Photo by Michal Jarmoluk via Pixnio
The chainsaw guy will forever be an important part of my life because he was the most important part of Erik’s life. I don’t know when Erik first saw the masked man with a chainsaw, and I don’t know where (which haunted house) he first saw him, but the man’s face and spinning power tool burned into Erik’s subconscious so deeply that he talked about the man with the hockey mask, ripped clothes, and the chainless chainsaw every day of his life, taking only a three week break between Halloween and Thanksgiving to talk (everyday) about how cranberries tasted so good with turkey. When he returned back to school after Thanksgiving break, the chainsaw guy came back with him, and stayed for another eleven months.
“Oooh, the chainsaw guy might get you” or “The chainsaw guy is around the corner, and I don’t want to go there” or “Why do you think the chainsaw guy wears a mask?’ or, to answer, “He probably wears a mask because he has a scary face. Oh, no! The chainsaw guy has a scary face” or “Why do you think his cloths are so ripped. Did he chainsaw himself” or “Someone told me he was from Texas. Is he from Texas, Kase? Is he from Dallas, Texas, where the Cowboys are, Kase?” The chainsaw guy from the haunted house lived in Erik’s brain. The smiling young man with clean and tightly combed hair, acne from his meds, and round glasses, lived in a world where the thoughts in his mind seemed more real than the tangible world around him. If a stranger walked down the street, he could be the chainsaw guy in everyday clothes, and in Erik’s mind, from what my non-medical background could deduce from years of observation, the stranger could have a collapsible chainsaw in his pocket at the ready to whip out and chase us down the road.
Even John, the boy who could speak so little and who could convey such little thoughts, would say “Eriiiik.” The tone of his “Erik” said, “that’s enough, buddy. We’ve heard about the chainsaw guy enough.” But Erik’s love and infatuation with a man who wielded a deadly weapon in a haunted house was nothing less than endearing. His mom, a good mother, who helped out at Canyonview School (the school where I worked as a job coach for young adults with disabilities) who chaperoned field trips, who gave everything to Erik, knowing she would need to do so until she could not longer, took Erik to the haunted house every year to see his friend the chainsaw guy. But I never understood why. It seemed to perpetuate his obsession with the villain, the deadly mix between Jason Voorhees and Leatherface. Erik’s family was strictly Mormon – no cussing, no drinking, no rated R movies – but the chainsaw guy lived among them freely. Now that I have a nine-year old son who sleeps in the next room while I write this, I understand it more than I did then.
One day, during the second year at Canyonview, Erik asked, completely out of the blue on one bright September morning, “Will you take me to see the chainsaw guy?”
“Sure,” I said. I was certain he’d forget about asking me by the next day. He did not. Every day in September, Erik reminded me that the chainsaw guy would be there soon. He said the chainsaw guy would scare my pants off. He said the chainsaw guy waited in the dark all year and then came out in October. He said that he would protect John from the chainsaw guy. He said he would walk up the chainsaw guy and tell him to put down his chainsaw and stop scaring John. He said the chainsaw guy slept with his chainsaw every night so that he could chase people in his dreams. He said he would sacrifice me to the chainsaw guy if need be.
“Eriiikkk,” John repeated.
“Maybe he will cut you up. Maybe he will,” Erik said. He’d lean between the front bucket seats of the van, his seat belt strapped to him and pulled as tight as it could be, put his mouth two centimeters from my ear, and yell about the chainsaw guy. He’d grab onto the driver’s side chair and pull back on it to gain leverage. Jenny, a young women with Down syndrome, sat shotgun and would punch at him, never making contact, and tell him to get back into his seat and that she had heard enough about the chainsaw guy and that Kase had heard enough about it and that she knew because we used to date. She smiled at the end of her rant. We never dated.
