Rio Negro Lane

I spent over a year living in what my friends described as a commune on the Central Coast of California. Although I’m from Boulder, I don't consider myself a crunchy hippie, so I felt the description of my living situation was somewhat extreme, but never made an effort to refute it. The house had 6ish bedrooms and a whole other guest house out back. The bottom floor was occupied by the owners of the house, Cynthia and Dennis, a married couple in their mid-50's who fit together about as nicely as a cask of gun powder and a lit match. The main house was a sprawling 4,000 square feet, so it was often hard to tell if you were the only one home. Cynthia and Dennis had what is best described as their own wing. Their living room was large enough to fit a widescreen TV and the largest home office desk and shelving unit they could find at Office Max as well as a couch coated with a protective layer of fur from their barely living Pug, Whisper. Her name perfectly described her because by the time I met her, there was only about a whisper of life left in her stinky little body. There was another TV in the bedroom in case you didn't have enough energy to hoist yourself 10 feet into the living room to watch the latest episode of 'Big Brother' waiting to be watched on the Tivo. The shower in Cynthia and Dennis's wing could easily have housed an entire football team and then some. On New Year's Eve Cynthia had a few too many champagnes and and head butted the shower wall while getting ready for bed, but I still can't figure out how she managed to reach the wall with her face since both of the dual shower heads were positioned at least 10 feet from every wall. Maybe Cynthia was extremely tall, but I never noticed because she was always folded up into her wheelchair. Cynthia spent most of her time rolling around the bottom floor of the house as a result of a back injury 'from a fall at the hot tubs at Sycamore Springs,' but I suspect it was more a combination of laziness, Taco Bell and extra large Meatlover's Domino's pizzas. I visited her in her bedroom one time when she came home from the hospital after hip surgery and she was snacking on an entire rotisserie chicken from Safeway. After she got done sucking every piece of gristle off a leg bone, she nonchalantly tossed it onto the carpet for Whisper to wrap her ancient little gums around. My face must have twisted into shock and disgust, but Cynthia didn't seem to catch it as the grease from a wing slid down her chins. Dennis was a psychologist at the Men's Colony, which is really just California's liberal way of saying minimum security prison for nutcases. Dennis was an intelligent man, but I wondered if maybe he was starting to identify with some of his patients. He had a little half ring of hair around the back of his head and was constantly shoving a pair of what looked like prison-issue glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He was also a nervous laugher, which I find particularly unsettling. He would squish his shoulders up and emit a high pitched hee hee hee hee after I told him I had to wait 10 minutes to use the treadmill at the gym. I would find myself staring back at him with a forced smile on my face and a foreign ha ha ha coming out of my mouth. Dennis spent most of his time in the garage where he worked on stained glass. It was originally a hobby Cynthia got into, but like most things, she abandoned it and the $5,000 kiln was left to collect dust until Dennis swooped in with visions of grandeur and ideas for a jewelry making business rattling around in his head like a loose penny in a dryer. He made everything from earrings to belt buckles. On weekends he liked to enjoy his handicraft with his shirt off, exposing his thin, pale old man body to everyone in the neighborhood. Dennis must have the metabolism of a cheetah because he could polish off an entire pizza for dinner and his ribs would still be sticking out. It's really no wonder Cynthia was so gargantuan, she probably just mirrored what Dennis ate and before she knew it she was wondering which wall the fire department could cut a rescue hole through without compromising the structural integrity of the house. I'm not really sure if Cynthia and Dennis loved each other. They had a photo on the desk near their computer of a much younger them on a skiing trip, and they looked genuinely happy standing arm in arm at the top of the run, skis in hand, but the look on their faces in the photo wasn't something I ever saw during my time in their house. Maybe they were sad their only son was in South America with Peace Corp for two years instead of at home petting Whisper and showing them how to use YouTube. Or maybe they were just tired of each other.

