Tommy the Leopard

By Robin Crane

The apartments looked like a series of five identical white houses in a row, something built in the fifties, slightly adorable because of the birthday cake look of the white-painted metal awnings shading each of the windows. But they were, in fact, just a row of duplex apartment buildings and not houses, which is a critical distinction for people who want to but will never be able to own their home.

These apartments, which took up a block of the occasionally unsafe but usually drowsy and breeze-blown neighborhood where I spent all of my weekends (with a mom too dangerously childish to have gained full custody of me), were slated to be torn down on an unnamed date in the next century: Wendy, my mother, moved in on a hot day in January, 1993.

Before that, she'd lived for a couple of years in an apartment next door to her best friend, George. They were both definitely grown ups at this point in time, George being in his late fifties and Wendy in her mid thirties, and the fact that each of them had a best friend instead of a spouse, that they were living next door to each other, situated within sleeping distance like a constant slumber party, may give you an idea of the cluttered, funny anarchy of Wendy and George: the workers in the gas company's billing department were surprised each month with checks from Wendy on which she'd scribbled in the memo-line comments like, "for the cocksucker swindlers at gas co." Similarly, acquaintances of his never really understood George; he looked like just a sloppy, near-sighted old man, but he is a reader of obscure lesbian poets, a watcher of homemade films and a loyal friend of bullied, pint-sized misfits.

Before the apartment next to George, Wendy had lived in an apartment she’d accidentally burned down, slightly ruining the lives of everyone who cared for her from that day forth. Her nihilism in light of her frightened hands-and-knees crawl through the fire, and her grief over the loss of her collection of Golden Books and her childhood diaries were a sticky poison that stayed on her hands, and whenever she touched one of us, it got on our clothes and our bare arms.

At each of these rented homes of hers, these apartments, she’d hoped she had found a place where she could nest forever, could shelter herself and George and the occasional injured boyfriend and as many cats as possible against the harsh gaze of the outside world. Somewhere out there in the country at this moment, a little boy whose stepfather drinks too much is climbing up the rope ladder that leads to the tree house his father, a patient, dead man once built for him. There are tears stinging the little boy’s eyes as he makes this secret climb up into his true home. He lies on the board floor of his tree house, puts his damp mouth to the grains of the board, and whispers to it, to the house, “I love you. Please protect me.”

That was how Wendy felt towards each apartment she lived in, in the post-childhood, post-divorce, post-sober life she was living. When she moved into the white apartment building, the one I began this recollection with, I could tell what was happening immediately. She was silently pledging a devotion, almost menacing in its intensity, to this apartment. She would love it more than the others, because she knew she shouldn't.

Whenever she was going through a crisis or a depression, Wendy wouldn’t leave the apartment for weeks. George brought her groceries: vodka, orange juice, cigarettes, margarine and English Muffins and, depending on the season, a bag of candy corn or a box of Popsicles. She had a manic year or so, during which time the electricity of her mania attracted these two men, much younger than her, who came over to her apartment almost every night, laughing and drinking with her, thinking of her apartment as the fourth friend in the conversation, as she did.

She wanted to stay in this place forever, and staved off the building’s impending destruction with various gestures indicating that she was there to stay. For example, she became the benefactor and midwife to the generations of stray cats who lived in the neighborhood. Those cats who used to reside in the dumpster of the deli down the street or under the apartment building across from hers now took up a permanent residence under her own apartment, reclining often in the tree next to her bedroom window, having their supper from the wild polka dots of colored plastic bowls of cat food that she put on the porch every night.

She further asserted her wish for permanence by weighing the apartment down, piling as many of the things that she loved, liked or needed into it. She was a packrat, so there were many such items: secondhand McDonalds Happy Meals toys; dresses with full skirts and purses with patterns on them; books; movie magazines; rock records; videotapes; audio tapes; several boxes of earrings; art supplies; any item that was printed with a Las Vegas theme or came in primary colors; a carpetbag, three plastic shopping bags, and a knock-off Gucci shoulder bag all overstuffed with scraps of fabric bought at rummage sales over the years; any item pertaining to the Beatles; trinkets; bags of chips; boxes of cookies; bowls of candy.

But the place was torn down. I was still living out of state when she sent me two manic letters written during her last month there; the last paragraph of the second letter stated that she would have to leave some of her stuff behind, since there was nobody in her circle of friends with enough money or logic to help her move everything. Wendy wondered what would happen to it all. She imagined the walls of the buildings being hacked at and mowed over by bulldozers, and guessed that the bed and the couch and chairs and the chest of drawers with clothes still inside the drawers, and everything else that she'd left behind, would be crushed along with the walls and the roof that had once constituted a shelter.

I was finishing my last semester at a college in Seattle when the apartment was torn down. I moved back down the coast, back down to Los Angeles, back into my old bedroom at my father's house. I would not see Wendy for two months, but my first Sunday back in town, I drove to where the apartment had been. The lot where the duplexes had once stood would someday be the location of a Jewish Community Center, but for now, it was just the type of landscape I usually love, a wild piece of land in the middle of an otherwise overbuilt town, a piece of land overgrown with tall weeds, governed by stray cats (Wendy’s family, who had hid from her during her last month there, too sad about her departure) and home to an abandoned car whose rightful owner nobody could know anything about.

Wendy's apartment had not been completely demolished. The roof was gone. One side wall and most of the back wall were torn down, but the building's facade remained partially intact. It's not as though there were a front door to walk through anymore but there was enough of the facade left to look like a set piece of a jagged mountaintop. Parts of the inner walls were still intact. I went inside.

Next to a stranger’s mateless workboot, I found a red plastic heart-shaped bracelet that I had worn a long time ago, but when I picked it up, I felt sad and scared, like I was holding a barrette that had been found clipped to the hair of a dead child. One of Wendy’s bulletin boards remained nailed to the part of the kitchen wall that still stood, and tacked to the board, a lone photo of Paul McCartney looking stoned and satisfied, a photo bought at a Beatlefest in the early eighties. I walked through the ruins, and some of the pieces of trash were Doritos bags or beer bottles left over from construction workers or squatters. But much of the trash was Wendy’s and mine. The floor was littered with pages from an old Mad Magazine I’d giggled over one weekend, a stray peacock feather earring of mom’s and a vest she’d worn that still smelled of patchouli.

This, this roofless hut, is the nakedness of Wendy’s old home, a body, once, of plaster and corners I never thought I’d see so bare. And strangers squat here, true – this is evidenced by the containers and scents they’ve left behind. But also, ghosts live here. You can tell by the way the cats sometimes purr or howl in unison. Ghosts live here, and like the bare floors of Wendy’s apartment, that are the revealed bones of her old home, ghosts are our deepest bareness. Inside your chest is your heart, it is almost as deep inside of you as is possible, and even deeper, the atoms that make up the walls of this heart. But even barer than the body stripped of all form but its atoms is the bare but all-encompassing invisibility of the ghost, who crouches in the corners of people’s souls and, when set free, inhabits gutted buildings or cars that have lost their relevance. The ghosts keep Wendy’s cats safe, and sweep the floors of the undone apartment. In fact, the junked car parked in the weeds near mom’s torn down home is owned by a ghost. His name is Tommy the Leopard, and he is a million years old. He is benevolent and funny. He is the patron saint of homeless shy people. He will watch over you whenever you need it.

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Robin Crane is a proud Los Angeles native, currently working on a Master's Degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia; she studies Kurt Vonnegut and destiny. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Olympia Literary Yarn, Newtopia, Poetry Super Highway, All Things Girl and the anthology 'Zine Scene.