The Black Aura - 1. The Beginning

When I was young it was more important
Pain more painful and laughter much louder, yeah
When I was young
When I was young

RIOT - 1982
Originally recorded by 1967 by Eric Burdon and The Animals, also recorded by the Ramones, 1994.

1

I didn’t realize I was special right away. That came later. I guess when you’re only a few years old and pretty much everything is new to you, you don’t realize that you can do something that nobody else can. Until you ask someone about it, that is.

I guess I was about 12 when I finally figured out my special talent was unique to me. I’d noticed that the auras around people were all different colors, but I’d never seen a black one until that day. “Momma, why is that man’s aura black?” It didn’t register right away even though she answered “What man? What aura?” It still wasn’t completely apparent when the plate glass window that was being installed on the new skyscraper came flying down and split him in half vertically. Like I said, I was around 12 and therefore pretty freaked out seeing a man sliced in half by a window. Wouldn’t you be?

I grew up in Plattsville, a small city in New Jersey. Who am I kidding, aren’t all the cities in New Jersey small? Anyway, I suppose I should introduce myself since I’ve already relived my earliest trauma for you. My name is Avery Noonan. That trauma happened 55 years ago. Although it didn’t answer my question at the time, it gave me something to think about, in between the nightmares, that is.

I think it truly clicked a year later when my grandfather died. We were visiting him in the nursing home where he lived. He’d had a heart attack a few years before. His aura was black too. He died while we were there. He’d gotten pneumonia and was pretty sick. Momma knew the end was near and wanted to see him at least one more time. I guess if she knew she’d be subjecting her 13-year-old son to his second death in the span of a year, she may have left me home. But then, it may have been years before I knew why people had black auras. But I knew then. They were about to die.

2

Once I realized it, it also became obvious that not everybody had this skill. If Momma did, she wouldn’t have let me stay in the room with grandpa. It also gave me a few years’ notice before I was grown up enough to truly take advantage of it; and to figure out how I could do just that. I started paying closer attention to people’s auras, especially when they were starting to get dark. I didn’t always know who they were to look them up in the obituaries afterward, but when I did, you can bet your buttons that is exactly what I did. It was always kind of a mixed reaction when someone I knew had their aura get darker and darker, but I was more prepared than I would have been without my special skill. Until Jimmy, anyway.

Jimmy Millis was by best friend growing up and he was the third person I’d ever seen with a black aura. Funny, this was once again, about a year after grandpa died. The difference between Jimmy and the other two was his aura wasn’t black when I rang his doorbell to go riding bikes that day. It was a pretty dark green, not the yellow that was usual for pretty much everybody in our class. There were exceptions, of course. I'll get to that. Some were slightly darker, some were lighter, but still pretty much yellow. We’d planned on biking downtown to the Kings and hang out with a couple other friends we planned on meeting there. We never got downtown. I wanted to stay at Jimmy’s house and play games or something, thinking that maybe I could prevent whatever bad thing was approaching him. Turns out I wouldn’t have been able to. Had I seen his mom and little sister before we left, maybe I would have realized I can’t change stuff like that, but when you’re 14, you think you can do anything, right?

So reluctantly, we started riding toward the Kings. I kept on side streets, less traveled roads, did anything I could to prevent the inevitable. Turns out, people run stop signs more often on the path less traveled. Who knew? I guess it was good for us that we never saw the big pick-up truck coming. Jimmy died pretty much instantly because he was on the right side of the road. I was staying to the inside to “protect” him. He died, but the truck didn’t stop fast enough after hitting Jimmy to keep me from being in the hospital for the rest of that summer. Two broken legs, in multiple places, dislocated shoulder, road rash along pretty much the entire left side of my body, and oh, yeah, the fractured skull that the Ford’s bumper gave to me.

I woke up three days later. Momma was there, and my first words were “Jimmy’s dead, isn’t he?” She didn’t answer right away, but I’d seen the dark green aura, so I knew. I didn’t really notice the change to black I guess because the green was as dark as it could be and still be considered green. I didn’t say anything about it then and she probably doesn’t remember about Mr. Paine. He’s the skyscraper guy I told you about. Pretty ironic that his name was Paine and that’s the way he met his demise, although I didn’t know that at the time. I did look it up after grandpa passed. I think whoever wrote the newspaper article about the man named Paine who died when a sheet of glass from a construction site fell on him had a hard time not inadvertently putting any bad puns in that article. Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up.

3

So, I guess it was during my recuperative time in the hospital that I’d decided if I couldn’t change anything about the black aura, I’d still find some way to use it to my advantage. Momma had told me after I was awake a couple days that Jimmy’s mother and sister died in a fire the same day as Jimmy. You’ve heard the story, kitchen fire, starts the curtains on fire, it was an old house, and it went up quick, etc., etc. That’s also another factoid that helped convince me I couldn’t change things. If we’d stayed at his house playing games, he still would have died. I heard afterward that the fire chief said it burned so quickly nobody had a chance to get out. Jimmy’s mother was trapped in the kitchen and Leslie’s bedroom, where she was playing, was right above. Probably what would have happened was that would have been the exact moment Jimmy went into the kitchen to get us a couple drinks and he would have been trapped as well. My aura is only turning from tan to a true brown now, so I would have somehow made it out, not being in the middle of or above where the fire was.

It took a couple weeks into the school year before the opportunity arose where I could benefit from my recent discoveries. It still sounds macabre, and I suppose it is, but if you can bet your friends that their least favorite teacher in the world was going to die by Christmas, you’d try and make a few bucks. Wouldn’t you? Be honest.

