My preoccupation with cleanliness started as far back as I can recall. Some of the earliest snapshots of my existence consisted of me holding a rag with a pail of discolored water by my side. At first, I didn’t even realize that we were different, I don’t think anyone would until they had something to compare it to.
It took me socially interacting in kindergarten to receive that initial epiphany. I visited my best friend Caitlyn’s house for her birthday, and instantaneously, I could see a discrepancy so vast that it was damn near a crystalized black and white comparison.
There were places they could sit in their house, the couch wasn’t entirely overrun with newspapers, trash, and dated unopened mail. The walls were not filthy to the touch and there was not a slew of seemingly useless objects that just appeared to be collected for no specific purpose.
Piles of clothing that would never be worn didn’t comprise whole rooms in Caitlyn’s house. Every dish in their cabinet wasn’t soiled and heaped up around the sink or stacked in other random areas. There wasn’t mold manifesting in the corners of the walls and ceiling of the bathroom. It was easier to breathe and smelled like freshly folded laundry, not spoiled food.
Maybe the part I enjoyed most was that there was nothing else living inside the house aside from Caitlyn and her family. No dead or dying mice emitting shrill cries of agony, twitching in insensitive traps. No pellets of their feces sprinkled in their cereal and no sounds of them scratching about the walls to leave you restless at night. They drove our husky shepherd absolutely mad. Buddy was constantly barking and chasing after them.
We had even encountered a few rats in our time, so monstrous and vicious that traps weren’t enough to eliminate them. Whenever they surfaced, it would usually take my father hobbling around the house and beating them to death to resolve the issue. One time, he’d seen one walk right up to Buddy’s dry food dish and start eating out of it.
After clobbering a few, he finally got tired of it and decided to sniff out the source. He learned that they were coming up from a hole in a grimy unused toilet in the basement. He plugged it up eventually, which solved the rat problem, but there were still so many other creatures traveling throughout the property.
The mice and rats weren’t even what bothered me the most. What bothered me the most was reserved for an even creepier, stealthier type of appalling vermin—the cockroaches. A mouse wasn’t going to crawl into your ear or nose while you were sleeping. A rat wasn’t going to lay eggs in your bed that could hatch in your sleep, but those little bastards most certainly would.
A few weeks after Caitlin’s party, once I realized just how abnormal the conditions of my existence were, I found one inside my lunchbox. I pried the lid open after gym class one day, salivating at the thought of my bologna and mayonnaise, only to feel my drool dry up just as fast as it had dribbled out.
The roach was a fat, repulsive thing. It shuffled around fearfully once the light invaded the box and tucked itself underneath the plastic-lined soggy white bread. The gag-worthy bug was fully matured with thick auburn wings resting on its back. It terrified me when it suddenly flailed them and began to flutter about around my lunch noisily.
I killed it discreetly before it could alert the others. As squeamish as it made me, my reflex was to use my palm to mash it down into a juicy porridge. While the squirming prickly insect frightened me, the thought of everyone else knowing I’d introduced it into our classroom frightened me more.
I pretended to eat my lunch, but instead, I just sat there sipping somberly on my apple juice box and gazing into the roach’s guts and beige filling. I think that was probably the first time I can recall feeling shame. It was a pathetic belittling sensation that rocked back and forth inside me. It made me sick. So sick that it altered the very fabric of who I was. You can’t change what cloth you’ve been cut from but you can at least try to wash it.
After the roach incident, a fire flared up inside me. My way of life needed to change. At about five-years-old, I began to clean every inch of my room fanatically. Most kids at my age would have been concerned with going to a friend’s house, playing games with the other girls on the street, or maybe discussing their very first crushes. But not me, I was different. We were different.
The problem was, I didn’t want to be different and if I wanted a push to normalcy, it was going to have to come from within. I decided that there would be time for friends later. Plus, if the other kids understood the conditions my family and I lived in, they most likely wouldn’t be my friends for long anyhow.
I decided it was better to make my friends after the abnormalities in my home were remediated. My once frequent contact with Caitlyn diminished, and before long, we were more casual classroom acquaintances than the gossipy girls we had connected as initially. I was slowly putting up a wall, and I made sure it was cold and impenetrable. It wouldn’t drop down until things had changed… until I was ordinary.