Sandy and Cynthia met in some community college class and after Cynthia learned about Sandy’s husband’s tendency to get drunk and hit her, Cynthia invited her to come live in the house so Sandy could get away from him and his greasy mechanic’s hands. Sandy lived in an upstairs bedroom with her own bathroom when she was paying rent, and the downstairs bedroom, which only fit her king size bed and put her at the mercy of Cynthia’s nagging, when she wasn’t paying. During my stay in the house, Sandy spent most of her time downstairs. She would often stay up all night watching her free cable on a tiny TV she managed to squeeze on a table jammed in the corner of the room. I would go downstairs at midnight to head to the news station and see the light from the screen bouncing around under the door. Her life reminded me of the last summer I spent at home before college, only I had been 17 and she was in her 40’s. Despite her life of leisure, she always seemed stressed out or put out despite getting free room and board and unemployment checks. Instead of using the money for rent, she would spend it on hoards of groceries and packs of Marlboros. I would come home from producing the morning show all night and find Sandy and Cynthia relaxing in the pool, trashy romance novels in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It might seem like they were living the good life at first, but I sure never envied them. Sandy thought it was a persistent black cloud that had caused her life to turn to shit, but I think it was her attitude and laziness. She’d often tell me how lucky I was to have parents who paid for me to go to college and that’s why I had a great job in news. She was right, I was fortunate that I had parents that cared about me and sacrificed to ensure I never had to struggle, but Sandy’s only daughter only came around once a year to see her own mother because that was all she could stand of her. So based on Sandy’s own parenting skills, I imagine it was the money that made her jealous of me, not my great parents. It was difficult to get to know Sandy because she quickly wavered from living in a fantasy world in which she was going to start her own business, to complaining about how hard it was to find a job and how every job listed on the county’s website wasn’t something she could ever see herself doing. Sandy started and quit three jobs in the time I knew her. At the first job, the manager didn’t respect her and gave her menial, administrative tasks to do. At the second job, the people that worked there were unfriendly and ignored her. The third job involved doing things she just wasn’t interested in. If there was some sort of company that based its business model on doing nothing but complaining about everything, she would have been the CEO.

Art worked for the postal office and had the best room in the house. He had a deck off his bedroom, a huge walk-in closet and connected, private bathroom with a tub that overlooked the expansive backyard. When he moved out, I would later occupy the room for 3 months before moving to San Francisco. Sadly, I only got to use the tub once. Art was in his early 40’s and lived his life shrouded in dark mystery. He had a tiny, red, fuel-efficient car he would use during the week, and a loud, badass Harley that would roar down the country roads on the weekend. I imagined him as a 20-something pounding Coors Original in a dive bar with his Hell’s Angels friends, but more likely he was once a family man who would do anything for his son and he bought the bike as an affirmation that he was still young at heart, despite the stories the creases in his face might be trying to tell. Most women would describe Art as tall, dark and handsome, but despite his good looks, I was suspicious of him. Whenever he was at home, he would be in his room with the door shut. He never even left it slightly ajar while he ran to the kitchen for a soda. This made me wonder what he was trying to hide. Was he lying on his bed, hand on his crotch, watching ‘Remember The Tight Ones’ or some other movie from his extensive porno collection? Or worse, while I was at work, did he place tiny cameras around my room to film me undressing? When I was in the shower, I would inspect the grout in between the tiles for anything suspicious. He could easily drill out a space to slip a waterproof video camera in to and be going to town on himself over me lathering up with my Dove Deep Moisture Body Wash For Dry Skin. I guess I’ll never know why Art was so secretive about his room, but I have to admit I didn’t find any weird stains on the walls or carpet when I took over the room.

