I know there are some people who
think that subterranean living is no big deal. I mean basement apartments are
certainly a part of American living and can even be seen as a great way to gain
some extra income. But I am not one of them. Every time I see an ad to
“refinish your basement” I think, “Not in a million years, thank you very
much.” I’ll keep mine for its intended use of storage space, and to hold the
house’s plumbing, electrical and heating infrastructure.
Maybe this is because the basement
that I grew up in was much more like an underworld than a home. Or maybe my
disdain for basements has as much to do with the other underworlds that seem
braided into our lives during those years we lived beneath the earth.
There was the underworld of the funeral home
that my undertaker father worked in, replete with “walk-in freezers,” a casket
room, an embalming table and a cosmetics counter where my Dad artfully applied
“life” back into the cheeks of the deceased. And there was the dark underbelly
of a world that my mother unfortunately fell into—and which eventually pulled her
away from us—including the hot blinking lights of NYC and some unsavory
characters she befriended.
Metaphorically speaking, there was
also the underworld of thought in my
family—something I would come to describe as a sort of “victim mentality” that the
adults around us all seemed to share and pass on, as their parents before them
had passed onto them. It would be a mentality that I would rally against—as would
my siblings—deciding to end it with us and our generation.
But it was also that damn basement
that made me hate basement living so much.
And it didn’t help that the place
was haunted.
I’m not talking soft core hauntings
like memories, thought there were certainly memoires floating about that
place-- of my mother and the good times, as well as her mysterious absence,
something that no adults around us wanted to talk about.
I’m talking hard core apparitions.
Were these spirits passing though
on their way to hell? It wouldn’t be unlikely, I remembered theorizing as a
fourteen year old girl to my brother, Greg, who was 12 and my sister, Jaz, who
was 16. We were, after all, halfway there.
Maybe we were on their turf!
There was the time that Jaz walked on
the treadmill and felt a hand clamp down upon her shoulder and yank her off the
machine. Or the time Greg woke to a man standing over him; when Greg blinked
the man had vanished—but had left a scent of cologne in the air. Or the myriad
of times I woke to feel hands pressing down on my throat and chest. Many years
later, as an adult, I would watch the movie The Entity and think, “Oh, hey, I
know that evil spirit! He used to frequent the basement.”
Besides being haunted, the basement
was also… well, it was a basement: cold and dark and moldy and full of insects,
it lacked anything remotely connected to the warmth of a home. Suffice it to say, were weren’t going to win a
spread anytime soon in the pages of Architectural Digest.
Black and white checkered floor
tile had been glued down over cement (and not very evenly, I might add; it was
an unusual day when I didn’t stub a toe). On top of this sat a pair of frayed,
brown, velour couches that some distant relative had discarded--which we’d
arranged into an L-shape to face the nineteen-inch television abutting the
stairs. (Now that I think about it, those stairs were actually the one
architectural feature the basement did have, even if they did symbolically
remind of us our descension to the lower world). Overhead, fluorescents-- of course-- blazed
and flickered, illuminating things we’d rather not see, namely that our
refrigerator, a thirty-year old dinosaur that likely had come with the purchase
of the house, sat as its own piece of furniture in the living room.
“But why can’t we just slide it
into the kitchenette? It’s embarrassing,” we begged our father. This plea happened during our last stretch in
the basement, when he had taken us back there—yet again—and it made us question
things in a new way. We had also done everything we could to camouflage the
unit such as draping it with cloth and buying a fake plant to shroud it. But no
matter what we did, there remained a refrigerator in our living room.
“God, you guys act like it’s a dead
body,” our father said. He liked to say things like that, as if we were the
crazy ones for caring that four of us inhabited 800 square feet of dampness.
But we knew better. We lived in middle class suburbia and no one we knew had a
refrigerator in their living room.
For that matter, no one we knew
lived in anything other than a cape or a ranch home with windows; nor did they
sleep on futon mattresses or spritz their a hot water heater as part of their
cleaning routine in the “kitchen.” (I think in my mind now I am still
constructing the louvered doors I longed for to hide that embarrassing heater).
