Pizza & Other Biohazards  

Mystic, like the rest of New England, is cursed. Weekenders from the interior arrive for the craft-fairs & the clam-bakes in their boat shoes & their muumuus unaware their chances of bursting into flames has increased exponentially (from nearly nil to yeah!, maybe). The townsfolk, meanwhile, go about their business never letting on about the ominous origins of this quaint seaport. It’s an American tradition like all others: this is a land gentrified through genocide. Ever since the puritanical John Mason set fire to the Pequot Village in the Mystic Massacre of 1637, this town has been extra-incendiary. Spookily combustible. Fiery. Join any of the historical tours around town and there is a common refrain. Here is where there used to be a tavern where revolutionary heroes drank & whored until it burned down. If you’re lucky, you might bump into a patriotic ghost. Here is where there was a shipyard where carpenters hammered & whored until it burned down. If you’re lucky, you might meet a ghostly pair of sea legs. Here is where there used to be a church where whalers prayed & whored until it burned down. If you’re lucky, you might shake the greasy ghost-hand of a blubber-butcher. Tour guides will bat around jokes like, “is that ectoplasm in my fishnets or are you just happy to see me?” 

Yeah, this place is cursed.

I had been summoned to the Connecticut coast by my mother. Mina. At first, I was cautious. Is she up to her usual tricks? Any who have played this woman in tennis are aware of her modus operandi lulling you into a gentle rhythm before charging the net to deliver a devastating overhead spike. The invitation to Mystic began as a soft-lob when she asked if I still had the hots for Julia Roberts. Julia…?, I said with mild apprehension. I mean, everyone at some point…, I shrugged. Did you know?, Mina asked, the film Mystic Pizza is about a pizza shop in Mystic, Connecticut? She then suggested a pilgrimage to the small town to visit the inspiration of a mostly forgotten pre-Pretty Woman Julia Roberts movie. A trip to Mystic seemed innocent enough. There would be pizza. And beer. Why not?

The pizza shop sits on a hill overlooking the main drag of town. At the far end of Mystic is the tidal river spanned by the bascule bridge with its gargantuan testicular counterweights. The restaurant is charming and, yeah, nothing like the movie. The menu had plenty of options: Yaiya’s Secret, Seafood Delight and… good god. Chicken Ranch? Did Miss Roberts sign-off on this? Deciding these were not serious people, I opted to play it safe with a plain damn slice of cheese pizza. And a beer. 

Wow, Mina said as she forked at her salad, Julia Roberts may have sat on this very stool! I admitted there was a non-zero percent chance this was true. Putting down her fork, Mina cocked her head in thought and after a deep breath said, y’know what might be fun? Whuh?, I asked with a mouthful of chewed pizza cud. Mina then revealed her true intent for this summer. She wanted to go to Plum Island. 

I ignored her, naturally, pretending distraction with my ear by shaking it’s lobe as if the beer had gone down the wrong tube. Before Mina could refocus the conversation, I announced a change in scenery. Directing us out of the pizza shop, I navigated a path downhill into the thick of town where a pub had earlier lit up my radar. Alas, here we are: the Harp & Hound. I order a pint of Guinness, another of Smithwick’s, and with my fetched bounty allow my mother to sample each. Which do you prefer? Mina tries both and decides she prefers the pinot grigio. 

So honey, she says after I return again from the bar with her glass of wine, what is the furthest you’ve kayaked on the open water? After a moment of consideration, I tell her: 14 miles roundtrip, not straight-out into the Gulf of Mexico but along the coastal islands. That’s perfect!, she says.

I don’t even have to ask “what’s perfect?” before she elaborates.

Did you know that it is only eleven miles as the bee stings to go from Lyme to Plum Island?, Mina asks.

Plum Island? If I didn’t know better, I’d think Mina has been trying to kill me for as long as I’ve known her. On second thought: do I know any better? Exhibit A: this latest plot of hers. 

Jeez mom, I say to her, Plum Island is off Long Island. Long Island, New York. Which is on the wrong-side of Long Island Sound from here. You do know they call it “the Devil’s Belt” for a reason? It’s not a body of water to be trifled with. Mina’s smile is undeterred. Even if we survive the journey, I ask, who would ever want to set foot on that bubonic-flea & syphilitic-tick infested island? Who is crazy enough? 

Your mama!, she responds as if delivering the punchline of a joke. C’mon Vic, she says, don’t ya wanna to explore?

