Regarding the Howlers
fast food fear, Thriller, and a witchy sleepover
Hi.
The last update was quick and easy, mostly photos, but this one’s a long read. Gonna take 20 minutes or so, but I hope you make the time.
We’re catching up with Tilly again, but earlier in life. I often think of this story as prologue.
I wrote “Regarding the Howlers” before Taco Bell Quarterly launched, but submitted it immediately when I found them online. I got a kind rejection nearly a year later.
As the editor of a non-Taco Bell adjacent magazine, I suggest that if your Yo Quiero shit doesn’t make it through the hopeless TBQ gauntlet, you gotta self-publish the thing.
Please enjoy, and please share. For real: Send this shit to somebody.
Best,
Adam
Regarding the Howlers
Adam Voith
The Howlers were not Christians. Mr. and Mrs. Howler smoked cigarettes indoors, always had cocktails in their hands or sweating nearby on coasters, and Mr. Howler sprinkled ‘shits’ and ‘goddamns’ into almost every sentence. Lotta coughing between the two of them; middle-aged wheezing. Their son Tommy was a little older than me, and to my mom’s dismay, we hung out all the time.
At the top of the cul-de-sac, crown jewel of the street, the Howlers’ yellow two-story wore a bogus farmhouse costume, with the garage built to look like a barn. A game room sat where the hay loft should be.
Mr. Howler was a realtor. He had a gold watch and big rings, and if you drove around the neighborhood counting For Sale signs with his photo in front yards—stiff mustache, tinted glasses—you’d know The Howlers were doing just fine. Tommy always had new shoes on, the best toys, the first computer I ever saw. Tommy’s older sister Heidi was certain she was getting a car on her sixteenth birthday; that kinda stuff.
If my parents were being kind, they referred to The Howlers as worldly. They watched all the new movies, read the bestsellers. Mr. Howler liked to take little jabs at my family’s other-worldly beliefs. Plenty of families on our circle were a little bit religious, or religious on the holidays. Religious by default when extended family came around. Religious when they’re about to get on a plane. Religious at births and deaths, marriages and splits. There were tame Catholics, Presbyterians. My parents loved to call The Belles backsliding Baptists. There was one unspecified party—nobody knew shit about shady Mr. Cardoza—but the Howlers had zero religion.
“Your dad praying for his Steelers this Sunday?” Each time I came or went from Tommy’s, I’d lean into the living room from the entryway, respectfully saying hello or goodbye to his parents, and there was always some light bullshit to endure from Mr. Howler. “Those Satanists playing for the Saints don’t stand a goddamn chance, hey?”
The jokes were decent, honestly, and endless. “So, you guys get the hungry fed this week? All the homeless got houses now?” Mr. Howler was red-faced and cloudy, always smiling with his expensive teeth, very straight but badly stained.
Once, he sounded serious: “Oh, hey there, Tilly. Listen, before you go, I was gonna ask if maybe you could pray for me?”
Whoa. I was stun-gun still for a second, then rose to the occasion: “Uh, yeah. Yeah, of course, Mr. Howler. What for?”
“The big bottles of my bourbon have been out of stock at the store. Been a difficult time for the whole family.” Big phlegmy laughs, watermelon gut slung inside his tucked-in golf shirt jiggling, ice swinging around in his glass.
“Senior. Be nicer.” Mr. Howler was also Tommy—Thomas—but everyone in the family called him Senior. Mrs. Howler would half-heartedly lobby for him to lay off, grinning into her needlepoint or magazines. These were my first persecutions, just like the Bible said there would be.
As a softener, Mrs. Howler asked, “Honey, would you like to come to dinner with us tonight?”
I tensed up in my body, and in my brain. “I’ll have to ask my mom, Mrs. Howler. What are you eating?”
“Taco Bell, tonight,” Senior said. “Mrs. Howler’s favorite.”
Shit. “Okay, I’ll ask.” I hustled home and looked for my mom in the kitchen, the laundry room, then finally yelled up the stairs. “Moooooommm!”
“Don’t yell!” she yelled back down.
I climbed the steps and found her in the hallway bathroom. She was on her knees, one arm in the toilet, yellow rubber gloves up to her elbows. “Tommy’s mom invited me to dinner.”
“Now?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“Where?”
