Death of a Lapdog (In Four Floors)

Nobody liked Grandma all that much when she was alive, which made it all the weirder to stand at her funeral in the company of over twenty complete strangers, none whom were half her age, plopping drugstore carnations on her wood-paneled casket. “It looks like our old TV,” my sister had said, when we were flipping through the catalogue of coffins. “We shouldn’t speak of such things” my mother said, sounding like the obese librarian I used to harass about not having an adult film section. “What happened to that TV, anyway?” I had, of course, dropped it off the diving board at the YMCA, in a project for a friend’s movie we were making on World War II. I told Dad I had given it to Pete, the homeless bard who sold puppets outside of the grocery store, so he could watch TV while he figured out how to get his life back together. Besides, Dad wasn’t going to be a man much longer if he didn’t spring for a flat one that stuck to the wall.

Grandma didn’t give a crap about anything those last couple months that she lived with us. She couldn’t cook her own toast anymore, and Dad was too cheap to put her up at Silver Lining, the nearest retirement zoo. His announcement that she was moving in went over about as well as my burps in church. Mom threatened to move out, and Dad looked almost excited about that for a second, but I could see the terror in his eyes. He’d be back on the once-a-month laundry boat and living off Hamburger Helper, like he did when Mom took her trips to see Uncle Zambutu. From the looks of it, they came to an agreement resulting in him apparently never touching Mom again, and that seemed good enough for the time being. I was immediately put off by her moving in, as it meant I shared a bedroom with my sister again, which hadn’t been forced on me since Zambutu was with us for that strangest of summers.

Grandma slept more than the cat, and when she was up, she was meaner than Slobodan Milosevic. She ate nothing but candy, and smelled like Goodwill furniture. “I’d sell you ingrates in a heartbeat to be twenty-nine again,” she’d say. Then she’d take a bath for two hours, and spill about half the tub getting in and out. Mom refused to clean it up, and we got used to taking our shoes off to use the bathroom, because at any given time it looked like a tsunami had just washed over the cracked-tile landscape. The only thing older than grandma was our apartment, which we moved into illegally when a coworker of Dads left the country to pick up his mail order bride in Slovenia and never came back. After a few months and some paperwork he refused to talk to Mom about, he decided we could take it. The rent was low, and it had a great view of the abandoned sausage-rolling plant. We had the top story of four floors, with no hope of an elevator in the near future. The apartment was older than God, but with rent reaching obscene heights in the city, we were lucky to have as much room as we did, and tried to tread lightly and ignore the stairs when they sounded like ghosts on a sex trampoline.

Before the funeral, I wasn’t familiar with the majority of the strange cast of people from our building. I’d seen Father Fred on the front steps, where he sat with the newspaper and his lapdog that refused to shit anywhere but in the wheel well of the faded green 1986 Camry that sat out front, collecting parking tickets like a snowball. From what we understood, Father Fred had given up on his profession, and instead occupied his time watering geraniums behind the apartment and using foul language. After he called my sister a “tramp” on Halloween the year she decided to be Christina Aguilera, my parents banned us from knocking on his door. If I hadn’t been unconscious that night from trying to plug my lamp costume in to an actual wall socket, I’d have come to her defense. He still dressed for church every day in the whole getup. Everybody had their own speculations on how things got so bad for Fred, but nobody knew for certain. From time to time we’d also see the newlyweds that lived below us, trudging up the stairs with Drano or toilet paper, but they didn’t say much in passing. We could hear them yelling at each other under our living room at night, but that hardly passed for entertainment after the first few months.

On the day it happened, Grandma was particularly irate, and flipped off every member of the family individually over the course of her half a grapefruit. She made a sucking face when she ate it, and I pitied the grapefruit more than anything in the world. Mom had come to treat her like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, and ignored her as well as she did my sister and me for the past couple years. The apartment fell into an unthinkable state of disrepair, so much that the cat eventually started living with another family somewhere below us. That day, Grandma went through her usual routine of leaving a disgusting trail of garments snaking its way to the bathroom. I almost made the mistake of picking up after her, but touching any of the alien accessories that mysteriously held her together would likely have caused me years of therapy and/or homosexuality, neither of which sounded as good as Dad having to do it.

When she filled the tub, she filled it to the brim, “like a proper drink,” she’d say, before dousing the rotten floor with another gallon. She eased herself down into it, gripping the sides of it and displacing another huge splash with a heavy sigh of relief. She sat there for a good twenty seconds, quietly closing her eyes and thinking cruel thoughts. That is, until the bathroom floor beneath her caved in.

3^rd Floor

When my Grandma rode that ceramic canoe through the sinking crater of our bathroom, she rode it naked and screaming, with remarkable velocity. To the rest of us, it sounded like the swallowing of an extraordinarily heavy pill, down a throat of tunneling termite wood. The hole she left was no larger than eight by five feet, basically the circumference of the tub, and its most soaked-through perimeter. She went almost straight down, without much of an angle to speak of, though I imagine there must have been a slight forward momentum, as though she spilled forward, as a barrel-rider down Niagara Falls. That was the description Geoff and Judy downstairs gave, and they had a better look than just about anybody.

