Ohhhhh….. STOP (tape squelch)
I’m an aural dude. My ears are much more sensitive and attuned than my other four senses. No, I don’t play an instrument; thanks for asking. Why did I start cooking instead of making music? I don’t know, man. Youth is wasted on the young. I like a warm, thick sound to ensconce me. The sound I heard slicing out of my kitchen at 3 a.m. on February 17 was the opposite of that.
It was all treble; it sounded unnatural and alive. Searing, powerful treble, ripping through the air of my kitchen, living room, and bedroom, where it found me asleep. Bleary and confused, I jumped out of bed, sans glasses and pants. Through squinting eyes, barely aware of my wet feet, I saw a hole in my kitchen ceiling about the size of a half dollar with water rushing out as fast as it could. I remember running to the bathroom for a bucket. When I returned to the kitchen, still squinting and making use of the street lights outside my windows to illuminate the situation, I thought, “Huh, I don’t remember the ceiling sagging like that before.”
As I bent over to set the bucket down, I heard a loud crash. Two-thirds of my ceiling swung from above me; suddenly, it was beside me. Judging by the rubble against the wall, it missed me by a foot or so. It might have been the late-night delirium, but at the time I thought it looked like someone had thrown an incredibly ungarnished, incredibly large turkey party sub against my wall. Taking in that moment—white and beige chunks of my ceilinged wall, cast in the orange hue of the high-pressure sodium street lights outside—I felt small. One more bucket, a call to my landlord, and a couple of washed feet later, I was back in bed, letting tomorrow’s problems wait for tomorrow.
With your feet on the air and your head on the ground, try this trick and spin it... yeah!
For a while, I managed, as a lifelong Midwesterner does. But skin crawls, and minds change. I was rescued from an apartment thick with rat shit dander and mildew by a great fucking friend. We regrouped in the ’burbs, and we returned with brown tarp, bleach, and staples. Out of the mess, we salvaged something manageable. Sometimes when I made coffee I would look up at that tarp and see it throbbing, like it was taking shallow breaths. Probably just a drafty apartment.
But eventually, two months of a brown tarp ceiling, meals cooked on an induction hot plate, and Colombian takeout gave way to a new kitchen. Not only a new roof—a brand new kitchen.
During the installation work, I came out of my home office, and my building’s handyman eagerly waved me over. He proudly described my new kitchen, seemingly of his own design. With sweeping arm motions, a twinkle in his eye, and a thick Eastern European accent, he painted the picture of the scene that awaited me: the counters, the cabinets, and the hardware, oh the hardware. Once he finished, I pointed out the space (or lack thereof) between the oven and the fridge in his new design. I walked over to my old stove, still covered in a thin film of dried plaster, and demonstrated that the space between the refrigerator and the stove was not enough to fit an open oven door and myself.
“Oh, well, it’s too late. Everything ordered,” he gruffly said and walked out.
There’s no dancing now in my kitchen, just stumbling. It feels unbalanced and cumbersome. Even after trying to set my workstations in comparable positions, the place feels unfamiliar. It was one thing when I hunkered down, tarp above my head, figuring out meals I could make in a Dutch oven and with not a lot else. My expectations were lower because I focused on getting by. But now that I am out of survival mode, and just trying to carry on with day-to-day life, I feel disconnected from this place. It isn’t in my body anymore; it all takes thinking when I want to return to muscle memory. All the essential elements of a kitchen are here, but it isn’t my kitchen. But as much as my body feels clumsy and uncomfortable in its confines, this is my new normal. And it’s not changing, so the only way out is through.
I woke up the other morning really fucking thirsty, too many ranch waters or glasses of Riesling or some damn thing. As I gulped a tall glass of water, with more than a little running down the sides of my face, I noticed something on my kitchen ceiling. I went to get my glasses and investigated further. Above my fridge was a new discolored and bulbous area. Parts of it were rust-colored, parts off-white, parts black. Together they formed an eye that looked back at me. What it was looking for, I can’t say.
I called my maintenance guy, describing the situation, and suggested that the fridge in the apartment above me might have a leak. He said he’d check it out. That was a few weeks ago. I haven’t heard back yet.
Your head will collapse, but there’s nothing in it, and you’ll ask yourself...