“They’re going to Taco Bell.”
“Well, I was about to make salmon patties, but I guess it’s fine.”
Salmon patties were a top three grossest meal. Mom churned the fishy mix by hand—fuck, yuck!—slapped out burger shapes, and flipped them in a frying pan until each side was the leather sole of a slipper. The inside was crumble dry. We’d squeeze lemon over the top, which fixed nothing. The juice just rolled right off. Every four or five patties, maybe every other family-salmon cycle, a tiny bone would make it into the mix and a brittle hairlike horror would snap between my teeth. Mom would laugh when I’d frown and spit it out. Missing salmon patties was a score, but I was preoccupied.
“But mom, I’ve never had Mexican food.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“Have you been there?”
“Where?”
“Mom! Taco Bell!”
“Oh. No. I don’t like Mexican,” she said.
Here are the meals my mom made: Chicken, served a couple ways, none of them interesting; meatloaf with onion bits I forked out and spread around, hiding them in ketchup puddles on my plate; chili with chewy macaroni noodles inside, soggy green peppers with the meatloaf recipe stuffed inside; burgers like flattened baseballs; broiled cod from the freezer; her vegetable soup, which was torture; saltless green bean and potato stew—devastating. Her tuna noodle casserole killed me, and there was a brief period when she went all in on stir-fry after buying a mail-order wok to toss dry-ass rice and tough strips of steak with frozen cubed carrots and peas. Her lentil soup was surprisingly nuanced, aside from the rubbery chunks of ham. Her spaghetti sauce, to be fair, was delicious. My grandmother’s recipe.
It was a rare night of mercy when mom and dad wanted BLTs, and they’d let me do peanut butter and bacon on toasted bread instead. When relatives came to town from Pittsburgh, hoagie night was a huge ordeal, an assembly line of meats and dressings. I could skate by in the bustle just eating potato chips.
“What is Mexican?” I asked.
“Tacos and burritos, I guess,” she said.
“But what’s in them? Or, I mean, what’s on them?”
Mom got up from the floor, flushed the toilet and watched the foamy water circle for a second. “Mexican flavored stuff. It’s meat and cheese, salsa and beans. They probably put lettuce on them, but I told you, you’ll be fine.”
“There’s lettuce?” I didn’t know what salsa was, but it didn’t sound great, either.
“Tilly. Just ask for no lettuce. Go.” She snapped off her dripping gloves. “Eat with your friend. Have a good time.”
Downstairs, I picked up the phone and dialed down the street.
“Hello, Howlers,” Tommy answered.
“I can come to Taco Bell with you.”
“Tilly’s coming,” he said to whoever was standing there with him. “Okay, stand at the end of your driveway. We’re almost ready to leave.”
Senior’s Chrysler Fifth Avenue always felt to me like it could sneak into a motorcade with its boxy grill and decorative side panels between the windows. Tommy’s mom put the radio on, and Mr. Howler draped his right arm lazily over the steering wheel, his wrist doing the work, his other arm limp out his window with a cigarette between his fingers, probably drunk down to their tips.
I was between Tommy and Heidi in the backseat. “What do you guys get there?” I asked them.
“Tostada and a Taco BellGrande,” Tommy said. “Those are new.”
“Burrito and Pintos ’n Cheese,” said Heidi. “Oh, and I love the Cinnamon Crispas. What do you like?”
“I’ve never been,” I confessed. “Is it good?”
“Never?” Tommy said. “God, we go all the time. My mom loves the Taco Salad. I like it fine, but Clancy’s is better. They have that double drive-thru lane. Corner Drug is awesome, too. They have Coke floats and the candy aisle is like a mile.”
Senior parked and we walked up to the building, Alamo-esque! It was dark-stained wood everywhere inside. There was no line. Mr. and Mrs. Howler were at the register right away, waving us up to order.
“You guys go,” I said to Tommy and Heidi, stepping back behind them and studying the menu board hung above the counter. Tommy and Heidi ordered quickly, made their picks just like they told me in the car. Tommy topped it off with Mountain Dew, Heidi got root beer, and then they went to find a table. “Go ahead,” I told Mr. and Mrs. Howler, “I’m still looking.” By the time they finished their orders, I’d decided on hard shell tacos, hoping for the best, but when I stepped up to the teenager behind the register, a cardboard display on the counter announced the arrival of Pizzazz Pizza. You know it now as Mexican Pizza. They dumbed down the name for the national roll-out after regional test marketing.