Irinea and her daughter, Irinea, came to live with us a few months after I got to the house. Irinea, or Irene, had lived with Cynthia when she was younger and getting her degree at a local college, but moved back to Mexico and got a job on a cruise ship shortly after graduation. She always told fantastic stories and punctuated the most important parts with a classic Spanish over-dramatization. She dressed fairly simply except when she would go to her daughter’s school for performances or conferences. She took on the role of housekeeper during her stay at Rio Negro Lane, so her outfits mirrored her duties. She had full lips and a broad smile and eyes her daughter said looked like Whisper’s since they stuck out of her head a fair amount. Little Irinea, or Iri, or ‘Edie’ if said with the correct Spanish pronunciation, had bravely come to the U.S. with her mother to spend 3rd grade in an English speaking school so she could learn to speak like an American. She went from barely being able to say ‘Hello, how are you?’ to reading me English books at a 4th grade reading level. When I was working in marketing and advertising, I would come home at night to find Irene in the kitchen with no fewer than 3 pots on the stove and a pan of something in the oven. Iri would be bent over her homework sounding English words out and asking for help in Spanish. A Spanish-English dictionary found a permanent home on the kitchen island in case a curveball came up in the homework and a consultation was needed. Whisper was constantly underfoot, using her nose, one of the few functions that hadn’t given up on her yet, to search out any little piece of food that may have hit the ground. Irene would look down at Whisper’s cloudy, rheumy eyes and tell her, ‘Ay, Wheespur. Get outta here. You are so astinky.’ Iri would laugh and ask her mom if she could be done with la comida and have galletas y leche for dessert. She would enjoy the end of the meal with an English cartoon. Cartoons really are universal. One of the first nights Irene and Iri came to stay with us, Iri was watching ‘The Simpsons,’ which I remember watching when I first moved to Mexico, and she was laughing at all their slapstick antics and enjoying it as much as a young American kid would, all the adult humor flying right over their heads. Irene and Iri shared a room upstairs just down the hall from mine. My room was enormous compared to theirs and I felt guilty for taking up all that space for just one person. I shared a bathroom with them and would often find every shampoo, lotion, face wash, you name it bottle arranged in neat little rows across the counter. I guess you make do when you’re forced to leave all your good toys in another country.

My room was actually my rooms. When you first entered, you were in an office with a desk and a closet and and large clothes bureau. The walls were painted in gold diamonds that looked like someone may have slapped up at the end of a long coke bender. Through another door was the bedroom that was built over the 3 car garage and stretched over nearly all of it. There were 2 gorgeous skylights that, after moving in and realizing what an extraordinary amount of light they let in, I would end up covering with removable pieces of cardboard so I could get to bed by 4 pm and get up at midnight to head in to the news station. The day I quit news was celebrated by a violent ripping down of the cardboard pieces. As it turned out, the room was too large. I pushed the bed up against the farthest wall from the door and put the TV at the opposite wall, but when I would put ‘Seinfeld’ on before bed, Jerry looked like he was raving about man hands on a 10 inch, not the 42 inch I had invested over a half a paycheck on. The room also had odd little storage cubbies that ran the length of two walls. The ceiling was sloped because it followed the shape of the roof of the house, so a grown man would have to crawl through the cubby doors, but I think that made them even creepier. I often woke up in the middle of the night thinking I’d heard one of the doors creaking open. I finally got smart and put bells on each of the doorknobs. At least that would give me more time to jab a finger into my attacker’s eyes or roll away from the shiv before it could pierce through my sternum.

But it wasn’t through the creepy elfin doors that my potential assassin would come. It was through the heating vent, or a cracked window or perhaps the faucet in the tub, but surely not the faucet in the sink, unless this thing was some sort of contortionist, which, looking back, I wouldn’t put past him, so perhaps that should also be included as means for how he gained entrance (and a means that subsequently should have been plugged up with arsenic pellets and industrial strength cement).

