BILL BATCH WHERE ARE YOU???

0129 733 pm

Recently my Mother and I have been discussing an experience that happened to our family in the late Seventies, a story that doesn't seem quite real but sure enough it happened. The other day, on the phone, I asked my Mom about a man named Bill Batch, a person who I never physically met and yet still seemed somehow connected to the fragments of stories I heard my Mother tell about him.

Why are you thinking about him, she asked, and when I thought about it I realized I dreamt about discussing him with some ghost in my subconscious. So, we had a long conversation about what really happened, without the distorting of one's own memories. She said it was around 1978 or 79, at a time when my parents were separated but not yet divorced, with my father living out of the house, with his new girlfriend Glenna, and my Mother in the house in Greenford, OH, a tiny little fleck on the map of Ohio, with five kids and no way to support them. So my Mom learned how to upholster, starting with car and RV interiors, eventually expanding beyond that to reupholstering people's furniture. She was amazing at it, and what else was cool was going into people's houses, just invading their spaces and taking out their furniture--I went with my Mom on pick-ups and I'd bring in the Swatch books and wait patiently while old ladies picked out their favorite fabrics. My Mom was an amazing businesswoman, basically learning from scratch the in's and out's of doing business for yourself, totally DIY.

But, in that line of work, one was prone to meeting strange people. People would cold call my Mom to come and fix their furniture, make it look better than brand new, she ruled at it. So sometimes the paying customers could get strange. She said one time she had a call in Salem, OH to reupholster this guy's couch. She said she and my late brother-in-law Eric went to his house, and although he was a complete stranger, he seemed to know things about my father, things my Mom didn't think someone as random as this man should know about her estranged husband. Later after they got out of there with the couch, Eric told my Mom the man really frightened him, and Eric was not easily frightened. My Mom said there was something almost too powerful about his presence, the way it seemed to intrude into your unconscious mind. They had the couch in the basement in the house in Greenford, and my Mom found a folded up blanket inside of the furniture's frame. She called him, Bill Batch, and told him she found his blanket just in case he was missing it. But he told her to cover her child in it, the one who was in danger. She got off the phone, rattled and not sure what this freaky dude was all about. Eric took the folded up blanket and tried to immolate it in the barrel, but it wouldn't burn. My Mom said he buried it somewhere on the property.

They brought back the reupholstered couch, looking amazing, but I guess Bill seemed somewhat distracted. He paid my mom, and told her of a book he had written. He gave her a copy of it, but she says she doesn't remember what she did with it. But during this meeting, Bill Batch got even weirder. This man seemed to put himself into a trance by tapping his pen on the desk, with his face going blank, his voice altering with his facial expressions, channeling some outside force to the two of them. He was ready to transmit a message to my Mother, and Eric urged her home.

The story doesn't end there. A few days later my Mom came home and found a note from Bill Batch, attached to the body of a headless chicken. In the midst of the dead chicken on her porch she says she doesn't remember much of what the note said, she was super unnerved by the gesture. Why did he leave a blessing like that for her? She didn't know. But a few days after that, maybe a week or more, a cop car drove down into Greenford and came down our drive way. My Mom came out to meet the police. They told her that a man named Bill Batch had been committed to Woodside, the local psychiatric hospital. And he had escaped from the hospital, and he told everyone he had to get to Greenford, because he had a message for Jackie, my Mom. He was still on the loose, the cops told her, so lock up the house and windows and call us if he comes here. They left, and my Mom was left in a delicate state of sheer pants shitting panic. Who was this maniac and what was the message he had to deliver to her?

That's where it seems that Mr. Batch had more than a similarity in his practices of some sort of Caribbean religion, be it Santeria or something else more localized, but within the definitions of these beliefs, one can see this man was being compelled to make contact with my Mother. One of her children seemed to be in danger, and he had information that could potentially redefine our whole lives. But he never got to my Mom. They caught him, and put him away somewhere no one could find him. All alone in solitary confinement, he knew he failed in delivering the message he was commanded to deliver. This is thirty years ago, and I want to know what happened to this man and, most importantly, I need to know what was the message. Why did he have to deliver it? I don't think we were in any danger of this man harming us. In fact, I believe he was responding to some spiritual sentiment sent to protect us.

So, I know he wrote a book. I know he was a patient in Woodside Hospital, more than once no doubt. He lived in Salem, OH. He'd be between 60 and 70 years old, a man with a life's purpose nullified, beyond recognition. He failed the Spirit that spoke to him, and yet somewhere in him the Spirit still dwells, and maybe if I can find Bill Batch and ask him what the fuck happened. I want to know, because I think this experience has a much greater significance in the grander scheme of our day to day existence. I don't buy the insane plea. I think there is divinity in insanity, I have felt it myself in darker times, I know it is there, and I know there is truth within the candleflame, and the reflections it makes are divinely inspired. This man Bill Batch, was he a psychonaut, some kind of wizard? He was a nobody in a sea of faces, of jobs done and forgotten he gets remembered for trying to get involved with us spiritually.

When I find him, I will record his explanation for his actions, and maybe something will flicker again and that energy will answer what we seek.

