Under the Hill, Under the Bluff

1.

The capitol city was busy and I had difficulty parking my car. Several times, I circled the block before I found a spot, an opening into which I glided without difficulty. Ordinarily, I am clumsy about parallel parking but this seemed easy to me.

My destination was under the hill, under the bluff: a series of gloomy elongated rooms. These chambers were interconnected without corridors, one narrow space opening into the next. The rooms were on slightly different levels and so you stepped up or down at the threshold between chambers. The place was lit by dim yellow light bulbs installed behind fading parchment-colored shades and the walls were covered with dark, flimsy panel – the sort of paneling that you might see in a basement rec room finished in the early sixties. In places, moisture had sprung the panels and they sagged and the dark brown carpet was spotted and flecked with debris. The furniture was old and derelict, heavy-looking stuff upholstered in fabric like rotting shag carpet. It was none too clean – there were soda pop cans on some of the shelves and ash-trays clogged with cigarette butts and stacks of old magazines and newspapers were shoved into odd corners and angles in the walls.

We sat at a long battered table in one of the central rooms and debated. I recall the surface of the table strewn with papers. The disputation was dull and I amused myself by putting nouns into Pig-Latin.

Then, it was time to leave. I was hurrying from room to room when I encountered a place where the lights had failed or been shut-off. It was pitch-black ahead of me. I paused at the threshold of the room, wondering whether to step up or down. Then, as I moved forward, something crossed my path, moving from right to left in the inky darkness. We collided. I felt fabric, a slick of cool skin, a joint moving under a garment. It was a person. Although it was rude, I wanted to know the identity of the person who I had bumped into. I raised my hand, groping toward where I expected the person’s face to be. No one spoke. I knew that this was rude and I was frightened and thought that I should back away from the figure in my arms. Then, I felt hair, someone’s scalp, the sinew in the back of a neck, lips and a nose.


2.

Where had I been in long, narrow rooms like those under the hill, under the bluff?

Once, there was a drop-in center located at the foot of a steep hill in Kenwood, two blocks from where the Guthrie Theater used to be located. The hill was covered with grim, petrified-looking mansions built in the era of the railroad and timber barons. The drop-in center was a shabby place, a couple of rooms in an old home mostly used for referrals of some sort.

My church conducted an over-night venture for the senior high Sunday school students. The trip was called “Journey to the City” and it was designed to show suburban kids what things were like a dozen miles or so away from our homes in the bedroom neighborhoods west of the Metro. A couple of earnest, painfully hip and nice, high school teachers chaperoned the tour. Most of the kids were ninth and tenth graders – juniors and seniors were too cool and remote to remain participants in Sunday school.

One of our stops on the Journey to the City was the drop-in center, a place where young people with no place to go could come and take shelter from the cold and wet. We were brought to the drop-in center under the hill, under the bluff, and ushered into the warm, damp-smelling rooms where there were bean-bag chairs, old davenports that seemed partially collapsed, and antique radiators that gurgled and belched like someone with stomach flu. The chaperones knew one of the adults responsible for the place and they vanished into another room, probably, an office. We were supposed to interact with the denizens of the center.

The rugs and davenport smelled of cigarettes and marijuana. Magazines and newspapers were strewn about. At a folding table, five or six kids were playing a card game – Hearts, I think. The kids were talking loudly to one another and seemed to be drunk. One of the girls had an infection in her arm. A purplish streak ran from a sore on her forearm up and across her bicep. Periodically, she flashed the infection and the track on her arm to her friends as if she were proud of it. They said that she should go the emergency room for an antibiotic. “I will later,” the girl said. I was worried about the girl. One of our group asked her if she was okay. “Sure,” she said. “I’ve had this happen before.”

A young man entered from outside. He looked like Jesus as portrayed in engravings hung in the basements of Methodist churches. He shook his shoulders and long hair like a dog, expelling the cold clinging to him around his upper torso. The young man looked tired and he went to one of the corners of the room where he stretched out on a pile of newspapers. He beckoned to a couple of us and we went to his side.

The young man wanted to know what radio stations we listened to in the west suburbs. We told him. He shrugged and said: “Cool.” The young man had big sad eyes. He told us that he was very tired. We asked him what he had been doing all day. “I know a girl,” he said. “We’ve been balling all day. Just balling.”

The chaperones came from wherever they had been concealed. They had styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands and the coffee had a strong, bitter fragrance.