I had debated adding this entry, but, reading it over decided to anyhow. It's not exactly nautical (actually not nautical at all), so if that matters just skip it.

But if you wanna experience what we did yesterday, than read on.

1001 Beach Street

“Y cunado llueve yo recuerdo”

-Tish Hinojosa When It Rains / Cuando Llueve

There is a street in Laguna Vista Texas that overlooks the Laguna Madre Bay to the east. It is a street of affluence, and many of the houses are valued in the mid to upper six figures and beyond. Mostly newly constructed, they reflect the success of businessmen, real estate agents, professionals and others who work to provide services to South Padre Island, whose high rises are visible from patio sliding glass doors on the clear, hot summer days out on the distant horizon looking for all the world like geometric blocks jutting above the low sandy barrier island some eight miles to the east.

The bay here has a rough-shod beauty, and when the winds are light from the east, it is often clear and blue-green on this western shoreline, revealing dark sea grass beds and bright sandy potholes in its shallow depths which grade upward into dry secretive monte, sentinels of Yucca and Mesquite overlooking dense zacate populated by rattlesnake, bobcat, quail and dove. There is a harsh timelessness here, dusty and inhospitable.

During the middle twentieth century, the shoreline of Laguna Vista, as well as the old town site were composed of mostly vacation homes belonging to folks from the mid and upper Rio Grande Valley, a bedroom community to the Island, a place that offered quick access to the prime fishing spots along the western shoreline of the Laguna Madre. Some of the houses on Beach street, on the west side of the street are original homes, constructed as far back as the 1940’s. Some have been restored; some are in the process of being restored, and some are left in rundown ramshackle existence, testaments to another more charitable  time in our history. Regardless of condition, property values here are high, as is the case in any place where the view is that of the water.

We had recently been house hunting again, looking for a place that was large enough to accommodate our family, and it’s newest member, my father, who at 88 years old had suffered a minor stroke, necessitating him to move in with us so that we could give him a little help. We had tried to purchase a house in the old town site, on Ebony Street, but because of realtors inattention and a myriad of unresolved “issues”, after seven months of trying to close the deal, I finally bailed on the thing in abject disgust. So it was back to square one. And I didn’t really feel like house hunting again after that experience. No, if it was up to me, I would move everybody onto the boat, and live there from now until the indistinct future, let this current whirlwind of economic uncertainty pass. With my Dad though, it just wasn’t possible.

So we were relegated to the great house search again. Something that would fit us, and him. And there is no shortage of houses right now either, what with the housing market downturn raging in full boogie tilt mode. No, houses are plentiful and the prices are falling along with the market.

Since this last disgusting experience, I had formed the opinion that real estate agents were basically spoiled adult-children, selfishly awaiting their commish, while they lazily attended daily wine and cheese socials, basking in the largesse of rich yuppies who bought houses more as an investment strategy than as a home. It was my observation as well, that these days are now gone forever, and they had better ship up or shape out…adopt a new hungry attitude and get to work. And that point was validated by my friend JJ who owns Coastal Auto in Laguna Heights, who noted that he had several cars in his shop that the owners could not pay the repair bill on, owners who just happened to be realtors.

It was with this in mind that I hesitatingly retained Christine, a realtor whom we have known for some time from the Church we tend to attend on a semi-annual basis.

In the process, we decided to move my father to a gated condo community in Laguna Vista for several months while we continued to hunt for a suitable house. The closest was a nice complex right on the bay, the Bridgeview. Last week a real estate agent was showing us a unit, and as usual I began my anti-realtor diatribe, describing in lurid detail the events of the past seven months and how it was due to the inattention and carelessness of realtors that the sale of the house on Ebony had been lost. In the course of our conversation, he mentioned that the house across the street from him on Beach Street was for sale. The owner was asking around two hundred fifty thousand, but he was sure that an offer of a hundred forty something would take it. And he himself had already sold the house several times.

Later, after we finished up at Bridgeview, we drove over to Beach Street, less than a mile away, and located the house, a white brick, low, flat 1960’s vintage place, with an enclosed front porch and a recessed entrance. The outside looked benign and tranquil, the front yard dominated by a large flowering poinsettia.  And there was a clear view of the bay across the street through a vacant lot. We were intrigued enough to call Christine and see if we could arrange to see the inside of the place. It looked to have all sorts of potential. Definitely a fixer upper, but one that just might be worth it.

On Tuesday Christine called and said that she had several houses for us to look at, including the one on Beach Street.