While Tommy and his family apparently traveled all over town, visiting any and all restaurants on repeat, my family never went anywhere to eat. The only exception was the occasional Friday when I’d ride in the front seat, a special treat, with my dad to the Pizza Hut downtown. He’d keep the car running in the parking lot, leave me in there and pop inside to grab the order. When he came back, he’d pass the cardboard box to me, and I’d rest it on my legs for the drive home and let it warm my thighs.
Mom would have paper towels and plates set out on the living room floor with the TV tuned to CBS for The Dukes of Hazzard. After the pizza, she popped popcorn and poured Pepsis, and this is, without question, my happiest family food memory.
“I’ll have the Pizzazz Pizza,” I said. “And a Pepsi, please.”
While Mr. Howler paid, I studied the photo of Pizzazz, getting a real look at what I’d be eating. Easy to pull the diced tomatoes and black olives off the top. I was freaked out by the squished layer of light brown gunk, refried beans, but otherwise it looked mostly edible to me. Down to just the beef, cheese, and tortilla crusts, really.
At the table, with our trays of food, The Howlers dug in quickly, unwrapping and unrolling, squirting sauces all over everything.
“You want some Hot for your thing?” Tommy asked, holding up a grip of packets.
“No thanks,” I said, “I like Mexican cold, I think.”
“Hey Tilly, say a little prayer over our Taco Supremes,” Senior said, and winked.
I took things slowly, got rid of the stuff on top that wasn’t cheese, got my soda straw ready, and chased the first bite with the Pepsi. On the second bite, more bravely, I tasted those same things everybody tastes when they eat every menu item at Taco Bell for all time, and I was fine.
“Hey, lemme try that pizza thing,” Mr. Howler said, surprising me. “I’ll trade you for a taco.”
“Oh sure,” I said, lifting my tray toward him. “But I don’t need the taco.”
“You don’t like tacos, Tilly?”
“Oh no, I definitely love tacos. It’s just that Pizzazz Pizza is really great. I don’t think I’ve got room for more.”
“Here,” he said, unwrapping a taco and putting it on my tray. It was packed with shredded lettuce, dripping with sour cream, chunks of tomato everywhere. Mr. Howler picked up a slice of the pizza in exchange. He gathered up a few olives from my tray and put them back in their place before cramming the whole thing into his face.
Tommy, Heidi, and Mrs. Howler were happily crunching away, but Senior was eyeballing me while he chewed. “Kid. You can’t be scared of a taco. Come on now, take a bite of that goddamn thing.”
* * *
“Hi, Mr. Howler.”
“There he is. The Apostle Tilly. Tommy’s upstairs, go on up.”
Mild that day. I bounced up and headed for the game room where Tommy and his sister had couches, a big TV, a massive set of shelves running the length of the room packed with boardgames, art supplies, piles of pom poms and batons. There was a mini-pinball machine you played sitting on your knees. No one else on the street had pinball. No one else had a game room!
Heidi’s toys were aging. She was deeply into the telephone and MTV, and often huddled over the turntable stationed between furniture-sized speakers, putting on a favorite song again and again.
Michael Jackson’s Thriller had arrived to every home but mine. I saw the LP on the floor and picked it up. It’d been out for a year, but I’d never actually held a copy. I’d heard the songs, of course, a thousand times already on the radio, the overhead speakers at the mall, blasting from cars when teenagers drove by, and of course Heidi played it all the time. I wasn’t overly interested, but then the music video came out. I first heard about it from kids at school, and then quickly got a different take from my parents and a brief comment from the pastor at church. I was scared of it, and dying to see it.
“Is the video actually scary?” I asked Tommy.
“You haven’t seen it?”
“We don’t have MTV.”
“Your family’s weird,” Tommy said. “Lemme turn it on. They play it all the time.”
We messed around with all the shit up there, keeping the TV on in the background. Within an hour, Tommy pointed at the screen: “There it is. This is it. Turn it up.”
Michael Jackson’s jacket was so red! The fog in the graveyard, of course, was evil. The monsters and the zombies looked real—I’d been told about demons—and when Michael’s face changed, when his eyes turned yellow, I briefly covered mine.
