The Room

"Uncle Trey had a big rambling old house that he lived in; bigger, many thought, than a confirmed bachelor like him would ever need. We liked it, though, because it gave us lots of opportunities to play whenever we would visit him. We had the run of the house, upstairs and downstairs, except for one room that Uncle Trey warned us to never, ever go in. It was a room in the basement, at the back of the house, underneath the service porch. Most of the time we stayed away from the basement anyway, but sometimes we'd go down there and sneak a peek at the door to the forbidden room. It was a heavy door that was always locked, and we wondered what could be on the other side of it.

In the rest of the house, Uncle Trey kept artifacts from his travels around the world, and that was usually enough to keep us busy. We'd put on turbans and sit on pillows around the giant hookah in the India Room, and look at the funny pictures in a book called Kama Sutra. Or we'd test how well the native shields would protect us from the sharp spears on the walls in the Congo Room.

One time our curiosity got the better of us, though. Uncle Trey had to drive Stephanie to the hospital after a game of "Torture the Marxist Rebel" got out of hand in the South America Room. (In our defense, I have to say that neither Goose nor I thought that the car battery the electrodes were hooked up to was live.) With just the two of us there, and the prospect of Uncle Trey and Stephanie being gone for some time, we decided to take a trip to the basement.

Goose wasn't good at very many things at all, but there was one thing he had learned, and that was how to pick a lock. In just a few short minutes, we had unlocked the series of combination locks and padlocks on that big door and swung it slowly open. Inside, it was dark, the walls all painted black, and it took us a little while to see what the room contained. There were all sorts of devices hanging from the walls and the ceiling; most of them were made of leather or metal or a combination of the two. It looked like whips and belts and pokers and such, and there was a metal stand in the corner that looked like a barbecue, with a glowing fire in it and six or seven pokers or branding irons or something sticking out of it. The last thing we saw before we shut the door again was the big table in the middle of the room, with the straps all over it and somebody we didn't recognize tied down there and looking back at us.

It was almost a year later that we saw a picture on a milk carton and realized that it looked a lot like the kid we had seen in Uncle Trey's room that time. It was kind of hard to tell, though, because the kid in the picture wasn't wearing a ball gag in his mouth."

New York
"The first time I visited New York City it was 1946. The year, I mean. It was hot on the heels of World War II and I was a young man seeking a college internship or a job as a roadie for Glenn Miller. The city was huge, at least for back then. It... (3/18/02)

Fishing
"Old men have their fishing stories, and Sampson L. Hartwig is no exception. The best fishing story is when I was nigh 25, I went fishing with my college buddy Meadows. Meadows was an expert fisherman, raised in a fisherman family. His father was... (3/4/02)

History
"My college years were plentiful with fun and new experiences. When I recall people from that time I always think of my European History professor, Mr. Carmel. 'Hartwig,' he once told me—he always called me Hartwig—'Hartwig, history is... (2/18/02)