I was too young to understand that mother was a monster. I remember her telling me a story when I was about the age of three, back when she wasn’t quite sick of pretending to love me yet.
“Stephen, if you don’t quit picking your nose, the Bogeyman will come to get you for it.” If I had been old enough to understand complex emotion, I wouldn’t have mistaken the malice in her voice for a light airy humor.
The Bogeyman sounded like a joke to me, like a little tiny man stuck in one of the many facial orifices where my thumb also liked to reside. Maybe the Bogeyman would like to thumb wrestle with me in a fight for my green hunks of gold. Perhaps the Bogeyman was even shaped like a thumb himself. Ha! What a hoot that would be!
Mother was an artist back then, a real one that went into people’s houses and drew on their walls in exchange for money. Before I realized she wanted nothing to do with me, I wanted everything to do with her. I wanted to draw just like her. I drew pictures of what I thought this mysterious Bogeyman should look like. In my head, the Bogeyman was very slimy indeed. His feet dripped muck with every step so you could see him coming for you from miles away. Sometimes he was a green color, sometimes he was a blue color, but he always had the sickly pallor of someone who had not been alive for many, many years. He was very tall with the fruits of his labors. The more slime he collected from a person, the taller and taller he got until he could reach mountaintops. Those were my favorite pictures to draw of him – the ones comparing him to mountaintops; I was proud to display his size and strength, but I was scared of him too.
Mother used the word “monster” when describing the Bogeyman. She said he was a monster because he does bad things like steal children away and never gives back to their families.
“Do all monsters do bad things?” I asked her.
“Of course, that’s what makes them monsters,” she informed me.
“Are they always ugly?”
“Always,” she sneered, “the bad deeds grow on their bodies like fungus.”
When I was 6, Mother told me that I was old enough to start staying home by myself. She said that she was busy and that she had a lot of things to do with her new boyfriend that were more important.
“It’s time to be a big boy, Stephen,” she reprimanded me, “the Tylenol is in the cabinet in the upstairs bathroom and the Mylanta should be there too. That should be everything you need in case of an emergency. Don’t bother calling my cell phone. I probably wont pick up.”
“I’m scared,” I whimpered right before she left, “what about the Bogeyman?”
“Don’t worry. The Bogeyman won’t come in unless you answer the door. Whatever you do, just don’t answer the door. Not for anyone.” She slammed the aforementioned door behind her.
My mind began spinning once again with images of the Bogeyman. His feet must not have been the only parts of him that were slimy. Surely, his hands had to be extra slimier than the rest, that way he couldn’t turn the door handle to get in without an invitation. He must have had big eyes popping out of the front of his head, so he could spy on little children through the window and try to persuade them into letting him inside. These ideas all seemed quite brilliant to me. I grabbed my crayons and paper and began to draw. This time, my monster looked bigger, slimier, and even more hideous than all the other drawings I made.
I did this throughout most of the night to keep myself entertained. I did some other stuff too. I made myself a cheese sandwich. I flipped through a few channels on the TV. I took two Tylenol because mother said they were there and that I could.
It was half past one when mother finally got home.
“Now was that so bad?” She asked me angrily, as if I had done something clearly wrong in her absence.
“No,” I replied meekly.
“Did you answer the door for anyone?”
“No, but is it really true that the Bogeyman can only get in if I let him?”
“Always,” she sneered, “Monsters never show up without an invitation.”
When I was 8, mother simply stopped coming home altogether. She did answer the phone every few days, and I finally asked her, “but what about the Bogeyman?”
“Stephen,” she sighed, “you’re too old for this. The Bogeyman isn’t real. Monsters aren’t real.”
I was appalled that mother had lied. Not real? Then, why had she told me they were real? I ran to my paper and crayons and once again began to draw the Bogeyman. This time, he was more grotesque than ever. He had claws, sharp teeth, and protruding bones. He was absolutely the most ugly thing I had ever drawn. Underneath the picture, I wrote MONSTERS ARE NOT REAL and I hung it above my bed. I went to the kitchen and tried to make myself another sandwich, but there was only one slice of bread left. I ate it and watched more TV. Then, I took some of the interesting looking red pills that mother kept in the cabinet next to the Tylenol. She’d never told me to take them, but she’d never told me not to take them either.
I was in quite a stupor that night. My head was spinning and my body felt like it might lift right off the floor. A knock came at the door. I thought maybe I shouldn’t answer it. The Bogeyman always knocks. I heard another knock and then another. I looked up at my picture from earlier in the night and remembered what mother had told me. Monsters aren’t real, so why shouldn’t I open the door?
I opened it with caution, still not quite sure if what I was doing was somehow wrong.
“Stephen Ballentyne?” A kindly woman in a blue uniform inquired.
“Are you the Bogeyman?” I asked. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting the Bogeyman to look like. First of all, the Bogeyman certainly couldn’t have been a woman, and there were no slimy feet and no great gaping mouth ready to consume bad children.
“Of course not,” the not-Bogeyman replied, “Monsters aren’t real.”
I’m 12 years old now, much wiser than I was back then. Mother is gone now; the not-Bogeymen in uniforms assigned me a new mother. I even have a father too. I understand now that monsters don’t have webbed feet, forked tongues, or spikes on their backs. Monsters don’t look like monsters and they don’t need an invitation to walk into your life. I am sure of a few things though. Monsters are real and they sleep in our beds and eat at our dinner tables. Monsters are flesh and blood and sometimes they look like the people we love.
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