Throughout a number of years, I have been putting together some favorite recipes to pass on to my family. Finally, about three years ago, I got the idea for a Memory-Cook Book, and decided to round up all the things I had written, plus some new memories and recipes and get it ready by Christmas. That was about the middle of October. (I was quicker then.)
I made it, though, even to finding family photos in black & white of many of our doings and celebrations. Each chapter features one of the best. I have to admit, son Phil helped a lot there, sizing and storing the pics for me to insert into the script. I hope I am not taking too big a chance, presenting family pictures in an open forum, but they are a part of the mystique of 'Family' and while most are gone, they will forever remain in my memories and heart.
Anyway, I had 10 copies of the book printed at Kinko, and put each page into a clear sleeve, back to back in book form, which I inserted into a binder. The chapters lead us through the seasons of the year and the years of my experiences growing up in a large family of Italian background. It makes a very nice coffee table book, AND it moves into the kitchen for the times when the memory of a recipe needs a nudge. 8-)
That Christmas Eve we all sat around our fire and took turns reading a chapter from our own personal books. It was much fun, and a bit tearful, too. I am especially happy that we did that, because my 88 year-old Uncle Mike (the one who survived Aunt Lee's Scalloped Potatoes) passed away this past January. He, especially, enjoyed all the memories. Even nicer was the fact that many of his fondest dishes and memories---of Christmas Eve Festa, were on my buffet that evening. Maybe there was a reason I got the 'urge' to build the book that October.
I hope you enjoy the chapters as they come up, also.
Little Italy was the last restaurant to reside in the forty year old building, which was weathered gray and stood 2 stories high--its upstairs windows peering eerily out at the huge parking lot, waiting each evening for the cars of hungry patrons to park and for the customers to disembark and be swallowed up by the voracious front doors below.
The cellar was a huge cement cavern, with nooks and crannies everywhere, old furniture storage, a huge walk-in refrigerator and a separate room (where we kept the CO2 tanks for the draft beer dispenser in the bar above it) that led into a cubby under the outside back steps. Nobody wanted to go down to that cellar alone for supplies, and I can't say I blamed them. So they always went by twos--and two always came back, luckily.
There had always been a story going around the town that one of the restaurant owners from years back had used the upstairs as a house of prostitution--complete with a red light set prominently in one of the upper front windows. Even worse, it was rumored that one of the ladies of the night was the proprietor's own daughter, and that she had mysteriously left town. Who knows what is true? It did, however, make a good story.
In those days of the late sixties, I fancied myself somewhat of a seer. I learned the art of reading 'espresso cups'. To prepare the cups, you boiled together espresso coffee, sugar and water for five minutes. You then poured half of an espresso cup with boiling coffee (grounds and all) for each person who wanted a reading. The person slowly drank the coffee, holding the cup in both hands, leaving behind the grounds until it was almost empty. Then they were instructed to swirl the grounds residual and turn the cup upside down on the saucer. The cup is then ready to be read.
I was quite good at it. Caught my uncle in a traffic violation while doing his reading one evening. He was stunned, because he had been stopped by the State Police just that day, before he'd come for dinner, and I "saw" the police hat in the cup.
Then came the day I read the cup for my cook. In it I saw a young woman, veiled, and crying her heart out. I predicted a death. Two days later, her son-in-law was killed in a motorcycle accident, leaving her daughter with two small children. I never read the cup again.
A few years later, I read about the "Wine Glass". It worked on the same principle as a Ouija board. All you needed was a stemmed wine glass, a round table and four or five brave souls to challenge the spirit world. After closing the restaurant, some of us would often stay behind, place one fingertip lightly on the rim of the glass and ask it yes or no questions--and also questions about those at the table. The glass would slide to the yes or no area, or to the person concerned. It was fun! Until.......
ANGELINA
It was getting on toward the fall of the year and it got dark much earlier than before. When we closed the lights of the restaurant and lit the candles to begin our 'seance', you could hear the old building creak in the fall wind. From the open door to the upstairs, a cold draft hustled down and around our seats at the table.