About six-thirty we met her at another two story house, a recent upgrade on Palm Street and took a walk through. The owners had nicely furnished the house in tropical décor, avocado and mango walls accenting the Rousseaus and Picassos hung tastefully throughout. Coral and other classy nautical flotsam and jetsam adorned baskets, and brightly patterned window treatments hung from driftwood curtain rods. Over the refrigerator a lacquered paper-mache parrot kept watch along with a dark wooden African war mask.

The house neither inspired nor depressed me. It was just another house.

Please understand that I am a conservative individual by nature and politics, I am trained in the classical sciences and I tend to try and explain things in terms of natural process, mathematics and statistics. It makes the universe a much more orderly place to do so. I am a natural skeptic regarding what the new-agers call paranormal. However, I am convinced that the world we live in is certainly more complex and in some areas incomprehensible to us. I consider myself an unashamed Christian, and so I believe in the dichotomy of the soul, ultimate good and ultimate evil, in the cosmic struggle that we are privilege to in poetic verse.

I do not avail myself to popular culture and television shows such as haunted houses, demonic possession and the like. Nor do I (generally) watch horror flicks, although as a normal 60’s American kid I would watch the Saturday afternoon monster movies, things like The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

That was a long time ago.

But, houses in general seem to retain some of the energy of their past occupants. Through the course of my wandering and gypsy existence I have owned, leased and rented a number of abodes.  Some of the houses, apartments and condos remained sterile in their impression, unaffected by the colorless past souls who lived there. A few have only retained a diffident façade of former occupants, vague impressions of either tranquility or chaos. An even fewer had an almost tangible aura, usually one of unsettled and troubled existences of tenants now absent. I am sure that I am not alone in being able to detect this. I think it’s like a child’s coloring book. Sometimes the pictures are colored lightly, almost gossamer with little dots of wax adhering to the almost imperceptible texture of the paper, other times a heavy slick coat laid down by an angry hand.

And so, this house seemed almost neutral, with no perceptible past, and it felt sanitized and disinfected. As we walked to our cars to drive over to Beach Street, I told Christine that it would remain on the list.

The afternoon was waning, softening towards a warm spring evening as we drove across the main street, Santa Isabella on our way to the house on Beach Street. Dee told me that Christine had mentioned that the house had a lot of issues (realtors love this buzz word) and that we should go in before her, get our impression of the place. She mentioned that there were a lot of different tile combinations, wall combinations, and that a lot of work would be needed to bring it up to date.

We parked and waited by the door in the sky lit breezeway that gave tenant to dry and dying landscaping plants in planters that once had obviously been arranged in an attempt to brighten the features. The lawn now desiccated and brown, was interspersed and overgrown with native burrs, heliotrope and buffalo grass.

Christine drove up and before opening the door mentioned that the realtor who was actually in charge of this property mentioned that her client had to sell the place, and just to bring some sort of reasonable offer……

She turned the key in the lock and the door swung open.

Inside, in the dimming light an unkempt vista of dark green eighties carpet greeted us. The walls were cedar tongue and groove, wainscoted in places. There was a hodgepodge of Saltillo tile along with several other styles, culminating in a faux-flagstone tile in the front, which was obviously a screen porch enclosed to now be additional living space. On the kitchen counter bar, were a number of pennies. For some inexplicable reason, I was drawn to them as if by a magnet.

My insides began to churn.

A vague nausea began to grip me from the solar plexus, as if I were being pulled….pulled somewhere. Despite my attention to the house layout, I felt a strange almost tangible sense of melancholy….no….a sense of something ineffable, something more like despair, and it begin to overtake me.

I did not let on.

Continuing down the hall, I glanced in the bedrooms, simple affairs, bare brick on the exterior walls. The first bedroom had a Gatorade bottle lying on the floor, in a pile of what looked like perhaps some sort of shards of shattered glass. The feeling of unsettlement grew stronger.

The adjacent bathroom was dark, and so I continued down the hall to the next bedroom which was much like the last, except it had an integral restroom. Lying on the floor of the shower was a child’s rubber duck. I stared at it for a moment, experiencing an overwhelming sense of sadness.

By now the feeling of despair was growing to an almost perceptible level, and I could almost feel as if the house were literally muttering and mumbling, speaking words in a language that I could almost understand, but did not want to.

And I began to feel as though we were being watched, as wave upon wave of electric terror began to work its way from my center outwards to my extremities.

Further down the hall, was a large room with chaotic storage areas and a strange huge shower with two shower heads inside the claustrophobic bathroom, dimly lit by diffuse light that poured in through high small windows, and by now I just wanted to be outside.

