Towering

I’ve Got a Nasty Altitude Problem

Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash

I was in grade school during the advent of America’s Intergalactic Death-Star Warehouse grocery store invasion. Without fail, my parents dragged me into the city every Monday night for a pilgrimage to the glamorous Super 1 Foods, when resistance was futile, shuffling the identical weekly route aisle to aisle

I was never tempted to pursue a life of fame and influence (I’m not that gung-ho of a people-person), and I never daydreamed about flinging obscene stacks of cash into my fireplace for kindling (I’m hot-natured and live in Louisiana. I have three standalone fans in addition to central air blasting me senseless as I write). Power, status, leadership, fame, worship — each of these scenarios reinforces the emptiness in my soul, expels a nothingness taste in my mouth. (I don’t even have a fireplace.)

I never wanted a family. Even as a child, I understood that short of chemical castration, there’s no buzz-harsher more efficient than intimacy with the opposite sex, much less the splicing of my DNA sequence into the bodies of any of them, except maybe Neve Campbell, although even if it came to that I’d sooner hurl myself atop a woodland conference of skunks and porcupines.

Unless we’ve achieved enlightenment and/or we are a goldfish, we tend to want most what we know we cannot have, no matter our age, circumstances, or how many investigations conclude that an election wasn’t stolen. Years ago, a legendary American bard once theorized that the acquisition of what we covet will drain from us the buildup of passion and expectation we’ve cherished for years:

(“When I get what I want, and I never want it again.”)

Photo by Eleanor Brooke on Unsplash

I don’t consider my first obsession any more unreasonable than people who garner fulfillment by eating their own sofas. To this day, the gloomy excess of medieval castles, their ambitious towers and turrets, and charming isolation, every one of the 100+, hell, what’s the consensus? 200+ rooms? Whatever — all of them adorned with glorious tapestries, labyrinths of libraries, and unblemished flatware may have comprised the fantasies of my youth, but like any healthy individual, we grow up and abandon such absurd superficialities, and then spend the rest of our lives resenting the holy hell out of it.

Still, I’d take a job scrubbing every toilet throughout Neuchwanstein every hour on the hour until I die.

Neuchwanstein Castle — Pixabay

My penchant for architectural curiosity originated in connection with my passion for social justice back in the limbo-land of kindergarten. Abandoning my principles as a conscientious objector as well as my fingerpaints, I challenged the establishment by turning whistleblower on the teacher and her aide, exposing a toxic network of favoritism and crony capitalism as evidenced by the distribution inequality of building blocks during the post-naptime creative construction hour.

“You have plenty!” hissed my teacher, a woman who assigned gender identities to all twenty-six letters of the alphabet (only vowels were female, with the controversy of “sometimes y” not up for discussion, this being a Catholic school). I stewed in silent injustice; they knew I did not have enough blocks to fashion my skyscraper. I had big dreams, agendas, and my elders employed their socialistic witchcraft to bar my resources. Back then, life was loaded with such Rosa Parks moments.

These days, I philosophize in circles about the helplessness of aging, its certainty and permanence, its unforeseeable horrors capped off bluntly with the extinguished fires of our loves, fears, memories, and potential. It’s one example of nature’s vulgar offenses against all earthly lifeforms not classified as Anderson Cooper (vulpes argentum). Still, stats be damned, I am grateful to be counted amongst the last generation to master the now arcane technique of cursive handwriting, and it was during those 2nd Grade days of dotted papers, №2 pencils, the countless measured swoops and curls and flourishes that I found time to fall in love with a pursuit not uncommon for eight-year-old boys, the mysteries of all things Dinosaur. My knack for distinguishing a diplodocus from a brachiosaurus was my first and only trace characteristic of boyish normalcy. But since plenty of boys were just as absorbed if not obsessed with throwing, slamming and kicking sports-balls as well as each other, proving arbitrary violence the instinctive male parallel to girls’ traditional affinity for RPGs with Barbie, they could care less about paleontology, archaeology, the Terrible Lizards of the Triassic, Jurassic, and catastrophic Cretaceous Periods, though at the time scholarly sub-communities driven by prehistorical hysterics ushered the phenomenon into the cultural mainstream.

But, as an aging mortal afflicted with lightning-fast hormonal upheavals and fickle obsessions of my own, I naturally outgrew my zeal for those unfortunate reptiles but not the zeal itself, the hunger, the fervor of a desperate bird circling 24/7 over earth’s bleak tarmac in search of a comfortable topic to call home. And I can remember, I can ace my own history test. I had only to search backwards, and my curiosity latches its talons around a medium which chose me, not vice versa, and to this day tackles my interest with the same gusto as my first Transformer stegosaurus.

