When I was twenty, I lived in an attic. It was in a large old creaky house on Boyden Street in Syracuse that had been turned into five different apartments. The lady downstairs in the back was elderly and smoked cigarettes as if she were a factory and peered through a crack in the window whenever anyone came near the house. The two apartments that used to be the upstairs of the home belonged to two attractive girls. I never saw who lived in the other apartment.
The attic was odd. It had a 4 ft knee wall, all part of the steep pitched roof. There was a single dormer that acted as a desk area, a front window that I had to get on my knees to look out onto the street, and an old gas stove that scared me into eating at a Chinese restaurant down the street. The front door to the apartment was in the bedroom and you walked right to go to the kitchen and bathroom or left to go the living room with the odd window near the floor.
My friends at the time were all visual artists and when I wasn’t slinging Italian food to rich people in the suburbs, they would come over. At one point a large ream of paper was rolled out, covered with art. It stretched through the attic like a long ornate rug, from the kitchen, through the bedroom and all the way to the strange window near the floor. Then other artists came over, climbed the three flights of creaky stairs and walked into bedroom. They were there to draw, paint, drink, and smoke pot.
It was my apartment, but I was just a visitor on nights like these. I wanted to become a better writer and I watched the artists carefully. They would sketch ideas on a pad, make slight adjustments, discuss it, and then put it on the large ream of paper, at first lightly in pencil, and then discuss, make further adjustments before etching it darker and deeper.
I wanted to do that with writing. I was twenty and didn’t know much about anything. Especially writing, but even less about pot as I came to find out.
When I would be visiting my attic apartment there would be lots of pot. They were all smoking it, guys and girls, painters and graffitist, significant others and cousins. Most nights I poured wine for myself and bounced from group to group jumping in on conversations and taking mental notes and their approach.
I had found an old computer in a dumpster one night at Syracuse University and had taken it home and plugged it in. To my surprise, it worked. I was about to write the next great American Novel and I needed to know how. I mostly steered clear of the pot.
But one night I decided to smoke it and drink wine. I did not take any mental notes that night. I wandered around, visiting my apartment until everyone left.
When it was my apartment again, I decided to watch a movie. I flipped on the tv, grabbed the leftover Chinese food from the fridge, and plopped on the couch. I didn’t have a microwave and was scared of the oven, so the food was cold and it made me chilly, so I reached behind the couch for a blanket and touched something that startled me.
The couch was up against the wall and because of the pitched roof I wasn’t able to look back there. I set down my food and kneeled on the couch, my face pressed against the slanted ceiling, both hands fishing behind the couch for the pile of blankets my aunt gave me before I moved out on my own.
I touched something while back there. Something warm and human. Something that shouldn’t be behind the couch. I was absolutely terrified.
I moved my hand back to the spot where it was and I found it again. It was fleshy and warm and felt like skin. I grabbed a hold to see if it would move and it didn’t.
In retrospect, I should have moved the couch away from the wall to look but didn’t think of it at the time. I grabbed the thing again and pulled it up quickly, just in case whatever it was decided to wake up. As it got closer to the top of the couch I squinted and turned my head, leaning back in paranoid fear.
I pulled up my own hand. I had both hands behind the couch and my right hand had found my left hand and I pulled it up. My realization came slow, my furrowed nervous brow slowly turned into surprise and then to delight. I started giggling slowly, it turned into a deep breathless belly laugh, my soundless gurgling morphing into a high-pitched cackle and then to comedic titter. I laughed until the tears were streaming down my face.
It was then I realized that I had to be more careful when I was visiting my apartment.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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