“Oh, come on. It’s just makeup. Special effects!”
We recorded the video on a blank VHS tape the next time it played, and rewatched several times, rewinding and finding new things each time. We started trying the dance routine.
“Can I take this home? You think Heidi would mind?” I asked Tommy, holding up the LP.
When I said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Howler, Senior saw the record under my arm, and nodded. I walked down their driveway feeling cool, maybe for the first time.
But halfway between the Howlers’ house and mine, I got flutters in my lungs and itching on my arms. When I hit my own driveway, my hands were sweating, and I was switching the record from left hand to right nervously. Up our sidewalk, and up our front steps. Slowly. Step. Step. Stop.
The front door opened and my mom swung out holding the doorframe. “Whatcha got?”
My plan had been to enter quietly, head upstairs quickly, and stash the record between my mattress and box spring. At some point when my parents were occupied, out in the yard gardening or walking through the neighborhood, I’d play the album on our stereo and record both sides over top of a Sandi Patty or Amy Grant cassette using the ghetto blaster my dad bought to record the sounds of the family opening Christmas presents.
Had she seen me coming? Watched me walking? My mom was staring at me, blocking the door, eyebrows up. I held the record dumbly and took a second to look at the cover, flipped it over for a glance at the track listing, giving it fake scrutiny. I opened the gatefold, Michael and that little tiger—Dang, so cool!—and his glowing white suit.
“It’s Thriller?” A question? A surrender.
She deadpanned me.
“Tommy let me borrow it.” Wimpy little shrug.
“It’s demonic, Tilly. You walk straight to Tommy’s and give that thing back. It’s not coming in this house.” She shut the door.
* * *
But there was an encounter with demons at the Howlers’ house. Tommy and I tiptoed down the hallway from his bedroom. He laid down flat and wiggled like a snake for the last few feet up to the game room door, which was locked.
“Get down,” he whispered.
I hesitated.
“Come on, you can totally see.”
I slid down the wall slowly, onto my hands and knees, then onto my belly. The gap between the carpet and the bottom of the door was generous and with our heads down sideways, one ear to the carpet, we got a good view of Heidi Howler and several other older girls from the cul-de-sac looking at magazines, putting on records, sitting cross-legged in pairs braiding each other’s hair.
Tommy stood up and waved me back to his room. “They haven’t started yet. We’ll come back.”
A Howler-house sleepover was an event. They happened a few times a year, and sometimes left footnotes in neighborhood history. There was the night they watched The Shining, when two girls ran out of the Howlers’ house and down the street, wailing. Once they all listened to Eddie Murphy’s Comedian with their ears really, really wide, and new words and phrases entered the street’s lexicon. Legendarily, there was the time the girls snuck out after midnight and threw twenty- five rolls of toilet paper into trees in Kyle Pfister’s yard. Everyone knew who did it, but Mr. and Mrs. Howler covered for the girls, claiming they were all together watching Saturday Night Live.
And of course, everyone remembers the sleepover that winter when Ellie Daukin’s parents knocked on the Howlers’ door while the girls were in the kitchen making a mess with a flour fight while baking brownies. It was snowing outside, too, and when Mrs. Howler opened the door, the cold air came in quickly along with Ellie’s mom and dad.
Ellie heard her mother’s voice in the entryway and knew, like all the girls knew, what brought them down the street in a winter storm. Yogurt, the Daukins’ family dog, had been sick and almost dead for ages, limping around and holding on. The time had come. The neighborhood girls descended on Ellie and smothered her in hugging.
Ellie walked home with her parents and cried over Yogurt’s body but, after some time, told her folks she needed to be with her friends, and walked back to the Howlers’, making another path in the snow.
The sleepovers were growth, for the girls and for Tommy and me. He always had me over on those nights. We’d spy on the girls, then try to mingle when they’d hang around the kitchen eating snacks. Tommy would ask if we could join them for movies, and they’d never say yes. The girls stayed up later than we could, and the next morning, they’d sleep in, sprawled around the game room on couches, in chairs, and rolled up in sleeping bags on the floor. Once I woke up early, peeked in, stood looking over them just breathing and dreaming.