Dammit. Lulled into a calm by a satiated-belly full of pizza & beer, I am unprepared for my mother’s call to adventure. This has happened before. Last summer, Mina politely challenged me to participate in the world’s largest pizza party. We rendezvous’d in New Haven, Connecticut, where thousands of people became Guinness Book of Records world champion pizza partiers. Including us. With nothing more to prove, I decided to cleanse my palette with some local breweries who were setup in this picturesque park on Yale Campus. This is when she struck. Everyone was busy with the party. Distracted. What a perfect time to uncover the inner sanctums of Skull & Bones. What?, I asked with a hard blink. She went on to explain the Skull & Bones as an illuminati tree-house boys club. I know!, ugh…, I said, we can’t just Dan Brown our way into their crypts. We’re better off joining the Gilmore Girls tour. C’mon honey, my mother insisted, don’t you wanna explore?

I doubt I will outlive my mother, but if I do, I will have that epitaph engraved on her tombstone, “don’t you wanna explore?”

During my childhood on the beaches of Florida any time a new condominium or house was under construction my mother would have the urge to take a look. My father wanted nothing to do with it and, opting-out, stayed home to smoke cigarettes & watch Letterman. Flashlight in-hand, Mina would approach the construction sites from the beach with my sister & I in tow. Under the cloak of night (closed-circuit security cameras were not as prevalent back then), we’d enter the build site. One “exploration” I remember well: the work-in-progress Bermuda Dunes condominium was a nine floor concrete structure. Like a fishbone skeletal, there were no outside walls to the building yet, just the staircase elevating our footsteps from level to level. We climbed those stairs until we reached the top floor where the Gulf of Mexican breeze whipped the strongest. My little fingers clung to exposed rebar as I worried about being blown clear-off the building. 

It’s a statistical anomaly we survived unscathed & were never caught! Especially considering my criminally-minded sister’s tendency to deface property. I wouldn’t be surprised if she tagged the concrete walls of the building with her crayons, “Yvy Neverman wuz here!”

Oh no, honey…, my mother corrects me from her stool at the Harp & Hound. She says, Yvonne’s graffiti was all faked. She was setup, remember? Yvonne was framed by an older brother with a vendetta. You. You defaced property in her name.

Nooo, I say, I wouldn’t…

I pretend to be distracted with a buxom fiddler fidgeting with her bow during soundcheck but truly my mind is swirling around the realization: Yvy’s criminality had been me all along. Damn, I think: I really had all the makings of a great evil genius. 

My mother nods to confirm. “Vindictive little shit” is how the school counselor put it, Mina says without expressing the words herself. 

Connecticut has the legend of Hannah Cranna who was called a witch after she pushed her husband off a cliff. Today, Hannah Cranna is considered a 19th century proto-feminist. Like Hannah Cranna, my mother has outlived husbands. And Mina did so in Florida where there ain’t shit for cliffs. Resilient, Mina has reinvented herself as a New England socialite and is now regarded as the one of the coolest kids at the East Lyme Bridge & Mahjong Club. Hannah Cranna would approve, I think.

From her new perspective, my mother spends most of her year looking out across Long Island Sound for places to explore. It was only a matter of time before her imagination would be captured by Plum Island. And who better to rope-in to her shenanigans than her jetsam-son who’s washed-up on many of an untidy shore?

Thinking of the mutant rats gnawing at their cages, I ask Mina if she knows about the bullshit they’ve been up to at Plum Island over the last 75 years. Oh sure!, she says, but they haven’t done science experiments on animals in years, honey. Years…, she repeats as if anthrax spore potency only has the shelf-life of an avocado.

In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is offered a beach vacation on Plum Island. Understanding the type of zoological contagion research performed there, Hannibal says thanks/no thanks for the ticket to “Anthrax Island.” Plum Island is where the US Gov’t developed vaccines to defend against germ-warfare (with assistance from former Nazi scientists), but that label of “defense” means they need to first create the offending biohazard. What happens if we take bubonic plague and splice it with the gene that makes people want to sing karaoke? Let’s give it to a spider-monkey and find out! 

4 out of 5 online conspiracy theorists agree: lyme disease was manufactured at Plum Island and then jail-breaked via hitch-hiking tick(s) aboard a seagull or a wayward paddle-boarder across Long Island Sound to Lyme, Connecticut, where the disease was loosed upon the world. Lyme. The town where this woman, my mother, spends her summers pondering what lies beyond. 

