Popcorn Bowl, Demon Chalice (Part 1)

Memphis: Summer, 1972

Returning to Memphis to face the woman who’d booted me a year before, looking into her hard, anxious, blue eyes for the first time since that final, nervous hug when I promised to be good and accepted a twenty dollar bill for pocket money, then turned to board the airplane. Walking into my mother’s new and much smaller house for the first time in a neighborhood where I knew no one. All of it left me spinning and wildly apprehensive.

Was it normal, nervous butterflies or some ominous, gut level sense of things to come?

Uncertain hugs at the airport and a quick retrieval of my suitcase from the revolving carousel. A nostalgic, celebratory stop at Shoney’s Big Boy for hamburgers and a slice of their famous, strawberry pie. A drive past Graceland. Elvis was not at home.

Mom’s new digs were much smaller than the ones I’d left, that generous, suburban, tri-level where my sisters and I had spent most of our elementary school years and I had stayed up, alone, late on a Sunday night to watch Neil Armstrong place those first ever, human footprints on the moon.

Since Debbie and I were both living out west with Dad now and Mom no longer getting child support for us, she had needed to downsize, exchanging our first Memphis house for a humbler, single-story cottage, giving up those four generous bedrooms and the two car garage for a much smaller floor plan with three rather compact bedrooms and an open sided carport.

When we pulled into her driveway the little house was just sitting there, calling absolutely no attention to itself but for the numbers displayed beside its front door; a single-story, boxlike structure, indistinguishable from the dozens of other one story, brick and earth-toned houses lining the flat street, brown, weedy, tinder-dry lots, fronting and sparse woods beyond.

A few doors down, one house stuck out, blooming roses and a clump of tall orange cannas beside the mailbox, pink and white petunias bordering neatly mown green grass. Was it just that none of the other houses in this neighborhood intended to reflect their owner’s personalities, I wondered, or that they all reflected them perfectly? Working, TV dinner zombies. Simple, Sunday church-going rednecks with nothing much to say. This was a coagulation of don’t rock the boat, lower-middle-class, Mid-South America in all its glory, plus one energetic oddball, inevitably some sweet, little old widow lady or maybe a retired, Korean War vet who still craved order and beauty enough after the horrors of war to make everyone else’s efforts look lame. Unintentionally, of course.

My initial tour of Mom’s new house began while holding Bonnie’s eager hand, stepping through the formal-ish, black-painted, front door, which, was obviously almost never used. Mom smiled and held up the key ceremonially, as if that’s what one should do for an honored guest, then unlocked the door and we all stepped inside.

The house was cool and dark and full of new smells. Bonnie’s faithful little chihuahua, Friday greeted us, dancing in excited circles at my feet. I knelt to scratch his oversized ears, grateful that he still remembered me and began to look around. Plush, off-white carpeting on the living room floor and familiar old funishings; that same old, scratchy, brown davenport we’d had since I was in kindergarten and those same gaudily framed, dime-store reproductions of famous Spanish and Dutch masterpieces printed on brush-and-canvas textured cardboard.

Strangely, aside from the diminished size of the rooms and the dim views beyond their draped windows, not much had actually changed. There was that thick, aromatic scent of dried eucalyptus leaves in the air which was definitely new for Mom, but underneath it, the disappointingly familiar undertones of desiccating dog turds and dried pet urine still smelled like the home I’d left.

Mom directed me across the living room/dining room and through the swinging, saloon style doors that separated it from the narrow kitchen, which was cooler and even darker yet, wood paneled walls and dark-stained cabinets. A shaded breakfast nook at the far end looking out into the shady back yard and the scraggly woodlot beyond. Our familiar old formica kitchen table sat there in the windowed alcove, brown bordered and cream centered, with its four familiar, metal legged chairs.

In the sink, a pile of dirty dishes and beside it, an ashtray full of Virginia Slims menthol cigarette butts.

