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

By Adam Rapp

The Third Policemen should have been college radio royalty. But it never really happened for James Ingalls and his band; even if obsessives now covet their vinyl albums and EPs, it doesn't change the fact that his 20s slipped away, and then, so did his wife. She's now off in New York with another man while James took the family house in Illinois when his dad retired to Florida.

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So now I am a landlord in the house I grew up in. I feel neither sentimental nor disturbed by this fact. I'd like to think that after a failed marriage and a semi-promising rock-n-roll career that has evaporated into the Mist of Destiny (or Irony), that I have found the comfort of acceptance in the simplicity of my life. Is this grace, I wonder? Or is a series of small rationalizations that mask an enormous failure? I probably won't know until I reach old age, if I'm that lucky (cancer runs in my family like salmon in the River Tweed).

Todd and Mary Bunch, a young married couple in their late twenties, live in the ground-floor apartment (#1). Their six-year-old daughter, Larel, has recently gone missing and as of late there have been detectives and representatives from the Pollard Missing Persons Bureau hanging around. It's been two weeks since the disappearance and Todd and Mary owe me January rent. It's not easy wrangling money from people when they're down on their luck, let me tell you.

The Bunchs were former trapeze artists in the Ringling Brothers Circus and they gave that up after their daughter was born, and now Todd is a rookie at the local Fire Department and Mary, a petite, doll-eyed, slightly haunted-looking milk-maid-of-a-girl, spends almost as much time moored to the house as I do.

This morning a detective from the Missing Person's Bureau visited the house. His last name was Mansard and he had the face of an insomniac and his line of questioning had mostly to do with the Bunch's domestic habits, specifically odd behavior, and whether or not there has been any sings of spousal or child abuse, to which I could only answer -- and honestly so -- that I didn't know; that I never noticed anything out of the ordinary like bruises or limps or silent cries for help. I explained that the house was nearly a hundred years old (it's 96, actually), with thick walls and floors and a layer of acoustic vinyl I had installed underneath the carpeting on each story. Mansard seemed suspicious of me, like I was somehow in cahoots with the Bunch's.

"You really haven't seen anything?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Nothing."

He gave me his card the way they do in 70s movies and walked off the porch with his head tilted slightly to the left. I'm sure he'll be coming around again.

In the second floor apartment (#2) is my ex-brother-in-law, Bradley, who was living with Sheila Anne and I for a few months before she left me. Bradley had dropped out of Wisconsin-Whitewater for unexplained reasons and was wrestling with a pretty ferocious weed habit, which, after his money dried up, was quickly replaced by his sister's 27-inch high-definition television. Bradley is one of those handsome, athletic-looking types who've never played a sport in his life. Women seem to descend on him the way crabapples fall out of trees and he is the least bit interested. In my opinion it is not his sexual orientation that accounts for this lack of interest -- he's obviously straight -- but a kind of disconnect from the world that, in its most elemental state, is plant-like. And like most plants, it is only sunlight and water that he needs; a condition that might be called human photosynthesis. Recently he has grown a full beard and exists largely in his underwear (not terribly unlike Yours Truly). When he does leave the house he wears a long black trench coat and an equally black skullcap. I suspect that underneath the trench coat he is still clad in his BVDs.