Phyllis was a nice girl and all, but the one that had really captivated Mr. Ed was Michelle. It looked to Mr. Ed like she had always been this kind of girl that could light up a room with that million dollar smile – the kind that attracts all kinds of folks. Ultimately it was up to her which kind of people she would choose to reside with, but what Mr. Ed could only guess at was that for some reason she had always felt more comfortable around what people would generally describe as bad company. Maybe it had something to do with who she was at heart, and when it came to that there wasn’t that much of a choice after all. Mr. Ed had always believed that we will always be subjected to our nature.
It was no surprise then that Mr. Ed had a hold on Michelle since that first time that they had sat down, and although it wasn’t more than a hunch on her part, she had become certain that Mr. Ed fit the profile of the kind of guy that could show her who she is at heart. She was sure that it was just a matter of time before they both lowered their guard.
1
In a way what had kept both Mr. Ed and Michelle busy was the same kind of question about the badness of men, or to be more precise, what makes a man bad. For some reason Michelle’s thoughts started going back to this urban legend about a guy that was nick-named Cotton Charlie. She had first heard about it a good seven years ago.
It was the summer when she had turned 18 and it was the first time that she had heard about the legend of Cotton Charlie. She learned about the story in the way that we get to know about most of these kind of stories that bordered on an urban legend: she didn’t read it, but it was told to her. She was at a party, it was late at night, after midnight in fact, there was a good vibe going on and everyone had a good buzz going on as well. She flocked around a camp-fire with about ten others.
The DJ lowered the volume and the kid who’s parents had gone out of town and where the party was organized in the villa and around the pool yelled in a loud voice:
“Who is the creature that everyone fears….”
“Charlie!”
“Who was born good and died a bad man….”
“Charlie!”
“Who was tortured and tortured and tormented….”
“Charlie!”
“Charlie who?”
“Cotton Charlie!!” the crowd screamed. An electric guitar came on and the first few notes sounded like Iron Maiden’s Run for the Hills and instead of Native Americans running from the Europeans, it must have been any person that came in sight of this guy named Cotton Charlie.
“Who is Cotton Charlie exactly?” Michelle asked the guy she ended up with that night. She had already forgotten his name.
“You don’t know?” the guy asked, “It’s an old story, an urban legend and a good one too. Cotton Charlie became the nick-name of a guy named Charles Keller who was born just before the turn of the twentieth century. He was killed in the 10s, the 1910s.”
“Aha,” Michelle said, “So how did he get his nick-name?”
“Charles Keller had been from out of town and one day he just showed up in Martossa. At first people didn’t bother with him: he was a grown man, well fed, but by his demeanor you could see that he wasn’t just a bit dim, but it seemed more that he was a kind of retard. He carried a few items with him: some clothes, a hymnal and a bunny rabbit that he kept in the inside pocket of his overcoat. For a good week he hung around town, in the park, in the docks, in the train station. After that week a local bum started to look after him and he took Charles Keller to an abandoned warehouse where most bums and homeless hung out. Most of them were junkies that ate scraps here and there, besides which they crawled into bottles of strong liquor that they stole from here and there. The thing was just that Charles Keller didn’t drink and after three or four days they decided that he was no fun and they kicked him out.”
“Kicked out by bums….” Michelle said, “That’s what I would call being down on your luck.”
“It only got down hill from there,” the guy said, “Charles Keller was out on the streets for a few more days, until there was a madam by the name of Sandy Roberson who got the idea of making a bit of money out of what she called ‘this freak show’. Her idea was to feed him back to strength in her whorehouse and to put him in a cage where people could fight him for money. She had even thought of a nick-name: the Grumpy Giant (he wasn’t grumpy, but she was sure she could change that). The plan started to unfold slowly. The whores looked after him and they became very attached. Unlike their clientele, this was a man that was more interested in his bunny than he was in theirs. It took a few weeks for Charles Keller to get back some weight and to regain his strength.”
“Then what happened?”
“This madam had heard of illegal fights in an abandoned warehouse. She brought him down one night and when they saw Charles Keller enter, the crowd went wild: he looked daunting and violent, and his first opponent even took a step back, but then it happened: he didn’t fight. And not just that; he just took a beating without doing anything.”
“Because he was a pacifist,” Michelle said, “So did they get him to fight?”
“The madam took him down a second time, but what she didn’t know was that his bunny was in his coat’s pocket,” the guy said, “So there was this big strapping guy, and when he entered the cage, people already started woe-ing for him to go away. Next he took out his bunny and started petting it. His opponent started making fun of him and since he stayed unresponsive, he tried to grab it from his hands. That’s when the bad eye of Charles Keller turned on him: he beat the guy into a pulp within minutes.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” the guy said, “How about you get us some drinks?”
Michelle did and the guy continued when she came back.