Fortunately, I was a smart kid. That early foresight and intelligence helped me avoid the constant ridicule of my peers. That youthful wisdom came from a deep understanding of my surroundings and taking note of how others around me behaved. There were many children that were not as fortunate and couldn’t yet grasp how social settings and ruthless pecking orders functioned. If they found out that you smelled, or if you were dumber than everyone else, you were done for. Because right when they found out, the first thing they did was exploit it for their entertainment.
From that point of discovery moving forward, you were a walking punchline. I knew I needed to keep the irregularities that plagued my family close to the vest. If anything got out, I would be tortured and teased forever. Because of those sticky circumstances, for the better part of my childhood, I lived in continuous fear. No sleepovers or girls’ nights out, just the struggle to both conceal and change who I was.
It took me years to clean the house, no one else seemed to ever want to help no matter which way I sold it. Maybe it wasn’t that they didn’t want to help, more like they couldn’t. Everyone had their own specific problems that they were always faced with. There was a circle of sadness rotating within my family. It seemed like I was the only one unaffected and somehow motivated to change things. A house doesn’t just turn into hell overnight.
My father was still in the grips of the war, dealing with the nightmares when he slept that carried over to when he awoke. His leg had been blown off by a machine gun after just a few years of service. He wasn’t partial to prosthetics and couldn’t find much of a reason to leave the house anymore anyway. For the most part, he just sat on the couch and watched boxing or political speeches while he sipped his iced tea and sucked back no-filter Camels religiously.
My mother tended to him as best she could but the despair had leeched onto her as well. As I was growing up, she was always working full-time and also caring for me, my father, and my older sister, Lisa.
Looking back, I was probably still the least difficult of the group. I was a kid, sure, but I was quite mature for my age. I never generated too much worry or the darker variety that expelled itself elsewhere. My father was a handful to be there for, both physically and emotionally, so I tried to help Mom out with whatever I could. But Lisa was a much different story.
Mom’s grief was more the product of my father’s and Lisa’s spiraled together than her own. We did everything we could for Dad but it just seemed like he was set in the darkness. Maybe the war could account for that or maybe it was just shit genetics that wormed their way into both him and Lisa via our unfortunate lineage.
However, one glaring distinction was that my older sister’s situation was much more extreme than my father’s. Dad was always at a low boil, and Lisa was the bipolar opposite. She was scary to be around. We all feared for her safety but also for our own.
Lisa had a fascination with killing herself since she became a teenager, but only sometimes. It swung back and forth like the flip of a switch. Our age gap was a large one so most of my friends with a similar family structure looked up to their older siblings with a great sense of pride. It was like they were almost another parent to many of them. For myself, it was just another thing to hide, another dimension of myself to deny and pray never saw the light of day.
Over the course of a few years, I did a marvelous job of pulling the house out of its gloomy standard. My mother and father (to a less enthusiastic extent) were probably as upbeat as I’d seen them in ages. Chipping away at the rubbish suffocating the family had finally earned us a bit of breathing room.
I’d bagged and thrown out the clutter little by little, week by week, month by month. I wanted to donate the mounds of seldom used clothing but nothing really seemed salvageable. It was all chewed up and covered in mouse droppings and dead insects. It was hard for my mom to part with the items for some reason, but as I increased my persistence, she did a much better job of letting go.
Once the trash was tossed, there was finally some room to work. I was able to see areas of the walls that hadn’t seen daylight since before I was born. I washed each discolored wall in every room and also detailed all of the smudged and foggy windows. For the first time in years, the place was starting to shape up and it seemed like there might actually be changes afoot.
The mice and bugs were starting to reduce with the garbage having been eliminated. There was enough space around us now, so I was able to locate and target many of their nests. I placed generous baskets of poison pellets in close proximity and hoped they’d bring it back home and kill their families.
I had to be careful though and ensure that I wasn’t placing them in places where Buddy would be sniffing around. I swear that dog only seemed to enjoy eating things that he shouldn’t. We used to joke that his favorite food was plastic. I made sure to lock the doors where I’d set poison and keep him out of harm’s way.
