THE NIGHT STALKER

There were occasional weekends when we’d return to the shape and sense of our old self again, my family. All seven of us home, staving off the outside world, which seemed to be inching closer all the time or else pulling us farther from the perfect seven we’d always been. Dad was still gone four nights out of seven, his absence punctuated by a smudge of oil in the driveway from where his Chevrolet leaked. Wanda had moved back to the Bay Area and taken a marketing job at a company that printed calendars and business cards. She lived in a sunny apartment on Guerrero Street in San Francisco and was saving money for a season in Europe all by herself, a foray into the world she had already begun to crave more than the world we all together made. Even Jean, who had reclaimed her room at home on the second floor and who served as my one barrier against the abject loneliness I imagined was the plight of an only child, sometimes chose to go out and do things with other adults, leaving me home clocking the time till she’d return to indulge me with her presence and attention. Conrad was in San Francisco, too, about to start medical school, which had been his dream since he broke his funny bone at age eight and fell under the spell of the white-coated doctors, with their air of kind-hearted superiority (that’s probably not how he described it to himself, but that’s how they’ve always struck me, and what I’ve always envied). Michael was firmly installed in his life at Stanford, an updated version of the self he had become immediately upon his arrival to campus. He now parked a red motorcycle in the vestibule of his dorm, and everyone had taken to calling him Spike, a hybrid of his high school nickname, Spider, and Mike. I wondered whether becoming Spike had required my brother to let go of a big part of the person he’d always been. Or, as I’d later discover for myself, perhaps it was simply a matter of having encountered bits and pieces of himself he’d never before taken stock of and deciding to give them a little extra space. Whatever it was, he was also mostly off on his own as an undergrad ninety minutes away, closing in on that future I’d never thought to account for when I imagined growing up: the future that situated us each in our own distinct lives, separated from the rest of the family by a world of distance, difference.

Sometimes, though, everyone came home. Maybe it was my mother who called them back, promising food, rest, and whatever else they needed. Or maybe home still held something for them that beckoned on its own and drew them of their own volition. Whatever it was, their being back brightened the otherwise long stretches of eventless summer with weekends of footsteps in the hallways and up and down the stairs. Those times, my father, whose car sat dripping oil onto the driveway as if marking its territory, would wake up early and set a pork shoulder or a turkey up to smoke, sometimes both. I’d lie in bed taking in all the happy clatter of my parents preparing the feast (out of necessity, it was always a feast when the seven of us were together: meats, breads, cakes, and holiday side dishes), eager for my brothers’ and sisters’ voices to fill out the array.

Sometimes my parents would get excited and turn our reunions into bigger parties, inviting the neighbors and some of the families from church and setting up the front and back patios like a restaurant, all covered in the blue tablecloths and napkins that my mom had sewn the very first time she’d thought to entertain on such a scale. Those times, we’d eat past our fill and then push back the tables and dance. I liked watching my father take my mother in his arms and lean down so that their cheeks touched. They’d both close their eyes and smile, and though there were plenty of better conclusions to draw about what that gesture might represent, the first thing that always came to mind for me at those times was Mr. and Mrs. Huxtable from The Cosby Show, which, by then, had given me something upon which to project, or in which to decipher, the things I understood about happy black families. It even came up sometimes at school, when one friend who knew my family would describe us to another who didn’t. The default would often be “They’re just like the Huxtables,” and that seemed to set everyone straight. I supposed I was grateful that there finally existed such a convenient marker of what my home life looked like, relieved that some outside source was finally corroborating the balance and comforts of the life I knew. Maybe the Huxtables affirmed for them that there was such a thing as a happy black family—an alternative to, say, the black orphans or black project tenants or junkyard occupants of the other shows and movies my friends and I grew up on. Certainly, the wholesome Huxtable kids provided a perfectly timed alternative to Urban Youth, a possibility the larger culture seemed to incrementally consider and accept.

I clung to these gatherings, to the fact of them, to the voices and the racket and the lights on inside the house and out. I felt protected in the midst of so much cheerful activity, with so many adults to buffer me from the aspects of the night that, hours later, promised to poke and jab jeeringly at my sense of calm. For when the dishes were done and everyone else was asleep, I’d lie awake in the throes of a new panic: that whatever might have been deterred by the buoyant commotion we’d made earlier in the evening would be emboldened by the dead silence of two or three o’clock in the morning. Sometimes, I’d creep downstairs in the night to double-check that the front door and then the outside screen were properly locked. Oh, and wasn’t there a ladder out by the side of the house? Though I wanted to sleep, tried desperately to trick myself into surrendering to exhaustion, my ears were too busy tracking every creak and scrape and passing car. It was a fear that only ever came when we were all home together, and it surged worst, I think, during the long, slow summer months, when we’d sleep with the windows open to let in the cool night air.

It was, after all, the summer of the Night Stalker, the serial killer who was taking California by rampage, breaking into houses at night and killing, raping, and mutilating the people inside. He used a tire iron on occasion or a machete. Once, after shooting a woman three times, he cut her apart with a carving knife. He carried home her eyeballs in a jewelry box, like souvenirs. Did I really think he would come for us? It didn’t matter if it was him or simply someone like him, a copycat or even just a cat burglar, the thought made me crazy with anxiety, worried sick not so much for myself as for everyone I loved, defenseless and asleep in the deep center of night. What would life be like, and how could it be worth anything, without my parents and my beautiful brothers and sisters? What would be the point of living on without them?

