My Place in the Pipes

Before my mom and dad divorced, I stumbled into this place in the basement where I could hide and watch. I guess I was 7. Maybe 8. It was a place I had discovered by accident, the kind of godforsaken dangerous vein in the wall that I’d holler at my kids if I saw any of them squeezing in there.

But no one ever caught me.

No one ever even knew I was there.

The basement was three rooms and there was no sunlight down there; it was dank carpet sad, a subterranean crypt where my dad drank alone and hammered hard nails into wood. Everything reeked of stale Parliament smoke/ the potent stench smashing into your face as soon as you opened the old door in the kitchen corner that led down there. My dad’s bar room was at the back: a tight dark tomb of air rising up around the imposing bar he’d built himself out of plywoods he’d stolen from his job, stains from Sears, bottles and mirrors and neon signs that gave off a familiar glow I’d experienced many times before in the hundreds of remote taprooms I’d sat in with my dad on warm summer afternoons after we’d fished for smallmouths with spinners.

In the middle of the basement was the largest room, a kind of rec room that had a couch or some chairs. It went largely unused, I think. My mom never came down there. No one did really.

In the front, underneath our built-in porch that looked out onto 9th Avenue, there was a small workshop my dad used to build things. Or fix them. Or maybe that’s where he ruined them for all I know. This was the spot where I learned to hide. Away from the hideous light of the halogen tubes raining down on my dad’s vises and his grinder and his metal tool boxes, I eased my body- slim and weak- into a space where the wall opened up to let the pipes pass through. For a brief time, it would become a refuge. A kind of blind. A sort of fort of total invisibility where a little boy could disappear but still see many, many things.