Transcription
Around the Cosmic Campfire by Tony Wright
Chapter 24: Lyle Avenue
It was the mid-70s. I was beckoned in Nashville to do some music recording by a producer who had flown all the way to a cornfield town in Nebraska to hear my country band for a one-night show. He liked what he heard and saw, including my washboard thimbling. When I got the call, he wanted me to come to Music City. I was excited, although I wasn't really a country music singer. I wanted to be in the throb of a place focusing on music all around me.
I left for Nashville and made arrangements to stay at a friend's house. I met with the producer in his office one evening after we had dinner and talked about my moving to town. He declared he wanted to work with me. He didn't talk about the band moving to town, just me moving to town. I wasn't sure what he meant, but I figured it out very soon. By the time the evening of long discussions had ended in his office, I discovered that I was going to be chased around his desk indignantly. Immediately, I left. I didn't have a car there or even cab fare, as I was now a starving and committed musician. I had given all of my savings to my friends who let me be a part-owner in his guitar-building shop, The Old Time Pick and Parlor.
So, as a young woman often does when they are ticked off, mad, money or not, I headed out walking late at night. I didn't really know how long we'd been talking or how late it was, but then I was young; time meant nothing. It was sometime after midnight by the time I got to Hillsboro Village from Music Row. I was happy to only be a few blocks from my friend's sort of crusty apartment in an old house. Suddenly, I could hear sirens screaming towards me, and the village opened up in gunfire. Gunfire passing me was a car being chased by a police car, and they were shooting at each other, like right there next to me. I looked around to see if I was in a movie set, but indeed I wasn't. I jumped over some shrubs and hunkered down behind them. I had no idea what to do but waited it out as they continued to speed by. It became clear I was safe, and so I came out of hiding and hoofed it faster than before to my friend's place on Fairfax Avenue near Dragon Park. I was shaking all over and talking to myself, cursing at myself for being out late alone, shaking and chattering like a bumbling idiot. This was my introduction to Nashville. It was like it was saying to me, "Welcome, little girl from Iowa. You like Texas and its outrageous cowboys? Well, we have everything here too. Welcome to your very first shootout."
Ultimately, I did move to Nashville. I forgave the shooting incident, packed up the things I had stored at my parents' house, and moved them into an apartment I was quickly quite lucky to get. At the same time, in the 70s, musicians were unreliable and difficult for landlords, hence even avoided, to say the least. Musicians and bad credit were even more difficult for the phone company. It was hard to get a phone, so I didn't. I found an old, way-past-historic apartment building on Lyle Avenue towards downtown. It was handy because, within walking distance since I had no car, was the only health food store in town—actually, it was the only store I could get to on foot. It was the size of a small living room, packed with every kind of herb and nut and rice, complete with a sticky floor from patrons having trouble pouring honey into tiny honey bears from five-gallon honey containers. All of the employees were excruciatingly thin and sunken in, and I never saw them smile. I figured they really wanted some McFries, and I was wondering why anyone would want to be a vegetarian if they just seemed so joyless. It certainly wasn't a good initiation for me at that time in my life. I knew nothing. I lived on hotel food—Holiday Inn rainbow-colored beef, Howard Johnson's powdered eggs, Waffle House fake syrup—and every kind of fast food around. I was a road dog, but the health food store was close by, and I could get rice and a few things cheaply to live on until my partner returned to town from his own singing job. I would be okay. I could take the bus over to the laundromat on Blair Avenue with my dirty laundry in a cotton muslin bag on the seat next to me and get back home just fine. It was another time in life I was forced to take a bus, so I felt like I wasn't progressing along at all, but as that turned out, I certainly was.
When I got moved into the 100-year-old apartment building, it smelled very different. The building at the main floor entry smelled a bit like fermented Thai food and bad cheese—like, very accurate. I hoped I could get used to it as it slowly moved its way upstairs. There was a very, very old woman living on the main floor below me, and she was the only one in the small complex beside me. Actually, she had a strange young man living with her. He didn't speak English and, with some version of Asian background, mostly stood and stared at me in silence. I figured he was making really authentic Asian fish-heady food in the kitchen, and that it could be what smelled all over the apartment, and it was some strong stuff. It was a four-unit building, and oddly the other units were empty, and I wondered if the smell kept the occupancy down. It was important to me that the old woman liked me, for some reason, so I would go down from time to time when I first moved in and talked with her. Her apartment was full of antiques and old chairs with seat cushions she had needle-pointed with her own hands at one time in her life when her hand still worked. I felt like I had a grandma there, and I was comforting at first. She welcomed me there, and I vowed to be very quiet—after all, I was alone all of the time.