The one thing I never could seem to get clean was the carpet. The damn thing was almost black in some areas. It had reached the stage where if you moved a piece of furniture, you could clearly see the outline of grime around where it had formerly resided. But cleansing the carpeting wasn’t a quick fix, you couldn’t just take a rag or mop to a carpet, believe me, I tried everything. It was 1969, that sort of cleaning had to be done professionally back then, which, of course, we didn’t have the money for. So, they just had to remain looking like filth magnets.
I finally finished cleaning up the many mountains of dishes, and even with everything else I was working on, I forced myself to consistently stay on top of the new ones being created. The less food we had hanging around, the better. I felt like this was a big reason why the mouse count had dropped and the plump, well-fed roaches weren’t as rampant.
I eventually learned the roaches required much more focus than just the cleaning. I ended up having to use the money I saved from my summer job at The Ice Cream Machine to buy a couple of dozen cans of Raid. The slogan is still “It kills bugs dead” and I was probably the most relieved person in the world when I confirmed that it wasn’t just a slogan. The stuff actually did the trick.
The house had come a long way, however, the people inside it hadn’t. Mentally, everything was almost identical to when I’d begun the purge. Actually, Lisa was much worse. Her always bizarre thoughts and behavior had taken an even darker twist once she discovered alcohol. She was now of legal age so there was nothing much that any of us could do except hope the monster stayed in its room.
One thing was certain at the time, the monster was showing up more consistently since Lisa had turned twenty-one. It was like our ears were hearing a constant pulse emitted by the house. When we heard her start slamming things around upstairs, we knew this would usually lead to an incident of some sort.
Most of the doors in the house no longer locked as they’d been broken down or punched through during her endless rages. If you just took a glance at her, you’d never believe how powerful she was or the terror she was capable of instilling. The concept of the doors not being operational in itself was adrenaline-inducing. Knowing that there was no real barrier between us and her fostered a mood of never-ending discomfort.
Whatever thoughts might be running through her mind in the evening could be put on full display at any moment. Most of the time, we were just tired. We still had the responsibility of performing our mundane daily tasks to stay afloat, but there was no break from the sinister nightly rituals we were constantly forced into. There was never a second to relax, never a moment when the question wasn’t there: what or who was going to get broken tonight?
Mom was always too afraid of what might happen if she called the police. Due to her bipolar disorder there was no way to be exactly sure how it would play out. Would Lisa be arrested and “come back and fucking kill us all” like she threatened on so many occasions, or would they be able to pacify the situation? Delay the grim reality just a little bit longer. The gamble was uncertain, so most evenings saw us walking on eggshells, praying that nothing we did would set her off.
We were just entering the 70s and mental health and its myriad of deficiencies were still mostly a mystery. The only other alternative in those days would have been to commit her, but Mom viewed that option as a death sentence. She knew the people in those places were treated inhumanely and without concern. They were treated like specimens, like some sort of low budget science project that would only serve as data to fatten their studies. No one ever came out of those places better. In fact, no one ever came out of those places at all…
Those were questions we had to ask ourselves every day. Stresses that we had to push through for what projected to be our whole lives, at least that is what we always assumed. There was a very realistic chance that she might take her own life too, we’d had a handful of close calls already.
She’d been clinically dead several times only to be revived and wake up with a perverse disappointment painted across her grimacing face. The undeniable appalling comprehension that death couldn’t be spellbound and contorted to appease her. There was no way to tame or beckon it with total accuracy, no, it was only the malicious shrouded skeleton that could beckon you. Mr. Bones wasn’t quite ready yet.
The brutalization of her body during the span of these attempts only served to make her quality of life uglier. It was a terribly dispiriting thing to watch unfold gradually but unfailingly over and over again, only to output the same traumatic results.
I can’t even remember how many nights I fell asleep with tears in my eyes and fear in my heart. Visions of her screaming at us in a drunken stupor, her throat hoarse and her eyes bloodshot and crazed polluted me. The threats felt more probable with each successive day of destruction.
The final incident was oddly the exact opposite of the outbursts at max volume and vulgarity displayed on the road that had led us there. Mom found Lisa one afternoon in August when she came home from work lying dead in her bedroom.
The last thing anyone would want is for their mother to see that. She’d broken down many times explaining to me just how backwards it was. “Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. It’s not a natural cycle,” she’d cry to me. All I could think was that there wasn’t a tremendous amount that was “natural” about our family.