While Mom began mooning about how much she loved having her coffee there by that window in the morning, how peaceful and pretty it all was, Bonnie grabbed my hand and started tugging me toward her room. She needed to show me all her dollys and stuffed animals, and her big girl’s twin bed, she said.

I rolled my eyes playfully for Mom and followed Bonnie obediently, trying to take in everything with my eyes as we traversed the dim, wood-paneled den and then down the short hall; a pink carpeted bathroom on the left, with both a pink tub and pink sink and a small, tile-silled window in the shower’s back wall.

Posters of Donny Osmond, The Partridge Family and Davey Jones of The Monkees completely covered the closed door to Cyndi’s room on the right, and beyond that, Bonnie’s open door, directly across the hall from Mom’s master bedroom where a sliding door opened onto a small, awning-covered back patio with an aluminum lawn chair and view of the woods.

“Isn’t this a good house Davey?” Bonnie asked moments later as she bounced among the sea of stuffed animals on her unmade bed. “Don’t you just love it here?”

I smiled into her eager eyes and nodded in agreement but truthfully, would have preferred to be almost anywhere else. I really had wanted to like the place and suppose it did spare me some residual heartache, replacing all those stacked up ‘life with Mom’ nightmares from our troubled years on old Nellie with a clean, blank slate …smelling vaguely of dog shit. But wanting to like her new place wasn’t nearly enough to actually make me like it. Call it self-preservation, call it instinct; something was off.

I definitely wasn’t picking up any happy or peaceful vibes from Mom’s new house. Right off the bat there were strange, chill pockets of air which I noticed and tried to dismiss, and a heavy, sinking-in-quicksand feeling that left me off balance and sad. After spending my first few days and nights there, sleeping in my old canvas sleeping bag on the living room floor my creeped-out grievance list had grown: unaccountable door closings, dim lighting, strange noises, drafts of air that awakened me in the night, the gloomy back yard and crumbling concrete patio, an unworkable kitchen/laundry room setup, to say nothing of the overall malaise of eerie feelings and eucalyptus-scented filth.

To make things worse, Mom and Cyndi were scarcely speaking to one another, which absolutely did not help, and neither would say why. We had all experienced that strained territory with our mother many times in our young, adolescent-emergent lives, so I assumed I understood Cyndi’s part of the standoff, but only until the real story began to unfold weeks later. Clearly the rift between them grew out of something far more terrifying than anything I had ever experienced with Mom and I had not a clue where to file it away.

“Jesus Christ, Mom!” was the best I could muster one morning after she, vodka spiked coffee in one hand and chain-smoking Virginia Slims with the other, began nervously unfolding those first, timid, shame-filled admissions of an absolutely humiliating, batshit crazy story; psychics and witchcraft, and evil spirits that followed her home, and a bowl of salt water in the fireplace, and something about disappearing money. This from the woman who had continually reminded us how tough and smart she was, that she had ESP and other special powers, and was more than a match for any spooks or voodoo chanting bad guys she might encounter while fine-tuning her mastery of the occult.

“You are truly unbelievable!” I muttered, unable to look her in the eye.

It would crush anyone's belief in their mother after all, to be beaten for the deeds of a ghost?

(To be continued.)

©2026, David E. Perry. All rights reserved.

_{When I was fifteen I lived in a boarding house in Mississippi for the summer and worked, seventy and more hours each week …on a catfish farm, where I earned just a dollar an hour. The work was honest, if the circumstances surrounding it were not. My mother was dating the fish farm’s married owner. His wife wrote and signed my paychecks every week. He knew I knew. I knew he knew. I was both liability and oddity, a hard worker trying like hell to be worthy of my paycheck rather than the nuisance brat of some fancy piece of tail.}

_{It was complicated.}

If you would like to read more of the forty, previously published chapters from this unfolding coming of age memoir please click on Raisin’ Up Catfish in the menu bar at the top of my Substack home page. And if I haven’t said it recently or nearly often enough, thank you, truly for being part of this family. Your participation and your presence here means the world to me.