Butthole Surfers--Creep in the Cellar

Linda

So Monday is my sister Linda's birthday. I won't tell you how old she is, but I will say I have known her all my life. I've seen and done a lot of crazy shit with Linda around(note to my Mom, that part's made up! Haha!). I may not choose to implicate my dear sister in any infractions of the law(again, Mom, figuratively speaking!), but just know we've been chased in the car fearing for our lives on two separate occasions(exaggeration), and both times she was driving(and wearing her seatbelt). And I'm still here, so thanks to her quick maneuvering and thinking we got out of a lot of sticky jams. She taught me the joys of vandalism(which we have never committed, my dear nephews! Toilet paper belongs in the bathroom), which would one day turn around on me, but at the time it was a blast. We were pros with the toilet paper and the jumbo sized bottle of dish soap, ready to squeeze driveby style on a car window as we drove through a sleeping neighborhood and blasted everything we saw. We were assholes, but for a while it felt so liberating to be such assholes(note to Linda's sons--don't be assholes). We salted dirty words into front lawns, to kill the letters a dead yellow against the green. We threw slices of deli bologna onto the hoods of those who trespassed us. (All right, we did do all that. I can't keep up with all these edits. I'm done!)

It's too bad you, the reader, never had such a badass sister like I do. I remember one time I was fighting with my friend Joe and she trapped him in our garage and lectured him for nearly an hour about the virtues of me and my friendship, and at the end of the interrogation/lecture Joe came out and hugged me, and told me he was sorry. She did something terrible to his brain and his psyche, but he bounced back ok, and we became much closer after that. Me and Joey, I mean.

But it wasn't always the good times growing up with Linda as my big sister. One time was kind of a drag, and I call that the Story About The Time I Got a Fish Hook Stuck in Linda's Head. It's a little gruesome, so the more queasy of you, maybe skip this one. All right.

So, my brother Scott was dating a girl named Kat, whose father had a pond on his property that he kept stocked with various fishes, some of them so nasty he'd feed them roadkill he'd scraped from the sides of the road. He kept a shovel in the back of his truck for that express purpose. So, I guess someone thought it would be a good idea for Scott to take us out there and go fishing for fish that eat dead mammals. Makes plenty of sense. I think me and Linda were at that age where we were at perpetual war. Our battles always began with her verbal taunting, a sort of soul crushing chatter that could make someone just lose their shit and start beating ass. And it wouldn't take long until I had suplexed her onto the floor or wherever. She'd get in my head and tell me wrestling was "fake," and I'd boil until the lid blew off and I'd have her in a figure four leglock, yelling, "Does this feel fake? Does it?" And then she'd say I hurt her, and I'd stop and feel guilty and she'd make me feel worse.

So, this went on for a few years, and I may have given her a beating on that day, but I don't remember. I just remember casting my line into the water and not catching a thing. The bait would be nibbled and gone, but I never would feel it getting taken. And my brother was off somewhere balling his girlfriend so we had nowhere else to be. But after a while it was time to go when they came back and I guess I wasn't ready to leave then. I knew I didn't have any bait on the hook, but I kept casting out and reeling it back in. Like a dumb little robot on repeat, cast the line, reel it in. Scott was packing up his tacklebox and I took one last cast but when I went to throw my arm foreword, it wasn't snapping through the air. And I tugged, a few times pretty hard, and i guess I didn't realize the bare hook got stuck on something. Or, in this case, in something.

I couldn't get it in the water because I'd hooked Linda in the back of her scalp and somehow worked the hook into her skin. I don't remember her screaming, not at least until I turned around and realized what had happened. It's pretty gross to see a fish hook stuck in your sister's head. Overwhelming, even.

And sometimes it felt like I was born with an overwhelming sense of guilt, so seeing Linda with the line leading down into her hair, still hooked by my fishing pole, it broke my brain. I felt like I had killed her. I don't remember how we got there but all of a sudden we were all inside and grown-ups were holding her under the lights and smoothing her hair along the part so they could see where the hook went in. Things were further complicated by the barb on the hook, a nifty metal prong added to hooks to keep it good and stuck inside the fish's mouth. This barb was lodged in her head pretty good. They worked it out somehow with some careful amateur doctoring and we eventually went home. I don't remember what my Mom said when we came home and Scott told her what happened. I seem to be mentally blocked there!

But she survived her head hooking and we grew up some and became better friends, but sometimes we'd fight, never long enough for it to stick, I guess.

And we became adults and had more crazy adventures, too insane to recount here, but I've found that spending time with my sister meant there was going to be some sort of pursuit of cataclysm, but despite the years of wreck and ruin, she's gone on to do some amazing things, and raise three radical boys. And a year and a half ago she drove to NJ in the middle of the night when I had some, shall we say, personal issues. She was right there and knew what to say to me to get my thinking straight. But then, this is the same girl who put a hole in the upstairs bedroom drywall when we were practicing our breakdancing moves in the house in Petersburg. It was some sort of freestyle knee lift/push off that made a giant hole in the wall. She wanted me to take the blame for it, but eventually Linda made us come to an agreement that we wouldn't tell our Mom where the hole in the hall came from, and we knew then our breakdancing dreams would never be realized. But we had other dreams, and we lived them.

And, it seems to me, that for the first time in a long time my sister is emerging from the murky black cloud and feels new again, and in that spirit I propose a new Year One, a new beginning and challenges that seem trifling compared to past victories. The years that have passed have taken with them the unfaceable challenges and overcomeable odds and she has arrived at a place where she can be her own woman. And I am really freaking happy for her. No more fishhooks or piledrivers or concussions (that's not a funny story though, the concussion one), no more near death experiences, that shit's so passe.

Happy birthday to my stupid sister Linda. I guess I could have sent you an anatomically correct female reproductive organ model from a medical supply house, but this just seems more personal.