No one knows exactly where she got the gun. Lord knows my mother wouldn’t have allowed it in her house. She’d gone so far in her attempts to shield Lisa from harm that all of the sharp cutlery and piercing objects had been confined to the trunk of her car.
Not that anyone was really coming over for Thanksgiving anyway, but Mom and I had kidded privately about the thought of all the guests only having access to a butter knife. It would have made for some humorous, or at the very least, interesting dinner conversation had one been able to take place. But that was life, sometimes you had to laugh, otherwise, you’d only cry.
The funeral was a guilty one. We all knew that Lisa had never wanted to be on Earth. During her bipolar mood swings she often said that she never asked to be part of the world we were born into and, in turn, held hostage by. In a way, we understood that she was in a better place now. That she was never fit for the sort of lifestyle that most people enjoyed. But I could tell, even though it remained unspoken, there was still that bit of unending guilt gnawing inside all of us. Because we each knew deep down that we were a little bit glad she was dead.
We were downtrodden but also ashamed to admit the relief we felt that the burden was over. That the fear and abuse had finally evaporated. It took a horrific, scarring event to reach that point, but realistically, we all knew there was never going to be a cure. There could be no magic day that she would have woken up and suddenly everything would be alright.
We’d been holding out our hope for much too long. That fantasy concept had rotted away long ago, in turn, giving showcase to the grueling, unpleasant reality. The terror and dysfunction had become our way of life. Moving on from that was a bizarre process.
After the funeral, things were quiet in the house. So much so that the new silence felt deafening. I thought it would be easier given that I had been preparing myself for it since I was a child, but it wasn’t. It felt incredibly strange—the quiet, the freedom, the absence of terror and bodily harm. I had to do something to take my mind off of it, so I did pretty much the only thing I knew how to in our house. Clean.
My sister had left a vibrant mess all over the walls and floor of her room. What most people don’t know is that, when someone dies violently inside your house, the paramedics or the coroner only take the body. But until it happens, no one really understands that they don’t take the mess.
We just finished paying for her funeral—money we didn’t have to begin with—so there was no way we were going to be able to pay a professional to clean up the gory remnants. I wasn’t about to let my parents be the ones to clear their child’s brains and face off the wall. As much as I didn’t want to, I had to clean it.
When I entered the room, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Of course, I’d seen things like this in the movies, but in person, it was a whole different feeling. I felt queasy looking at the mashup of tissue strewn about; there was even still one of Lisa’s eyeballs surrounded by meaty slop and wedged inside the partially cracked heating vent.
I had a rather weird moment with myself, closing my own eyes and thanking my brain for keeping them in there all those years. After a few more deep breathing exercises, I paused and composed myself, summoning the willpower to push my way through.
I poured some of the potent liquid soap into a bucket of hot water and dipped the scruffy sponge inside. Once I was able to accumulate some suds and had gotten the mixture right, I wrung it out with both hands. My fingers were sweating profusely, trapped inside the yellow rubber gloves, as I began to wipe down the splattered walls.
It ended up being a fairly quick clean, which was surprising but far from easy. Scooping out the hunks of brain matter from the vent was wince-inducing. My fingers struggled to grip the battered fractions, further mushing them even as I restrained the application of pressure. Aside from that, the wall along the vent was manageable, save for dealing with the remainder of the eyeball. Once that was finished, I felt better. I was still crying but a moment of reprieve stirred inside me… until I looked down.
Those awful, godforsaken fucking rugs. I scrubbed them ferociously and wiped them repeatedly for hours and hours. Despite the elbow grease, there was so much of her blood and skull contents saturated inside the cheap flooring that there was no way I was going to be able to get it all out.
My effort was not completely ineffective, the rugs showed some signs of letting go of the stains but it was still obvious that something evil had transpired in the room. It seemed that aspect would be irreversible. Regardless of the less than perfect outcome, I’d done what I could. It wasn’t ideal but it was a massive upgrade from no action at all.
From that day forward, everywhere I lived was always shining and spotless. The nastiness that was my childhood was something I would always be trying to clean up. From the used dishes to the disorder and dirt, moving forward it all always had to be sterile and unmarked. If I started to see the filth then it brought back the memories. The horrors, violence, and despair that I tried so many times to wash away. It was like an endless juggling act, everything needed to be just right for me to remain one step ahead of my past.