The ceilings in the apartment were 14 feet high. There were only electric wall heaters in each room, and they weren't very efficient. I found, after the first month, that the electric bill in the winter was more than my rent, and I wasn't even warm, no matter what I did. I could not get the place warm. I had to get up on the top of a 12-foot ladder and sit to get any heat, as it was all hanging up near the ceiling. Luckily, I was on the ladder a lot, painting and trying to make this half-broken-down apartment livable. It was dirty when I took possession of it, but I knew I could make it look like home, as I had a special gift for that type of thing—cleaning things up and making do. I was a master at that. The walls had really old wallpaper, and I determined it probably to be antique wallpaper. I was painting over some of the walls, paper and all, which peeled off onto my ruler. The kitchen had an old gas stove that was from the 20s. It was beautiful mint green and cream porcelain-covered cast-iron stove with curved legs and had a lot of character. My bedroom, the one and only bedroom in the place, had an old screened-in porch attached to it, and it felt a bit spongy to walk on, and I wasn't sure I could actually hang out there. I stored a few lightweight things there instead.
As I painted, I got to the place over the old coal-burning fireplace, and the paper was coming off the wall a bit, and so I just decided to take the top layer off and see what was better under there. As I started pulling down the loose wallpaper, antique coal powder started falling into my eyes. I found the original wallpaper and just had to step back for a moment and get my wits about me. It then occurred to me, as I stared at it, that the entire room had once been wallpapered in spider web wallpaper with black spiders printed on it—the entire room, spiders and spider webs. It freaked me out a little—actually, it freaked me out a lot. This place was slowly presenting its hidden creepiness. I ripped it down and painted the rough wall and got it looking better, having to shake off how I felt about it.
At one point, I was moving the ladder around, and as I did, I stepped barefoot onto something on the floor that I hadn't cleaned up yet since I was in the painting process. I planned I would do move-in cleaning later. It scrunched and crunched under my feet, and I thought it was some old piece of brown shag carpet down there, but as I looked and took a very close look, I could see it was a giant spider—no, it was a tarantula. Now, considering that in my life spiders have been the scariest thing next to snakes that I could encounter, stepping on a giant spider in my bare feet was the worst thing ever. Although it was dead, there was something radically gross about stepping barefoot onto one. It was huge and hairy and as large as my fist. I could not figure out where in the world it would have come from, and the second question quickly emerged: Are there more? Are there live ones? I thought I would have a heart attack. I had no answers to this question, so I asked the old woman, and she knew nothing. I felt like I was in an information vacuum, that there was no one to ask, no one around, and so I threw everything away in the living room on the floor and started to clean. I tried to make myself forget that the room had been papered in spider web print. There had been a crunchy giant dead spider in there as well. Maybe it wasn't really that big. I contemplated it. I concluded: No, it was that big.
As days went into a week, I realized the truth: I am in one creepy apartment, and I can't get out of it. I can't even drive away from here; I have no car, I have no money. I will have to face my fears. To make things worse, I was hearing things go bump in the night. Was I imagining things? I doubted it; my antenna for odd things always eventually worked very well, albeit sometimes very slowly. Every night, I turned on my tiny little black and white TV on the chest of drawers and stayed up watching goofy old movies from under my blanket in my bedroom until the sun came up. I had a .22 Llama handgun under my pillow. I knew how to use it, but I didn't want to. I was a particularly good shot with an automatic, but I wasn't sure what I would shoot. I had started hearing things above my bedroom, and there were no apartments up there; it was an old attic. During that first week, I started to feel a presence in my apartment—something unseen but definitely there. The gun would be of no help, and I innately knew this. I had known a lot about unseen forces for many years, and since my personal antenna was finally working great for certain, I knew something unfamiliar was about—weirder.
