I Love It Here!

The Goodwins were a strange family. They lived right across the street from me, and when I graduated high school they moved away, driving off north to their new home as I went south to mine. They were one of those families that seem to have been lifted out of a movie: they had two children my age, one infant daughter, and one older son, much older than his siblings. His name was Adam. One of the middle children, a boy named Eli, was certainly psychopathic, or at least he displayed the early signs of ASPD: sometimes frogs would end up on my porch with bluejay wings stapled to them; he had a penchant for hiding in the bushes behind my house, taking pictures of me and my family going about our day to day, pictures that always ended up in our mailbox, return address ‘God, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington D.C. 20500.’ The little infant started talking like scarily early. The other middle child was more or less normal, and the parents were swingers– they let everyone know. Pineapple doormat, doorbell and c. Like everyone knew. I think that the father, Mr. Goodwin, had done several tours in Afghanistan, but he seldom talked about anything besides, y’know, the swinging. They led a fairly quiet life, passing quite well as a normal family living amongst others in nuclear America.

One summer, however, the summer before my freshman year of college, they were anything but quiet. Mrs. Goodwin, this sort of eccentric, tchotchke amassing woman who only ever wore pink slippers with M.G. embroidered on each foot, who spoke in a sort of neo-transatlantic/Boston accent, decided that they must renovate the house. It was all quite loud. Instead of a sunroom or a garage, they decided to completely remove the roof of their colonial 5 bed 3 bath and add another story entirely, this new, 3rd story having a turret on the street-facing starboard side, a widows walk on top, a greenhouse, along with two new bedrooms for their incoming children (each of different parentage. Swinging, and all). Or at least it was planned.

In June they got to work, and Adam et al. took the roof off in two days. Where it went is of great importance. Sometime, I believe it happened over night, a massive pit of this black, bubbling ooze appeared in their front lawn. Like some kind of petroleum pool and it just… arrived. Some days, when the sun took forever to set and I would sit on my roof just watching the clouds go by, I would catch glimpses of birds attempting to land on the pit of tar, only to be swallowed completely. Always would their consumption be followed by the expulsion of one or two tarry feathers; they all got eaten too. And so into the pit the roof went. Panel by panel, room by room, Adam and his army of younger children would tear up shingle and plywood and just chuck it into the depths of the goo– it was the perfect wastebasket. It was so massive that it could swallow practically anything, the whole house, if they so desired could be eaten, room by room or all in one go– it was all the same to the ooze. When it rained it would rain hard, and all that the Goodwins did was say “when it rains it pours” and they would sit on their couch watching Super Nanny, all the while getting soaked in their shelterless shelter. The plants like it, they would say to my mom when she asked if they wanted to wait out the storm in our house. The rain would make this weird popping sound against the pit of black goo, a low viscosity liquid that at times appeared more solid than anything else, though the popping was not some chemical reaction– the goo was a comfortable temperature, and– as you will see– most things ended up unaffected by the tar’s properties

After the storms passed they started cleaning. I guess that the renovation also served as a time to strip away the fat from the house, to leave only the necessities before they started a new chapter of life. Through their windows they tossed their belongings into the pit: old photo albums, little hand-made christmas ornaments from their children’s elementary school’s art classes, dog collars and food bowls, a couple torn parkas and a rusty kitchen knife, all into the pool of black gunk and ooze. Sometimes I would hear them argue, ‘No no please Mike don’t throw that away it’s from before I met you!’ ‘But Adam I’m also one of mommy and daddy’s kids!’ ‘How can you not remember Oscar?! The cat that loved water!’ But all the same the belongings were sent flying, straight into the black. It became an object of attraction. Almost a landmark. People from neighboring streets or adjacent neighborhoods would drive in to get a peek at the pit of matter, sitting on the lawn in folding chairs to watch Mr. Goodwin toss an old microwave into it– people even started helping out with the dismantling of the second story, just for the hell of it. But as soon as they started the construction– the building of their second story– the people ceased to come. Only I remained, watching from my bedroom window as they built an extension to their staircase, or as they erected a loose layout of their new addition.

It was then, around August, that they started to get cocky. They started to jump over the pit at its narrow parts. They would stand extremely close to the edge. It was as they were adding the turret, this decadent stone structure that really did not fit the aesthetic of their house, nor any of the homes surrounding it, that Adam fell in. He was being a dick. Rose, the youngest child, the freak who could talk at 6 months, kept scolding him, telling him to stop standing so close to the pit! But Adam, in his hubris, did not care. And I mean I can’t really blame him, I wouldn’t want to be bossed around by a sibling twenty years my junior. At that point it’s essentially just some kid you know. But so on this one hot August day, when the air was really humid with no breeze to cut through it, one of those days with loud cicadas and loons just ripping their calls throughout the thick, sticky air, Adam fell in. The ground underneath him just gave in, and he was completely and totally consumed by the black ooze. I watched it happen. He said, afterwards, that it was the strangest thing ever, where he did not really feel any substance on him, but he forgot completely what it felt like to be in plain air. To be unburdened by ooze. To be weightless. He certainly did not enjoy the ooze, but it was comforting in the sense that it was all that he knew. And so as Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin and Eli and the other one rushed down to the front yard to see what Rose was yelling about, he just sort of floated to the top. Eventually he did get out, with a little help from his family, but while he was in that black, all he said or did, the only movement of his body in any way aside from treading the ooze, was him yelling out with a zealous grin ‘I love it here!’