“That’s how they got him to fight and it worked every time, and it was also at that time that he had gotten that nick-name Cotton Charlie: a puppet that can be made to dance when you pull a string,” the guy said, “Until after about ten months, the bunny had gotten hurt and got killed. Charles Keller turned violent without control and when he had beaten his opponent to pulp, he continued with the next person within sight. Four or five guys stepped forward and they all awaited the same fate. It was then that the crowd turned bad. Back then men were more like the cowboys that you see in old westerns – every man carried a gun, a knife, and some even walked with pitch-forks (don’t ask me what they needed that for, going to a fight). They started going after Cotton Charlie and it soon turned into a lynching that lasted until the sun came up at six the next morning. They had gotten very vicious: he had about eighty puncture holes, he had lost a few fingers, and a toe, there was a deep cut in his skull that kept gushing, and there was another cut that had gone superficial and where there was this one character that had started to pull off his skin (it was later told that this guy was a bonafide sadist).”
“Wow,” Michelle had said, “And where did all this take place?”
“In the docks in a small sea-side town by the name of Martossa,” the guy had said, “Cotton Charlie succumbed to his wounds and died when the first crow was heard.”
“….”
“Of the crazy mob, five died. Three of them in combat with Cotton Charlie, one of them in conflict with another man, the last one had a heart-attack.”
“That’s just horrible.”
“It was,” the guy had said, “But it’s not where it all ended. They say that Cotton Charlie is undead because he was tortured to death in such a horrible wayand that he can be summoned in all its fury between midnight and sunrise.”
“That’s what that yelling was all about?”
“A little bit,” the guy said, “But it’s mostlydrunken foolishness. What brings Cotton Charlieback is a little rhyme and you have to say it with the word ‘will’ instead of ‘won’t’: Cotton Charlie on a stick / it’s the candy that I dig / in the morning, in the night / it’s the thing that I won’t fight.”
“You believe that?”
“I know that some kids tried it a few years ago and it really went apeshit after that,” the guy said, “They weren’t beat up, but mentally, they lost it….”
“….”
The guy started laughing, “Just pulling your leg. As far as I’m concerned it’s just an urban legend. Probably just a fiction.”
2
Michelle had retold the story of Cotton Charlie to Mr. Ed during their next talk.
“Later on when I studied anthropology I started looking into its meaning in the broader cultural context,” Michelle says, “For a long time I believed that it was that any decent person can be driven to do something bad, given the right circumstances.”
“But then you changed your mind….”
“What if it’s just madness in any form?” Michelle asks, “A kind of personal madness that a person just is overcome with?”
Michelle looks over at Mr. Ed and she pauses.
“Madness as our personal demon,” Michelle says.
“….”
“What do you think Cotton Charlie is supposed to tell us?”
“Be warned: bad stuff is out there,” Mr. Ed says, “Most notably Cotton Charlie.”
“No subtext?” Michelle asks, “You don’t believe that this story is a metaphor for some real life monsters that are out there?”
“You mean: something besides the predator that walks on two legs?” Mr. Ed asks, leaning forward, “Not necessarily dead, alive, undead, vampire, werewolf or any of that — why do you think that all those creatures look like men?”
“You mean to say that we are the predators?”
Mr. Ed thinks: people Exactly Like Us.
“Now the real question is: are you willing to accept that?” Mr. Ed asks.
Michelle thinks: he’s prying again. This time she doesn’t mind it so much, and it brings back that tingly feeling in her belly. She has this feeling that the reason that he’s prying mostly confirms that her dream about Mr. Ed was more than just a fiction.
“It’s a proven fact that most murders are committed by men, as in not by women, so I’ll give you that,” Michelle says, “What these creatures tell us is that we either like to believe in monsters, or it simply serves to differentiate between us and them.”
“It’s also human nature: we’re fascinated by that which we can’t quite comprehend,” Mr. Ed says, “And a creature that can be summoned between midnight and sunrise….”
“One that appears in all fire and fury with murder on its mind….”
“And it’s complete brutality, because at that point it doesn’t matter whether it has a primitive incentive like something territorial or hunger….” Mr. Ed says, “It’s nothing more than what it is…. Which makes it even more incomprehensible.”
Mr. Ed leans back for a minute and takes a sip of ice-water.
“One thing though about the story,” Mr. Ed says, “Cotton Charlie became undead?”
“Basically.”
“For sake of the discussion: let’s say that a person can become undead.”
Michelle starts to laugh.
“You… I mean: youare willing to believe that a person can be undead?”
Mr. Ed looks like: what’s so strange about that?
“Well…. For the discussion’s sake: Cotton Charlie wasn’t atypical undead,” Michelle says, “That would be mostly about vampires that start to burn in sunlight, like being hosed down with acid.”
Mr. Ed laughs at that one, “Not a vampire then, just undead.”
“In a way you could say that he’s a variation on that theme, but there’s something about it that sticks,” Michelle says in a mysterious voice.
Now it’s Michelle’s turn to lean forward.
“The undead are found in many cultures and in many forms,” Michelle says, “And in some it’s believed that person’s that do bad things are in fact undead, without themselves knowing about it….”
Mr. Ed thinks: I have been implied to be many things, but this —this is a first.
“Or a part of them,” Michelle says, “Like a vital part of who they are has already started to rot away.”
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