We were going to party like it was 1999. Then we looked at the calendar and hoped we’d done that.
On a fine summer’s day in 1999 the crouching lady who lived in the house where I grew up let Dad and I come in. I was allowed to go upstairs to see my old rooms. She extended exposure to the backyard where we commonly camped out behind the brick grill and cooked bacon and beans before the neighbors woke up. Even the garage was fair game. Only the basement was ruled out-of-bounds.
The pleading began.
“Come on,” I yipped. “That was my playground, my paradise, my altar. Everything I know incubated there. I developed my pipes in the laundry area. It was comedy cultivation headquarters.”
She proved unmoved by histrionics.
“Sorry,” she said. “I can’t let you go down there. Forget about it.”
We moved from that house in the late-1950s. My entire boyhood was wrapped in its basement’s small closets, passageways, hidden storage areas and other mythology. I wasn’t going to give up.
“Oh Jesus Christ,” I said, hoping an intimidating escalation in rhetoric would shake her resolve. “I must go down there. I have to go down there. Won’t you please reconsider? Can’t you see how important this is to me? Do you have even half a heart?”
What she really had were a quirky manner and a saucy disposition.
“Mine’s an artificial heart,” she told me. “They’re superior to the government issued version. Of course I recognize what going down into MY basement means to you. The only problem is, you don’t live here any more you fucking little asshole. Treasure your memories for what they are, images within the brain.”
As a one-time member of a college debate team I recognized openings within her remarks. But Dad was growing weary of this dialogue and signaled, by stepping on my left foot, he was ready to go. I knew I only had one chance left and would have to seize it immediately or lose a golden opportunity for possibly another 50 years.
“What’s the source of your opposition?” I posed the question directly, succinctly and in both Canadian and American. “Are you harboring the missing Hearst daughter down there?”
Her frown expanded nearly filling a zip code.
“That’s none of your business,” she told the former newspaper reporter whose skill sets include advanced coercion and elementary nepotism. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”
Now she’s on the run, he thought as he scratched his thigh and considered 1st Corinthians, Verse 6.
“Something illogical is at the root of your fear,” he proclaimed in a triumph of reason and bombast.
“You’re clearly obsessed. It’s about Y2K isn’t it, the new century, the drama of change, the computer anxiety, the unprecedented fear so prevalent in the emerging conservative media?”
Her facial tone changed from red to a lighter shade of mauve. Her thinly painted eyebrows perked slightly. Her weight shifted like a jug of soymilk in the trunk of a swerving Dodge Dart. Her frog-skin boots made a soft clicking sound not dissimilar from the subtle “rat-a-tat-tat” cadence of a junior church usher’s exodus from vespers. “How did you know that,” she inquired with a casual gasp.
“I’m the writer,” I conceded. “I get to make all of this up and call it great literature. It’s my word processor and I’ll buy if I want to.”
Her reticence gave way to Gestalt. “The basement’s full of packets of lentil soup and boxes of dried raisins,” she said in confession, sobbing and emitting various fluids from each of her disintegrative facial crevices. “My grandchildren are making me store it there in case the world as we know it ends when the calendar turns to 2000. They want to ensure I survive while the rest of humanity is starving to death simply because they can’t get the lights on at Kroger’s. Fortunately I like macaroni.”
Well, shoot everybody, I wasn’t going to let a few palates of cranberry powder prevent me from seeing where I used to hide from my sisters and sing along with “Don’t Be Cruel.”
Looking her straight in the eye I made my final plea. “I’ll give you five-dollars for five minutes down there, I won’t eat any of your food and I definitely will never mock your survivalist paranoia. Just let me slip back into my childhood for one final moment of reverie and quash the ghosts of my past while my libido still processes blank matter. This means more to me than all the herb in North Bangkok. I beg of you sister, show me some mercy for crying out loud, for the love of Mike!”
She wouldn’t budge. Stacks of boxes meant too much humiliation. Even my most acute arguments failed.
“Tough shit,” she said. “Ain’t no way, Jose.”
And there was no way, no know-how. Whatever partying we might have done in 1999 paled in comparison to one unyielding woman’s denials. But, I digress.