“But, Jenny. The chainsaw guy might get you too,” he would say to her with complete concern. “Maybe you shouldn’t eat so much food at lunch so you can run away from the chainsaw guy.” Erik did not have a mean bone in his body, and in his mind, he tried to help Jenny get away from the spinning chain of the evil man. Jenny’s diet, however, had become a staff-wide conquest, set up by her mother and carried out by the lunchroom staff, the LIFE Program Staff, and now Erik.
“Shut up, Erik,” she’d say.
“Maybe you should tell that to the chainsaw guy,” he’d reply. Jenny would just shake her head and gasp in frustration.
Haunted houses opened up on October 1st, and on September 31st, Erik could not complete his work. Jenny and John would walk into the hospital offices, grab the boxes of recyclable paper, and dump them into our cart. Erik stood by the cart. The sterile hallways of the hospital spun around him, and he did his best to keep his hands down in front of him, but the best he could do was keep his arms by his side, bent at the elbows with his hands near his face with wiggling fingers. Hospital staff walked by, and his mouth opened to let them know that he suspected they might be the chainsaw guys. The staff, used to Erik’s infatuation, did not help the situation by reminding Erik of what he needed no reminder, “Haunted houses open tomorrow, Erik. You have to be so excited!” Erik would hop each time someone passed and talked to him, and he would remind that them that chainsaw guy lived at the haunted house and that Kase was going to take him to see him. My fate had been sealed by the simple affirmation, “Sure.”
Kelli, a coworker and amazing friend, stood next to me on the Hansen’s porch. She loved the students as much as I did and had no worries about the upcoming evening. I did. The sun had dropped, and every window in the house filled with light. Squared hedges with symmetrical corners lined the edge of the porch and the pathway to the home had been swept, not a piece of soil from the flower bed that surrounded it had remained on the smooth cement. People talked on the other side of the door, and Erik’s voice raised and elevated in conversation.
Before we could knock, the door opened in front of us. Erik, his mom, and his dad stood with smiles and waved us into their home. Erik had been dressed to stay warm, the hood from his hoody draped over his head and glove-covered hands. His eyelids stretched to their limit, and his excitement twitched his leg, over and over and quicker and quicker. The Hansen’s house mirrored their front yard in precision and tidiness. Photos were perfectly aligned, and Erik’s mom ran through what to do if Erik started to seizure, if his throat swelled up on him, or if he got lost. Erik stood at the door and looked through the window out toward the car – he stared at the vehicle that would take him to the haunted house, and therefore to the chainsaw guy. He waited patiently until his mom let us go. Even though Erik sat in the back of the Jeep, his head bobbed evenly with our heads in the front seat, like three Pez heads lined up in a row and driving down the road.
The line for the haunted house stretched from its entrance and wound through the night. Children shook and screamed from both the cold and from fear, while teen-aged couples held each other close, the girl pretending to be scared and the boy pretending to be brave, all in the hopes to push their bodies as close together as possible. Ghouls, ghosts, and monsters circled the crowds and snuck up behind unsuspecting girls to send their screams into the chilly mountain air. Erik had no part of the hullabaloo going on around him. If he could sing a song to the chainsaw guy, who, at that time, did not circle amongst the crowd, it would be “I Only Have Eyes for You.”
The Grim Reaper, large and dark and hooded, stood behind our little group and placed his scathe on Erik’s shoulder, hoping for a reaction. Erik turned and his eyes widened with the expectation to see the chainsaw guy, but when he saw that the towering grim reaper with sharp scathe and skulled face stood behind him, he brushed him off and whispered under his breath, “You’re not the chainsaw guy.” He ignored Freddy Krueger. He didn’t blink an eye at the headless horseman. He waved Michael Myers away. And he even shushed a zombie.
More than an hour of standing in line and making monsters feel like kittens, we stood at the entrance to the haunted house. The musty smell of dry ice and manufactured steam leaked out through the door covered in fake blood, and screams of teenagers echoed out toward us. Fake danger awaited. The door creaked open, and we entered.
