We’re swinging to the opposite end of the father figure spectrum for this one!
As a ten-year-old boy, you can imagine the excitement my eight-year-old brother and I shared when we moved into the place on Tulip Avenue. We didn’t believe our dad when he told us we would each have our own rooms. Or that they were on the second floor! But I’ll never forget when we drove up to the old place set back from the other houses on the block at the end of the street.
After being cramped in a two bedroom apartment for as long as I could remember, the two story craftsman house set among ancient coast live oak trees seemed like something out of a fairy tale. I distinctly remember my mom asking how we could afford it, and my dad telling her it had been on the market forever, that there were things that needed fixing up, this and that, and even as a kid I could tell she wasn’t buying it. But I could also tell she didn’t want to call him on it in front of my brother and me. Later that night, when I was supposed to be asleep I heard them talking.
“Haunted? Seriously?” my mom asked.
“That’s what the real estate agent said. He was deadly serious about it. Said the place kept getting resold and resold… apparently it’s got a reputation and they had to really come down on the price.”
“Like way down into our price range? That’s like off a cliff,” she laughed.
“Well… yeah. And there really are some serious things that need fixing – I need to get the roof looked at before winter, and there’s some foundation issues…”
“That sounds pretty serious. Are you sure it’s safe?”
“It is,” he said.
It wasn’t. But he had no idea what he’d gotten us into.
The backyard held the one thing my brother and I were most excited about. Built ten feet off the ground around the massive truck of an ancient oak tree was a treehouse. Let me remind you, we were two boys and there was a treehouse in the yard of our house.
But from the first time I climbed the ladder rungs hammered into the tree to the little porch and opened the door I knew we weren’t alone.
Mostly they moved things. Tommy would set his army men up in dramatic tableaus only to come back the next morning to find the army men positioned completely differently. We chalked it up to animals getting in through the window openings, but none of the army men were ever tipped over or knocked off the little table – they were all upright…. Just moved around.
After we’d lived there for a while I think the ghosts that lived in the treehouse felt more comfortable with Tommy and me because we’d catch movement out of our peripheral vision. More than once I’d hear laughter from the opposite side of the tree house that Tommy and I were playing in. But we never felt threatened or like the ghosts were evil. Honestly, it felt like we were at recess at school – kids all around doing their own thing. We just couldn’t see them.
Once Tommy and I were fooling around and I grabbed the action figure he wanted and ran through the door of the treehouse trying to keep it away from him. In my hurry, though, I managed to hit the small gap between two railings on the porch; where I expected to push off a railing I was met with empty air… and a ten foot fall to the ground below. Only I didn’t fall. I started off the edge but felt hands arrest my fall. For a moment I teetered precariously on the edge of the porch and then the hands pushed me back until I caught my balance. Tommy watched the whole thing and asked, “What just happened?” I could only shake my head in disbelief.
Our dad had a temper made worse when he was drinking and his drinking started getting bad after we moved into the Tulip Avenue house. As his moods would darken the tree house became our sanctuary. In hindsight, I don’t think he was acting completely on his own – there are a lot of stories from the Tulip Avenue house.
I don’t remember what we did to set him off. I don’t know if it was Tommy not cleaning his room, or we left lights on – I genuinely don’t remember. But I remember his anger. I remember Tommy and I running out of the house and scurrying up into the tree house. Dad followed us out into the yard.
“You kids think you run this place!” he yelled at us. “I’m going to tear that goddamn treehouse down and where are you going to go then? Huh?”
We didn’t come back into the house until he’d passed out on the couch watching the Late Show. We were worried about the treehouse but I convinced Tommy that dad wouldn’t remember his threats and we’d be fine.
He remembered.
He was still asleep when we left for school that next morning. But when the bus dropped us off after school we hurried around to the back yard only to find the treehouse had been reduced to rubble around the base of the tree. Dad sat in a lawn chair smoking a cigarette facing the rubble (which he only did when drinking), his tshirt sweat stained, and a number of empty beer cans around the chair.
Tommy had started crying, and I think that’s what first alerted my dad to our presence. He turned around with a really evil grin on his face – it didn’t look like my father. “How do you like your goddamn treehouse now?” He started laughing – again, not like my dad normally laughed. Tommy ran off for his room and I followed because I didn’t want to be anywhere near my dad.
A week later, though, we had a new treehouse.
After my dad died and the Tulip Avenue house was a memory for the three of us, my mom told me what happened. That night Tommy and I had snuck back into the house with our dad sleeping on the couch in a drunken haze was the last time he slept in the house for a week.
Mom said he claimed he was being tormented. “Goddamn kids are around the bed!” he said the first night.
“Mike, there’s no one here. Tommy and Dale are in their rooms.”
“Can’t you see them?!” he said staring frantically around the room. “Seriously, Christy? There’s like a dozen of them! You don’t hear them laughing and singing?”
My mom didn’t hear or see anything. She was convinced my dad was having some kind of psychotic break. He eventually left the room, but mom said she could hear him walking around the downstairs saying, “Stop following me!” and “Leave me alone!” until he eventually left the house entirely and slept in the cab of his truck at the jobsite he was working on that week.
The next night was the same. Mom said he had started drinking harder than usual, but everything he would start to nod off he’d jerk awake and yell at one of the invisible children to leave him alone. Mom hid his keys because he was so drunk, but she said he kept doing that nod-off-jerk-awake-yell-at-kids thing until the sun came up.
For our part, during that time Tommy and I effectively hid in my room coming out only to eat and go to school. In hindsight I think we were mourning the loss of our sanctuary as much as we were trying to stay away from our father.
Mom said the whole tormenting lasted about a week and my dad became more and more delirious from sleep deprivation. Finally, in the middle of the night after being tormented she said he yelled, “Fine! I’ll rebuild it! Is that what you want? Will you leave me the fuck alone then?!”
Apparently, they let him sleep that night.
When the school bus dropped us off the next day we could hear dad running one of his saws. We went around the back to find him and our uncle Andy rebuilding our treehouse.
“Hey guys!” Uncle Andy called to us. “What do you think?”
We were speechless.
For his part, so was our dad. His eyes were bloodshot and he worked silently, but the children let him sleep that night. Dad and Uncle Andy were finished the next day and we were up the new ladder the second they were done. From up in the treehouse I could hear Uncle Andy say to my dad, “Looks really good, Mike.”
My father grunted and walked away mumbling, “Fucking kids better leave me alone.”
“Mike?” Uncle Andy said shocked. “What’d Tommy and Dale do?”
“Not those kids. Not those kids…”
