4/24/02 Tuesday 6:36 PM

Pickman’s Model and the Terror Under the Stairs

I have a recurring dream. It takes place in the basement of the house that my father built and that we lived and grew in. My father was a housing contractor during the formative years of my life. He designed and built houses that were as remarkable for their interior space as they were prosaic for their outward architecture. A housing plan is a housing plan until you step inside one of my old man’s houses. Mr. Freud and Mr. Jung take note from your perspicacious psychiatric perches as this dream moves out from the superego into the transpersonal.

When I was in the seventh possibly the eighth grade, my mother's mother, you’ve glommed on to it, my grandmother, moved from her and my mother’s side Whittier Street homestead just a few scant blocks off Larimar Avenue in East Liberty, definitely T(capital)he N(capital)eighborhood, to our home in Penn Hills. 1533 Maple Avenue for which it still stands. Several years ago post my marital break-up, another dream for another time, I lived as a boarder of the present owners in the upstairs apartment for about a year. Full, you betcha', circle. Recursion! A journey from (as you shall soon see), the basement to the attic and back again.

When Grandma Serrao, so we called her to differentiate from Grandma Coluccio, came, she took over what had been my brother's and my bedroom, overlooking the backyard next to the unfinished patio. We moved down the stairs to what had been the game room. A larger and more cavernous underground hideaway. Gaily painted, red, green yellow, concrete walls, a large mural of a Mexican village with a Senor taking a siesta next to a crumbling wall. Adequately painted by the man who rented the upstairs apartment that I have more recently inhabited. A bar with a five foot bottle of 4 Roses Whiskey resting on a pink painted refrigerator. The dark glass jug was a trophy from a downtown Pittsburgh Saloon one happy New Year’s Eve. My father cut a slot in the cap. We used it as a penny bank until he wrapped the pennies one day and bought some real booze. We had access to the blond wood console record player that had a 78 copy of Hearts Made of Stone by the Chordettes, a Sinatra that spun Young at Heart and of course Julius LaRosa's incomparable Eh, Cumpari!, a tootatoot u saxophone.

On the far side of the room was a laundry room, very scary and full of strange gurgling noises in the night. I remember reading Lovecraft's Pickman's Model one lonely evening and never quite recovering from the frisson. Like a fool I opened the perfectly closed door to the room across from the closet under the stairs. My father cached his tools there. The door slowly creaked open. I flung my hand inward and quickly flicked the light switch and found…..I can’t go on it’s just too horrible! Nothing! An eight foot level that sits to this day in the garage next to me, a couple wheel barrows with a dried coats of plaster, wooden tool boxes with hammers, crosscut and ripping saws, plumb bobs and wooden planes. The concrete and shaved wood smell of a million buildings. Not a rat, not a big horrible face with large dripping fangs, nothing animate at all, except me as I shoved the door closed quickly in anticipation of grasping skeletal fingers and a low moan like the wind on a moonless October night. Nada!

Where were the frightful little bastards who make these chilling noises as I read? Dissatisfied I move on down the hallway toward the little office in the extreme rear of the house. This door is also closed. Why, is the door closed? It crosses my mind for about the tenth time that all the horrors in the all those films can be avoided simply by the act of walking away. Don’t go down the steps and the ghastly tentacle of whatever Boogey just won’t grab you. If you know the Creature with very sharp claws that likes to gnaw on folk inhabits the lake then damn well don’t go swimming. Better yet, hire John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, the movie would only last a few minutes but whatever primeval Thing that crosses from nightmare to real world would meet a very satisfactory end. Dumb, I open the door. Moonlight is streaming through the window fills the bottom of the window well. Some things are revealed

In a few years I will begin my book collection at the desk and book shelf situated on the side wall, stealing the backwater office from my father. Those who have visited my basement, damn I guess I still live in a basement, more recursion, can attest to the fact that the collection has grown. My desktop into this very computer has grown. Surrounded am I by myriad volumes, hard paged and virtual, some important some dead frivolous, all loved and hard won.

It is in this rear of the house back room that my dream always begins. There is a hitherto unseen half-sized wonderland door that I climb through. Follow a hallway that gives way to another door which leads to room after room of small treasures. Hallway after hallway that transfer to universe after universe. Treasures of knowledge, on I go endlessly following the discoveries learning by intuition the nature of all things. It is an integrating dream. I know from the sense of well being and health that I have on awakening.

And Pickman and his grisly model’s are after all just more literary pictures on the wall reflecting a perfectly dark and acceptable vision. At least until tonight.