pigeon
Well I forgot Matthew
In an earlier pigeon, I called my younger step-cousin “my younger step-cousin.” Let’s give him a name now: Jalvin.
There’s graffiti all over the walls.
The walls are covered in broad stripes of rusty orange and off white rough fabric, or possibly some sort of particle board. The floor is plywood, loosely comforted by a rug. The light is a bare bulb in one corner of the low ceiling, with a pull chain hanging down. The doorway is about four feet high, obscured by a hanging blanket. Perpendicular to the doorway and right outside it, a rope ladder hangs. You can either climb down the rope ladder, or you can use it as a suspension bridge to monkey your way across the gap to the landing; from the landing you can go out to the back yard, upstairs to the real world, or back down the stairs to the larger world of the basement.
One of the graffito in the little cubicle of the clubhouse is a childish scrawl: JALVIN IS STRONG. And underneath that, by way of elaboration: That’s why girls like him. (None of this is true.) Nearby, he has inked his first and last name, in case there might be any doubt in the minds of future spelunkers about specifically which Jalvin it was who was so strong and attractive to the opposite sex. Then under that, he has added Well I forgot Matthew.
For weeks I thought this was a cryptically elliptical note to me. You forgot what? What did you forget? But I never asked, because Jalvin was an annoying dork and whatever it was, it was probably dumb. Eventually, he revealed that his middle name was Matthew, and he had forgotten to include it in his mural signature.
See? Dumb.
No dumber than any other subterranean message, I suppose. No dumber than the impulse that led Arne Saknussemm to take up his 16th-century dague and carve his initials into granite, on the way to the Central Sea.
No dumber than Kilroy. No dumber than blogging.
I was over at my dad’s every other weekend (eventually every other week during summer, then full time after I turned 17 (but that’s a different pigeon)), and Jalvin was over there far less often than that, so the syzygy of us playing together was infrequent. I didn’t like him exactly. Some of his flaws I’ve enumerated previously. He was four years younger than me, so that was a demerit but also an advantage because I didn’t usually have someone to be older than. I’m not sure I was entirely comfortable in the role of elder, though. It has never really been my forté.
One of the best things about Jalvin was how much my stepmother, and by extension the rest of my immediate family (dad’s half), didn’t like him. There was plenty of gossip of the “Oh my god can you believe how annoying...” variety every time after he was gone. That’s always fun. Bonding moments, you know. Jalvin’s dad, my stepmother’s brother, we all loved. He reminded me of George Carlin and Kurt Vonnegut. We were ... cool, shall we say, about his second wife (Jalvin’s mom). I’m not going to get into her whole deal right now, but here’s a reference to another pigeon: she was so cheap, if you were at her house, she made you use your teabag twice. She bought all the plain label groceries, not just the ones where it really didn’t make any difference. (And not because they had to; they were both teachers, so they were — well, not poor, anyway.) In the white-elephant gag gift exchange at Christmas at my step-grandparents’ house, she would never hesitate to take the best candy and nuts literally out of the hands of children, when it was her turn and so her prerogative to do so.
And we found it emotionally expeditious to experience her son (their youngest for a while, until one younger was born) as a weird, creepy, clingy brat.
But playing with him was still OK, most of the time. Kids are after all adaptable in the business of play, no? You make it work.
My dad had made the clubhouse for my brother and me out of a hole in the basement wall. In our 1930s house there were several inexplicable pockets of wasted space. The basement had two dirt-floored caverns under the foundation, several feet above the cement floor. There was a big one, spanning the far side of the basement, that was never fully tamed and always smelled like rust and mold and cement and danger; and the smaller one, below and beside the wood-plank stairs, that he cleaned out and spiffed up so we could have a little secret hideaway.
My dad is cool like that.
We had a battery-operated shooting gallery in there (complete with hapless bear), a beanbag chair, bookshelves, all manner of weaponry, and the pictures of puppies I had pinned up on the walls. And the walls were designed to be drawn on. I’m sure they looked hideous once subjected to our artistic impulses, not only because of Jalvin’s patently false claims about his virility.
Any books you left down there would curl and fluff up with the dank humidity.
Shortly before my dad and step-mom sold that house and then proceeded to rapidly start getting old, my brother and I went down there to reclaim a few archeological items. Some Tonka trucks, a sword, a gun. The clubhouse had filled up with random crap, as any unused space will in a house that’s been lived in long enough. The dust and the silences of time had taken over.
A younger couple bought the house. I wonder what they use that space for. I hope it harmonizes with them. I hope it resonates. Can I love them? Can I assume they’re beautiful? Alive? Unwavering bands of light? Can I honor, for them, for all of us on our journeys to the center of wherever we’re going, the empty space in my heart that’s the exact size and shape of that tiny little room?