Before my mom and dad divorced, I stumbled into this place in the basement where I could hide and watch. I guess I was 7. Maybe 8. It was a place I had discovered by accident, the kind of godforsaken dangerous vein in the wall that I’d holler at my kids if I saw any of them squeezing in there.
But no one ever caught me.
No one ever even knew I was there.
The basement was three rooms and there was no sunlight down there; it was dank carpet sad, a subterranean crypt where my dad drank alone and hammered hard nails into wood. Everything reeked of stale Parliament smoke/ the potent stench smashing into your face as soon as you opened the old door in the kitchen corner that led down there. My dad’s bar room was at the back: a tight dark tomb of air rising up around the imposing bar he’d built himself out of plywoods he’d stolen from his job, stains from Sears, bottles and mirrors and neon signs that gave off a familiar glow I’d experienced many times before in the hundreds of remote taprooms I’d sat in with my dad on warm summer afternoons after we’d fished for smallmouths with spinners.
In the middle of the basement was the largest room, a kind of rec room that had a couch or some chairs. It went largely unused, I think. My mom never came down there. No one did really.
In the front, underneath our built-in porch that looked out onto 9th Avenue, there was a small workshop my dad used to build things. Or fix them. Or maybe that’s where he ruined them for all I know. This was the spot where I learned to hide. Away from the hideous light of the halogen tubes raining down on my dad’s vises and his grinder and his metal tool boxes, I eased my body — slim and weak — into a space where the wall opened up to let the pipes pass through. For a brief time, it would become a refuge. A kind of blind. A sort of fort of total invisibility where a little boy could disappear but still see many, many things.
The first time I noticed the place in the pipes was one evening after dinner when I was doing what I often did back then: Nothing. My evenings back then, like many kids in the late ’70s my age, were taken up by simply moving in a forward direction and allowing whatever appeared before me to just… be. I rarely had thoughts overtaking my sentience. My entire existence was unaffected by the gaggle of notions that would worry me later on. Girls, money, sex, debt, enemies and friends: I was untouched by any of it because I was unaware of and uninspired by any of it. The eloquent rawness of my existences was defined by the random pop of a lone bubble out there in vast and endless space.
A kazillion years of before me.
Then.
Pop. Here I am.
And right away, the start of a bazillion years to bury my memory.
I was typical, bland, American blue-collar suburb-ness. I was a buck-toothed kid whose parents fought a lot, whose dad was always drinking or drunk, and whose entire world at that point revolved around simplistic mundane things like cartoons and Mike Schmidt and Cap’n Crunch. I had never born witness to much of anything let alone accomplished any things of note. Upon my gentle easing in and out of my parent’s stressed-out vantages, I tend to believe that I was quite often merely a flash of background art, a single component of a much larger set designed upon a stage that forced the two main characters into never-ending drama, into remarkable flights of action and activity while I simply floated across the scene after hours/ when they were too exhausted (both) or bombed (dad) or crying (mom) to even notice a living ghost.
This isn’t to say I was neglected. Not at all. But my childhood was the type that is much different than the ones my own kids are experiencing now. Their agency is more noticed. Their shit is more important than mine was when I was their age. No one thought of kids as little adults then. No one treated them as equals. They were not equals. They were the kids. They were grubby and goofy and they each took little kid shits that looked like rabbit poop and didn’t stink and they made no money at all but made their parents smile at times, at the ball field or in the station wagon on the way home from Burger King or laying in bed at night in their Kmart pajamas/ eyes like slits/ sleepy baby slits/ Mom on the edge of my bed, her hand running easy through my gossamer hair/ Dad snoring in the recliner down in the living room/ with the TV on/ inebriated after his work day.
