The Secret Pirates of a Bedroom Crawlspace

Growing up, I lived next to a dungeon.

Well, some days it was a dungeon.

Other days it was a mysterious compartment that held riches beyond my wildest dreams.

Or the body of a twin brother my parents never told me about.

In reality, it was some kind of a crawl space.

Pushed in the corner of my bedroom sat some kind of a removable panel. When standing it probably came to my waist. It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t large either. Screws held it in place, and the raised border around it suggested whoever built the house had designed it to have the secret compartment.

That side of my room also had a light switch. A light switch that did nothing. My parents told me once upon a time a previous family had decided to build a second-floor balcony out of the bedroom, but for whatever reason, they gave up on the project.

Or maybe my parents had no clue what the random light switch did, so they just went with the first story to pop into their heads. Because telling a four-year-old “I don’t know” isn’t really an answer.

In my mind, I only half believed them. The other half knew that switch had to control something in the crawl space.

Maybe it did. Maybe it turned on the secret communiqué line running under the house to a bunker full of wanted criminals or pirates.

Perhaps it flicked on the torture chamber equipment.

Maybe my parents were never supposed to move into the house…Maybe they found a house they liked and then, you know, made the previous family disappear?

That crawl space fed right into the imagination of a kid who used to slip basketball trading cards between the wood floor cracks as they defended castles made out of LEGOS from G.I. Joe and Star Wars action figures (oh, how many Michael Jordan cards did I split and warp doing that…).

But I never opened the crawl space. It was always just there. It had been painted over so many times it felt like part of the natural decorations of the room. Like the overhead light or the windows.

Eventually, I moved out of the room and into the basement. Because every teenager naturally craves the darkness of a basement cave. Plus the steps squeaked so I had a bit more warning if someone was coming. Which…as a teenager…well, you know, every second counts.

When I moved off to college my former bedroom became the guest bedroom. Of course, nobody ever used the guest bedroom except when I came back for the holidays.

A guest in my own bedroom.

Sometimes I’d look at the crawl space and again wonder what sat behind the panel. Two decades into my life and I still had no idea.

If I opened it up would a nest of a billion spiders crawl out? We’d have to torch the house if that happened.

And yet something would distract me, or I’d forget. Or I didn’t have a screwdriver that would fit into the well painted-over screws.

And then I’d return to college.

After my dad died and my mom had to move out my two sisters and myself had to help pack stuff up. Well, more accurately, my aunt came to help my mom and would crack the whip on the three of us. She had to get to Florida for the winter. The three of us? Well, packing the house we grew up in just didn’t have any appeal to it.

But we eventually finished it, sold off what we could, and put everything else into storage.

Seeing the house I grew up in empty and hollow was truly strange. Now, my mom wasn’t a hoarder. But she did find ways to interject meaning into things. Some of it was cool. Like the scrapbook her great-great-grandmother kept, including the original newspaper announcing the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But there was far too much junk with just enough dusting of interesting. So when she finally left with nothing left inside, it was like someone walked through my brain with a leaf blower and just blasted away memories. Memories fluttering away to land somewhere else. Maybe I’d happen on them again. Maybe not.

I can’t remember if I cried, or if my mom cried, or if my sisters cried when we closed the door for the last time.

But as she closed the door for a final time my mom looked at me and asked, “hey, do you want to open up that crawl space?”

I thought to myself.

“No,” I said. “I like that memory how it is.”