Fresh Air and a Chainsaw

While a bunch of mush-brained, grey-haired men in suits hovered around a big red button as they finalized war plans, I was hauling out synthesizers and rack-mount equipment out of my friend’s apartment, who was standing outside his doorway wearing a P100 respirator mask—the one with the two big pink filters and the plastic shield that completely seals your face. Those things are serious. I know this because I couldn’t comprehend a word he said to me all day. I just kept handing him stuff and hoping nothing he said was important.

He was wearing the mask because, over the prior few weeks, he’d discovered he had an intolerance to some form of bacteria that had made its way into his place. Everyone else was fine. I was fine. But the air and dust inside his home had become toxic to him due to whatever intolerance he’d developed. So I pulled all his equipment while he stood out front in the mask, because if he tried to do it himself, he’d risk being thrust back into nightmares, stomach issues, mental breaks, and losing another 10 pounds.

His landlord came by to do the walk-through. He brought his son, and I listened from the studio as they paced through the living room. “You need to look everywhere for damage,” the landlord ordered. The kid was maybe ten—an aspiring landlord himself, apparently. A real go-getter.

I caught a glimpse of them in the master bedroom. The landlord was eyeing shelving while the kid sat on the edge of my friend’s bed, which pissed me off. The bed, along with everything else in the apartment that wasn’t recording equipment, would all have to go. All of it risked sending my friend back into a spiral. Still, it annoyed me. To be that comfortable at ten years old, pacing through someone’s home and touching their shit, sitting on their bed. It was like watching an asshole in the making. It wasn’t his fault. This is how it happens: one asshole crafting a younger one, and we can only hope that some dosage of culture, failure, and life experience slaps the kid around into becoming something different from his father.

The shitty guy and his future shitty kid made their way out to the parking lot. “It looks pretty good. Just some holes to patch up and then a deep clean. I’ll hire a handyman, but I don’t know what it’ll cost. Could be $300, could be $400, could be $700.” This was not a person who didn’t know how much things cost. This was a guy who knew exactly how much everything in the world cost and would grind you down until he got what he thought it was worth. My friend was too exhausted to argue, standing in the parking lot wiping down and disinfecting whatever he could in hopes of salvaging something.

“I don’t like that guy,” I told him after the landlord pulled out. “Why?” he asked. “Because I can tell he sucks.” He gestured to the surrounding units and said, “Well, you guessed correctly, ’cause everyone here hates him.”

He went on to tell me about the ficus tree that used to live in front of his apartment. He said it was tall and strong, with its roots spiraling upward from the tree’s base and wrapping around the trunk itself. It blocked the scorching afternoon sun and kept the apartment cool all day, which was a selling point when he initially decided to sign the lease. A month into him being there, he woke to the sound of a chainsaw and the sight of an empty wall where the tree once towered. The landlord decided he didn’t want to pay for upkeep.

Despite the circumstances, my friend was getting out at a good time, as the landlord was about to start construction on another unit. There was likely a craftsman or mid-century home on that lot at some point. Maybe a bungalow. Now it’s just big, beige boxes. As many as he can squeeze in.

I went home covered in dust. I thought about the air and how it wasn’t poisonous to me, but was to my friend. I saw that some more bombs had been dropped in Ukraine. I thought about the air over there. I thought about the air in Gaza. I thought about an article I read recently about the theory that all our worst serial killers came from the Pacific Northwest in the ’80s and ’90s due to Tacoma, Washington being home to one of the largest and most poisonous lead smelters in the world. The air itself killed family pets and stripped paint off cars, and potentially warped the minds of a whole bunch of men, sending them into aggressive and manic states. I thought about the dust in my friend’s apartment and wondered if it made me aggressive toward his shitty landlord.

I thought about the bombs dropped on those nuclear sites in Iran. I thought about the air out there. I wondered if anyone was there to breathe it in. I wondered if there aren’t more places getting bombs dropped on them than not at this point, and I took a deep breath, inhaling the good stuff while I still can.