The Goblin Under The Palm Tree

In 1973 Mel Sweggert and I were college roommates at UCLA, but we decided to move out of the dorm for our final year of college. We found an old two-story apartment building in Culver City that had seen better days…but it had a courtyard with a pool. Drooping near the stairs in a corner of the courtyard was an unattractive, but undeniably real, palm tree.

We christened the place our first night with beer and a fifth of Southern Comfort. I knew I was wasted when I looked out the window and saw strange creatures walking up and down the street. In the moonlight they appeared short and shriveled. “Come check this out,” I said to Mel.

He staggered to the window. “What’s up? I don’t see anything.”

I looked again; this time nothing. The street was empty.

I blamed the booze and laughed it off.

We drained the bottle of Southern Comfort and polished off the rest of the beers, staggered down the stairs and jumped in the pool. The September night was typically warm; I felt content with my life. I gazed at the stars, blurry behind the smog, and watched planes passing frequently overhead, their lights disappearing behind the silhouette of our homely palm tree.

The next evening we partied again, this time with our friends: Rodney, Jay and Barry. 1:00 A.M. rolled by and I was having a great time drinking and horsing around in the pool—until I saw the tip of a cigarette glowing in the darkness. We were being observed by someone beneath our palm tree. I’d noticed several good-looking girls in the pool earlier that day and had chatted with one of them in the laundry room. Perhaps a hot babe was sitting in the shadows, checking us out.

Just as I was about to draw everyone’s attention to the intruder’s presence, the glowing cigarette disappeared. I heard the creaking sound of someone rising from an old lounge chair, along with sandals slapping concrete. The person was leaving, their silhouette visible in the flickering glow of a nearby bug light. My mouth dropped open and I took a big gulp of pool water. We weren’t being checked out by a hot girl looking for some action; we were being observed by an escapee from last night’s hallucination, some sort of goblin or gnome. I shook my head in disbelief and wiped the water from my eyes.

When my vision cleared, it was gone.

The next day was Saturday, no classes. I poured a bowl of Frosted Flakes and tried to brush aside the cobwebs, along with last night’s disturbing image near the palm tree. My thoughts were drowned out by the sound of a lawnmower. I glanced out the window and saw a goblin pushing a lawnmower up and down the tiny lawn in front of the Hollywood-style bungalow across the street.

I’d grown up on children’s books like The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and the creature across the street certainly looked like it could have come from a mushroom planet. Too much booze, I thought. But the apparition refused to vanish. I abandoned my Frosted Flakes to confront it.

Conclusion on Friday

The Mystery Box

The box looked like it had been constructed in a hurry, even to my twelve year old eyes, It was rough and unpolished and made of cheap plywood, six panels forming a twenty-four inch cube. Little care had gone into the construction; the sides had been roughly screwed together and there were no hinges or latches to indicate an opening. Nothing was written on it and there was no way to glimpse inside without tearing it apart.

When I was growing up, the box collected dust in our garage. Its only official purpose was to serve as a pedestal for the short and stout Christmas trees that my parents preferred. In December the wooden box was lugged from the garage, brushed off and gussied up with a white sheet; only then could our tree be positioned on it. Over the years, the plywood cube came to smell like Christmas.

The box had unofficial functions; sometimes it served as a pedestal for neighborhood kids to stand on when we played “statue.” Or it would end up as the cornerstone for the forts we built from stacking stuff in our garage. Whenever I asked my parents what was inside it, the answer was inevitably the same: “Nothing important.”

I was a persistent pest. “C’mon, Dad, tell me; where did the box come from?”

Dad finally ‘fessed up. He ran a hand through his creosote hair. “I made it”

“What’s inside, Dad? C’mon, tell me…”

At first I didn’t think he was going to answer, but he said, “Inside are papers and photographs.”

“Anything from the war?”

“A few things.”

When I asked about “the war,” I meant World War II. The Korean War should have been fresher in everyone’s minds, but the Koreans and Chinese never captured my imagination like the Nazis. Defamed in film and vilified on many a TV program, they were deliciously evil, and as a small kid I relished being terrified by them. David, my grumpy older brother, liked to taunt me with the fact that they never actually caught Hitler. He swore the Nazi leader escaped to somewhere in South America, then fled to California where he was hiding out as a school janitor. Because of my brother, I always kept a wary eye on mustachioed Mr. Mestemacher as he shuffled along our school’s corridors with his push broom in hand.

“What kind of war stuff, Dad?” I knew he’d served in the Pacific, had joined the Navy at eighteen and had been shipped off to Guam. “Is there a Japanese flag in there? A chunk of airplane from a kamikaze?”

“Nothing like that.”

His reluctance to talk about the box only stoked my imagination. With pretend X-ray vision I conjured weapons of war, pirate’s booty and, on more than one occasion, fragments of a radioactive element from the home planet I shared with Superman—Kryptonite. The mysterious box was the depository where I stored my fantasies and heart’s desires.

One day I was hanging out in our garage with my best friend Ricky Delgado. His attention settled on the dusty box. We’d talked about it before. “I think it’s time to see what’s inside,” he said.

“Dad says it’s full of papers and old pictures.”

“And you believed him?”

“Of course.” I’d never known Dad to lie.

Ricky let out a long, “Hmmmmm…”

“Hmmm, what?” I replied.

“It’s just that he went to a lot of trouble building a wooden box just to store crummy papers and pictures in. He could have stored those in a shoe or cigar box.”

That was certainly true.

“Why don’t we grab a screwdriver and peek inside?”

I shook my head. “I’ll catch hell if we get caught.”

“Why? Did your parents tell you not to open it?”

“No, but I really don’t think we should—”

“You got a screwdriver around here?” Ricky asked, his eyes darting over to Dad’s workbench.

I picked up a screwdriver, and wavered before opening the box. I couldn’t count all the times I’d gotten into trouble because of Ricky Delgado, but after so much imagining I was suddenly busting to peek inside.

The screws didn’t come out easily and my shirt was damp and sticking to me by the time I removed one of the plywood panels and caught a glimpse of what was really inside. A seismic event was about to take place, a discovery that would shake my world nearly as much as when I learned the truth about Santa Claus.

(To be Continued…)