Literary Crackhouse

I’m stuck in the upper-most corner of the rafters, teetering above a few members of the audience, in what looks from the street to be a crack house. I have issues with heights and bouts of claustrophobic anxiety and I am pretty sure the people below me can see the crack of my ass. My kids are alone, across the street at the KFC—oh, the things I do for my education.

I knew when I saw the room that it would be too small for all of us, my kids and me, to fit in. I didn’t have a plan B, but since I had to attend a literary reading, I knew I needed to form and implement one quickly, or subject the rest of the literary audience to the extreme discomfort of four cranky kids. Outside, I looked around at the corner of University Avenue and Utah Street, but all I saw were smoke shops and tattoo parlors, giving me an even bigger sense of worry. Then, like a lighthouse in a sea of fog, there stood the Kentucky Fried Chicken. I mentally tabulated the amount of cash in my wallet and Plan B was ready to be put into motion.

I left the kids sitting in a booth, with a stack of ones, some quarters, and instructions to “stay here!” The girls, 18 and 16, were used to babysitting their nine-year-old brothers, but not quite under these circumstances. The boys’ biggest problem was not that I was leaving them alone in a fast food restaurant but that they had never before eaten at a place like KFC, and they weren’t sure they’d like the greasy food. The irony of the situation tarnishes my halo of parental perfection.

Back at the crack house, the room is filling up. The seats have all been taken, and I am directed to the upper level of the room—and I use that term loosely. The upper level looks to me to be a reformed attic. Anyone over 5’6” would have to stoop. The walls of the attic have been torn away on one side, exposing the space below. I move to sit in a spot in the furthest most corner of this former attic, under the sloping roof. My seat is a makeshift piece of overhang consisting of a few dusty slats of wood. Luckily for me, I am short. Less luckily for me, I don’t fit into small corners like I used to.

Next to me is a small stereo set, the wires falling through the slats of wood and drawing my eyes downward to the unlucky people who, should they glance up, will undoubtedly see the mounds of tattooed flesh hanging over the waistband of my jeans. There is also a high school yearbook here, crowding the corner further and adding to the number of things that could possibly fall onto the people below me: the yearbook, the stereo, and me.

The room looks as if it has been condemned for demolition. But this seems oddly appropriate for a literary reading. The walls are unfinished, except for the blank white sheet of drywall screwed into the wall behind the podium. A freshly-fabricated, improvised bookcase takes up a corner, its newness standing out in the dust. Above me, ceiling pipes are exposed in several human-sized chunks, and I wonder if I will see any rodents wandering through. I notice the spider webs above and next to me, as I simultaneously feel the breeze on my exposed lower back, and I wonder what species of arachnid will be dining on my hide this evening. I attempt to relay the hilarity of the situation to the much-younger college student who is seated on the other side of the
yearbook and stereo, but she looks more trapped by my presence than I am by the sloping, dusty ceiling.

When the guest speaker begins, I am transported from this piece of wood in the upper-most corner of a literary crack house into his tale of academic adventure on the east coast. When he mentions a translucent scorpion, however, I wriggle back to reality, praying that no scorpions live in the walls behind me. The speaker continues with the story of an outhouse in Greece; a few moments later, the audience is treated to the sound of rushing water through the exposed ceiling pipes as someone flushes a toilet next door.

In between the sound in the pipes and the music of the prose, I am reminded why I’m here. I hear encouragement between the lines of poetry. And I know that, no matter the obstacle, I will someday be the speaker in front of a roomful of listeners.

After the reading is over, I make my way down from the attic and say a quick hello and goodbye to my classmates. I rush across the street to KFC and find Alexa, Kendall, Dane and Jared seated exactly where I left them. They have their own adventurous tales to tell of their leeriness at being left in such a sketchy environment, and the kinds of people who visited the restaurant during the hour of my absence.

During the ride home, they tell me of the guy who rushed into KFC to refill his Wendy’s cup with soda. They tell me of the guy seated next to them who spent the entire hour nibbling every morsel of meat off the bones of his pile of chicken. Somewhere along I-5, the subject changes to a website that has nothing but pictures of the people who shop at Walmart. Seems there is a picture of a guy that looks like a human condom.

“What’s a condom?” says Jared.

The girls look to me for answers, but I have none. After this night, don’t they realize I am making this up as I go along?