talks after he'd accepted the invitation to come to Connecticut...
While most adolescents grow up plagued by the notion that they're not like everybody else, in all the wrong ways, for Campbell Holt it was a stark reality that first manifested when he was fourteen. No dramatics, nothing remotely like Liz's involuntary and apocalyptic initiation. It was, in fact, sweetly innocent and benignly kinky. One Saturday morning, while home alone, he'd picked a pair of his older sister's panties off the bathroom floor, given them an experimental fondle...and suddenly found himself bowled over by the delirious sensation of some other guy's fumbling hands tugging them down her thighs the night before. A quick spiral into all possible explanations of what had just happened: I'm an incestuous pervert, I'm going insane, I'm gay, I'm a transvestite, I'm gay AND a transvestite.
Further episodes were quick to follow, never predictable, rarely welcome. At sixteen, he'd narrowly avoided a head-on collision while driving a friend's car and finding himself helplessly plunged into intimate knowledge of what her father had for years been doing to her after witching-hour drinking.
And it wasn't always personal possessions, either. It may have been rare, but public property could also pose a risk, objects tainted by recent essences so negative their power was akin to contamination. In a restaurant, a ketchup bottle might be merely glass...but then again, it might flood him with a toxic distillation of hatred left by a misanthropic hand that had clutched the bottle before him. This helped explain his spare frame, too: He'd once nearly dropped a barbell onto his neck after tapping into a psychic whiff of some steroidal date-rape predator who'd preceded him on the weights, who'd felt he owned the barbell.
By seventeen it was becoming a party game, guaranteed to freak out his classmates and humiliate the more insufferable ones into keeping their distance...not an unwelcome development, maybe even deliberate, since he was getting a reputation as a resident headcase based on his increasingly cavern-eyed appearance.
By nineteen, the police knew about him. Not for crimes he'd committed, but by reputation. Word-of-mouth, fellow graduate tells fiancee who mentions it to her uncle in the department, who scoffs until the next questionable death. A visit to the home Cam still shared with his parents, except by now he'd moved to the basement and wasn't going out much, and even the crappy McJobs never lasted long, and the drop-in was strictly unofficial, understand, but still: So anyway, Campbell, suppose I let you hang onto this gun for a minute. You could maybe tell me if the scene it came from was a murder or a suicide, right?
He could. So why would they stop there?
Umm, Campbell, got this pair of shoes here. The girl who owns them, her parents really miss her, and...did she just walk off and leave 'em sitting on the riverbank because she didn't want 'em anymore...?
No. No, she hadn't.
Sorry, son, but think you might be able to tell me a little something about the person who used this hacksaw?
Soon after that he took a running leap into self-medication, giving the extrasensory impressions plenty of fogs and tides to work against, which worked well enough that there wasn't much point in going home at all anymore, not when the worst blocks of Leavenworth Street offered all the neon-smeared dives he would ever need to keep him distracted, places that Bukowski at his worst would've been proud to patronize. That and a pair of gloves did wonders, except sometimes he lost them in the summer and they were stolen in the winter. Mostly he was just relieved to be away from home these days; all those trinkets of his parents just lying around waiting to be touched, to rub his nose in the worry and fear and peculiar loathing they had begun to feel for him.
Good to be on his own.
A couple years of that and one night he made it back to the old neighborhood anyway, not
While most adolescents grow up plagued by the notion that they're not like everybody else, in all the wrong ways, for Campbell Holt it was a stark reality that first manifested when he was fourteen. No dramatics, nothing remotely like Liz's involuntary and apocalyptic initiation. It was, in fact, sweetly innocent and benignly kinky. One Saturday morning, while home alone, he'd picked a pair of his older sister's panties off the bathroom floor, given them an experimental fondle...and suddenly found himself bowled over by the delirious sensation of some other guy's fumbling hands tugging them down her thighs the night before. A quick spiral into all possible explanations of what had just happened: I'm an incestuous pervert, I'm going insane, I'm gay, I'm a transvestite, I'm gay AND a transvestite.
Further episodes were quick to follow, never predictable, rarely welcome. At sixteen, he'd narrowly avoided a head-on collision while driving a friend's car and finding himself helplessly plunged into intimate knowledge of what her father had for years been doing to her after witching-hour drinking.
And it wasn't always personal possessions, either. It may have been rare, but public property could also pose a risk, objects tainted by recent essences so negative their power was akin to contamination. In a restaurant, a ketchup bottle might be merely glass...but then again, it might flood him with a toxic distillation of hatred left by a misanthropic hand that had clutched the bottle before him. This helped explain his spare frame, too: He'd once nearly dropped a barbell onto his neck after tapping into a psychic whiff of some steroidal date-rape predator who'd preceded him on the weights, who'd felt he owned the barbell.
By seventeen it was becoming a party game, guaranteed to freak out his classmates and humiliate the more insufferable ones into keeping their distance...not an unwelcome development, maybe even deliberate, since he was getting a reputation as a resident headcase based on his increasingly cavern-eyed appearance.
By nineteen, the police knew about him. Not for crimes he'd committed, but by reputation. Word-of-mouth, fellow graduate tells fiancee who mentions it to her uncle in the department, who scoffs until the next questionable death. A visit to the home Cam still shared with his parents, except by now he'd moved to the basement and wasn't going out much, and even the crappy McJobs never lasted long, and the drop-in was strictly unofficial, understand, but still: So anyway, Campbell, suppose I let you hang onto this gun for a minute. You could maybe tell me if the scene it came from was a murder or a suicide, right?
He could. So why would they stop there?
Umm, Campbell, got this pair of shoes here. The girl who owns them, her parents really miss her, and...did she just walk off and leave 'em sitting on the riverbank because she didn't want 'em anymore...?
No. No, she hadn't.
Sorry, son, but think you might be able to tell me a little something about the person who used this hacksaw?
Soon after that he took a running leap into self-medication, giving the extrasensory impressions plenty of fogs and tides to work against, which worked well enough that there wasn't much point in going home at all anymore, not when the worst blocks of Leavenworth Street offered all the neon-smeared dives he would ever need to keep him distracted, places that Bukowski at his worst would've been proud to patronize. That and a pair of gloves did wonders, except sometimes he lost them in the summer and they were stolen in the winter. Mostly he was just relieved to be away from home these days; all those trinkets of his parents just lying around waiting to be touched, to rub his nose in the worry and fear and peculiar loathing they had begun to feel for him.
Good to be on his own.
A couple years of that and one night he made it back to the old neighborhood anyway, not
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