The Dark at the Bottom of the Stairs
I live underground, which is a remarkable statement considering that its genesis was haphazard, random. The architect of my home, who was not really an architect but merely a contractor, took a (then) 20-year ordinary house, a rambler, moved it onto property, jacked it up, and began to build a future.
Mine, as it turned out. As it turns out.
He built a thousand square feet of day basement, obviously intended to be of the mother-in-law variety: wired and plumbed for a living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, until he ran out of money and sold it to me.
Last summer, a bloodsucker of a mortgage refinancer told me, in verifiable ways but still you have to wonder, that my house had a market value over $300,000. The state, appraising for taxes, would put it in the low 200,000s, but then they do that.
In 1988, I paid $83,000 for it. So. Sometimes you do all right.
The basement was unfinished, as was the landscaping. I planted grass and mowed and trucked in rock and bark, but the basement was beyond my control, or aptitude. Giving me an unfinished space, a wet dream for a home-improver, was like handing a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle to a 6-month-old. It's not going to happen, although something may, although some of it may be dangerous.
When I began working at home, my brother-in-law came over and turned the bedroom part of this basement philosophy into a home office, mostly by framing walls and putting up drywall (sheetrock, whatever you call it, wherever). So now I exist in 300 square feet (I think; I estimate 20 feet deep by 15 feet wide, but I'm not really good along those lines).
It's not a dungeon, just an office. We live on a hobbit hill, so a level foundation still results in windows (on the other side) that are eye level with the grass, and others (my side) that seem fairly normal, a few feet from the ground. I get plenty of light, in other words, and see my dog scamper in the backyard and plums fall from the tree. I'm not a hermit.
But it's my space, partly because of tax reasons, partly because we have plenty of room in this house for other spaces, and partly because it can get a little toxic. I open the window from time to time, and last week I brought the Shop-Vac in to suck up the residue on the floor of quick meals and old Altoids, but it reeks of solitude and loneliness, and I blame nobody for trying to avoid this room. It's mine, and I tell people that, when it's messy, which it often is, it looks like the inside of my head. From what I can tell. It's just a metaphor.
"Office" is an awkward word, sort of the way you say "commode" and I say "toilet," or I say "soda" and you say "pop," or you call half an acre a "ranch" or an "estate" when it's really a "yard." Still, I understand.
I had a friend, 20 years ago, who moved into an apartment and put a piece of shelving across a closet, parked his typewriter there, and called it his office. That's what he said. "I'm going to my office," he would say, and walk three feet and sit in his chair and separate.
"It's a cupboard," I would think then, but now I have an "office" and I write about it with that term, not "computer room" or "den" or something else, and I assume some of you think that's silly, too.
Nobody else comes in here. There's no reason to, so I'm allowed to get sloppy and lazy here, to manifest my brain on the carpet. I have two plants that have died, for example, that just have wilted under the dust and inattention, and they are plastic. Just for example.
There are boxes of computer parts, and then just computer parts, a keyboard, an old mouse, a few manuals. Several cookbooks. A text on programming in VBA. Some Simon&Garfunkel CDs. A couple of Dell catalogs. Some plastic bags.
Two full-scale relief maps, and a globe.
And a poster.
It was a whim. I love biography, which she knows, and particularly political biography, and especially presidential biography, and maybe specifically contemporary presidential political biography. So Julie found this poster for sale, a famous picture, Life Magazine, taken by Hank Walker on July 25, 1960, the day before my second birthday, just before the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.
I look at this poster a lot, mostly when I'm bored.
It's a hotel room. John Kennedy sits in a chair, right hand draped over his thigh, left hand holding his chin, mouth open, talking apparently, looking down.
A foot away, perched on a bed, his brother Bobby sits, hands on his knees, eyes closed, head tilted to the right. One is talking and one is listening.
Sometimes they move, when I look at them.
The rules had changed, in 1960, and JFK knew it and a lot of others didn't. He went through the primaries, fought through West Virginia, and he came to LA knowing he had the delegates while Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader, stayed in Washington and liked to assume he would push the youngster aside when it mattered.
They tried to reconstruct smoke-filled rooms, and Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, said, "If we have to take a Catholic, why this pissant Kennedy?" and they were relics, then. He was young and smarter. And he had a brother.
They were of The Greatest Generation, which because of their youth and young deaths doesn't play much these days, but they saw war and it changed them.
I look at this poster all the time. We know more about JFK, know about his weaknesses and hedonistic tendencies and medical problems. He and his brother would both take bullets in the brain, as it turned out, in their 40s, such was the time.
If I had time-travel fantasies, I'd go back then, to that hotel room, and tell them what to avoid. Don't go to Dallas. Take a different exit after winning the California primary. Be sure what you want with the Cuban effort. Don't mess with the Mafia, they hold grudges, they will kill one of you to get the other. Don't fool around.
Marilyn Monroe is unstable.
But, mostly, I look at two dimensions and see three.
They will (would) walk out of that hotel room. Into the future, into an interesting if painful future, a future that held (holds) me, and I think today that the door is the best part.
You get to leave the room, you see. You can. I can. Open the door, is all.
My brother stops by today, on Spring Break, with his family. If I really wanted him to, he'd lean over and close his eyes and listen, but he's a wise man and he'd probably want to tell me to open the door, there's more out there, Horatio, than you dream of.
Well, there you go, stream of consciousness. I have a toilet, or commode, to clean before we have visitors. And more than one door to open. And I think now that if you see photographs move and plastic plants wilt, it might be time to get out. So. Getting out now. 
3:20:10 PM 
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