This time, Tommy overheard Heidi on the phone talking about a game the girls were going to play. He thought they’d wait until late at night. We sat in his bedroom on two kitchen chairs borrowed from downstairs, playing computer games.
“So, they’re gonna be floating?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Tommy said. “We gotta try and see.”
“Is it real?”
“Dunno. I’ve watched them do the Ouija board before. I think they were just moving that thing, pretending.”
I’d heard all about Ouija. Was scared shitless of it, of course, and unlike Tommy, I was 100% certain the thing was a direct telephone line to the Devil. I got anxious when kids talked about Dungeons & Dragons at school. When Ben Tucker, across the street, quit cutting his hair and took to blasting “Stairway to Heaven” out the open window of his bedroom, I always ran inside to wait the long song out. I can still sing the secret backward masking from that one by heart. Oh, here’s to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan. If you just played it backwards, there it was, right under the normal lyrics about two paths you can take and no biggie if you wanna drink and party, smoke cigarettes and have lots of sex, because there’s plenty of time to switch up the road you’re on. We’d seen a dead-serious videotape about it in Sunday school.
“Yeah, they were probably just moving the thing around the Ouija board.”
“That’s what I just said,” Tommy said.
“Oh, I know. I just… it’s probably never really demons,” I tried.
“Oh, man. Jesus again?”
I was also getting tired of being a Christian in front of Tommy. I was determined to watch the witchcraft with him that night even if it actually killed me. We checked in on the girls a few times to make sure they were still doing normal, non-Satanic things. Eventually, we heard the records stop and their loud voices went quiet.
“Look,” Tommy said, pointing down the hall. The light under the game room door was out. “They’re starting.”
We crept down the hallway again, back on our bellies. The girls lit two candles, and the flickering made our view under the door hazy. The whole room looked different, and the girls did, too. Their pajamas, which they’d changed into earlier in the night, were sacred robes. Their eyes, the shapes of their faces, were freaky with the shadows.
Heather Stowe was older than Tommy and me, but the youngest of the girls there. She was new to the sleepovers. The candle glow gave her curly red hair a halo as she laid down on her back with the others around her on their knees.
“What’s Heather doing?” I whispered.
“She’s the feather, I think.”
Heather’s family lived next to me. Non-practicing something—Lutheran, maybe. I wondered if she knew about spiritual warfare.
Heidi gave the other girls directions on where to place their fingers, two from each hand under Heather’s body. Heather, flat on her back, rolled her head sideways and looked toward Tommy and me.
“Shoot, can she see us?” Tommy hissed. “It’s too dark, right?”
It was too dark, surely, but I blinked twice, slowly, just in case. I thought I saw Heather smile, just slightly.
“You see that?”
“See what?” Tommy said.
Then Heather turned her head to heaven, closed her eyes, crossed her arms over her chest, and took a few big breaths. They all went over the script several times. “But when we do it for real,” Heidi said, “It needs to be like chanting.” And when they started into it, the little witches had it perfectly timed.
She’s looking ill (3x)
She’s looking worse (3x)
She’s dying
She’s dying
She’s dying
I thought she still looked okay.
She’s dead
She’s dead
She’s dead
She seemed peaceful.
Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board Light as a feather stiff as a board
And then, it was working. It was working. They had her up in the air, hovering. “Tommy! It’s working!” I hissed. I tried getting up to my feet, having seen enough, but lost balance and bumped a flailing elbow against the door, making a racket. I was certain I heard a thud inside the game room, too. Heather tumbling.
“What the hell, Tilly!” Tommy said, scrambling to his feet, too, and heading down the hall back to his room.
“Tommy!” came Heidi’s holler.
I peeled down the hallway, too, but turned to go downstairs—two at a time—instead of back to Tommy’s room. I bumped into Mrs. Howler at the bottom.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. Everything okay?” she said.
“Yes. Or no. I don’t really know,” I said. “I think I need to go home, Mrs. Howler.”
She looked at me. I don’t know how you look at someone slowly, but that’s what she did. She coaxed me into kitchen, got me a glass of water, and asked me where Tommy was.
“In his room, I think.” I looked around the corner into the living room. “Where’s Mr. Howler?”
“Come on,” she said, leading me into the laundry room, closing the door behind us. She pulled a soft cigarette case from her pocket, lit one with two big puffs that made the tip flame. “Are the girls okay?”