I had come back from a weekend trip in some exotic location, no doubt, and decided to get in bed early and fall asleep to the TV. Like a metaphorical poem comparing the sun set to death, so too appeared this dark villain as dusk slipped in to night. It may have been instinct, or possibly tremors caused by his thick, hairy legs, but I woke up suddenly to find the light from the TV bouncing off the white walls, but getting lost in a dark shadow in the corner. Without my glasses, the dark spot looked harmless, until I started squinting and it slowly took on a shape I once saw behind plate glass in the Arachnid House at the zoo. I leaped from my bed, never taking my eyes off the figure and uttering a quick thanks that the light switch was on the other side of the room and not under the shadow, being protected like an angry bum’s only sleeping bag. I thought spiders the size of dinner plates only existed in the Amazon and Jurassic Park, so this one was either hopelessly lost, or he’d been feeding on neighborhood children and was now looking to graduate into adult prey, starting with me. My mind raced as I stood glued to the wall. What was that statistic I had heard somewhere about people swallowing an average of seven spiders in a lifetime? What if this little fucker had managed to ball himself up enough to get me to swallow? Surely each one of the thousands of hairs on his body was filled with poison. He would have died in my stomach and as he decomposed the poison would seep out and into my bloodstream. Doctor after doctor would run tests on me, diagnosing me with obscure diseases but offering no solutions for how to cure my ailments, until finally I would die and the coroner would slice me open only to find one shriveled, bristly leg bobbing around the remnants of a grilled cheese sandwich. I imagined him, clinging to the wall three feet from where I was deep in dreamland, my sleeping image dancing in the light of the TV on his many eyes. Surely his chest rose and fell with anticipation until he focused on his sniper breathing technique to prepare for the attack. This was no one-shoe job. Especially not a women’s size 5, which was the only thing available to me within arm’s reach. The spider would likely catch it using just one leg, leap off the wall onto my face, and use the shoe to beat me senseless and teach me a lesson before sinking his fangs into me. This thing needed a good solid book I would be willing to dispose of following the murder, or some sort of small, heat seeking missile. The biggest book I could see was Don Quixote, but it was only the paperback version, and I knew it sorely lacked the girth I needed to take this tufted beast down. My options were limited since I refused to take my eye off the spider and give him a chance to dart under a piece of furniture laughing, assuming I would live in fear for the next several months while he planned another fang-filled attack. Had he managed that, I would have vacated the room with only the pajamas on my back, and promptly set fire to the house. Two can play this game, sucker.

Out of the corner of my eyes I scanned the room for possible provisions: CDs, flimsy books, socks, running shoes, dirty clothes, and there I saw it resting against the wall in the corner - a curtain rod that had been there since the day I moved into the room. I didn’t question then why there would be an extra curtain rod resting in the corner, and I won’t question it now. I slowly inched over to my new bludgeoning device, the spider’s neck turning as it followed my every move. I picked it up in my sweaty hand and held it like a baseball bat, taking a few practice swings and envisioning me taking it down in one fell swoop and then billy clubbing it to death, bits of spider flesh and splashes of blood flying up into my face as I laughed maniacally. But then I realized with how severely my arms had started to tremble just thinking about getting 4 feet from the spider, I would be lucky to hit the wall at all, let alone do actual damage to the spider. I couldn’t risk him drafting the air from my missed swing and using it to propel his body on to mine. I decided to combine the running shoe and the curtain rod to create a weapon that would allow me a large, steady impact zone, and gain some leverage and force through my swing, but also allow me to stay a slightly less than reasonable distance away from what were likely rows of razor sharp teeth. The problem with the shoe-rod, however, was that I couldn’t get the shoe tied to the rod securely, so instead, it just sort of hung there and threatened to fall off every time I moved the rod. At this point I had to abandon my visions of heroically toppling the spider and standing atop his defeated carcass. So I did the next best thing, I called for help.

My rescue crew, in the form of Irene, arrived in about 30 seconds. She spotted the spider immediately and simply whispered, ‘Ay. Dios mio.’ She disappeared from my room and returned with a large broom, her bright yellow rubber gloves, paper towels, 409 and a plastic grocery sack - the murder weapon, and the crime scene cleanup. I was glad she thought to put the gloves on before any actual cleaning needed to be done; they seemed thick enough to repel a bite, and they would protect her shirt from any blood spatter, and I was sure there would be a deluge based on the size of this thing. Irene approached the spider from the side, as I vigorously waved my hands, hoping to distract him from his impending death. I didn’t see the broom actually make contact with his ill-fated body since I was squeezing my eyes shut, but the entrails smeared across the wall told me it was over. It took the September issue of Cosmo to scoop the rest of the spider’s remains off the carpet and about half a bottle of 409 to get every little hair off the wall, but I was saved. After a 15 minute standoff, in which several scenes from my short life passed before my eyes, I was free to go back to bed, unmolested by things on eight legs.

Unless I was wrong, and the spider was a she and before I woke up she had been scurrying around the room discretely tucking eggs into safe locations. In that case, I would have to move. I should move, just to be safe.