Hallowe’en time, 1989. The chill dusk and the faltering street lamps vie for dominance. More pronounced are the fluttering wheezings of circles of dry leaves — desiccated and umber as shreds of dead skin. A scraping sound on the pitted concrete turns out to be sneakered feet.
I’m bent forward, my head buried in a tattered hoodie. My shivering is from more than the icy air. Who is that bearing down on me?
The heart stops abruptly — I imagine an irregular shiv-blade drawing across my gullet. My step freezes. I half emerge from the hollow of my pullover jacket. A bone-thin figure, struggling with an oversized paper sack, lurches past me. Not glancing sideways, thanks God.
In the sallow light, the “Boys Baptist Academy” looms overhead. Clad in a creepy “perma-stone” front, the old villa retains only bits of its original Victorian grandeur: eyelid hood molds over windows, jagged stepped cornices; two narrow Addams Family-style blind-arched doors. One incandescent bulb flickers. Otherwise, silence.
Down by the juncture of Vermont and Thirteenth sits the pooled darkness of Logan Circle proper. At one end is the “Cadillac,” a mansion turned bordello since before World War II! Across the oval lies a bulging double monstrosity that could have been thrown up by old General Logan himself, or his buddy U.S. Grant!
At this point, as the slumping skinny dude drew back and gulped a pinkish liquid from the rumpled paper sack, I resumed my sliding gait, jawwalked in the near-dark, and made it to a vacant bench ‘round General Logan’s crusted copper-green equestrian statue.
I drew my arms tightly around my achey frame. I folded back my legs up into the slat seat. Fatigue consumed me. As I dozed thankful I had no Miller beer left to chug, and murmured, “Definitely, I’ve experienced some genuine LOGAN DREAD!”
The irony of being like a speck of neglected human detritus framed by the Baroque ghostliness of Logan picture-frame residences — well, it was beyond my wearied perception.
Miraculously, I awoke unscathed on my bench, groped my way back to the kitchen of Help House, and inhaled two bowls of Smate Bean. In the early a.m., I awoke on linoleum, beneath the slab table. I returned by morning light, armed with a spare pair of ox-blood loafers, which I sold to an old man for $3.00 —- enough for six ponies of Miller.
