I was born as the war in Vietnam lurched toward its unsatisfying conclusion and started to learn my place in the world as President Ford pardoned the evils of the prior administration, but I was protected from this swirling chaos by my suburban parents and the magical kingdom of our subdivision. The monsters of my life were not the realities of inflation and fuel shortages, although I think I remember helping my mother reach toward the back of the Safeway shelves for lower prices on canned soup and endlessly waiting in gas lines that circled the block; the neighborhood was so safe you could hear a pin drop, but magical lands require magical enemies and so the trashy kids next door and I wove the legends that haunted my young nights and live in my nightmares to this day, twenty years later.
My neighbors, a girl my age named Deena and her much older brothers, were allowed to roam night and day with no supervision while their mother wandered around the house naked and smoked pot, but I was supposed to be home by dark. Sometimes, though, on warm summer nights I’d be allowed out after dinner as long as I stayed in the yard, and that’s when, despite the lingering humidity, we would raise goosbumps by whispering the tales of precious, beautiful things twisted and destroyed by the greed of men, lashing back with supernatural fury.
There was a man who had a beautiful wife. Isn’t that a terrible way to begin a story? Part of the horror, perhaps, is the unconscious misogyny. Perhaps there was a beautiful woman who had an average husband who looked upon her as an object to be jealously guarded, but that is not the way the tale came to us. There was a man who had a beautiful wife, and she was so beautiful that her arm fell off and was replaced with one made of pure gold. The exact mechanism of this transformation was never clear to us but it seemed plausible enough in the days when people wore leisure suits and flocked to films like Saturday Night Fever. The wife with the Golden Arm lived her life as the possession of this man, her husband, and when she died, she was buried in a coffin with this gleaming appendage still attached. As time went on the widower longed for and eventually uncontrollably craved this thing that he missed, and so one dark night, he went to the cemetery, dug up the grave, and raped her corpse. No, of course he didn’t! Even in the nineteen seventies, love was not that liberated; he just grabbed the precious Golden Arm, went home, and hid it under his bed.
Later that night, he tossed and turned over what he had done. We cannot know if he was wracked with guilt or giddy with anticipation, but we do know he was awake when the wind kicked up and a familiar voice floated to him over the hills and fields. Where’s my Golden Arm? said the wind.
The man sat up in bed, straining to hear. “I must be imagining things,” he assured himself, but then the voice came again, closer and more clearly. Where’s my Golden Arm?
“OMG,” said the man, who was otherwise paralyzed with terror. As he cowered, he heard the back door open and shut. Its slam shook the house and punctuated the fervent question: Where’s my Golden Arm?
Footsteps crossed the floor below, footsteps muffled by the hollowness of death and the clinging mud of the grave. As they reached the staircase, the man buried himself under the covers and hoped for the best.
Where’s my Golden Arm? The question came from the stairs and was repeated in the hallway and at the bedroom door.
Where’s my Golden Arm?
Where’s my Golden Arm?
Until finally he heard motion in his very room, the rustle of a funeral dress, the clunk of a dirty heel. He smelled the smell of his wife’s coffin, which he had violated only hours before: the sweet and sour odor of mud and decay.
Where’s my Golden Arm? demanded his wife. And then the blankets were suddenly ripped from his body, and as he lie there exposed to the one-armed horror he had once controlled and lusted after, a horrible shriek filled his ears and mind:
YOU HAVE IT!!!!
To be continued...