The old woman started to call me all the time at night to tell me to stop walking so hard on the floor; she was trying to sleep, but I was not walking; I was in bed, and no one else was there either—or in the building, in fact. She said she could hear me walking all up and down my long hallway, but I could hear that walking above me, and no one else was there or in the building, indeed. I would stay awake until the sun came up. I didn't have a job yet and was in limbo, so I could afford to stay up all night and sleep during the day. Ultimately, I was awake just staring at the television station sign-off identification circle. I was listening to the loud, high-pitched long note it played all night long. If I could do that, I could safely stay awake—just my gun and me.
One day, there was a knock on the door, and it sounded like the woman from Diary of a Mad Housewife. I wasn't sure whether I should get it because I was feeling so unsafe at that point. I was quite timid. There was a front door and a back door, and both had eight locks on them—eight. That was my first clue that I wasn't making any of this stuff up. None of this did I notice when I said I'd take the apartment. The front door had a doorknob lock and a series of slide chain locks and a deadbolt and two peepholes and one oddly angled and hand-glued in so one could see left down the staircase. The back door had eight locks as well. "Lord, please help me." So I answered the door. There was a kindly seeming guy there, Larry by name, who had come to get his mail. He was the previous tenant, and I indeed had some mail for him. And then he asked—I asked him about any troubles with spiders in this place. He laughed and said he had lost his tarantula out of his terrarium when he was here. He must have resurfaced and then died. He only had one. I was quite relieved after he left, and I felt better in my arachnophobia, but still at odds with the mysterious sounds around me, which I didn't ask him about. I forgot to ask him if he had had a bird because I'd cleaned bird poop that had dripped all the way to the floor down one wall. I would just assume you did.
In the second week, I had heard enough walking at night and things unseen moving around me in the apartment and decided to go upstairs and have a look. That was completely uncharacteristic of me, since I barely watched a Dracula movie when I was young without having to call my parents. I went around back very briefly at one point during the daylight hours and found there was a separate staircase out back up to the attic. I don't know what made me do it, being the scaredy-cat that I was, except it was just time for me to get a grip and mostly get some sleep. I climbed on it. When I got up to the top, the attic opening didn't have a door on it to the outside, nor did it have any windows—glass in the window openings. The air was just moving in and out in a slight breeze. I stood there a moment looking around at the empty window. It was totally empty of anything like furnishings, and I looked inside. All there was was a wooden floor that was completely covered with a thick layer of soft dust. There were no footprints in it of any kind—nothing. No one had been walking there for sure recently, nor for a long time. However, hanging in long strands from the ceiling all around the room were long bunches of garlic. I got off that staircase so fast it would make someone's head spin. It was the creepiest thing I'd seen for a while, and the final assessment was that the room up there had not been inhabited by at least humans for a long, long time. It was completely undisturbed by anything physical. I knew that people for centuries put up garlic to scare away the evil spirits and ghosts. My question was then: What was walking up there creating those human footsteps above me that could not be seen? I didn't know. I was in my early 20s, and suddenly I wanted my mommy.
When my partner came back off the road, I was never so glad to see anyone in my entire life. I almost climbed down a throat wanting to see if I could live there like a gentle parasite inside his body, safe and warm, never coming out again. I could barely relay the tales to him; he would only think I was a frightened little girl anyway, and indeed I was. But then, frightened or not, I always had a knowing when things weren't right, even if sometimes tagged "better late than never." When I got the opportunity to go to Calaveras County in Northern California to work with Randy Sparks and the New Christy Minstrels and run his club, I took it. I left the apartment and the garlic and the sticky health food store floors far behind. I sublet the place to a really nice man named Jean Beach, who was a guitar builder at The Old Time Pick and Parlor, who vowed to take good care of it, including my belongings in it. Within months, he had to leave town, and then he sublet it to a rounder he met, and most of my stuff was then stolen. It was not a good place at all.
It was a weird chapter for me in my life, for sure, wondering if I was making it all up and overreacting. I decided I wouldn't think of that place again, and it would become ancient, quiet, and not revisited history in my life. It usually doesn't work like that for me; there's usually more to the story.