A restaurant in the dark of the night is much different from the bustle of the day. You can hear it breathe in the uptake of the air filters, and the heart beat from the compressors is a raging, disjointed rhythm, aching to be freed from its moorings. That night, Little Italy lived in the surreal world, far from the feeding of daytime's human appetites.
Everything started out as it had many times before. The glass slid easily, making little circles and taking short dashes to wherever the answer to a question hovered.
Then someone asked, "Are you a Spirit"?
The glass stopped dead center of the table and just quaked and shook. It grew hot to our fingertips, and then burst over to the YES! There it went round and round in an unending circle, until we took our fingers from the rim.
After a few moments, we tried again. "Are you unhappy?" was the next question. Again the dash to YES!
"Are you a woman?" YES!
"Can we help you?" NO! NO!
Then we began to try to find her name. We tried a variety of names and received a NO! for each one. Suddenly I felt a pain in my head and I burst out, "ANGELINA!"
YES! YES! YES! YES!
With every YES! the glass became more frenzied. It swerved and raced across and around the table while we all tried to keep our finger tips on it...to no avail. It lifted up from the table and flew three feet away to crash against the side of the bar.
No one said a word. We cleaned up the glass, set the chairs back in place and locked up for the night.
The restaurant belonged to ANGELINA.
From then on a series of weird events kept happening. Someone rented the apartment over the restaurant and only stayed a week. He kept hearing sighs during the night, and found his gas stove on without the pilot light lit...and just couldn't handle it anymore.
Another renter hung a cross over his bed, assured that it would stop the 'hauntings'. Every morning when he awoke, he'd find the cross hanging upside down. His dog would yip and whine most of the nights, and he, too, was soon gone.
One day my youngest son, Phil, was using the bathroom upstairs, when he heard a knocking and rattling at the door. He ran to confront his brother, who he thought was pulling a trick on him, and there was nobody there. Just (as he put it) a cold breeze. When he came back down he was white as a sheet---more so when he learned that Rick had never left the kitchen!
We learned to live with Angelina--or she with us. Soon it was the seventies and fall again. Into our lives came the experience of The Ghosts of Villa Chigi, which is chronicled below. We've always thought that Angelina might have had a hand in that, too.
Angelina was a part of our lives until 1982, when there was a fire which ruined the building beyond repair. We had the fire department use it for 'practice', and it burned down to the ground.
Serendipity? I was rearranging my dresser drawers yesterday, getting ready for the cooler weather, when I ran across this large white sweat shirt, as pristine as the day I got it, laying there, sort of looking up at me!
and it brought another Halloween tale to my mind, back from the year 2002 past.
I had been contributing to the EEEEK! forum for over a year, when they came up with a contest for the best Halloween TRUE scary story. Well, I had one alright, and I quickly wrote it up and submitted it. The sweat shirt was the first prize for the mysterious true ghost story I share with you today.
THE GHOSTS OF VILLA CHIGI
Copyright
2000
September was dying, that year of 1973, in our little eastern valley. The leaves had been drifting down from gypsy-colored trees for a week or so. They smelled dry and musty and crackled underfoot, their colors mingling into a mortician's powdered rouge.
But, it had been raining all night and into the late morning on the day HE drove into the parking lot of the Little Italy Restaurant. His beat-up Chevy sedan sloshed soggy gobs of leaves up on to its white fenders, as he slithered the weary car into a spot near the delivery entrance. He saw me watching him from the door and waved a hand with a tube of newspaper clutched in it.
In a rush he was through the rain and up the stairs, grinning a big, "HI!" at me. "Says in the Herald here that you need a short-order cook. Well, I'M a short-order cook and I need a job. Can we talk?"
So, we talked. I found out he had a social security card, that he had worked all over the country, and that he was broke. I took him into the kitchen and let him cook us both up some lunch. He was good; quick, neat and creative. It was Friday.....big fish fry night in 'Catholic Valley', and I needed help badly, so I signed him on.
When he finished up a shift at 1:00 a.m., he asked me if it was OK for him to sleep in his car in the lot. I told him to spend the night in the empty apartment over the restaurant. I thought he was going to cry, he was so thankful....and amazed. The next day, I trusted him a bit further. I gave him half a week's wages so that he could find a weekly motel room nearby. Which he did, and there he stayed for all the time he was with us.