I still hold the hypnotic thrall of the Slinky accountable for activating my secretive obsession with staircases, stairs of every size, shape, height, from the hidden cobwebbed shafts of hospitals or skyscrapers to the carpeted kind found — sometimes twice — inside suburban residences as showcased in architectural digests or generic grocery store floor plan magazines, not the painful concrete floor-to-floor elevator alternatives of thirty-story buildings, not even the ancient brown hardwood of the winding, square patterned stairs of my old Lower East Side five-story walkup (the 90’s) or, worse yet, the tacky unimaginative eyesore of the spiral staircase like the glorified stepladder that trashed the already aesthetically compromised set of Friday the 13th Part 3. And unless you want me to backslap you across the face until the police intervene, please don’t bring up that savagely offensive architectural acid trip from Poltergeist. That savagely offensive fucked-up wavy nightmare still scares the noodles out of me.

Somehow, somewhere, as these passions fomented in the fogginess of my childhood, I acquired a jumbo plastic Slinky — orange, meaning I won it as a door prize or a cheap conciliatory award for placing third or fourth in a mandatory essay contest; I would never voluntarily gift myself with something as coveted as a Slinky, an orange one for Christ’s sake. Also, one of the topmost/lowest rings of my orange Slinky was slightly bent, rendering the entire contraption deformed and coiled crookedly in its resting phase.

Imagine how I gushed over my first and only gnarled orange Slinky!

Exactly. I resented the fuck out of that tacky piece of garbage, but at least I finally had one. I don’t know why I never asked my parents for the classic metallic model, although now, considering my gravitational attraction to rotten luck, it probably worked out for the best. There’s little doubt I’d have ended up like that unfortunate chick in Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Some people are too damn klutzy for their own good.

Slinkies will kill you.

As I said, Slinkies meant stairs, and stairs meant elaborate, gargantuan homes, and it was with them, instead of girls, with whom I fell in love. I was transfixed by their floor plans, the bonus photographs of their interiors, the shapes of their stairwells, the aesthetically unnerving quirks I’d correct in an instant; houses so absurdly huge that all the furniture on earth couldn’t fill the rooms, which themselves were too plentiful to fulfill a function, much less warrant a name. Mansions, castles, towers — not architecture, not the mathematical strategies and logistics of construction — (hell, in all four years of high school, my proudest algebraic accomplishment was a ‘C’, a grade I earned almost at the expense of my own life.) But I remember the enticement that connected me to my first two influences, one of which, though confined to the two dimensions of a painting above a hotel bed somewhere in south Louisiana, reduced me to a drooling, slack-jawed daydreamer. It’s still the most breathtaking masterpiece of architecture I’ve ever seen, this antebellum estate that lauds itself the largest in the south, its splendor unsurpassed by the wildest practicalities — on the outside. I found and noted on the hotel painting’s lower left corner: Nottoway Plantation.

It would be about ten years before I finally saw it for real; fifteen more before I’d begin spending one weekend there each year.

Until it burned down. Had it not burned, trust me, the main mansion would have caved in.

I wasn’t graced with the talent or the knack to graduate beyond wild and impossible floor plans, most of which I thoughtfully drafted on the hardwood floor of the living room at five or six in the morning, my favorite time, then and now. We only caught a handful of TV stations, but somehow the droning consistency and reassurance of the Weather Channel zapped the hell out of my synapses.

So that’s how and where you’d find me, on a makeshift blanket-rug on the hardwood floor, rulers and pencils sprawled out, and a T-square that eventually vanished, just like my socks, certain CDs, a friend or two, and my favorite shirt — all into thin air. Even into my early teens, long after I discarded my hope of hopes that we’d win the Publisher’s Clearing House, I still created monstrous homes, attacking countless reams of light green paper my mom brought home from work, mutant papers, almost twice as big as the standard 8 ½ X 11”, and with grueling accuracy I’d match up the three or four floors of the mansion du jour, complete with secret passages and luxurious panic rooms, turrets. balconies, gables, and at least three staircases, two of them hidden in the unlikeliest of places.

Now, having been raised in Louisiana, the concept of a basement, much less the gothic excitement of networks of underground tunnels, was completely lost on me until I finally got my hands on The Castle of Otranto, but at that point, I was eighteen and my floor planning days were a childish secret.

You dig deeper, you canvass and backtrack and excavate, but every dud mission leaves you defeated and depleted until the day you finally stumble upon something — an artifact, a totem, a relic — that manifests its significance by the chilliest shimmer, an impossible hum; unable to communicate further it relies on your memory to crack the code, dig even deeper, and if nothing works you step away, clear your head until the desperation to link the two languages, to translate how the secrets of your findings explain the secrets about yourself, recedes, and only then does something click, a stone comes loose, and all at once you’re flailing through a landslide of memories.

Sometimes, after trying so hard you’ve busted your every last blood vessel, you accept that it’s gone.

