b/c the old man really did kick it.
if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know who i’m talking about: our old man neighbor, the loner, the one we always checked in with each other about–that we’d seen him around. the one i’ve been irritated with for months and months: for his overgrown yard, rat factory garage, unconnected gutters…for reporting us to the city for a bag of leftover recycling that was mistaken for trash when i don’t even know if he’s the one that reported us. the one we could have reached out to more b/c we knew he didn’t have any family or friends.
we’d been smelling something weird in the house since wednesday or thursday. honestly, it smelled like a dead mouse, but just in the front of the house. we figured this was the case, since we just hired a new exterminator and he’d set a bunch of traps. as the days went by, it got stronger. hell, just this morning holly was sniffing really deeply–reallly really deeply (ugh)–by our front window looking for clues. we lifted up the arm chairs yesterday, half-expecting to find a rotting mouse or something. late last week we lifted up the couch. nothing there either. the smell sort of seeped into the basement, too. i’d even decided i’d call the exterminator to have a look this week since we just couldn’t find anything. it got to the point that we couldn’t do anything for any period of time (homework for holly, various writing assignments for me) b/c the smell got so distracting that we couldn’t concentrate–holly has homework, i have articles due soon and various writing assignments–let alone cook, and it really freaked us out that we couldn’t locate its source.
we didn’t see the old man on halloween (us three next-door neighbors: the “BGE guy,” old man and holly and i usually sit on our marble stoops each year with bowls of candy for trick-or-treaters). heck, we hadn’t seen him for at least a couple of weeks. we decided today we’d knock on his door to see if he was ok. if no one answered, we’d call 311, the non-emergency police line.
we knocked before we left to go out this morning. no answer. then we knocked on our neighbors’ door (the one who lives on the other side of the old man, the aforementioned “BGE guy” and his family) to ask if they’d seen him lately. or smelled something. but they weren’t home. we knocked on the old man’s door when we got back. still no answer. we talked to a couple more neighbors and asked if they’d seen him lately (he usually walked out to the local grocery store a couple times a week) and they all said, come to think of it, no we haven’t. so that’s when we decided we’d call 311, all the while expecting it to be nothing. he’d be alive–and mad and freaked out when the fire department kicked down his door, hell that might kill him, we figured–and we’d have wasted a whole lot of emergency responder time over a dead mouse in the wall, and we’d feel like the crazy, worry-over-nothing neighbors.
as soon as the officer got to the old man’s front door he knew. he said he could smell it from outside. plus there were flies on the inside of the windows. and condensation. (we’ve had an abundance of flies lately. it’s been odd, and i…don’t want to talk about it.) he was “95 percent sure” he said that our neighbor was dead inside the house, and had been so for some time.
soon the fire crew came, took out their ladders, climbed up and opened his windows to get in. we watched from the roof (we didn’t want to be in the house, but we didn’t want to be outside of it either; the roofdeck seemed like the best possible option, tho we noticed we could smell it from up there, too) as the firefighters and officers put on oxygen tanks and masks to go inside. that’s when i knew that our very worst baltimore nightmare had come true.
i wasn’t out there when they cracked the windows open, but when i came outside a little while later, there were still flies swarming on the formstone front of his house. the smell spilled out onto the sidewalk. it morphed into a smell that i don’t want to ever smell again. it’s burned into my memory.
i felt selfish for feeling so grossed out and disgusted. after those grossed-out type feelings passed a little, i felt just plain weirded out that we were just going on with our lives as he lay dead inside. (he must’ve had a heart attack and fallen on the ground, the crew told us.) once i got all those feelings (temporarily) out of my system, i started feeling really sad for him. that he didn’t get to die with dignity or with family around. that he was so alone in this world that the two girls next store wound up smelling something and called the police and the coroner had to take him out in a bag. that’s no way to go. then we both started feeling bad for not making more of an effort. we should have brought him hot meals, holly said. i shouldn’t have been so mad at him the past few weeks (since we got that environmental citation i suspect he turned us in for), i said. hell, the last time i saw him, just over two weeks ago, i’d say, he was standing in his doorway, wanting to say hello. he was oddly friendly all of the sudden, and i figured it was b/c he wanted to keep us off his trail (from suspecting that he was reporting our trash that wasn’t really our trash). he startled me, and i said hello and that was it. i was grumpy. little did i know that would be the last time i’d see him alive. now i feel terrible about it.
i take comfort in the fact that, in my mind, he’s not alone anymore. and with loved ones long gone. i wish the cops hadn’t thought it’d be funny to tell me gruesome details i pretty much begged them not to tell me so i could picture him as i had known him: as the white-haired, long-bearded eccentric man, always in his tan safari hat with the string hanging around his neck. walking quietly to the supermarket, always in khaki, multi-pocketed cargo pants and a dark blue jacket, always buttoned up, even on the hottest days. who mumbled about public television shows even i didn’t watch (like britcoms; oy, the britcoms) even when i worked at one (admittedly, i watch very little public television; yes, even when i worked at a public television station). who thought we were spying on him when we built our decks. the ex-morgan state librarian who tried to be friendly to us, even tho it was painfully obvious it was hard for him.
we won’t be staying in our house for the next couple days. (i’m writing this from our good friends’ house) it needs to air out. my whole head needs to air out, actually. i’m going to saline spray the hell out of my nose before i go to sleep tonight. we think our freshly laundered pajamas may have an odor to them, but honestly, what can we do? i’m going to ignore it and just put them on and try to go to sleep.
we continue to shake our heads b/c we never really thought it would come to this. we didn’t really think he’d “kick it” and then we’d “smell something.” it was always this morbid half-joke. and here’s it come true.
i’ve got to admit that this is just too much. i just want some peace and quiet. i just want all of this disgusting stuff to stop (and i haven’t even told you the half of it; i am saving some real doozies for the book). i know i joke around a lot about everything: about our neighborhood. the hookers and the dealers and the rats and the alleys. but at this point, i gotta say: i really just want to move away and leave this all behind. i don’t want to go back to our house. i feel like everything’s changed. i don’t want to sleep there. i don’t want to live there. i feel crazy just thinking about it. baltimore, i’ve had enough. i really think it might be time to go.
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