Eventually, we came back from California several years later. We resettled in Nashville, and my partner got involved in an old hobby of his, and he joined the Speleological Society in the area to do some caving or cave jumping. Tennessee is rich with an incredible amount of private caves in its vast underground caving system. There are thousands of miles of underground caves, actually. I tagged along and got to know some of the people, but since going into the bowels of the earth wasn't my forte, I became the call-down operator for the rescue team, being the liaison to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. Amazingly, they were regularly rescuing people out of caves in the area.
One night, on one of our caving excursions of camping and cooking out, we were around the campfire telling ghost stories. I told the story of a haunted house I'd stayed in on the Mississippi River, which spurned a man at the campfire to jump in with something creepy to share as well. Then I discovered the guy talking about living in a strange apartment years ago was Larry—Larry Adams, the guy who had come to get his mail from me at the Honda department years ago. When I discovered who he was, we started sharing stories about the place we both had inhabited at one time on Lyle Avenue, and it made sense. He had a tarantula; he was a caver, and he was interested in all kinds of wildlife, from insects to strikingly large spiders and birds and bats. He told me he used to be in bed at night in the Lyle Avenue apartment and feel an entity walk past him every single night, past the bed and into the screened-in porch room. It was quite an active place, and they never did him any harm but were all around all the time. He could hear steps walking at night as well, and between the smell, the footsteps, the old lady, and the beings walking around him at night, he eventually fled as well.
I could never imagine that I would ever hear about that creepy apartment that I had anxiously fled, but it was interesting to discover I was right; my radar was working efficiently, and I knew there were unseen forces that did not fit with my god frequency at all around me. I didn't know if I was in danger or not there as I heard some stories from friends who were not so sure they were safe with their unseen forces. There was an antique house I had been a guest in on the Mississippi River years earlier, and my friend Dave had been held down in his bed at night and asleep on a regular basis by some unseen force, and it was quite a force; he could not move at all, and the terror was accompanied by violent Civil War dreams. As I toured that house when I arrived, I didn't know of his scary encounters at night but felt something strange as I walked past a closet room and a closed room, which turned out to be where slaves had lived and also died during Civil War times. This house had an old widow's watch where women would sit and watch for their men to come home boating back on the Mississippi River. Just visually, this place was quite creepy, and the energies abound didn't feel right instantly. I didn't like the place and lasted only two nights there. Often in the old Mississippi River mansion, a rocking chair would rock on its own in the corner.
I learned there are many things on this planet that we do not totally understand, but they do exist. It is as if the veil between our world as living beings and those who are now gone from here is very thin, and perhaps some souls are not as gone as they should be. What I learned about myself was that although I have openness to all things in life and all experiences, I could not shake the distasteful feeling I get thinking I am being watched by some bodiless entity as I go about my private life every day. I think that's reasonable; just having one's privacy is not too much to ask. Are these entities real, or do we just make them up? Are they somehow extensions of our own fears and paranoia? I don't know all the answers, but I know I have had the experience of them for sure. One final knowing for me is that these feelings brought on by these forces to me do not feel godly.
It was just funny to me to have a deeper look at the synchronistic happening that I had to shake my head—that I was able to get the resolution in question about the Lyle Avenue apartment. The affirmation was that I wasn't making it up; the affirmation was that it was inhabited by unseen and somewhat disturbing forces. The supernatural about it was that out in the middle of nowhere, on a camping trip in the woods, many counties away from Nashville and years later, I would rediscover the man who came years earlier to get his mail, who I figured I would never see again. I hadn't even known his last name, and yet against all odds, there he was out in the middle of some woods with me, and he would affirm this apartment experience for me. I would discover that the law of attraction is a powerful law of nature: Everything we need, or even things we need to know, will come to us eventually. The one thing I was most frightened of in my life were spiders, and somehow I attracted a place that had been engulfed in spider wallpaper, complete with a tarantula to top things off. We do draw things to us that we vibe on, and as I matured, I have learned to appreciate the duties of spiders in this world, and I live and commune with dignity with all little things. I got over them truly. When we get rid of our fears and do not let them have power over us, all of the things that go bump in the night and are that are creepy crawling around us have no real power over us. My odd stories emerge every day, even to this day. I love to continue to learn that nothing is as it seems; there is so much more than what meets the eye, and I appreciate the journey I am privileged to be on. Life is absolutely a story-gathering adventure and, if nothing else, a vastly strange and amusing ride on an uncertain earth amidst inexplicable soul landscapes.