Life in a Neon Knapsack

By Michael Evanichko and Thomas Gaadt

In 1986 with only days until summer break, high school freshman Mamie Blackhead finds herself under the path of a small exploding plane while walking to school. Fighting to avoid the raining debris she discovers a neon knapsack with a journal detailing the life of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Evanichko
• Release date: May 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9798990636781

Michael Evanichko

Michael Evanichko began to write at a very young age. Inspired by the early works of Stephen King and the schlocky horror and suspense books of the eighties, he attempted his first novel at age twelve. It wasn't until much later in life that he actually completed his first novel, Life in a Supermarket Basket. Life in a Savage Landfill, and Life in a Neon Knapsack soon followed, and his "Trilogy of Life" was completed. Each novel is connected by a character and is unique in its tone and story.

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This book is a work of Fiction. Names, characters, events, or locations are fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This book is licensed for private, individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form by ANY means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted by the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.

Life in a Neon Knapsack

By

Michael Evanichko

Internal and cover illustrations by

Thomas Gaadt

© Michael Evanichko 2023

All Rights Reserved

KNAPSACK CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: MAMIE’S LANDING

CHAPTER TWO: EXPLODING DISCONTENT

CHAPTER THREE: A BLOODY HIGH

CHAPTER FOUR: WAITING FOR CHICHI

CHAPTER FIVE: LORD OF THE WEINER

Chapter Six: The Escape Club

CHAPTER SEVEN: UNWELCOMING FAMILY

CHAPTER EIGHT: DANCE OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER NINE: SWIMMING WITH THE FISH

CHAPTER TEN: COFFEE AND DONUTS

CHAPTER ELEVEN: WELCOMING FAMILY

CHAPTER TWELVE: CRATE TRAINING

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SIBLING REVELRY

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: GRAND LUNACY

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: SEVEN EXTRA BAGS

Chapter Sixteen: Connecting Dots

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE CEMENT

Acknowledgments

T

hank you to Thomas Gaadt for bringing this final story in the Trilogy of Life to life through his stunning illustrations. Thank you to Angel Endicott for breathing life into Martin’s story through the wonderful handwritten journal entries. Never-ending thanks to family and friends who inspired stories and situations included in Life in a Neon Knapsack as well as its predecessors, Life in a Supermarket Basket, and Life in a Savage Landfill. The love and support shown over the years helped motivate me to complete the sometimes tedious and maddening tasks of writing and editing. And editing. And editing. And editing.

CHAPTER ONE: MAMIE’S LANDING

R

egret and uncertainty smelled like aged wood and tarnished silverware and attacked my senses as I stepped into my recently deceased parent’s home. They did a great deal for me in my fifty years on the planet and I sometimes questioned my level of reciprocation. My younger version challenged the belief that children were gifts from God and my rebellious behavior led to a welcomed yet feared disownment. Booted from the house at fourteen would’ve proved challenging to explore the freedom I desired. Paying rent and grocery shopping at such a young age seemed ridiculous.

An open floor plan exposed the house and a hallway led to three small bedrooms and one tiny bathroom. I scanned the hazy living room of the only home my folks ever owned, marveled at the concept of owning just one home for the duration of a lifetime. I was currently living in my third house with a fourth possibly coming soon. My parents entered and exited the world in the same town—a town I couldn’t wait to flee.

Memories peeked out from every corner. The marathon Uno matches in front of the brick fireplace led my eyes to the nicked wood on the corner of the dinner table. The damaged oak was a courtesy of my front tooth when I was ten. A waist-high brick divider separated the living room from the eat-in kitchen and made home to an assortment of framed pictures. The Blackheads sat on the same furniture through decades of photos, and if we had a family crest, Frugality, in a fancy font, would hang above the lion or unicorn or whatever animal Blackhead represented.

How many Klondike bars have you eaten today, Mamie? If I find another wrapper shoved under the sofa, I am grounding you. You hear me? my mother said on multiple occasions as she peered at me from the kitchen. She always harped on me about my excessive eating of sweets, but she was also the one stocking our shelves with desserts. My dad used those desserts to motivate me to complete chores. He loved the jingle to the Klondike commercials. What would you do for a Klondike bar? he asked. Would you clean your room? Pull weeds in the garden? No, neither of those. I would simply reach into the freezer and pull one out. And sometimes that was a chore. Yeah, I was occasionally lazy.

Besides Klondike bars, Little Debbie had tasty snacks, and I fantasized she was my little sister and we shared a bedroom as I shoved her sugary delights down my throat. My nerdy younger brother, Theo, counted the number of snacks in each of Little Debbie’s boxes and notified my mother when one went missing. I was always the assumed thief of the snatched cakes. I stood guilty for years until my mom walked in on my dad binge eating a cake from each of the different boxes. He was a sugar thief like me but we needed the escape from my mother’s obsession with eating healthy. My brother did not partake in Debbie’s delights, for he thought sweets tasted like biodegradable peanuts used for packaging. He was so odd that my folks stopped conceiving after him, clearly scared of a repeated creation. 

I opened a few curtains, which brightened the house and showed varying levels of dust over everything. My father passed away in the hospital two and a half weeks ago but he moved to a nursing home six months prior to that, so the house had seen little action for a while. My mother died five years before his nursing home move, and she was the clean freak. My father never retired his coffee mugs to the sink as the rings of corrosion on the decades old end tables proved. Even as my favorite parent, I would have a difficult time living with his lack of regard to cleanliness and organization. I dreaded the thought of emptying the two-car garage; he filled it with so much irrelevant crap it would make a landfill of trash seem like Macy’s. I regretted not getting back more when my dad was alone, but he remained fiercely independent even when his mind eroded.