We had been through a long rough
patch, my sibling and I, but moving back for this final stretch was a complete demotion
to us, to a status even below foster children. At least while living in other
people’s homes we had had them to
blame for the chintzy furniture and bad taste in draperies. Now what could we
say?
Of course it’s true that we were
happy to have a roof over our heads, happy that we weren’t homeless and made to
sleep beneath the open sky—although now and then it did rain upon me; for the
foot of my futon caught the bathroom drip from above. But it was also a
senseless kind of roof, seeing as our father worked a profession that paid a
middle class salary that could afford us a place above topsoil.
Have I mentioned that the place was
also dangerous?
Just navigating to the back steps,
down the bush-lined path at the side of the house, one needed a machete. The
evergreen brush was so sorely overgrown that frequently one of us would come
bursting through the screen door cradling a poked eye or a scratched forehead.
I do believe there was a hedge clipper in the garage, and I even recall my
father outside on occasion snipping away, but those bushes seemed to me
symptomatic of my father’s life issues then; the more he clipped, the more wild
and untamable things became.
There was also the fact that when
night fell we could not see two feet in front of us. How many nights I walked
that path alongside the house, as if on a pirate’s plank, knowing an awful
inevitable awaited me around that bend.
Sometimes, as I rounded the back edge of the house, I’d ward off my
potential attacker, “Alright, Let’s get it on! You want some of this?”
Sometimes I cowered at a leaf rustle, fumbled with the key and hoped for the
best.
Once inside, little perils seemed
to mock us, like the cheap mirror squares on our bedroom door, the end corners
of which nipped at our passing fingers; or the bathroom shower tile wresting
itself from the wall with each watering, and once, with the assistance of
mildew, freeing the corner soap dish that nearly severed my big toe.
Most mocking--
and probably actually dangerous-- of all, was, of course, the monster living
inside our bedroom closet: the oil burner. Our clothes hung along the plumbing
pipes, but the closet was reserved for the great whale who heaved and growled
wintertime, yawning awake. The only separation between us and its noxious
breath was a thin wall of paneling.
We did
not know it yet, but the cats-- in further rebellion perhaps—were using the
floor beneath the belly of this beast as an alternate litter box. Countless
nights I jolted awake smelling the fresh scent of shit and would flick on the
light, searching frantically for its source.
The
quality of air—if I want to be so generous as to call it air- was pretty scary,
too. We all chain smoked, including Greg, when he was old enough to stand
inhaling, and then sprayed the air heavily with Lysol to hide the smell from
our grandparents-- and not once do I think we ever opened a window. I am also
remembering that we had no vacuum. Although we did have carpet.
Blue speckled, the carpet was in Jaz’s and my
“bedroom.” On the days when I could no longer take the chaos of our overflowing
ashtrays and clothes piles, I would “clean” by folding all the clothes into neat
piles, emptying the ashtrays and sweeping the rug by madly swinging the broom
towards the door of mirrored glass. Pennies and paperclips and odd bits of
plastic would hurtle forth, threatening to crack and shatter the glass. All the
while, a plume of dust and dander would rise like a tornado from the earth. I
would hang in there as long as I could, but finally the sneezing attack would
begin. And I would not—could not—stop, going twenty, thirty sneezes in a row. I
would have to dash outside and sometimes wait hours before returning, before my
lungs and sinus passage would finally settle down.
Thinking about it now, is it any
wonder that I still suffer residual health issues—that we all do?
It was there that my sister began
suffering from migraine headaches, her central nervous system going on alert
sending a tingling sensation through her fingertips.
(“Stress,” my father insisted).
It was there that Greg’s heart,
that miraculous little organ that once healed itself of a pinhole, would skip a
beat now and then.
(“Hypersensitivity,” my father said).
And it was there that we never knew
when we woke if it was night or day. If we were dreaming or awake. If we were
dead or alive.
Subterranean living: Needless to
say, I don’t think I will ever come around to liking it.