About the middle of October, he came into work quite early one day lugging a huge covered package. With pride, he said, "I've got something for you. I really appreciate how good you've been to me, and I know that wall over there in the dining room could use something nice, so I picked this up today."
He quickly tore off the wrapping, and I was dumb-founded. It was a huge, wonderful piece of art about 3 x 3 feet. It was called "Villa Chigi" --Village of the Blind. It portrayed at least forty villagers at their tasks in their village in Italy. Nothing unusual about the tasks, a shopkeeper, a blacksmith, weavers, women washing clothes at a spring......all beautifully done. The only thing unusual was that each and every person was chiga (blind). The BLIND were the only inhabitants of Villa Chigi.
All the help oohed and aahed over this beautiful picture, and HE even insisted that he install it himself, which he did. There wasn't a customer in that night that didn't remark about it and many left their seats to take a closer look.
Two days later, HE didn't show up for work on the 4:00 p.m. shift. I had been wondering all day where he was, because the Chevy was parked out back when I came in at 9:00 a.m. and hadn't moved. I filled in for him that night, and waited to hear from him. When I still had no word the next morning, I called the motel. They hadn't heard from him, but he hadn't checked out.
Several more days went by, and I hired another cook, for that is what restaurants are all about. Cooks come and they go. But, the Chevy was still in the lot.
On October 31st, the police came and towed the Chevy. We still had heard nothing, and the police knew nothing. That evening I went over to dust the frame of the Villa Chigi and turned on the viewing light above it. I looked at the picture, and then crawled into a booth to get a closer look. Behind two of the villagers, men wielding scythes in a grain field, were two ghostly figures. They appeared to be white shadows of the men--lurking behind them.
It was a nice touch....the only problem being that I had never seen that in the picture before. I called my husband over and asked him if he had seen it previously. He just looked at it, looked at me and said "Hell, no!"
Now all the employees took turns looking at the 'ghosts'. We all had a chuckle, saying it must have been a processing 'thing' that we missed early on.
The evening went on and soon it was closing time. I went over to shut the viewing light and now there were six figures with the white apparitions behind them! Everybody was only too glad to get closed up and the heck out of there now.
The next morning when I came in there were twenty apparitions. It went on for several days, until finally there were over half of the villagers being stalked by the ghostly shadows. Some thirty ghosts haunted the Villa Chigi......
We never saw HIM again. We never knew what happened to HIM.
The tale of the "Ghosts of Villa Chigi" at Little Italy Restaurant soon spread over our little valley. People brought their out-of-town guests to enjoy the pasta and pizza, but no one left without 'Ghost Busting' the picture. And, if they were lucky and I wasn't too busy, I told them the story about what HE brought to Little Italy Restaurant, one Halloween night.
When we moved to Las Vegas, Villa Chigi came with us. It is on the wall right behind my back as I am writing this. If I turn around, I can easily find a ghostly figure, hard at work in the Villa. I took a close-up for you to do some ghost-busting on your own. When you look closely, you should find some haunting the people gathered in the center of town.
Don't worry, they can't harm you as long as your intentions are good. They are my sentinels, given to me by HIM, some 35 years ago, just before he disappeared. Maybe he is there, in the picture, watching and waiting for each HALLOWEEN....
Every year since they were about 16, my grown sons have a doozer of a Halloween Party. The other day I saw Phil intent at his computer, working out the invitations for the 2006 hauntings. He's usually the one who does the art work and selects the music for the band they've had for over 20 years.
When I saw him hard at work on this year's bash, I thought it was probably time to put up some Halloween/October shivers here on my blog, so I decided to start with CLARK COUNTY HORROR. Phil wrote the initial story for the website dedicated to inviting guests, a job well done, IMO. Further down you will find the EPILOGUES to the story, which I wrote, together with some pictures pertinent to the occasion.
I hope you will enjoy all of Halloween 2005, and who knows what 2006 will bring?
**********
THE CLARK COUNTY HORROR
A Halloween Serial
By PDB
I
A Bad Place
The Horror didn’t start in Las Vegas. It followed us back. Back from places and things we shouldn’t have ventured. An old house. A rickety staircase that carried us up into the menacing gloom of the attic. The letters we read there. The secrets we learned. The charred heap of ...something... in the corner.
