Today I’m in Des Moines selling the Luke In Time Mysteries to anyone who isn’t watching March Madness.
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Without further ado, here’s the first installment.
I lived in a humid basement,
because I couldn’t afford anywhere else that would allow me to keep my cat Chewy. My landlord was a mechanic. He and his wife had four children.
The car mechanic dreamt of starting a church someday. His life was something like a musical, exploding spontaneously into song, except instead of song, he burst forth in sudden and impassioned sermons. This impromptu preaching frequently stirred my emotions.
Both the car mechanic and his wife came from massive families. The mechanic was the second child of five. His wife was a second too, but of six. As I recall, the Bible calls children a blessing, and so the holiest among us fuck like bunnies.
For weeks, my basement floor
had resembled an art installation of a multi-species waltz, footprints and kitty tracks intermingled across the concrete, so many clean islands dotting a dust-covered landscape. I was getting a taste of a live-in flip, a feature that would be the norm for me in later years.
Before Chewy moved in,
the home had never known pet hair or litter boxes.
The former owners of the mechanic’s house had partially finished the basement. They’re unavailable for comment, early victims of the COVID-19, but I like to imagine they were an upwardly mobile couple whose successes exemplified the power of Middle Class America. In the story I tell myself, the husband had a stable job for a respectable Omaha firm. His wife worked in downtown Benson, walking distance from her front door. Childless, they managed to stockpile a respectable retirement, and along the way, they had enough left over to undertake moderate upgrades to their home.
Its bathrooms were styled in cream with brass fixtures, a luxurious look from the 60s. The living- and dining-rooms had textured walls and popcorn ceilings, befitting the 80s, and the basement had been partially finished with faux wooden panelling, a kiss of the 70s, as if each decade had had its one allotted lifestyle upgrade.
The mechanic, after closing
on his first-time-homeowner loan, had visions of HGTVing the shit of that house, and that is why, among other reasons, he agreed to take me in as a subterranean troll. He also liked the feel of Christian charity, and I was a prime candidate. New to the Christian faith, I was a broke, 25-year-old, college sophomore living 100% on government teat. Any FAFSA loan money that didn’t go directly to rent I spent on my 24 Hour Fitness membership, cigarettes, Q Doba Chicken Nachos, cat food, and cat litter.
Some months, if I smoked too many menthols, I came up short on rent, and so, after a few months of this, the mechanic had a heart-to-heart with me. He gave me three choices: (1) Get a job. (2) Ditch the cat. (3) Find a new place to live.
He assured me it wasn’t that he couldn’t afford to let me crash for free, or even reduced rent, but he’d already given me a banger of a deal, and I needed to grow up and take responsibility for my life. He was strongly in favor of a two-part solution and urged me to pick both options one and two.
I, ever the nonconformist, managed to negotiate a fourth option: demo the crummy 70s basement finishing, and update it to a modern style. For me, it meant having no boss, no hard and fast hours to report, and a sense of agency about my living quarters.
The coolest part was, my labor would supplement any shortfall I had in rent, allowing me to smoke more ciggies.
After removing the faux wooden panels
I was confronted with the brick on the exterior wall. It had been slathered in pastel yellow paint. Both the color of the brick and the fact that the panelling had been thrown over said brick suggested the painting had been done in the late sometime in the late 60s or early 70s.
The United States government banned lead paint in 1978. Meaning that coat of chipper yellow was almost certainly fully leaded. As great as lead was in paint and in gasoline, if ingested, it can lead to any or all of the following: learning and behavioral difficulties, slowed growth, hearing problems, headaches, abdominal pain and cramping, aggression, anemia, constipation, insomnia, irritability, low appetite and energy, high blood pressure, joint and muscle pain, memory loss, mood disorders, and a host of secondary sex deformities.
None of this entered my thinking when I plugged in the palm sander. It was only after weeks of blowing yellow tinted snot into my dirty laundry that I had a passing concern about breathing all that dust.
In fact, I recall the moment my mind objected to the situation.
Waking one morning, perhaps a bit earlier than usual, I noticed a rim of yellow lining Chewy’s nose. There’s a scene from Scarface where a character’s nostrils are rimmed in cocaine. That’s what came to me then, and though my first impression brought laughter, the humor was quickly replaced with a question, bell-clear and coldly heavy in my chest. What could that dust be doing to a small cat’s lungs?
I got fully sucked into this fascination slice of life glimpse.