When we were younger, we built forts from blankets in the florescent glow of the television set. We sat, curled up, hiding. It was our place where we paid the imaginary rent and arranged the imaginary furniture. I couldn’t wait to find my own home because it wouldn’t be anything like my parents’.

It would be just like the house around the corner. When I was nearly a teenager, I discovered porn in between the concrete foundation of my neighbor’s house. I was told that this was something I had to see, and that it was safe because Bob couldn’t get in. Bob was my neighbor’s father, a sculptor and ex-member of the Hell’s Angels who visually represented both equally. He stood well over six feet tall and wore a long grey beard. His Harley was kept in his shop, downstairs, and it featured an animal’s skull above the front wheel.

Even in times when I was afraid of him, I respected him—liked him even. I knew more about him than I did any of my other friends’ fathers. He never wore a black suit or a watch and he wasn’t balding—a condition I later learned was not entirely controlled by genes, that could certainly be embarrassingly concealed. He was home a lot and drove a big van with no seats—we got to sit in the back and roll around with whatever huge pieces of marble or sheetrock he was working with at the time.

His house was through the woods, a five-minute walk that put me in the backyard of a house on his block. This yard had a chain link fence around it with plastic playground equipment. Their lawn was Kelly green and their house was complete with grey aluminum siding, to match the trees in winter. As I walked down the street, all of the houses looked like this, with sprinkler systems sneaking up on you and brand new Volvos in the driveways.

My neighbor’s driveway looked like a masonry supply lot. It had your regulars—gravel, peat moss, bags of concrete, wheelbarrows. In between them were huge marble sculptures crawling all the way up the broken, crumbling driveway. There were tarps and cars and old bicycles and paint and some pieces of spotty grass coming up between the cracks. I went there almost every day for many years.

Inside, it seemed the rooms were always changing. There were big, hardcover books everywhere, covering every surface that wasn’t already taken by artwork. There weren’t very many lights because it seemed like everywhere you looked was glass. There were skylights and glass doors and even some windows inside of the house, giving glimpses to other rooms you might not go into as much. I thought it was weird when there was a five-foot hole in the living room wall, until the next week when they’d decided another window would fit nicely. The inside of the house worked that way too—when they decided they

had

enough of the way things looked, they’d just knock down a few walls and build new ones.

So, somewhere in the middle of his house was a little tunnel. It was a miscalculation in the design of the house, a crawlspace uncovered by knocking out a wall with a sledgehammer. There was only enough room to squeeze between the two-by-fours that held up the ceiling, to get into a sort of crawlspace. It was created by gaps in the concrete giving way to a dirt bubble, creating a stomach at the end of the esophagus. Inside were milk crates full of magazines, their covers boasting fonts that I recognized from old movies. Their women full of hair and pale skin and nipples that were flat and the size of pancakes. Their pages like worn out paper bags, dry brown sheets that smelled like old gloves.

Did everything smell and look like this then? A pornographic time capsule, breasts and asses pressed up against motorcycle advertisements, together for a seeming eternity? Hiding lonely in the dark forever, until exposed by hungry hands? I’d like to be so small and invisible for a while.

Despite my fears that the house would implode, or that the house’s alpha male would break through the concrete to reclaim his heroic library, I felt like I could stay down there forever. We sat and we spoke, sitting in nests of dirt and rock, hiding from something.

We went to the kitchen and made pasta on his industrial stove. It was snowing hard, and by the time I walked outside, the snow was deep enough to come up to the canvas of my sneakers. Walking down the driveway, everything was covered in white, and for a moment I forgot what it looked like before, and where it ended, and where the others began.