Once, one of the girls Wanda used to bring home with her from college told us a story about having been robbed while she was home in bed. She’d just lain there, feigning sleep, while the thieves took everything and left her untouched. This story became a kind of gospel for me. At night, I’d lie awake trying to slow down my breathing and heart rate so that a thief, had he been checking, might mistake me for asleep. But the more I tried, the more the blankets across my chest seemed to heave up and down, raging as if racked by wind.

It wasn’t until the sun began to tinge the sky with the first red strokes of arriving hope that I could let myself really drop off to sleep. When morning came and sounds from inside the house roused me, I’d spring up, grateful to be alive and eager to spin my night terror into a gag from which we might all derive a little fun. Lines from Poe that had fueled my dread just hours before (lines so enchantingly incantatory that I’d long ago committed them to memory) now seemed merely funny, a lighthearted description of my insomnia: “Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.” I’d march downstairs reciting them like a ham actor, hoping the laughter they’d elicit might amount to reassurance, which I could stockpile for the nights ahead.

This fear of intruders even topped the fear I had lived with just a couple of years earlier, when children my age began to contemplate the possible repercussions of nuclear weapons. There’d been a whole unit in school devoted to the topic, and we kids had sat down in the library with our teachers and talked about our fears and what we’d do if we were the adults in charge. That had been right around the time that commotion was beginning to build about an upcoming TV movie called The Day After, about the effects of a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR, a movie that sprang to mind (though I hadn’t actually been allowed to stay up and watch it) whenever my radio dial landed on Sting’s voice singing, “I hope the Russians love their children, too.” Back then, I tried to carry the fear inside me silently at first, not wanting to give it the weight talking it through would confer. But silence only made it larger. I’d lie down at night and feel it pooling in my arms, my legs, running into the tips of my fingers and bubbling up into the very top of my head. At school, I’d sit quietly in the library, not sure what to say, while visions of my own desolated neighborhood filled my mind’s eye. Where would we go? What would we eat or drink? I could envision my own mother, pushing on for her children’s sake, and my father, diminished by hunger, by radiation sickness, struggling at the helm of our household, though of course it was no longer a house. Why would we do such a thing? Why would we annihilate ourselves? When I finally asked my mother these questions, she offered me her lock, stock, and barrel faith in God as an answer: “I don’t believe God will let man destroy himself.” That single sentence, and the stolid authority of her belief, helped to calm some of my unrest. Had I pondered her logic further, I’d have probably wound up feeling even worse, for what I now think she meant was more in line with what the book of Revelation had told me: God won’t let us destroy mankind; that’s a job He has reserved for Himself alone.

Back in sixth grade, the other kids and I had gotten a bit of relief from our nuclear hysteria by inscribing postcards with messages of peace and then launching them into the air on helium balloons. That’s how small the world was to us then. A few months later, a friend and I received word that our message had made it all the way to Hawaii, drifting on the same winds that, under different circumstances, could have been carrying toxic fallout. Never mind that the latex balloons had probably done no small amount of damage to the animals and the ecosystem; that concern wouldn’t cross our minds for another several years. Maybe, the success of the endeavor had managed to suggest, we will find a way to save mankind ourselves.

I remember a still earlier fear that settled upon me in a similar way before I’d finally learned to speak it and break its spell. I was six and in the habit of playing across the street with a girl named Becky Billings. For a week or two one summer, one of Becky’s cousins was visiting, a boy from a place like Fresno or Merced, where they had horses and rodeos. He told me, once when we were alone together, that he had a machine that could turn people into tiny dolls. “All I have to do is point it at you and you’ll be a doll. Forever.” This was his way of getting leverage, of bullying me to do as he said, and I was young enough to believe him. Luckily, he had no real agenda; he only wanted my fear, the promise of my obedience. Yet the threat of being made miniature and of being drained of my life transfixed, ensorcelled me. Would I still have a mind, I wondered, to think with? I could already feel the effects of the magic or the science silencing me, setting me in an inexpressible daze, as if I were already less human. I slept with the fear and woke up to it, yet still I went to the Billingses’ to play. I hoped the boy would tell me it was all just a joke. He never did, but after he left, I approached Becky’s father. “Is there really a machine that can turn a person into a little tiny doll?” I’d asked, relieved that it hadn’t happened to me that time but fearful it one day might.

In fear, isn’t there often an undetected tinge of fantasy? I certainly didn’t wish to be made into a toy, or zapped by a nuclear blast, or forced to watch my family slain. But the mind concocts such threats, I now suspect, as a way of testing itself, of closing off every possible door and seeing what other routes and outlets and modes of meaning it might find. When I feared those things, my mind raced with an ugly seriousness, a morbid determination—but it raced nonetheless. We do these things to ourselves, I suspect, as a way of digging in deep to even just a hypothetical urgency. We do it during our waking hours, and then, while we sleep, our minds continue to toy with our fears by spinning strange dreams—dreams like the one about God and the Rapture that were still haunting me now and again. I suspect on some unconscious level, the anxieties we dwell upon provide us with a primitive, roundabout way of affirming the addictive delight of being alive. Like testing to see if a 9-volt battery still has juice by touching it to your tongue.

At the end of the summer, the Night Stalker was arrested. His name was Richard Ramirez. He was tall with vacant, spooky eyes. And he was handsome in a way that made him seem, in retrospect, even more dangerous. He was caught after fleeing an East LA convenience store where his picture glared out from the front pages of all the newspapers. Some neighborhood residents ended up taking him down by hitting him over the head with a metal pipe. Night was suddenly less menacing than it had seemed for months and months, but I was already sleeping well by then. When my siblings went back again to their own homes, safe in the adventures I imagined were their lives, I somehow always slept like the dead.