cats and birds got lost in there
I rarely submit to writing contests, but I had submitted this piece to a local creative nonfiction contest and since I was not amongst the winners, I figure I might as well share it here on my substack—I hesitated to, but if I was willing to have it judged and possibly published by someone else for all to see, I might as well do so myself. It’s a rather experimental piece (for me) and a personal one. Do with that what you will.
Sheets of acetate, cels dropped and picked up again all out of order, flipped quick to animate the thought or left flat in a jumble of layers, until the right scene is on top but the rest is bright paint, just as bright, peeking out limbs and set pieces.
From the street, one could see the tall gable over the door, the torn green awnings, the mottled brick, bleach stain or rust mould, like the fur of a tortoiseshell cat crayoned by a shaky drunk. The front steps were plain concrete. Iron railing. No railing. It depends when you looked at it, which cel was right. What angle of light. I don’t remember the first door. So mundane it might not have existed except to keep the sunlight out of the house. It certainly didn’t work to keep people out. People came in and out of there like a slow-motion whorehouse.
Entering through that first doorway, the one that I’ve forgotten, hold the railing or don’t, and you’re met with a staircase to the half-story bedrooms. The hallway beside the staircase was dark. Insignificant papered walls, but the floor I’ll remember forever: a checkerboard pattern of green and black, fake marble. Green like leprechaun vomit, darkened by bleeding ulcers, pale smears like milk had churned his guts. There was no charm to be found in that floor. It was a nightmare on its own.
“Have you ever eaten gopher?” Long grey beard, tongue in his false teeth clacking. He thought the question was hilarious and old eyes squinted their mirth, hoping I’d make a shocked face. A simple speech, age-dry and lack-witted.
“No, I haven’t.”
“They used to make me eat gopher on the farm. Haw haw—gopher stew!” Spittle flew, unaware.
His door was the last on the right, sometimes. For a good chunk of time it was his door. There wasn’t always a door there at all, we had built it in. Or maybe we had taken it out. The house always changed, always the wrong cel. Every time I reorganized the acetate it was a different house. There was no sense of when, the only constant was the disgusting floor. Holes appeared in walls when I wasn’t looking, reappeared again.
“They’d give me the sack of kittens with the rocks in it. If I didn’t throw it in the river they’d whip me! You ever seen a kitten trying to swim?” He laughed again at this. His breath was coffee and cigarettes but it only added to his unwashed shirt. That thick uncleanliness that provided a waterproof sheen, a natural wax coating that darkened every flannel he owned. Impenetrable by any detergents devised by science. “I once tried to save a sack of kittens and boy did they beat me then.
“I worked in the slaughterhouse. I’ve turned all sorts of stuff into glue, and meat. You ever seen a cow die?”
“I saw a bird die once. Mandy is trying to be vegetarian. I might try it too.” I never went vegetarian, but I did quit McDonald’s—a difficult task for a kid only recently outgrown the Happy Meal.
I would stand in his doorway and admire his collection of junk. He’d give me model cars to build, though I had no paints, he was happy that I’d build them in their flat grey plastics and he’d put them up on his shelf. He had a dog, too. He didn’t understand kindness or cruelty to animals. He knew he felt pain, but didn’t understand that things other than himself felt pain too. He was never cruel to his dog, far from it. Spoiled the pitbull in a way you wouldn’t think he could to hear him talk. He liked to shock people. Being kind to his dog was the truth. Eating gophers and drowning kittens was the truth too but he didn’t understand why it made people upset, just that the expressions of disgust they made were funny as hell.
It fascinated me more than anything, all his stories.
***
Once, I stood in that doorway, looked in and saw a living room. Long, a computer and piano on one end with the sliding doors and TV and fireplace at the other, another empty doorway back into the hallway, everything tinted green but for where the sunlight blew through the tears in the awning. If you sat on the couch, behind you there was sometimes a wall. Othertimes the couch itself was the divider. VHS tapes and cigarette butts. I used the TV plenty enough but it wasn’t my space. I’d count dimes on the coffee table before taking myself to the gas station to buy a popsicle, the kind that were smiley faces. By the time I came back the wall was back up again. Smiley face stickers on notebooks, put a quarter in and twist, smiley face rings. The ‘90s might have been peak plastic smile.
The piano hid a large hole in the wall that gave a real handyman’s access to the bathroom plumbing. The hole could have been punched or kicked in, not cut with any tools, if tools had been involved they were used very poorly. Cats and birds got lost in there and I often dreamt of getting lost in there myself. Live in the walls where no one could bother me, like The People Under The Stairs. Our walls weren’t wide enough. Closest thing was the shop attic.
To the left of the front door, before the stairwell to the half-story bedrooms, there was a swinging tavern door. One of those curious design choices by the previous owners. That was when you looked in the doorway and saw a long kitchen and dining room. If you saw a normal wooden door, beyond it could be anything. Could be a hoarders room full of women’s clothing and rotten fruit. Could be a room shared by a woman and her teenage son, reeking of cat piss and pot.
No matter which it was, I never liked that doorway.
The dining room had a cold corner. That’s where the ghost must sit, my sister would joke. But upstairs, that’s where the real ghosts hung out. See, the previous owner of the house, his wife went crazy—or maybe she died of lung cancer or something, I heard it both ways. But no matter which way the poor woman died, her ghost was up there, so I was told. I had no evidence of this, either, and since my bedroom was up there for a time, it was one of those things that helped stop my belief in ghosts.
