Scripple-scrapple.
The night Madam Pamela’s Big Reveal went catastrophically wrong, I was staying in her guesthouse, waiting for the interview that I hoped would revive my career. From the window, I watched her staff flee. Wide-eyed and terrified, they raced, shocked too insensate to scream. Little whirls of gravel dust cycloned up from the circular driveway as their fancy electric cars peeled out. Some didn’t bother with cars. In dressy-casual business slacks, they ran.
The mansion glowed with a kind of phosphorescence. Inside was Pam’s Parlor of Extraordinary Delights, from which she broadcast her hit psychic show The Madam Pamela Hour. She’d built Split Foot Mansion here in Detroit because she claimed that this specific location was the most magic on earth, where meridians intersected, opening a gateway between worlds. With the aid of her “spirit companion” she’d dug a hole through the floor of her Parlor, where she claimed she’d broken the barrier between the visible and the unknown.
Glory Hole, I’d joked in a blog.
Right now, she was broadcasting her Big Reveal. For $200 per view, people were supposed to learn Madam Pamela’s secrets. She’d promised to let them see the world from her eyes. What was it she saw? She’d told us explicitly—dreadful drearies, she called them. Until lately, I’d assumed she was lying.
Pam Kowolski was rich, famous, and successful. I’d hated her for a long time. When I’d learned about her Big Reveal, I’d spent months researching this story, in the hopes of writing the pitch-perfect hit piece to take her down. I’d fantasized about her destruction, her hurt at my hands. How stupid. How blind.
I came out from the guest house. In the settled, pregnant stillness, a sound emanated from the mansion: scripple- scrapple. Something dreadful come round at last.
For me, there wasn’t a choice. There never had been. The staff had left Split Foot’s door wide open. I walked through.
It was time for our interview.
Crime Scene
I discovered Pam Kowolski on a late winter night. She practically apparated across my screen, her hair like black gloss, her smile a gash of red lipstick.
My apartment was the top floor of an Astoria, Queens walk-up. The landlord lived right below and had this thing about how all the rooms had to be covered in carpet. This was thirty-year-old, filthy blue pile that my roommate and I begged him to strip and replace. He refused. Our eyes itched constantly.
True story. This really happened: To suffocate the dust and mold, we spread clean, white bedsheets over the carpet. This had the effect of making the entire apartment look like a crime scene: Murder had happened, or was happening, or would happen.
Our home was murder in perpetuity.
I’d been sad lately, which was unusual. Typically, I was too pissed off to be sad. But things had been going downhill for a long time, and not just in my own life. It was like all of reality was hanging over an invisible precipice, about to tilt into something monstrous. Everyone was feeling this way. I could see it in my coworkers. I could see it on the street and in doctor’s offices. We tittered with a nervous energy, like animals in tied bags about to be dropped into a river.
I was on the common room couch that night, feet propped, scrolling my screen in the dark. Pot smoke wafted from the brightly lit crack beneath my roommate Punk Rock Dean’s bedroom. He and his dealer Sick Mike (whom he’d mistaken for his best friend) were getting high. I didn’t like them enough to want to join in. But I did notice, in a self-conscious sort of way, that I’d been excluded. Again.
Onscreen, advertisements popped like hot corn kernels. It was impossible to distinguish one from the next. Now, they were selling some kind of flexible dildo (or maybe a face massager?). The actor said it had changed his life. He used to be worried about politics and war crimes but his face dildo had taught him how to relax. That targeted advertisement ended (Why me? Did I seem like somebody who needed a face dildo to take my mind off war crimes?). Then came a lady in big hoop earrings with black hair: Madam Pamela.
I’d been vaguely aware of Madam Pamela for years. She was one of many crackpots who charged exorbitant fees for psychic video readings, which she called encounters. These encounters had made her rich and famous. So famous that even her fans had a name: Pam-a-maniacs.
I don’t know why I’d never recognized her before that night. She’d been a celebrity for a long time. My only explanation was that I was an oblivious person. For various reasons, and also one very specific reason, I didn’t tend to look outside my life or imagine the circumstances of the people I’d once known.
But things bubble up, especially the stuff you try hardest to weigh down. What’s that line?
The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.
Though Pam had been pretty in high school—that kind of bland, nonthreatening, approachable pretty that the boys loved—money had made her beautiful. Her once frizzy hair was smooth, her pimply skin clear.
“Are you curious about the spirit world?” she asked, her voice soft and seductive, her body turned sideways to make her waist appear thin, her face captured from a high and flattering angle. Why do women do that? Even at forty, they can’t just sell a product: they have to sexy-sell it. “Do you wonder what dreadful drearies whisper their stories in my ears? Have you ever been alone in a room, and suddenly felt eyes upon you? It’s the creatures of the nether and soon you’ll see them, too. Get your ticket to the Big Reveal on January 31st. Tell your friends, tell everyone you’ve ever known, my beautiful Pam-a-maniacs!” And then, somehow, she was looking just at me. Our eyes met in the dark. “Trust me,” she said. “This is a revelation of biblical proportions. This is everything.”
I was already mad that some jerk on my screen was telling me that she had the answers to the complex problems of a falling-apart world, a world that made less sense every day. Worse, she seemed to be trying to tell me that she could fix me personally. But what business was it of hers, that I was broken?
I despised her for that alone. But then, camera lingering, she tucked a lock of black hair behind her ear. The action reminded me of a girl from my wincing, painful past. A girl who’d hurt me so badly that I still hadn’t recovered.
An asshole, in other words.
A funny thing happened right then. Every amorphous bad feeling I’d had; every sorrow, every rage… these distilled. They became a perfect arrow of blame. I swear to God, I got goosebumps.
“Fuck me. Fuck her. Madam Pamela is Pam Kowolski,” I said to the dark room.
They’re All Gonna Laugh at You!
Some context: Back at Sewanhaka Senior High, Pam was one of those agreeable girls everybody liked. She wore witchy black broom skirts and carried a Tarot deck to fool people into thinking she was deep. Her crew was an assortment of mid-level popular, moderately but not especially athletic norm-cores. In other words, she was Wonder Bread. Tapioca. The extra rice you get at a Chinese restaurant that you don’t want.
For reasons unknown, Pam got accelerated into the AP classes senior year. Because none of her meathead friends were in these classes, and because no one who knew me liked me, we were often forced to partner up.
I was fighting a lot of demons back then. Memories of my mom were still fresh. Still, if I’m honest, I didn’t mind partnering with Pam. She was a good second. She took notes in neat, very small handwriting that tended to have lots of unnecessary loops. Her numbers and letters were sometimes backward, I suspect just to piss me off. Still, she was sweet. I never felt judged.
But then one day in physics class, I made a harmless comment. She took offence and retaliated. She cut into me, mean and loud for everyone to hear. I could no longer remember exactly she’d said. But I remembered the laughter. ...
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