We called it the McGill Mansion. My brother, Rick, the purveyor of real estate investments. The property speculator. He brought me to this moldy reliquary from the days when copper was Queen in the early years of Nevada. The house stood on a hill as an overlord surveying the ruins of smelters, offices, rail spurs and company buildings for the defunct McGill Copper Consortium.
We got out of the car and approached the house. Pushed open the gate on the iron fence that surrounded the property. We climbed the mortar-starved steps up a rather severe incline to the front porch. Apparently a renovation had been attempted because the screen frames for the porch were stacked neatly to the side. We looked in the front window, which was still intact and saw the walls had been stripped of plaster all the way back to the wood lath. New lumber was stacked on the floor. Fast food bags and soda cans were strewn about. A coat of dust covered everything. The front door was locked.
“Let’s check around back, there might be a way in back there,” said Rick.
“I’m not sure about this. We came up here for a fishing trip, remember?” I asked.
“Right. And we were going to look into some real estate properties as well, if I recall.”
“This wreck? You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “I didn’t think breaking and entering was part of the deal when I agreed to check out some houses with you.”
“Oh Christ, give me a break! It’s pretty obvious the place is abandoned. The owner probably ran out of money during the renovation and the contractor split. Look, I’ll call the number on the For Sale sign and let ‘em know we’re up here,” Rick pulled out his cell phone and walked over to the sign which hung askew from some rusty wire wrapped around one of the porch posts. “Then we can sit out here in the hot sun and wait for the owner to finish taking a crap so he can walk us through a house we probably aren’t gonna buy anyway. OR we can save some time and have a little fun sneaking into this old mansion and poking around.”
“If you just want to walk the grounds and not break in, I’m cool with that,” I said.
I had a peculiar feeling about this whole McGill side trip. When the copper mines closed, the town died a slow, wheezing death. Some folks held on, mostly the old with nowhere else to go. When we first pulled off the main highway and onto the gravel road that leads into McGill, we saw a crazy-eyed man sitting on his wrecked porch with a shotgun in his lap. Rick had laughed nervously and hummed a few notes from “Deliverance”. I wasn’t so sure. He looked like a man making a sober decision to place the barrel of that gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger.
Every town has a haunted house. Most of them aren’t haunted. Just old and deserted. A couple of windows busted out by teens on a midnight dare. Overgrown, needs paint, plumbing – the works. Something ready for a visit from Bob Villa. Other houses are the real deal. You can feel it. Smell it like an undercurrent of sewer gas on an otherwise pristine summer day. Things are just not quite right. Not right at all.
Investigators into the paranormal visit haunted houses and can document many manifestations of wacky electromagnetic fields, unusual temperature fluctuations, electronic voice phenomena, and photographic anomalies. Most have reasonable explanations. A small percentage do not.
The McGill Mansion is one of those unreasonable places. But here is the kicker. The whole town is one of those places. Something went seriously wrong here. A Bad Place.
(Continued...)
So we walked the grounds. The yard was overgrown scrub and cracked bricks all around. There were a few out buildings, one that resembled a caved-in garage, along with a tool shed and a smokehouse. The backyard was more cracked bricks and a seating area with a ruined fireplace, overturned and crumbling urns filled with dust and cobwebs. The back doors were locked and barred with metal strips to keep people out… or something inside.
“Well, that settles it in my book," I said. “I think we're out of luck trying to get into this old heap.”
I was relieved. This house gave me the feeling it was sizing us up. Daring us to breech its defenses. Call its hand. I happily folded.
Rick still had his hand in though, “Hey, check over here.” He was making his way around to the side of the house, tearing his way past a thorn bush that had grown over the pathway and had tried to keep him away. “There’s one of those storm cellar doors over here on the... Shit!” The thorn bush did its best and gave Rick a deep scratch for his efforts.
I ducked under the thorns and met him. “It’s a sign, Rick. We aren’t wanted here.”