When a tick senses the warm blood of passersby, it’ll extend it’s limbs skyward in a pose very common to Mina’s yoga practices. Entomologists calls it “questing”. Ticks are not jumpers, they’re huggers. Arms outstretched, they embrace the unknown as long as there is a pulsing heartbeat within the host animal before sinking their literal hooks into the fleshmeat with a breast-stroke motion to then anchor their barbed-harpoon feeding-tube deeper into host tissue. That sucker gets cemented-into the bite wound thanks to it’s protein-saliva. From there, there is a little parasitic give & take. The tick spits anti-coagulates into the wound to keep the host’s blood flowing as it takes enough mammalian life-juice to bloat it’s fat little belly. The host’s fingernail may scratch away at the parasite, but the damage is already done. An infection or lyme disease or worse is left behind. 

Now imagine when this delightful bit of nature has been hijacked by Nazi scientists at Plum Island to equip the ticks with lyme disease… The internet just lights-up like Christmas at the theory. Personally, as an Occam’s Razor pragmatist, I do not think the scientists at Plum Island invented lyme disease. But there are a lot of coincidences. And I sure as hell do not want to kayak eleven miles just to prove myself wrong. 

It’s likely highly illegal to set foot on Plum Island, mom, I say in attempt to persuade her. 

Yes, well naturally, of course, yes, she admits, but if we get arrested we can just say we were blown off-course. Right? Better to apologize than ask permission, I’m thinking…, she says, and-and!, and since they would escort us to the mainland, we won’t have to kayak home. One-way trip!, easy-peasy! Right, I say, yeah, I am sure New York police will give us a lift back through the city to Connecticut while towing kayaks. Perhaps we can ask our bail-bondsman to toss in a couple tickets to see Cats or the Yankees. 

Good idea, honey!, Mina says, …so cool. 

They say the lunacy common in Boomers is likely due to all the lead paint they breathed-in over the years. Or maybe too many of my mother’s generation bit down too hard on those mercury-filled thermometers and ingested quick silver. For Mina specifically, she grew-up in the backwood bog-waters of Central Florida with a family lineage descending from the hills of Appalachia. That alone could explain her lack of respect for territorial boundaries. Her favorite prayer, obviously, is the one about forgiving trespasses. 

What about the chupa-chupa?, Mina asked me. Chupacabra?, what about them?, I ask. The goat-sucker!, she says to refresh my memory. You’ve always been fascinated by those goat-suckers. Maybe more than Julia Roberts! I think the chupa-chupa was designed on Plum Island and shipped to Puerto Rico to see what would happen. Well, I say to my mother, I can’t deny that sounds like something we would’ve watched on X-Files together. 

And, and-and!, she says, have you ever heard of the “Montauk Monster”? Yes, I say, but no the Montauk Monster was not a creature that escaped Plum Island. A group of stoned teenagers found a dead raccoon on Long Island and decided to give it a viking funeral, setting it adrift on a raft they set afire. The resulting cadaver drifted ashore on Montauk a hairless & gumless fanged beast which startled morning beach walkers. It was not a chupacabra. It was no science experiment from the Island of Doctor Moreau. Or Plum Island. Just roadkill fucked-with by stupid kids. 

Oh, she says, oh okay, that makes sense I guess. 

Mom…, I say, from what I read, when foot & mouth disease – or whatever else they had cooking out there on Plum Island over the years – got loose amongst the livestock, they had to kill every animal. The incineration sent a smoke of what smelled like rotting roast beef for miles around. Those old sand dunes probably still stink to this day and are likely haunted by something deeply evil. And sad. I don’t need that in my life, do you? 

Mina takes a deep breath and exhales, …no. You’re right. I guess…, she says with a pout, I guess I just thought that since you won’t be here for Christmas this will be the last adventure we have this year…

Dammit. She’s done it again. She’s been setting me up at the tennis net this whole time. Sitting in her figurative yoga pose, arms outreached, questing for the right opportunity to snare me. 

You always did like your metaphors, my mother says with a prideful smile. But, really, honey, just one would do…

Yeah, I say and sit for a moment in my guilt. With the reluctance of the defeated suing for peace, I attempt to negotiate with Mina. 

Mom…, if I promise to return for Christmas, can we skip the Plum Island voyage?

Oh honey!, she says with a series of claps, what a wonderful idea!