Still, I did not let on.

Back in the living room, and past another door leading through a laundry room, into another room which I suppose might’ve been maids quarters. All doors to the outside, except for the main door were locked, and so we retreated back to the front door, and went outside and around to the dry and barren back yard, taking stock of the sprinkler system, cut down Ash tree and general malaise that seemed to be creeping outward from the inside of the house.

Dee wanted to go back inside one more time. So we went back inside as the sun continued to sink low in the west, illuminating a shaft of light down the hallway in a sad and hopeless way. I went out to the car to get a flashlight so that I could get a better idea what the bathroom adjacent to the first room looked like. By this time I was beginning to feel quite terrified, with no rational reason, and I just wanted to be gone from there. But I played along, keeping up my banter regarding what needed upgrading, trying unsuccessfully to cost estimate in my head as the house continued to mumble and mutter.

Still, I did not let on.

Standing in the living room, I did as I always do in any house that I am looking at with the intent to perhaps purchase, or at least live in. I try to imagine myself and all of us there somewhere down the road. Sometimes it’s easy, other times not so easy. Some houses I can see myself in, in years to come, either ambivalent to that particular picture, or usually at best comfortable with it; others houses I can and don’t like the picture so much, and so they don’t remain long on the list….

I could imagine neither in this house. Looking down that subdued sunlit hall as if through some sort of hidden prism, a sickening kaleidoscope began to grip my inner eye. It was death. No not physical death, but eternal death. It was the corporeal removal from good and light. It was vacuum, it was evil, it was darkness, despondency and despair.

It was a vision of hell, the eternal separation from God.

We finally turned to leave, and still I did not let on, even after thankfully venturing into the outside. I felt that whatever was in that house had extended long tendrils around my innermost being and was trying to pull me back inside. By now the hair was standing up on my arms, on the back of my neck as we told Christine goodbye and closed the car doors.

Once away from the house on Beach Street, I turned to Dee and all I could think of to say was; “I don’t EVER want to go back there again.” Her normally tanned face pale, reflecting shock and horror, and she was soon echoing my sentiment. “You felt it TOO?” she asked. “That’s why I wanted to go back in….just to make sure.”

I told her that I have on occasion had dreams about this sort of thing, houses that were like this, and this house was that dream. Not a sense of deja-vu, but the literal feelings of terror and despair from the dream that I always awoke from…..only this was no dream

Soon we were both babbling almost incoherently about what had happened. “I need a drink” I said “a strong drink”, and started heading back towards our house. On the way we ran into Christine who was driving by another house for us to look at. I rolled down the window and blurted out:

“There’s something terribly wrong with that house we just looked at.”

She looked at me incredulously and said: “You could feel it too?, I’m nauseated even!”….and she told us how the day before she had gone in by herself and experienced the same thing, how she didn’t want to go back, and that’s why she wanted us to go in first.

After this unsettling conversation, we started back towards the house, but by this time we just wanted to be many miles away from the thing. We could still feel some sort of tentacles, tendrils trying to pull us back for whatever reason, and so we decided that perhaps we’d go over to Gabriellas and have some strong alcohol and try and forget about it….at least try and soften it up.

At Gabriellas it was not quite so easy, and for me I viewed every person with some sort of irrational paranoia as though they were complicit in this event. I felt strangely dirty, as though my soul had been dragged through excrement.  And the nausea was still there, the gripping at the solar plexus. Finally after a few drinks the terror began to lift ever so slightly, but still we both sat there looking shell shocked and zombie like.

Ironically as we continued to drink nervously, Christine called and informed us that she had mentioned to a realtor friend of hers that she had shown us a house on Palm Street and the house on Beach Street.

Her friend told her that the house on Palm Street, the one I felt was so neutral, had been the scene of a suicide years before, when some border patrol agent, for whatever reason decided to give himself a heavy lead lobotomy. “Ahh” I figured, “so that’s why they remodeled it!”….still this information did nothing to change my impression of it. Perhaps that’s because often time suicide is a spur of the moment act, and probably not one that leaves much more than the physical splatters of brain and bone on walls.

But the house on Beach Street? Some sort of pervasive ongoing evil must have been committed there, over a period of time. However, Christine’s friend did not know.

I did not sleep well last night, tossing and turning, vivid strange, abstract dreams that I do not fully recall.

I wonder if the house on Beach Street will ever sell? I know that there are people who are insensitive to what we experienced and so it just might. What will happen then?