“It’s not a sign, it’s a scratch. You are one gigantic pussy, you know? I’m bleeding and this place owes me. That cellar door is unlocked and I’m going in. Now are you coming with me, or do I have to let everyone know how you pussed out on our little adventure? Besides, this is right up your alley with all the horror stories you read and all that Halloween stuff you do every year. This will be one for your memoirs.”
“You know, there’s some truth to a lot of those stories about the paranormal.”
“Yeah, yeah. One night on that Coast-to-Coast radio show you heard the story about the haunted blah, blah, blah. That stuff is all bullshit, you know.”
“Maybe it is a steaming bag of shit, but I’m telling you right now don’t go into that cellar,” I said. “I really have a bad vibe right now.”
“OK! Tell you what, you stand out here and suck your thumb and try to channel Art Bell and I’ll wave at you from the attic window just to show you what a complete idiot you are.” Rick turned and swung open the cellar door. It rattled and creaked like a pile of bones falling out of a coffin.
Rick screamed. “Dust! And cobwebs! Oh, Jesus! A house spider! Run! Run!!”
“Fuck off.”
“That’s the spirit! Now come on!” Rick made his way down the stone steps to the cellar.
I looked up at the side of the house above the stairway. Two large windows stared out from the second floor. Eyes. A long red brick chimney ran up from the cellar to above the roof. A nose. The dark chasm of the storm cellar. The mouth.
Into the belly of the monster we went. Swallowed alive. The house won its hand, aces and eights.
It was gloomy and musty but not too dark to see. Daylight poured in from the cellar door and barred; basement windows with stained glass panes allowed multiple colors of light to enter, giving the room an almost church-like atmosphere. But this was a church of the damned.
The floor was stone. An old bicycle hung from the rafters. Wood panels were stacked against the wall along with a mantle and some oak doors. A dead coal furnace with a Medusa head of radiator pipes guarded a dark corner of the cellar. Everything was covered with dust and cobwebs.
A sturdy wooden staircase led to a doorway.
“Going up?” I asked Rick.
“I better find something to stop this bleeding." The thorn scratch was pretty deep and a line of blood dribbled down his arm and dripped onto the stone floor. The blood pooled into a seam between the floor stones. “There might be some bandages upstairs that those carpenters left,” Rick said. He headed up the stairs into the first floor.
I watched him go up the steps for a moment then looked back down at the pool of blood on the floor. The blood was gone, down into the seam in the floor. The old timbers of the house gave a satisfied creak and clouds must have moved over the sun because the whole room became much darker.
“Uhhh, Rick?”
“Shit! What? I’m bleeding like a stuck pig here!”
“What was the weather forecast for today?” I climbed the steps to meet him on the first floor landing.
“Do I look like a fucking weatherman?”
“It was mostly sunny.”
“Well, thank you for the update. What’s your point?”
He opened the first floor door and the parlor was bathed in a gloom of a heavily overcast day. Thunder rumbled loudly and the house settled again letting out a long series of creaks and groans. A gust of wind whipped around the house and the storm doors below slammed shut plunging the cellar into darkness.
“It’s a desert thunderstorm,” Rick said as he made his way into the renovation area of the parlor. “Happens all the time out here, you know that.”
Lighting flashed very close to the house and thunder cracked with a deafening crescendo. The rain started like someone turned on a faucet. I looked out the large dormer window at the front drive. The drops were heavy and small chunks of hail bounced off Rick’s parked car.
“Great. Just great,” said Rick. “I hope that hail doesn’t ding up my hood. Hey! I’m in luck.”
Rick pushed aside a painter’s drop cloth and found a serviceable first-aid kit. We opened it up, and I helped him put some hydrogen peroxide on his cut and dressed the wound with some bandages. The hail tapered off, but the rain continued along with the lightning and thunder.
“Thanks,” said Rick. “Shall we continue our tour? Next stop, second floor. Linens and kitchen wares!”
I wanted to tell him about what I saw in the cellar. I wanted to tell him that the house had consumed a piece of him. The house had gained nourishment from his blood. I wanted to tell him the house was a vampire of stone and timber and it was going to get us....
But it was silly. It sounds silly. I was a fool. The joker’s wild and the house always wins.
(Continued)
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