_____
The pipes clanked and thumped when I climbed into them. They were hollow metal branches running through a darkness that had a very visible beginning and a very visible end. The wall was in my dad’s workshop and I would get up there by hoisting myself on a milk crate and using the hot water heater standing against a stone wall to steady myself as I walked up the stones, incrementally, until I could see the light at the other end of the wall. It was the light from out front our house, a small section of natural illumination that came from a single filthy ground level window that was part of the very front of the basement. There was a fourth room, if you will, a tiny stretch of storage area maybe large enough for a few buckets of old hardware and a stack or two of vinyl siding that would always remain a mystery. It was never a place I went to because there was nothing in there for me, but it did mark the end of the darkness inside this wall I had joined forces with. The streetlight glow drifting in through that window was my only guarantee that, if I was ever detected and needed to pour myself out of this place, I could follow the light from the far end and chase my chances there.
The whole stretch of dark pipe space was probably 6 or 7 feet total. But to me it was a coal mine that went on and on and on.
My dad first appeared one night when I was in the pipes waiting for him. I don’t recall if I had some inkling or hint that he was intending to appear in his workshop or if I had just become a regular there and was unbothered about anyone showing up down there ever again. Water would occasionally move through the pipes where I was laying, the sudden swoosh and flow of it only inches from my face. I never knew what it was. My mom doing dishes. My dad flushing a piss. My brother emptying the bathtub all the way upstairs. The details made me wonder but only in that way that kids often wonder. I didn’t need any answers. I didn’t even think there were any.
Shifting my body in any direction led to pipes vibrating and this made sound. I found that fascinating, that there were parts of our home that had remained silent for so long but now produced fascinating clanks and pings solely because I was there to help them do it.
That one night, when my dad first came down the cellar steps from the kitchen while I was in the pipes, there was a rush in my system unlike almost any I have ever known since. Faced with either being discovered or remaining undiscovered, I was — for the first time in my young life — caught somewhere between light and dark. Between good and evil. That isn’t to imply that my dad would have been mad had he detected me either on his own or by me popping my head out of the dark space at the top of the wall and more or less confessing. Truth is, it was long ago and I never got to know my dad much more than I knew him then. Which wasn’t much.
I can venture to guess that he was drunk when he came down the basement. That is conjecture, of course, but I base it on historical data, mainly that he was always drunk by dinner time and this was after dinner so you do the math. I knew that evening that he was likely at least well-buzzed by that point. And however I might have rolled the dice in my head, I came away knowing that I didn’t want him to know I was there.
I would remain a secret if I might. I would remain still and quiet and hold my tongue but I didn’t know for how long. Or why. This was organic by nature, the whole scenario. I hadn’t thought any of it through. I had no grand scheme in mind for spying on my own dad or anything like that. I had probably just found a place that felt pretty goddamn similar to what my mom’s womb felt like deep in my childish unconsciousness.
Ha. You can go ahead and scoff at that idea if you want. I get it. I’m sure I’d scoff at it if you wrote it and I read it too. But at the same time, the darkness/ the tightness/ the sense of blanketed security with only a tiniest window to the world outside/ the water in her pipes/ the settling in her bones: it all makes perfect sense too.
Either way, I watched my dad come into the room, crack a can of Pabst. I watched him messing with some tools, staring at some measurements. He didn’t engage in any real craftsmanship as far as I can remember, but don’t let that sway you. He might have been building an ark down there for all I know and I missed it completely. The high in all of this for me wasn’t the high of discovering what my own dad got up to when he thought he was alone.
The high was me, alone in my secret spot, breathing in his wild intoxicating cigarette smoke, trying not to cough. The high came from seeing your own parent completely at ease with themselves, in a way that they can never actually be in the company of anyone else/ even their own children. I seemed to sense I had happened upon the rarest of possibilities: the possibility of being able to watch yourself as a much older person someday.
The high was young Serge Bielanko watching old Serge Bielanko for the first time in his life when I knew he was there but he knew nothing of me.
He must have been there fucking around with whatever he was doing for maybe an hour. I heard my mom upstairs calling my name. I heard her footsteps rocking and creaking on the floorboards beneath the rugs. I picture her feet, her sandals and her curved toes, her moving from room to room wondering where I was but also not worried at all. I was upstairs, probably. In the attic maybe.
When my dad left, he cut the lights, rambled up the steps. It was pitch black. I was scared and thrilled. I don’t remember how I climbed out of the pipes, but somehow I did.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