As luck would have it, our bathroom was situated directly above Geoff and Judy’s kitchen. At the time, they were cooking ravioli and fighting about Judy’s failure to notice Geoff’s new work shoes. According to them, things were getting heated over what felt like nothing again, and Judy was beginning to imagine a life without Geoff, and how that sounded a lot nicer than when she agreed to stay with him until death did them part. Geoff was wanting Judy to know how little he actually liked ravioli, and that he suffered too for the good of “the team,” when my grandmother came crashing through the ceiling in her claw-footed chariot. Judy later said it all happened too quickly to really assess the situation, but that my grandmother was in what looked like a state of absolute terror, white-knuckles grasping each side as she flew, with a trail of lukewarm water and shattered yellow tiles dating back to the Taft administration.

The tub landed directly on top of the stove, sending the pot of ravioli flying, a non-issue considering the cacophony of flying pipes, roofing, and one particularly upset nude elderly woman. For the longest two seconds of their lives, the tub halted and rested there upon the stovetop, rocking almost casually as a duck on a pond. My grandmother turned to face the newlyweds, and as her eyes locked theirs, the weight of the tub on the stovetop pushed the lot clean through the floor of their kitchen, and down into the next story of the building. Geoff and Judy stood on the remaining half of their kitchen for two minutes before either one of them said anything. They had takeout for dinner, and Judy didn’t mind.

2^nd Floor

The velocity of the second drop was more significant, but my Grandmother was no doubt more prepared for it, having already done it moments prior. I doubt her wrinkled hands ever left the sides to the tub, and paramedics most likely had to use the Jaws of Life at some point to remove them from her awkward vehicle, but the medics didn’t answer any of my questions about that. What we do know is that when she left Geoff and Judy’s kitchen, she entered Jake Plummer’s living room at about fourteen miles per hour, but passed right through the ceiling and floor without much trouble, as Jake didn’t have any solid furniture set up outside of a small television and a couple of beanbag chairs. Jake was the quarterback for the Denver Broncos in his prime a few years back, but had been replaced by a younger, more pass-efficient prodigy, and had slipped into a more reclusive lifestyle, listening to loud rap music on his headphones and reading autobiographies of famous retired athletes.

Jake had been careless with his money, and was saving up through public speaking jobs at local high schools, living cheaply and unnoticed in our dilapidated complex. I didn’t recognize him until the day of the service, but he had probably been using disguises coming in and out of the property, understandably avoiding the attention. He was out of the room at the time of the crash, and according to police reports, failed to notice the sound of my grandmother screaming through his ceiling and floorboards, thinking it was only another part of the rap CD that he hadn’t given proper time to yet. When he came back in to check the score of the game, his television was missing down a small, rectangular crater in the floor, and a banged- up stove rested, smoldering like an overgrown cigarette on his favorite blue and orange beanbag chair.

Ground Floor

Father Fred had begun his day like any other, washing and shaving his face like the congregation might be studying it all morning. His tie affixed itself to the center of his chest almost magnetically, as though the Lord had granted it that simple, miniscule power. But Father Fred had gone years without feeling the Lord granting him anything, let alone powers or answers to the real questions that he needed. “Why should I even water these geraniums,” We’d hear him mutter, while religiously watering his geraniums. “They’re as doomed as the rest of us.” It didn’t help that his lapdog showed such distrust for the outside world that it refused to shit anywhere but in the wheel wells of the rusted Camry. The two of them together had become a neurotic pair, and neither was contributing to each others’ overall sense of growth.

This particular day, Father Fred had finished getting ready, and, over his depressing bowl of Cheerios, something gross and demanding weaseled its way into the confines of his head. “I’m going to kill myself today,” he said out loud to his lapdog, who was also lapping up Cheerios from a nearby dish, but not nearly so unhappily as Fred. “I’m going to kill myself right here and now, with the biggest and nearest kitchen knife I can find, and there’s nothing and nobody out there, not God himself, who can stop me.” He couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth, but the dog ignored him, and his arm reached for a knife, possessed by his wild new thirst for damage. He held it at arms length from his shining black shirt, and imagined how sharp it would feel when it poked through his white tie.

The lapdog slurped cruelly on, ignoring his masters’ final dramatic monologue. “This is the last time I ask you for a sign, Lord!” he screamed, raising the knife even more dramatically into the air, so that it gleamed like the climax to a bad film. “A SIGN!!” It was then that my grandmother made her grand entrance through the final floor’s ceiling, careening her canoe through Father Fred’s roof at thirty miles per hour, and landing with a tremendous crunch directly upon the lapdog, selfishly digesting his last gulp of Cheerios. For a second, the sounds of debris and termite shit littered the scene like sick Christmas snow, but soon everything was still. Father Fred blinked at my dead Grandmother, for the first time peaceful in her porcelain throne. He calmly set the knife back in its drawer, and gingerly walked out of the ruined kitchen, careful not to peek at my Grandmothers gross nakedness, and walked straight out of the building to the nearby church.

Ends

Father Fred was kind enough to perform the service for us, and spoke highly of my Grandma, though no one in the family could imagine why. Geoff and Judy brought more flowers than we did as a whole family combined, and Jake Plummer showed everybody up by having a dump truck deliver a hundred thousand blue and orange tulips to her grave. Judy confided in my mother that since the incident, she and Geoff hadn’t fought once, and she had come to appreciate his taste in shoes, just as he had come to accept her affinity for ravioli. Jake started using my grandmother’s story as a side note when he sensed his public speeches were growing too tedious, and he started making a lot more money and listening to less rap music. My Grandma’s trip through four floors on the way to her screaming death brought a surprising lot of different people together, and changed a lot of people’s lives for the better. She saved a marriage, an athlete’s second career, and the life of the best new reverend in town. I should also mention that she ended the life of a grossly understood and severely introverted lapdog.