I was ten years old when I discovered that there were entire magazines dedicated to floor plans, all styles and sizes, real or envisioned, interiors, exteriors — they piled up neatly beside my own creations, the stacks of green papers. My father, a math teacher, no doubt mistook my fascination for something logical and pragmatic and $$$, like architecture, if not interior design. He even brought me down one of the country roads that wraps itself in a loop around the wilderness of our town’s outskirts, the only road accessible to the new and snobby cluster of gigantic homes and their bumblefuck species of subhuman dwellers, a neighborhood into which one of his colleagues would soon assimilate once construction of her new home was completed.

With her permission and with dusk closing in, he brought me inside the husk of the house, a two-storied Victorian-shaped skeleton.

I don’t recall feeling anything beyond the urge to get the hell out of there. Its beams and splinters and transparency from one end to the other made the wide open space feel as roomy as a casket.

Sometimes my father would drive me through the wealthy subdivisions scattered around the closest town that passed for a city. Some neighborhoods blended with the upper-middle class strata, others were accessible via a single loop of road or through an imposing pair of brick monuments — the upper class. I wondered what these homeowners did for a living, wondered what it was like for their children to live and grow day-to-day in such ease and splendor. Were they happy? Wouldn’t I be happy, a better person, someone else?

Louisiana State Capitol (Dreamstime.com)

The grandiose and oh so subliminally subtle Louisiana State Capitol is proud to be the tallest in the nation. Although the original capital building was just as proficient, if not more convenient, proficiency is no match for ostentation. Do you really think that soap opera stars were hired through merit, talent, and experience?

This isn’t a term paper, so I’m exempt from delivering a Ben Stein information dump about the building’s history. That leaves me with two anecdotes: first, as schoolkids on more than one field trip to Baton Rouge, after enduring the same rigmarole about immediate expulsion should we spit over the ledge upon reaching the top, I remember the marble walls of the hallway outside the legislative chamber and beyond riddled with bullet holes from Governor Huey P. Long’s bodyguards going full on Tarantino on his dumb prick of an assassin.

Years later, throughout the summer after our high school graduation, my cabin-fevered best friend David and I embarked on several road trips, once to the top of the capital building, another awarding him a head start on his straight-guy bucket list by dragging another friend and me to a sumptuous two-course dining experience at the prestigious culinary reckoning known as Hooters.

Is it a fixation or an obsession? Does it need a name, does it need an excavation, a vivisection, a translation, if such a thing were possible, from the gravitational pull — a mechanism that exists without language — to an explanation printed, chiseled, or set in cold type for cold roving eyes. And therein lies the solution and the paradox, that when such a personal abstract, something deified, something as nurturing and affirming as mutual affection, yet more consuming and out of control than a tornado, is coaxed from within to the outside — spoken, written, blurted — its power disintegrates, the fever breaks, sometimes forever.

It’s like taking your mint condition Camaro, sleazy-red with nary a crumb on the passenger side floorboard, out on its maiden voyage only to have it sputter to a smoking halt at rush hour in the middle of downtown Bayou Goober. What was I supposed to do with my hundreds of re-imaginings of the American castle? The foundation can only bring you so far; I couldn’t teleport into my own creations and hope to bask in glamor and adventure. Even if I imagined the most addictive reading room at the top of a five-story tower overlooking the jealous peasants of my hometown, it would mean that I was still trapped, but at least with money to burn.

With maturity and the relief of such pent-up frustration comes not only the death, the falling away of a part of myself, but the loss of powerful magic that most of us lose at some point, whether we know it or not.

I’ve studied, stared at, and scrutinized floor plans most of my life, but particularly throughout my pre-adolescence into my early teens. As bittersweet a compulsion as it was, this one-dimensional infatuation contingent upon the convergence of my imagination, my curiosity, and my humorless vulture of an inner tax attorney who oversaw from a stiff distance the diminishing appeal of everything I cherished as a child, one toy dinosaur and one improbable mansion at a time.

He failed, however, to drain me of every spark of passion, and the most innocuous spark can provoke a wildfire. Granted, the disenchantment of age extinguished most of those flames, as well it should, but the longing and the fantasies and the craft transmogrified into something more civil and culturally mellow. I still drive through majestic neighborhoods, still fawn over the turrets and towers of every photographed castle I happen upon, aching to be there, to climb the winding stairs to the top of every belfry or seemingly superfluous Gothic skyscraper.

One of my better memories from my years in Portland was the surprisingly clear November morning that my then-boyfriend, a supermodel who’d missed his calling, drove us to the heights of a majestic neighborhood where we parked and walked the uphill streets, mesmerized by one towering residential estate after another. It was a selfless act of affection I’ll always treasure, one that I don’t need a rote, soppy sermon to assure me makes the property values of those mansions plummet to the ground like a lopsided Slinky.

Beauty. Shelter and safety. Mystery. A childhood fantasy I’m in no way compelled to abandon. This is the wonderful absurdity of hope, the impossible possibilities, the cold comfort that breaks our fall when the Unthinkable finally catches up and hurls us into darkness.