I didn’t have Mrs. Miller that year. We never knew anything about a Mr. Miller, although we’d always wondered how crazy someone would have to be to marry someone that mean. When I happened to see her in the cafeteria that mid-October day, I knew I’d found a way to buy that Xbox game I’d been wanting since it came out just after school started. She had a fairly dark green aura. I didn’t really have a best friend anymore, so I found one of the other guys that I sometimes hung out with, Scott Leeds. He was one of the guys we would have met at the Kings if Ford pick-up trucks knew what stop signs meant. It helped that he DID have Mrs. Miller that year.

“Scott, wanna bet on something?”

“What, football? The Giants suck this year so I ain’t betting on them.”

I had actually made a few bucks over the years betting Scott on Giants games. Not much, every once in a while, they’d win and he’d get some of his money back, but I was probably 7 dollars richer because of it. We bet small, fifty cents or a dollar, usually.

“Nope, something better.”

“What?”

“What if I were to bet you that Mrs. Miller would die by Christmas?”

“A, I’d say you’re nuts, and B, I’d say I couldn’t be that lucky.”

“So, you don’t want to bet?”

I could see the wheels spinning in his head. Scott wasn’t stupid, but Lee Wilpone, who was probably going to be the valedictorian as well as being the class nerd, wasn’t going to have any competition for that from Scott.

“She’s like 30. No way she’s gonna be dead by Christmas. How much do you want to lose?”

I found out later she was actually 34, but obviously still young enough for Scott to not think she’d have less than 2 months to live. I’m sure she didn’t know it either, maybe she’d have been mellower, but I don’t think it was in her personality. I had to be reasonable in my response. I knew I could make a bundle, but if I said $40, Scott wouldn’t take the bet because he figured I’d welsh.

“How about ten bucks?”

“You’re on.”

I suppose it wasn’t until lunch time that I knew I’d be getting that Xbox game for myself around Christmas, plus a lot more. There are 6, well, now 5 of us, that sit at the same table at lunch. So, who pipes up and helps me make a bundle? Yep, Scott.

“Hey, you guys wanna hear how dumb Avery is?”

Of course, they all said yes. I also wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but if I tried harder, I might have been able to give Lee a run for his money in the GPA department, so the guys were always looking for ways to knock me down intellectually. I guess not being so nerdy by trying real hard made it possible to have as many friends as I did. Well, cool friends anyway, not like who Lee hung around with. But more on them later.

“He bet me ten dollars that our favorite witch would be dead by Christmas.”

“Moron.”

“Idiot.”

“How can someone so smart be so stupid?”

You’ve no doubt heard them all before if you’ve at least made it to your teen years.

“You wanna lose ten bucks to me too?”

That was Jeffrey Pillser. We called him Pilsner. One of those cruel nicknames kids gave each other. His dad drank a lot, hence the cruelty.

I said, “You don’t even have one buck to bet with.”

He might have, but not much more. His dad was well on his way to drinking the Pillsers into even lower rent
accommodations than they already had to deal with.

“Yeah, I do. I got $25 bucks from my aunt for my birthday last week. I told my dad it was only five and pocketed the rest.”

“Fine. Ten dollars from Pilsner.”

“Hey, I don’t want to be left out of this.”

That was Joey Gugliardi. He had money. His dad wasn’t in the mob that we knew of, he worked on Wall Street in New York, but we called him Guido anyway. As poor as Jeff was, Guido was quite the opposite.

“OK, how much do you want to lose?”

Joey was kind of a smart ass, his response was, “Ha ha, funny guy. It’s more like how much can YOU afford to lose?”

I knew Joey could get me most of the way to my $49.94 plus tax goal, but I didn’t want to be completely unbelievable.

“Um, twenty?”

Of course, Joey agreed. Even though we pretty much knew there weren’t direct mob connections, we never were really sure. Have to go off on a tangent here. His parents threw a big barbecue every Memorial Day weekend. The first time I was invited and got introduced to all his aunts and uncles, the suspicions grew. So maybe it wasn’t so unusual that his father’s name was Vincent, aka Vinnie, and his three uncles were Tony, John, and Stephen; but their given names were Vincente, Antonio, Giovanni, and Stephano. Every time I was introduced to someone new by one of the adults, I was “Cousin Joey’s friend Avery.” The fact that my mother’s maiden name was Torre went a long way as well. Longer when I shared the fact that when her father emigrated to America, they shortened his name from Protetorre. This got the reaction “Hey that’s Uncle Stephano’s nickname, ‘Il Protetorre.’” The Protector. You probably could have guessed that.

Needless to say, after this, I was invited to a lot more family gatherings at Joey’s house. I always figured he was dying to ask me what color his uncles' aura were. Yeah, almost all red. His dad's was blue. Apparently not part of the 'family business.'

Now, where was I? Oh yeah; the bets.

“Hey, wait a second. What makes you think Mrs. Miller’s gonna kick the bucket anyway?”

Bill Conley was always the one that would figure out that something wasn’t right. He knew how the lame magicians that came to the school pulled off all their tricks; could figure out anything mechanical in the blink of an eye. I guess he was also the group’s undying pessimist. Bill’s glass never even came close to being half-full.

“I don’t know, just a feeling I got.”

“Well then, I don’t want my feelings left out. I’ll bet you ten bucks too. Can you afford to lose $50 bucks to us?”

“Yeah, I got the money. But I won’t need it. You’ll see.”

It had gotten a little loud in the cafeteria by this time, so people at the tables on either side of us overheard some of what was going on. Luckily for me, none of them said anything right away. If my friends knew I’d bet $200 more with, well, pretty much everyone who either had Mrs. Miller that year or the previous year, they’d figure I was completely crazy, and they’d never see a dime of their winnings. Of course, I knew they wouldn’t.