|
Three days ago, as I walked the dreadful arena of personal stares and vapid opinions, The Mall, I saw her.
A three hour drive away, fifteen years away, a hundred miles away, I saw Blind Boot.
That's what all the kids called her, back then, amid the weirdness of my childhood.
Blind Boot.
Goldsboro High School was perhaps ten minutes away from home when dusty paths that ran behind houses and through Herman
Park were used. If you knew the way, the how, you could traverse the city of Goldsboro in maybe fifty minutes flat. From Goldsboro
High School, a quick-footed teen, or a gaggle of quick-footed teens, could reach the Piggly Wiggly in ten minutes.
In front of the Piggly Wiggly, just across the road, lived Blind Boot.
As black as night with a permanent sneer drawn across her deformed features, Blind Boot spied lone teens and groups of
teens alike. More often than not, she'd be standing on the drooping front porch of the massive house that everyone assumed
she lived in. Her arms would cross her breasts and she'd stand on the shadowy front porch and sneer. Stare.
Oh, her breasts.
It was rumored that Blind Boot had three breasts, with the biggest one sitting smack dab in the middle of a too-thick
chest.
Kids and their ghost story, urban legend rumors.
Kids are merciless; everyone knows this. But it seemed, back then, that the kids in Goldsboro were far more pitiless than
what was average in normal kids. They'd taunt and jeer at Blind Boot as she stood on her porch, staring out at a world that
she must've struggled every day to comprehend.
"Blind Boot!" they'd scream, WE'D scream, laughing maniacally.
"Three breasts and not a drop of milk that wouldn't kill a baby stone dead!"
"Come on Blind, make yer move!"
Typically, Blind Boot wouldn't respond. She'd only stand there, bathed in the shadows of the front porch, and gape. Sometimes
there would be an old, rusty shopping cart at the foot of the steps of the house. The neighborhood kids sometimes told scary
stories about what was in the shopping cart.
"I heard she's got a dead baby in there. A dead baby with a mouth full of her sour, radioactive third breast milk,"
I heard one boy say as ten of us sat around a midnight bonfire, roasting off-brand marshmallows.
Another kid, this one as pale as a sky after a much needed rain, once told the nine of us that Blind Boot was a medical
experiment that had escaped and grown into something that Wayne Memorial Hospital could no longer chance trying to contain.
For some reason.
Sometimes though, sometimes Blind Boot would take the bait thrown her way, and BOOM! There she was, off like a bolt of
black lightning, giving chase to her tormentors.
Her victims.
The teens (every now and again there would be even younger kids amid the group of little bastards) would scream and take
flight. It was always fun for the first few minutes, but then the chase would get serious. The end of the playfulness, or
what the kids saw as playfulness, and the seriousness of it all, would usually show itself when Blind Boot began to scream.
Inarticulate bellows of retarded rage. Spit would fly from her lips as she ran as if to beat the devil, after the kids.
She'd bellow nonsensical garbled threats, spitting rage and saliva everywhere. The shopping cart would sometimes crash
along in front of her. Perhaps she intended to use the cart to ram the backs of any slow escapees.
She'd scream, and that's when the group in flight would split up...as if seeing enough horror films hadn't taught them
that splitting up when being chased is the very last thing that any sensible group should do.
But split they would.
And Blind Boot (later rechristened Sla-Ba-Boot by my older, slightly more cruel brother) would at this point single out
one kid, one runner who was slower than the rest.
By God, she could sprint like an award winner.
Not a soul ever knew for sure what happened to the kids that Blind Boot caught.
Some said she ate them.
Others claimed to have been caught, only to escape her clumsy, oversized hands just as she pulled out the Third Breast,
which dripped blue satanic chromosomes, apparently.
To the unlucky little bastard who couldn't escape, she would force-feed this Mother's Gift, and then, well, then they
would be no more.
None knew what happened to Blind Boot, Sla-Ba-Boot, as we grew into the slightly sleazy reality of adulthood. One day,
she chased us like a hound drving a fox to its master, the next, she was gone. I remember reading a clip in the newspaper
not long before I graduated high school about a homeless, severely deranged woman who had been raped and beaten to death by
traveling train-hopping hoboes. Her name, I forget. But the picture in the paper showed a woman who bore a powerful resemblance
to Blind Boot.
Maybe she moved away to escape the never-ending torment of droves of kids who could never understand her.
Maybe she never was who or what us kids thought she was. Maybe she was just a bedtime nightmare that we'd all agreed upon
and assigned to a dull witted woman who knew nothing of true reality.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, she slipped away with childhood one day, there amid the broken G.I Joe toys and the Saturday
morning cartoons. Maybe that's where she and her monstrous demon shopping cart baby are to this day.
I don't know.
I only know that three days ago, I saw a woman in the Mall who looked like her, who had to be her.
Blind Boot, come a-callin' again.
Instead of a shopping cart that bumped across grassless paths as she chased thoughtless and foolish kids, she held a black
purse.
Instead of an alien third breast, C-cups poked out at the world.
Instead of slurred speech and an endless sneer below white eyes, there was an almost pathological fear of the crowds in
the Mall.
When I tried to speak to her, she jumped and walked away.
I wanted to apologize, to make amends.
To be better.
But she never gave me the chance to do so.
One day, I'll learn Blind Boot's true name. I'll write to her, maybe. I'll tell her that all kids are stupid little toerags
who don't know when to quit. I'll tell her that I should've known a lot better, that I did know better, but that I was just
a stupid kid who wanted to fit in, who wanted to make sure that I wasn't branded an outsider by tearing down all other outsiders.
Blind Boot, the quintessential Outsider.
I'll tell her that I'm sorry, that since those days, I've always made a strong effort to teach the kids around me not
to be as mean spirited or as crazy or as pitiless as we Goldsboro kids were.
One mentally retarded woman, at the total mercy of hundreds of terrible little monsters, every day, all day, forever.
I'll never know her sadness, but one thing I can know is penance.
I'll be paying penance for the rest of my life, and you know, I am a far better person because of this.
A mentally retarded, perpetually sad and depressed woman called Blind Boot taught me this.
The saddest part of all of this is this; somewhere, in some place in the world, in some dirty neighborhood, or in some
ritzy suburb, there's a shopping cart with mystery and rage in it, just waiting for a Blind Boot to step into the space behind
it.
Hawksmoor...From The Bleed.
contacting hawksmoor.
hawk mail.
|
