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That Time When All the Sad People Came and Stayed at My House - Part One

By Adam Rapp

I haven't left my house in fourteen months. It is January 25th and three days ago a foot of snow fell on Pollard, Illinois and its surrounding farmlands and I have been spending the last few hours counting the number of people laboring down the middle of my street on cross-country skis. It is strange how full-body winterwear makes gender difficult to identify, especially during a snowstorm. Cross-country skiing is apparently a solitary pursuit, as I have not seen duos or trios forging out together. Perhaps there is something about the threat of being snowbound in a small town that inspires the lone adventurer in all of us? They're not going to find much in Pollard (and they probably already know this), although the houses on my street -- the ones I can see at least -- suddenly have an innocent gingerbread quality, with snow-heaped gables and frosted yards.

Inside my attic room it is warm and dry and the humidifier beside my writing desk issues a calming hiss and the occasional gurgle. I am dressed in long underwear and a light blue terrycloth bathrobe that has become a kind of monastic uniform as of late. This morning I believe my life took a subtle but tectonic shift when I realized that I hadn't taken the robe off in nine days. I smell like the attic, or maybe the attic smells like me. One of the strange symptoms of even the mildest form of agoraphobia is that it gets more difficult to distinguish between personal and household odors.

I inherited the house from my father after he retired and took his third wife, Sissy, to live out their days in Jupiter, Florida. That was four years ago and it's taken almost half that time to get rid of the scents of filterless Pall Malls and hemorrhoidal ointment. The hemorrhoidal ointment was my mother's and even though she died nine years ago I believe my father hoarded its strange medicinal odor of mink oil and turnips as a sentimental reminder of his true love and high school sweetheart. The Pall Malls were his and I'm convinced that despite his two-packs-a-day habit he will live to be a hundred.

It's a solid brick, Victorian home with a wrap-around front porch, lots of well-glazed, double-paned windows, and a handsomely paneled, industrial-carpeted, mold-free basement that has never flooded. Since my time on earth, the house has survived three tornados, a first-floor fire, an authentic wild boar, and a wave of resilient, late 70s termites that took six months of an archaic baiting process to get rid of. There are three bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs, off the living room. A year ago I converted the first two floors of the house into individual apartments, adding a bedroom to the first floor and a kitchen to the second. Three months before that one-half of the basement was outfitted with a false gypsum ceiling, a carpet improvement, a kitchenette, and eight panels of sheetrock. Even though I have been running fans for weeks it still smells like joint compound and bleach down there. My first basement tenant is scheduled to move in the day after tomorrow. His name is Bob Blubaugh, which sounds like some unfortunate character in a bad American independent film. I don't know much about him beyond the fact that, like me, he is in his mid-30s and, unlike me, he was the second alternate on the American Olympic luge team at Salt Lake City. He says he has very few belongings.

On the phone his voice was soft and clear and I imagined it emanating from someone with an inflamed, permanently chapped face; a result no doubt caused by years of coping with icy luge chutes and high-velocity winds.

In the attic I have a twin bed with a good mattress and plenty of floor space. I have a wall of books and a midlevel stereo system with state-of-the-art speakers. I have an authentic '69 Les Paul Epiphone electric guitar on a beat-up guitar stand and a small Marshall kick amp that I make noise with for a few minutes each day. I also have a wireless telephone and a small analogue answering machine from the late-80s that makes people sound like they're transmitting vocal arrangements from outer space.

I haven't changed the strings on the Les Paul in over a year and I have recently taken to sketching it in the margins of the very manuscript that I am using to chronicle all of this. (Whatever this winds up being -- a novel, a confession, a grand, self-indulgent palaver -- is anyone's guess.) Sketching things that historically resonate to me is perhaps my one sentimental guilty pleasure. I used to sketch my ex-wife a lot. And there was even a time when I spent a lot of time sketching my little brother Al, but he's dead now and like most things that pass through memory I have lost hold of what the story of his face was. Al was a special-ops Marine and he was killed by a car bomb in Iraq sixteen months ago, approximately three weeks before their purportedly democratic elections. He was the one member of my family who I actually got along with and I really believe he thought he was over there doing the world some good. We disagreed about politics and books but loved the Chicago Cubs with the same blind passion. So much so that we actually both wept when they let go of Sammy Sosa.

My wife left me ten days after Al's funeral so it was a pretty rough month. No one has seen the margins of whatever this is, so between my guitar, Al's face, and the various curves and planar pleasures of my ex-wife's anatomy I feel pretty safe that their various implications will remain an author's secret.

I also have my own bathroom up here with a working sink and shower. In the center of the attic floor is a bearskin rug that my father left boxed in the basement. I will occasionally lie on it and think of Sheila Anne (my ex-wife), her strawberry blond hair and her small perfect breasts and the slender, subtle natural arc of her back; my wife who left me for another man whose teeth are so white they almost hurt to think about (Sheila Anne insists he doesn't bleach them), a man five years my junior who dresses like an adult and has a lot more money than me. She and Dennis Church (is his middle name Catholic? Presbyterian? Lutheran? Russian Orthodox?) live in New York City in what I imagine to be some gleaming high-rise apartment building overlooking the Hudson River. I have never been to New York City. When the band was touring I had gotten as far east as Pittsburgh, but The Big Apple has eluded me the same way large game bass elude certain kinds of cursed fishermen.