Erik walked with confidence through the maze – I would find out later that he had been to the haunted house nearly every night since it opened. He knew his way through and did not make a sound, a true rarity from a boy who never quieted down, and Kelli and I followed him. The walls of the maze, built of thin plywood, opened up around corners, and ghouls jumped out of hidden passageways to scare us. Kelli shrieked. I jumped back. Erik pressed on like a safari hunter pushing weeds out of his way. Not a peep.
The maze opened up into a room full of caskets. Zombies popped up from their death beds. Heads sat on plates on tables and yelled at people, and insane doctors pulled guts from living patients on operating tables. Erik just glanced at the evil that surrounded him, recognized that none of the blood-sucking vampires or cannibals held a chainsaw, and moved on. He looked back at us and waved for us to hurry up and to stop checking out the grave digger and his eerie cat.
Erik entered the next room first. When I made it into the room filled with tires and lit by flashing strobe lights that made the scene feel like an old silent black and white film, Erik waited for me. He did not move quickly through the room like he did the maze or the cemetery/scientist room but stood and waited for me to catch up to him. He stood silently among screaming children, placed one hand on mine, and the other over his mouth and whispered, “Do you smell it?”
I took a big whiff of the stale air and couldn’t smell anything but body odor and used tires and asked him what he smelled.
“Gasoline,” he said. “Chainsaw gasoline.” He raised his finger to his mouth to quiet me.
Before I could smell anything, I heard a chainsaw start up in the room past us. The sound of spinning metal shot through my ears, and I froze. And Kelli froze. Erik did not. He ran as fast as he could toward the entrance to the next room, hurdled tires along the way, and threw adults aside in his quest to see the chainsaw guy. Erik, my responsibility for the night, had ran toward a man with a chainsaw and left me holding my jaw. Then I chased, with much less elegance than my student, falling over tires, running into walls around corners, and bumping into children. I threw the plastic-flap doors open and charged in to see the chainsaw man and Erik standing face to face.
In the dark of the house, there was no way the chainsaw guy could recognize Erik’s disability, so just like with any other teenager that challenged his wrath, the chainsaw guy revved up his chainsaw and shoved it as close to Erik’s face as possible. The smell of gasoline made me dizzy, and the fear that Erik might lose his shit right there, made me weak. I ran toward the two men who stood in a stare down, but before I could say anything, Erik placed his hand on the chainsaw guy’s shoulder, nodded his head, said something like, “Ooh you nasty, mean chainsaw guy – you scaaaare me,” and then ran out of the room.
I chased after him but did not catch the speedy kid until I exited the haunted house, skipping nearly all of the rooms that I had paid for on my tiny salary. Erik stood in the cold night air with steam rising from his skin and clouds of breath escaping his mouth. His chest raised and fell, and he smiled. He walked toward me and placed a hand on each of my shoulders. He leaned in close, his nose only a centimeter from mine.
“Did you see that, Kase?” he asked.
“Yes, yes I did,” I said, but I had no idea what he thought I saw.
“I think I scared the chainsaw guy,” he gasped.
I told him that I thought that he did. He talked about his confrontation all the way home and every day at school until November 1st when he systematically switched to talk about cranberry sauce. But for the next few weeks, when he talked about the chainsaw guy, for the first time, I got to be part of the story. He gathered John and Jenny, along with other friends, around the cafeteria table and told them all about the night, told them that the chainsaw guy scared Kase so badly, told them about how the chainsaw guy made Kase scream, and about how he stood up to the chainsaw guy and saved Kase from him. To confirm his story, he nodded at me, and I nodded back.
Kase Johnstun lives and writes in Ogden, Utah. He is the author of LET THE WILD GRASSES GROW (forthcoming from Torrey House Press), BEYOND THE GRIP OF CRANIOSYNOSTOSIS (McFarland and Co.), and is the co-editor/writer of UTAH REFLECTIONS, STORIES FROM THE WASATCH FRONT (History Press).