garage was haunted independently, and by a more contemporary group of ghosts. It had been built as a small stable, then used as a garage for years, and finally made into an apartment in 1959. There was one large room with an oil heater, a little kitchen and a bathroom at the back, and a narrow ladder up to what had been a hayloft and was now a bedroom. The first tenant was a lady graduate student with leukemia. She spent her last year there, and died in the place. She then became the first ghost, and supposedly, no one wanted to live there afterward. But the place was really no bargain. It was built flat on the ground and had no insulation, so it was cold in the winter and damp in the summer, and the oil burner functioned the way oil burners do, which is to say it didn’t.

     When Forrester went to work at the Wagon Wheel in the fall of 1962, Esther Bengey asked him if he knew anyone who would like to live in her “carriage house” for a very modest rent. Sure, said Forrester, he knew people who would live anywhere. So, for the next five years, Forrester’s friends moved in and out of the garage, and more ghosts accumulated.

     Woody Upton lived there in 1962 and ‘63, and there were a lot of parties, as there always were when someone had a place out of earshot-shot of those who’d mind. Woody got a girl from Kentucky pregnant, and she came to one very boisterous party in her ninth month even though everybody said she shouldn’t. And, big as she was, she was drinking and dancing and carrying on the same as anyone else until she fell down on the floor in labor. There was some panic and screaming and running for the door; then, everyone froze. She was a strong, husky sort, this girl, and she got her underwear off and hiked up her skirt and gave birth right there, to dead twins, The fetuses were laying on the floor all bloody and not breathing, the girl was crying, and people were standing everywhere with no idea about what to do, and then the lights went out. It was only dark for a couple of seconds and when the lights came on again, no one seemed to have moved. But the dead twins were gone.

     I don’t know what happened after that. I wasn’t there myself, and this story always seemed to break down in the denouement. But everyone who’s told it to me agrees the twins were gone. And they were supposed to haunt the place, too, as was Remey Miller, who lived there next with his lover, Phil.

     Remey and Phil were frail, effeminate types, and very attached. They lived in the garage for only a couple of months in the summer of 1963. Then they went to Cincinnati, where Remey had a job teaching high school. Bob Werhauser and his pregnant wife Lil moved in after them, even though Lil was frightened of the place. She had the baby in December, and a few days after she came home from the hospital Bob had to go away someplace for a month. Maybe jail, I don’t remember.

     Remey and Phil were in town a lot that winter. They’d drive up for parties at Uncle Mike’s or other places, and they had come to a party at Forrester’s one Saturday night when Lil’s baby was about two weeks old. It was a good party, as all remembered parties are, but I’m told that this one was better than usual, and that there was plenty of drunkenness, fighting, and confusion. About two in the morning the phone rang, and Uncle Mike, who was sitting next to it on the floor with a bottle, answered, and it was Lil. She said Remey was out at the garage banging on the door and threatening to rape her. Uncle Mike laughed and hung up. A few minutes later the phone rang again, and Lil insisted it was true, and Mike says that he thought that that was a great joke and that he laughed even harder. The third time she called she was screaming, and said that Remey was breaking in through the door. One hundred and twenty pounds of faggot and a two-inch stable door—Mike said to cut it out, will you, and the fourth time he just let the phone ring.

     It rang for ten minutes, and Remey stayed at the garage for a week. (Under exactly what circumstances no one has ever found out.)

     Eventually, though, Remey went back to Cincinnati and back to work and living with Phil, and that was the end of it until the spring of 1964, when some of Remey’s students came to see him at home and found him and Phil passed out with the gas on.

     Remey died. But whether it was an accident, murder, or suicide, no one knows. They were both alive when the ambulance came, and Phil recovered quickly. But Remey was comatose, laying under an oxygen tent in a welter of life-supporting tubes and hoses for a week. At first, they wouldn’t let Phil see him, and when they finally did, Phil paused for a second in the doorway, and then, with a hysterical scream, rushed to take Remey’s body in his arms, knocking the I.V. unit and plasma bottles apart and collapsing the oxygen tent. Remey died that night and, they say, came back to haunt the garage.

     Juanita and I moved in in the fall of 1966. Meanwhile, a number of people had lived there, the last one being my friend Jerry, who wrote unpublished novels and drank himself to death at twenty-nine. But that’s another story, even though I’ve just told it all right here. It was Jerry who warned me about the ghosts. He said they made noises upstairs in the loft, like dragging chains and moaning horribly. And that he thought that those were pretty corny noises for ghosts to make, and told them as much. After that, he said, they made noises like greased sumo wrestlers. Whatever that sounds like. And he said to watch out for the oil burner especially. It used to turn white hot and sing Gregorian chants to him. He was sure all four of them lived in there some of the time. Finally, he tired of the racket and got ready to leave (owing Esther Bengey three months). He said that the ghosts seemed sorry. And that for the last three weeks, they made no more frightening sounds—only plaintive sighs and an occasional baby’s cry in the night. But one evening, he said, while he was writing a letter with his new address in it, black inky stuff dripped from the ceiling and covered the street number. But there wasn’t really a ceiling. It was just the bottom of the loft floor on one side and the top of the loft floor on the other. No place for black inky stuff to come from. He checked.

