I don't remember Dan's sister's name, just that she had huge blue almond eyes and thirteen studs in each ear and that their parents beat her head against the ceramic sink in their home when she dyed her hair blue. They thought that she and Dan were fucking and that Dan had made her gay.
Dan was my boyfriend. My ill-advised, mentally-ill, university-is-such-a-clusterfuck, gay boyfriend. One time (brace yourselves, because I am seriously not making this shit up), he halucinated being under assault by flying chihuahuas with batwings who were the minions of Satan. Another time, he said there were worms crawling out of his body. And eventualy, it all seemed so bad and so real and so not funny I told the Resident Assistant and that was the end of that.
This isn't a nice story, but it's so old I can't really be ashamed. I was someone else then, entirely, and in a lot of ways, she's dead.
Dan was from Philadelphia, and he taught me to love that city. Most people don't get it, but I love it there. It's sort of eternally stuck in 1984, all punks and liberty spikes and I love it. More than once, I went up there with him to see his friends, to visit his beautiful, watery sister and to stay in his parents's home.
The house itself had been built in the late 1880s I think, and an addition, that included his rooms (he had two and a bathroom in which the water had been shut off, up the back stairs from the kitchen), had been added in the 1930s.
I hated Dan's rooms. They felt wrong, and I couldn't stand to be in them. The outer room was manageable, especially if I wasn't alone. The inner room was intolerable to me, and I ran screaming from it in random terror more than once.
Now it's easy to call that hysteria -- nothing rational was going on around me back then, and I was 18, frightened of everything and out of my goddamned mind and dating an abuser (he once gagged me with a sock and threatened to gouge my eyes out with a spork for grinding my teeth in my sleep) from an abusive family, but the fact remains, that room was wrong, and he eventually told me that a young boy had been raped and murdered there not long after the 1930s addition and that the house had then been sold during the War.
I'm pretty sure the problem with the room for me wasn't the boy, although I thought I saw him in that shut off bathroom once, huddled, naked, in the empty tub.
Here's the thing. Like all little goth boys of that year, Dan loved The Sandman (let's face it, he probably wanted to fuck Morpheus's brains out) and tried to get me into the comic. But it was hard for me. I wasn't Death. I didn't want to date Morpheus. I wasn't special like Delirium or hot like Desire and I wasn't as normal or odd as any of comic's mere mortals.
So I thought the stories were good, but it wasn't really me. I mean, I just wasn't cool enough for it. I knew that. Dan's sister knew that. Dan's best friend that he was fucking since I wouldn't put out knew that. Everybody knew that. Except Dan.
He tried so hard. Pleaded with me really to get it. And the only part that I got, back then, was the parliment of rooks. I was that bird who would be let go or pecked to death. Because I was a storyteller and always before a jury.
So I when I tell you I have an affinity for birds, this is what I mean. A parliment of rooks, the crow I talked to on top of a car in New York City years later, the clouds of grackles rising up from the roofs of service stations in the Texas dawn.
I thought I was that rook then, because I thought I was dying. Because I thought a ghost in Dan's house would rape me. Becuase I thought I was damned for not saving his sister and trying, stupidly, to help him. Because I was ashamed, that I only broke up with him when he took a swing at me (the first, the only) in public and missed. I've always had pride, above all else.
And that was The Sandman for me: a pretty goth girl with an ankh and combat boots and a bunch of birds.
Eventually I grew up and became friends with all these people who are friends of Neil's and I never wibbled and wobbled and oooh'ed and aaaah'ed about it, because his stories hadn't saved me. They didn't even condemn me. They just sort of bore witness, even though they, by and large, probably had better things to do. They certainly saved a lot of my friends. In the end they may have even saved Dan. Or his sister. I don't really know, but would like to think so.
Today I tell stories for a living, in a hundred different modes. And in a couple of weeks, I'll get to help tell two of the stories from The Sandman in a charity effort to make sure that difficult stories are always available to be heard when they are most needed. That they will always save and entertain and bear witness.
No matter what's changed in my life it still comes down to a parliment of rooks and a boy who may or may not have existed, who may or may not have been raped and murdered, and the girl I may or may not have once been.
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