Mister Denton
The little grains of sand that fill our hourglass each have universes of their own.
Quiet sadness ambling with
Grocery bags in hand.
A mother’s kindnesses doing what
Little good they can.
When his anger flared
Young eyes could not resist
The rooms of meticulous smut,
And the circus of an exhibitionist.
Thier stomachs knew before
The cats could understand,
In the days before
They found the feline's man.
None were as honest affection as they,
If they stirred, it was surely brief.
For need is their only loyalty,
Hunger, the only grief.
The wind only
Understood
That the shouting
Had stopped.
The drippings of the
Mortal remains forevermore
Are still entombed
Beneath that new vinyl floor.
And nobody
Told
The new
Tenants.
Everyone has weird neighbors. Some weirder than others.
I grew up in a strange place. The city, yes, odd, but oddity within oddity was my neighborhood. It was a cluster of about 12 houses in the middle of an industrial district. My across-the-street neighbors were the city's largest power transfer/transmission station. Massive towers, humming lines, rusted empire of pylons feeding every dwelling in town.
All of our neighbors were like us: weirdos. Who picks a house in place like this? Just people trying to exist. Who don't fear breaking the social norms.
And our next door neighbor, Mister Denton, fit right in.
To me, he was just always a very old man. He was quite fat, the shape of a bloated pear. Shoes to big and athletic socks always slouching and pants that were one slip away from dropping off altogether. His shirts in my memory were always greasy and mis-buttoned. Hair a wild swirl of salt and pepper and he wore coke-bottle glasses to be able to see.
Whenever Mister Denton stood, he always placed on hand on his hip, thumb down, like he was really pushing to put pressure on the hip, not just rest a hand. I would frequently see him walking down our dirt road headed to the grocery store with empty bags to carry everything home in. I lost count how many times my mom would give him a ride to or from the grocery store. In later years, she would just take him groceries.
The few times I can recall hearing him speak, he had a sort of high pitched voice for a man. Not squeaky, but just soft and high. This would have probably been when mom took him in the car. That's also where I got the lingering smell of body oder attached to his memory.
Most certainly mentally ill.
His house was an old World War Two era home. A tan stucco box with old rotting wood frame windows. The wall finish was cracked and falling off in several spots and the back of the house was asbestos armor.
A four-foot chain-link fence separated his house from ours, overgrown with trumpet vine—a flimsy attempt at privacy. To a pack of curious kids, that fence was not a boundary but an invitation. His windows had no curtains, no blinds, just greasy glass and rusty screens. It was practically daring us to look.
This invited snooping children to pop their heads up to see what they could discover. Especially when he started yelling at his cats. I never knew how many, but based on smell, way too many.
When Mister Denton raged, he screamed at the top of his lungs: a shrill, high-pitched fury that sliced through the neighborhood. Usually it was something food-related. The ritual became a game—one kid sneaking up to the window to report on the scene inside.
Which was frequently Mister Denton parading around in nothing more than his slouching athletic socks, grimy flip flops and a sagging, dingy pair of briefs. Only his coke-bottle glasses complimented his shocking lounge-wear.
Usually.
Sometimes he forewent the briefs.
Of the three windows we could safely peek into, the living room, the kitchen and a room that had become his library of paper back books, the kitchen provided the most 'entertainment'. It was on those cabinets and tables that he would open and sit cans of cat food. In my memory they are covered with open cans.
The library always attracted me, even though we rarely saw him there. A longtime fantasy of mine has been to have a room filled floor to ceiling with books. And though it was a small room, Mister Denton had that. It felt like a very wealthy feature for a poor broken man.
In my mind they were volumes of sci-fi and fantasy, worlds anew and adventures to be hand on this one. I was SORELY disappointed when, as an older teen, I was part of a crew that roofed his house and went sent inside to the library to clean up some debris that had fallen through the ceiling, I perused Mister Denton's titles and found what I guessed were smutty titles.
Of course, being the prudish teen I was, I'd never seen books of this sort. From the titles, one could estimate their contents. I could not. Curiosity being what it is to cats (and wolves), I plucked one book off and flipped through it and read a page, where i was disgusted to read of a man licking the anus of a woman on an airplane. It was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard of. Uhg! I had no idea people got up to these sorts of things, much less WROTE about them!
Immediately embarrassed, I nervously thrust the book back into his empty slot and noticed hundreds and hundreds of books with titles like; Trailer Park Temptresses; Nurses in Heat: ER After Dark; The Peach Orchard Diaries; Naughty Nights on Flight 69. It went on and on. My conflict between the man I saw and heard and his owning a large library of books suddenly was no conflict at all. Mister Denton was a pervert, pure and simple.
Now it all made sense.
To my knowledge, his interest in lurid books never translated to attention to little boys and little girls. Which in hind sight is a huge relief. We ran through our little kingdom day and night, nary an adult in sight riding herd over us.
I always felt sorry for my neighbor. He led a solitary life and while he no doubt had family, I never saw anyone visit him. Except my mother. As he got older she would take him food and meals. She was very kind that way.
It was this kindness that moved her to find Mister Denton after he had died. I am vague on the timing. Sometimes, I think I was still a teen living at home, others, married and out of my parent's home. I do have clear image of his bloated black and blue corpse through the rusted screen door and an overwhelming smell of decay.
Thankfully, I have no recollection of how the cats handled his death and decaying body once their canned food was no longer available.
That was many years ago, more than thirty, and yet I still think of him whenever I see that house next to mom and dad's place. I can no longer recall his first name or any other details about him. But, that small piece still lives in memory. As we all do. Even after we are gone from this mortal life, small vignettes exist for a time.
I do wish I had brighter, happier memories of the man who was my families neighbor for two decades, but reclusive personalities rarely shine their light on the outside world.
Mister Denton, should we one day meet again, I look forward to getting to know you and I'd love to hear how you remember your little strange neighbors on that dirt road in Dust Meridian.
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