     Jerry was tipping the glass pretty hard by the time I heard all this. He used to keep bottles of gin in the refrigerator, and every now and then he’d open up the door and show them a vermouth label. He called this a “Hemingway martin,” and he was drinking two quarts of it a day the last couple of years. So I didn’t pay much attention to him.

     The garage was a little spooky, though. At night, it always seemed darker and windier out there. And there was a big, dark, bloodlike stain in the middle of the living room floor. Some nights you could hear an occasional knock-knock-knock on the northeast corner of the roof, where there were no tree branches on the outside or plumbing on the inside. And sometimes the rungs of the ladder would creak, one at a time, like something was going upstairs. Not much of a haunting, I suppose, but it was only a garage. Anyway, nothing of a straightforward supernatural sort happened for the first four months Juanita and I were there.

     Well... there was this talking dog.

     Esther and Jake Bengey had a brother, Luther, who was even older yet than they were. He lived down in the Indiana hill country along the river, and he’d show up every now and then, apparently on foot, with an old-fashioned octagonal barreled rifle and a little dog, Boz. Luther claimed he used Boz to hunt bears and mountain lions back in Indiana, and it was no use arguing with him; he was deaf as a brick. One afternoon, Uncle Mike and I walked around the corner of the garage and Boz was standing there by the wall and said, “Hello” plain as that.

     Not much of a talking dog, either. But it did talk. It just didn’t have much to say. Besides, it was killed by a collie the next morning.

     So Juanita and I lived on at the garage from October into February, perfectly contented, considering how old we were. It was a very mild February, I remember. Warm enough to smell hay rotting in the thawed fields. It was almost like spring. Which might have been what put Juanita in mind of getting married and having a baby. Or maybe it was the puppy I gave her for Christmas. Whatever it was, she brought the subject up one morning late in that month and talked about it all day, especially where we’d live and so on, and on into the night while we lay in bed together. I woke up about three that morning, coughing and gagging. The loft was filled with smoke and I couldn’t wake Juanita or the puppy, though I slapped both of them. I got Juan under one arm (she wasn’t a big girl) and the puppy under the other and somehow made it down the ladder like that. I have no idea how. Even the opening through the loft floor wasn’t wide enough for the three of us. Nor am I given to feats of any kind, let alone strength. But somehow we got downstairs, where the oil heater was puffing out black fumes, and we made it through the door. Once outside, Juanita came around, but her lips were blue and there were blue crescents in the quick of her nails. We walked three blocks in our underwear over to Uncle Mike’s house. And we decided to stay there for the rest of the winter, where we’d be safe from the oil burner—an oil burner that hadn’t been lit in three weeks.

     I was back in _______ last year, and the big house is now “Shaperstein’s Furniture Universe,’ and the haunted garage is “Dinette Town” I hope it’s a happy arrangement for all concerned.

 The End. No, I should tell at least one real Uncle Mike story. I mean, I’ve got it in the title and everything. But just a short one:

 

How Uncle Mike Met His First Wife

 

     Tammy Omertti, Uncle Mike’s first wife, was a tough lady. She always carried a .38 in her purse—something I’m sure Uncle Mike didn’t know the night he met her. She was pretty, too, and built USDA Prime.

     Uncle Mike used to drink in a place called Mac and Flo’s, down an alley off ______’s main street. In fact, it was there that I met him myself. He was out on the bar’s little porch, banging his head against a cinder block wall. When somebody introduced us, Mike stopped for two seconds and said, “Hi. How are you?” civil as you please, and went right back to banging his head. He says he doesn’t remember why.

     One night, Tammy and a girl friend wandered into Mac’s while Mike was on a toot, and when Uncle Mike got a look at Tammy, he almost fell down dead. She was a dream come true, he says, an Italian—which Mike is—vision of paradise. Or would have been if she’d had a plate of spaghetti carbonara with her. (That’s Uncle Mike’s comment, not mine.) Anyway, he was in love, so he walked over to her table and said, “I got fifteen dollars. Wanna fuck?”

     She threw a bottle at him, and he went running away, laughing and howling and tipping over chairs. But he wasn’t so happy when he got back to the other end of the bar, and for the next half hour he stood there, looking sheepish and getting drunker until, at last, he bought two quarts of beer and took them over and gave them to Tammy and her friend. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me,” he said, “I’m really sorry. I want to apologize. I really do. I’m sorry that I said that about the fifteen dollars. I only got ten!!!”

     There was such a commotion that Vinny, who owned the place, had to come out from behind the bar with his ball bat, and Uncle Mike and Tammy were married two months later.