Rorschach Test

Melancholy Bridge - Kacy Crowley (mp3)
Lonely Boy - Andrew Gold (mp3)

An old man lives there. His clothes are raggedy, and he wears a moth-eaten sportscoat over torn white pajamas. His hair and overlong beard are more salt than pepper. And overalls. He has overalls on, too. But not a dog. His dog died many years before. As did his wife. She died many years before the dog. And he didn’t have any children. Or maybe he did, and they left him. They gave up on him. Maybe he wasn’t there enough for them, and now it’s irreparable.

It’s quite possible I have crossed over Thrasher Bridge a thousand times in my life. The bridge, which crosses over the Chickamauga Dam in Chattanooga, looks out to the west upon a railroad bridge some 300 yards away. Atop that old, bronzed and rusted metal structure, in the middle of the water’s width, sits a once-white house now gray from time and pollution. The house has no yard. It has no porch or deck. It barely has room for a front door and a walkway wide enough to stand outside.

I first remember seeing it when I was five or six. No telling how long it had been there. Must’ve been a bitch to build.

In railroad-speak, I’m sure this house has a very specific and vital function. In fact, it’s probably not called a house at all. Probably has some railroady name like “overlook station” or something. But I formed my story on this one early in life, and I’m not about to go let an education get in the way of my imagination in this particular instance.

Because this house has been the focus of my attention off and on for more than 30 years, how I see it and the characters I’ve invented to live in that structure have become an undeniable Rorschach Test on where I am at a given moment.

As a small kid, I remember thinking that house must be awesome. It’s so high up you could see practically anything. You had this awesome pool surrounding your house. You could dive in right off the front stoop. You could hop a train as it passed underneath and travel practically the whole world. Anything was possible.

In my teenage years, I thought more about Rapunzel. The house was a prison, and some teenage boy had been locked away up there. His job was merely to observe and report on all he saw from his perch. His punishment was to be limited in his interactions to merely that: observing and reporting. He could never actually do. Only see.

In my 20s, I thought the house would make the perfect location for a superhero base. He could get anywhere in the city quickly by way of rail, water or roadways, and the metallic column supporting his house could easily hide vehicles specific to each need, because no one looked that closely. He could have a secret drop that went alllll the way to the bottom of the river -- kinda like the firepole Batman would ride to his cave in the TV show. It was both the perfect Fortress of Solitude and efficient gateway to anywhere.

Lately, I’ve seen that sad old man. Loved ones have died. He’s living up there by choice, a prison of his own choosing. In some sense, he’s similar to the Rapunzel character of my teenage vision, but now he’s his own warden, his own captor, and the only reason he doesn’t come down is because he doesn’t want to, or can’t find the courage, or doesn’t see the point.

Prior to this latest version, the house's primary resident has always been some direct version of myself. The wild and fancy free version of childhood. The trapped teenage prisoner. The superhero atop a world of possibility. But this last one, the old man, I try to imagine him as someone else.

At times, I think this is because I’ve grown wiser, that I've begun connecting the house and its fancied inhabitant with the people around me, with circumstances beyond my own self-absorption. Other times, I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve memorized that scene from The Empire Strikes Back, and I know if the light saber slices off that old man's facade, the face emerging from the smoke just might perfectly reflect my own.

Anyways.

Anyways, it's a cool house to stare at whilst driving across the bridge.

Light in the Attic

Gravity - Josh Joplin Group (mp3)
Rudderless - Lemonheads (mp3)

While over at my mother's house for dinner recently, I was following my 16-month-old whirling dervish as he two-stepped like a drunken penguin down her hallway. I looked up at the entrance to our attic and noticed a light had been left on up there.

Our attic is a place of personal myth and legend, as I suspect attics and basements are for many children. I remember thinking it was a grand privilege to be allowed to go into the attic. I felt special climbing those rickety wooden ladder-steps and pulling myself up into a place that was always 50 degrees colder or warmer than the hallway below. The temperature change made the attic feel supernatural -- certainly ghosts and other creatures caused such climate change -- and having to maneuver around and over the entrance lest you fall to your premature death added a constant sense of risk.

Back in my childhood and teenage years, the attic was so packed you couldn't hardly get to anything. Boxes packed in so tightly that the only way to reach the ones farthest back would be to remove the ones in-between from the attic altogether. Entire undiscovered species of rodentia could have (and probably did) lived comfortably amidst this cardboard and fiberglass city.

Even when I was much shorter, I couldn't stand up in the attic, so going anywhere required crawling on all fours, which made it feel as if I were on reconnaissance in some military exercise. Perhaps the military feel came from the long line of Navy uniforms my father kept hanging on a pole that stretched what seemed 30 feet along the left side of that attic. Because this clothesline sat right near the narrow middle aisle, it was inevitably the focal point for anyone truly hoping to explore the greater mysteries on the darker, sketchier end. Beyond those clothes was increasing darkness and thus an ever-increasing ominous feeling. (Not to mention that if you went up there in July, the deeper in you went, the more likely you could pass out from the overpowering heat before you could reach the exit.)

When I lived there, one trip into the attic virtually guaranteed a week-long obsession over a single box or region. I must have spent several hours a day during one of my junior high summers, going into that attic and carefully investigating every yearbook my mother had tucked away. The ones she saved from her own school years were fascinating, but it was her collection of '70s and '80s books from teaching at Central High and Red Bank that I would study with hunger.

What were those high school students like? Were they all as fucked up as my step-brothers, who failed to make it out of there with a diploma? What made the cute girls cute in 1975? What made the popular guys so popular in 1980? What did happiness look like for a teenager? Was there anything more worth coveting than being captured permanently in a book for all eternity dancing with or standing next to, with arm around the neck of, a beautiful girl?

It was the pictures of couples I studied more than anything else. Why were those two people together? What did she see in him, and he in her, and who the hell on this planet will ever consider being in that kind of picture with my arm around them, or dancing next to me?

Other times I'd explore my father's boxes of military paraphernalia, things I'm absolutely certain he never once looked at once he boxed them up. He liked saving things for the symbolic act of saving them, because he knew they were somehow important enough to keep, but I don't recall him spending much of his life traveling down memory lane. As much as he enjoyed golf, I don't even think he enjoyed golf stories. He was a gardener at heart. You don't garden in the past. You garden for the present and future. Last year's tomato crop ain't worth talking about. Once the seasons change, you box the important memories up, stuff 'em in the attic, and let 'em sit there until you die.

After my brief obsession would end, I'd forget about the attic for a couple of seasons. More boxes would be shoved into all corners. The journey would get more treacherous, and the lighting would reach fewer nooks and crannies. And these changes made going up there again in eight or nine months all the more delicious.

I'm decades older, but I still look up at that entrance every time I walk under it. It still holds sway in me.

As I crawled toward the back of the attic to turn out that light, I passed by several boxes of my things I had yet to take to my house. Magazines I kept over time filled two boxes. Several years' worth of Esquire back when it wasn't trying to be Maxim. Several "Collector's Editions" of LIFE. Two years of Atlantic Monthly. And what kind of male would I be if I hadn't stuck a few Victoria's Secret catalogs and three highly-adored issues of Playboy in-between these other mags?

But the last box... it's exactly the kind of box that makes an attic magical, because no matter how many of these "last boxes" you find, you only find one of them at a time, and you find them when you most need to find them.

To be continued...

"Gravity" is from Useful Music. "Rudderless" is from It's a Shame About Ray. The latter can be found on Amazon.com or iTunes while the former is only on iTunes.