I stepped inside my old bedroom and wondered why my parents never transformed it into a study, or a spare bedroom, or a torture chamber, although I perceived it as a room of torture from ages ten through eighteen. I eventually escaped prison to attend college in a city that wasn’t Sundown, Tennessee. It was then I learned another meaning behind the term sundown; that itwas synonymous with racism and segregation, which disturbed me and made me wonder why the name never changed. Only a few black families lived in Sundown, and I hoped it wasn’t a sign of racism. Small town charm was merely backwoods harm, as friendships were scarce and broader horizons were literal.

I opened my bedroom window, and an angry gust of early summer air rustled my old posters, which were still carelessly thumb tacked to the walls. David Coverdale and his fellow Whitesnake rockers fled the white thumbtacks and the bedroom. They were searching for the redheaded woman from their videos. I pushed the window down to save Duran Duran and Joan Jett. My musical choices diversified as I matured, but you wouldn’t see a Kenny Rogers or Reba McEntire poster. Country music was poison I didn’t want to swallow in a town neighboring the city most associated with the guitar twangs of country music.

Mom? Why is Whitesnake in the hall? asked my daughter, Abigail, as she entered the bedroom with the poster. Her husband, Mateo, followed behind her with my granddaughter riding on his shoulders. Unfortunately, the five-year-old didn’t clear the doorway and head-butted the wall like a pro wrestler on fight night. Crying ensued immediately.

Que carajo estabas pensando! Abigail said to Mateo as he lowered Sofia and took her into the living room and the wail subsided the further they traveled.

What’d you say? I asked, always uncomfortable when they started speaking Spanish. I was proud of my daughter for marrying someone born outside of the United States, as it added a little flair to our family, but communication was sometimes tricky. She had to learn Spanish online with that instructional app named Babbel. I always thought the name of that foreign language learning app was condescending. It implied that prior to learning the language, you babbled incoherently, like a baby.

What the f-u-c-k were you thinking? my daughter said, spelling out the four-letter word.

That seemed a little harsh, dear.

He just left an imprint of your granddaughter’s head on the wall. Harsh? Really, mom? Sofia could have a concussion or even brain damage! She left the room. I heard her hushing the child and then yelling at Mateo.

I worried the fighting that transpired over the twenty-five years of marriage to my husband, Justin, might’ve set an unhealthy example for my daughter and my son, Lucas. We tried to be discreet with our arguments when the kids were young, but eventually lost that battle as the curtain dropped and we performed well enough to win Tony Awards. The disconnect in our marriage led to counseling, trial separations, divorce threats, and eventually resulted in Justin fleeing the coop thirteen days ago. He blamed everything on me, all the dysfunction—but I couldn’t be the glue that held everything together. Some glues don’t sustain the tacky specifications needed to prevent things from falling apart. I lost my husband and my father within weeks of one another.

I opened the closet door and glanced at the clothing of the eighties. A denim jacket with padded shoulders led to a plaid miniskirt and many striped garments; so many stripes it caused vertigo. The frilly baby-blue prom gown muted the stripes and reminded me the three years of high school were capped by a hideous dress. Given the way I dressed, school was bound to be challenging. My best friend was a fashionista with no fashion sense, and I allowed her to dress me. She called me her muse and I put the muse in amusing.

A black instrument case hid under the gown. My days as a flute player in grade school came to mind. I was never very good, and it wasn’t cool to be in the band in high school, so I ditched it—much to my parent’s dismay, as flutes weren’t cheap. I gave them false hope I’d pick it back up at some point, but then the pressures of high school mounted and I wanted what the popular girls had: the attention, the beauty, the boys.

Something grabbed my leg and I shrieked.

Hi Nana! Sofia completed her wailing and wanted some loving. I squatted to her level and my knees popped; my kneecaps wanted to escape the arthritic middle-aged body. Sofia swatted at my left knee. Pop! she said. Old and young, we were both damaged goods as she displayed a red circle in the middle of her forehead with a little raised bump. I hugged her tiny body.

Are you okay, sweetheart? My interactions with my granddaughter made me feel as old as a cracked tombstone in a centuries-old private cemetery. Being around children aged me and I couldn’t make believe I was thirty. She nodded and escaped my clutches, squeezing past me to enter the closet. I allowed her to crawl around under the hanging clothing as I pulled out several tops and recalled how my breasts looked in them. My tiny bosom was hard to highlight in any type of shirt. The vividness of those recollections amazed me as I typically struggled to remember a movie I watched two days prior. Also, what kind of demented human girl wore fuzzy turtlenecks?

Sofia emerged from the realm of ugly clothing with a suitcase of make-up. I used to color my eyelids with purples and pinks and blues, which was ironic as I’m lucky to wear lipstick nowadays.

Here you go. You can paint on this. I handed Sofia a tablet from my top dresser drawer. She removed three make-up pencils and began drawing on the empty page. Abigail called me and I left the bedroom as Sofia dumped all the make-up out of the bag and continued to create the modern masterpiece she’d begun. My old bedroom would never be the same.

Where is dad? Abigail asked.

No clue. Why? You haven’t heard from him?

No. I called him two days ago and left a voicemail.

Who checks voicemails? I wasn’t that hip to the advances in mobile phones, nor did I understand the features on my smart phone, but I knew checking voicemails was a dated activity. Voicemails suffered a fate similar to answering machines in the nineties.

I texted as well. Nothing. I’m worried. Where did he go?

I don’t know.

And you don’t care?

Maybe he returned to Chicago, I told my daughter. Even though our current home was Atlanta, we moved to the windy city