The stairs were steep, and ugly. They didn’t match the main floor. At the very top was a small bathroom, sink and toilet. The bedroom that was mine first and theirs later had brown shag carpet, and a deep cubby the shape of the ceiling I could hide in if I took the shelves out. One tenant that took over the room had a huge CD collection that he’d let me sit and peruse at my leisure, let me borrow them. The cubby that was once mine was near his drum kit and I’d sit in the cubby and listen to him practise drums. He let me bang on them a couple times. He paid his rent with handyman services and built a couple of the walls downstairs. Of all the vagrants that rented in our house he was the nicest to me. When it was my room I danced to Spice Girls. But he had a lot of grunge and college rock and metal and whatever else. My musical tastes thus evolved.
Sometimes I walk into that room and it’s virtually identical but the collection stacked on the floor is different. A schizophrenic hoarder with an affinity for storing Howard Hughes-style piss jars, stolen licence plates (“these are all the cars I own”) and he’d type outrageous numbers into his bank book (“this is all the money I have.”)
Once, as I ate a bowl of Cheerios, after the kitchen had been split from the dining room, he came down with one of his prized jars and asked my mother if he should go to the doctor over the white things floating in it. I distinctly remember the amber filled mason jar and rancid glow of his eyes as he watched my spoon go from bowl to mouth. I was disgusted by the jar, of course, but more disgusted by his scummy beard and wide, depthless eyes, he showed some teeth with a Charles Manson smile, holding his jar and admiring my preteen mastication.
By this time I wasn’t living in the main house. There was a parking lot behind the house and a former upholsterer’s shop at the back of the property. My room was the unheated shed attached to the shop, but I had my own door to outside which was handy when I wanted to leave unnoticed.
Another shuffling of cels and it was full of a failed secondhand shop’s goods.
***
There was no back yard, all parking lot. Handy for riding a bike in circles, or having bonfires out of an oil barrel, stolen fence wood, paint and all. When the secondhand shop failed it was great for summer-length yard sales.
Pick up only the cels that show the ceiling of the shop. There was an attic for a while. Then a tall gabled ceiling, painted white. Then smudged with remnants of a kitchen fire. My fault; I forgot I was heating up oil to deep fry and it boiled over and caught on fire. The sink was next to the stove, but something in my child brain knew not to try that. Perhaps I saw a PSA. Maybe I should have just crawled into the hole in the wall behind the piano.
The attic had a certain funk I’ll never forget. I know I’m not an anomaly here but my memory-smell connections have always been very strong. Naming the individual notes that made up the perfume is a challenge, as I didn’t have names for it at the time. A heady mix of rotten wood and rat and some other things will get you pretty close, but I do know whenever I smell anything similar I can feel the summer heat of it on my skin, a vaseline slick of decrepitude. There was a mattress up there, I don’t know why and frankly it’s amazing anyone got a mattress up the attic stairs for whatever reason they thought it needed to be there. This space, despite the smell, was my reading place. I avoided the mattress.
The window in the attic faced the property to the rear of us. Later, when the attic was gone and I slept in that shed, my window faced the same. I dreamt often of that window. To this day the cels of what was real and what I dreamt get jumbled up together, too.
A woman lived there and would creep to my window. Inviting me over to share tea. She dressed in Victorian rags and wore a shawl around her head, but had no face I could ever recall upon waking, other than ferociously deep wrinkles around her mouth where the lipstick would bleed into. In one sequence I did go to her house, and in the teacup there was a headless kitten floating in thick blood. The tea set had a classic pattern of blue on white china, and her hands were paper-skinned and liver-spotted. But for the life of me I still don’t know if she ever had an entire face. She stirred the kitten around with a silver spoon and insisted it would be rude if I didn’t drink the tea, but there was no tea to drink, and when I asked her about the kitten she said it was good for me.
That bedroom had no heat. One winter it was so cold I would hold my blanket to my chin and watch my breath puff. In the shop turned apartment my mother and her boyfriend had heat from a makeshift woodstove, built from a filing cabinet. If I had my belongings from those days I bet they’d still stink of burning, painted wood. More stolen pieces of fence, or anything else that would catch a flame. Garbage. Whatever.
“It’s ok, it’s ok. Don’t be scared.”
He grabbed me by my arms and tried to shush me. I had a chef’s knife in my hand and I’ve never shook so violently—what a cliche. My jaw shook. My hair shook. Someone was rattling the film canister I stood in. No cels here, this is footage shot on super 16. The shaking didn’t come from him but from the terror of what the reel shows me, his swarthy complexion poorly edited together with my pyjamas that I’m seeing from a different camera angle. The bathroom behind him once swelled up with sewage around my feet and now that sewage was touching me, but you can’t fight that off with a chef’s knife. My mother’s head had left a massive dent in the wall. To flee the sewage I had to run barefoot across the parking lot but there was no phone and they couldn’t understand my frantic explanations. Go to the gas station. Call the police. I often crossed that parking lot barefoot to use the shower in the house because of all the sewage that would seep up from the drain, or lack of hot water. I can’t think of that shower stall without thinking of brown sludge. I threatened him with the chef knife but ultimately I was a coward and had to leave my mother on the couch.
“But you liked him. He played guitar. You went to him when you lit the kitchen on fire.”
I might’ve been a coward but I was a child, too—closing my eyes when passing through the doors of that place, as if I would open my eyes and see another landscape, like Dorothy. It never worked. The figures are all poorly rotoscoped.