Towering

Have you ever fallen in love with a house? Have you ever failed to fall in love so you drafted your own?

TowerinG

by

Seth Cason

 

     My first glimmer of architectural curiosity began throughout those frosty, forgotten mornings at age five, mornings of chocolate milk, Care Bears, and the dismissal of my whistleblowing exposé on the social inequality ravaging my kindergarten classroom, evidenced by my unforgiveable, prejudicial deficit of building blocks.

     “You have plenty,” quipped my teacher, a woman who assigned gender identities to all twenty-six letters of the alphabet (only vowels were female, “y” not up for discussion being something akin to trans and this being a Catholic school). I stewed in silent injustice; I did not have enough blocks to fashion my skyscraper, and no one gave a damn.

     And now, the helplessness of aging, its certainty and permanence, its unforeseeable horrors capped off bluntly with the extinguished fires of our loves, fears, memories, and potential, is one example of nature’s vulgar offenses against all earthly lifeforms not classified as Anderson Cooper (vulpes argentum). Still, stats be damned, I am grateful to be counted amongst the last generation to master the now arcane technique of cursive handwriting, and it was during those 2nd Grade days of dotted papers, No. 2 pencils, the countless measured swoops and curls and flourishes that I found time to fall in love with a pursuit not uncommon for eight year-old boys, the mysteries of all things Dinosaur. My knack for distinguishing a diplodocus from a brachiosaurus (“I can name that sauropod in three notes, M**********r”) was my first and only trace characteristic of masculine normalcy. But since plenty of boys were just as absorbed if not obsessed with throwing, slamming and kicking sports-balls as well as each other, proving arbitrary violence the instinctive male parallel to girls’ traditional affinity for RPGs with Barbie, they could care less about paleontology, archaeology, the Terrible Lizards of the Triassic, Jurassic, and catastrophic Cretaceous Periods, though at the time scholarly sub-communities driven by prehistorical hysterics ushered the phenomenon into the cultural mainstream.

     But, as an aging mortal afflicted with lightning-fast hormonal upheavals and fickle, ever-shifting obsessions of my own, I naturally outgrew my zeal for those unfortunate reptiles but not the zeal itself, the hunger, the fervor of a desperate bird circling 24/7 over earth’s bleak tarmac in search of a comfortable topic to call home. And I can remember, I can ace my own history test. I had only to search backwards and my curiosity latched its talons around a medium which chose me, not vice-versa, and to this day tackles my interest with the same gusto as my first stegosaurus.

     I fell in love with houses. I mean big-a*s houses. Houses so absurdly huge that there wasn’t enough furniture on Earth to fill each room. Mansions, castles, towers; to this day, at least four times a week I have a dream whose story has no plot aside from me inheriting a residence too gargantuan to fathom. 

     But for me, architecture and the mathematical logistics of construction (hell, in all four years of high school my proudest algebraic accomplishment was a ‘C’, a grade I earned almost at the expense of my own life.) disqualify me from practicing quite a few vocations for fear my brains will sizzle and slide out my ears like a pair of greasy eggs benedict.

     But I remember the enticement that connected me to my first two influences, one of which, though confined to the two dimensions of a painting above a hotel bed somewhere in south Louisiana, reduced me to a drooling, slack-jawed paralytic.

     It’s still the most breathtaking masterpiece of architecture I’ve ever seen, this antebellum estate that lauds itself the largest in the south, its splendor unsurpassed by the wild, sprawling grounds of its gardens. I found and noted on the hotel painting’s lower left corner: Nottoway Plantation.

    It would be about ten years before I finally saw it for real; fifteen more before I’d begin spending one weekend there each year.

      I wasn’t graced with the talent or the knack to graduate beyond wild and impossible floor plans, most of which I thoughtfully drafted on the hardwood floor of the living room at five or six in the morning, my favorite time, then and now. We only caught a handful of TV stations, but somehow the droning consistency and reassurance of the Weather Channel zapped the hell out of my synapses.

    So that’s how and where you’d find me, on makeshift blanket-rug on the hardwood floor, rulers and pencils sprawled out, and a T-square that eventually vanished, just like my socks, certain CDs, a boyfriend or two, and my favorite shirt-- all into thin air. Even into my early teens, long after I discarded my hope of hopes that we’d win the Publisher’s Clearing House, I still created monstrous homes, attacking countless reams of light green paper my mom brought home from work, mutant papers, almost twice as big as the standard 8 ½ X 11”, and with grueling accuracy I’d match up the three or four floors of the mansion du jour, complete with secret passages and luxurious panic rooms, turrets. balconies, gables, and at least three staircases, two of them hidden in the unlikeliest of places.

      Now, having been raised in Louisiana, the concept of a basement, much less the gothic excitement of networks of underground tunnels, were completely lost on me until I finally got my hands on The Castle of Otranto, but at that point I was eighteen and my floor planning days were a childish secret.

 

 

 

     My very first castle-- yes, castle-- wasn’t mine at all, at least not before its original owner, an older cousin, finally outgrew it, thus passing it into my hands several weekends a year when visiting my aunt.

      It was a Playskool palace manufactured no later than 1980, a morose two feet tall beginner’s deluxe sadism starter kit that unfolded onto a medieval foyer with flags painted up and down the plastic walls and a staircase that, when pulled away from the wall, revealed a painted secret alcove. Rounding out the estate was the Playskool animal barn whose red double doors, to my unshakeable delight, emphatically “moo-ed” each time they opened and closed. And at last, a gathering of slowly salvaged livestock, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and a quadruple amputee milkmaid named Peaches lovingly conspired to help pass the time. My aunt kept these and the rest of the toys in the last of her house’s four bedrooms, approximately thirty miles south of my hometown in the green desolation that is St. Landry Parish, the last room to the right down a long, perpetually dark hallway which stopped with a floor-to-ceiling mirror into that served no purpose beyond alerting my puppy to the treachery of illusion and the virtue of caution versus concussion.

     For readers born too late or too early to grasp the innocent simplicity of Playskool People, allow me to present, as a visual aid, the cover of Sunny Day Real Estate’s bitchin’ 1994 debut album, Diary: 

     In high school, I benefitted more from this image than I could have possibly known at the time. It reinforced my repulsion toward conventional adulthood through sheer terror, forcing me to explore the gamut of unconventional possibilities. Unfortunately, there were no instructions, no roadmaps or methodical strategies written down, fleshed out, or carved in stone. Still, I had only to gaze on the Playskoolers’ happy-go-lucky, unflinching ignorance, their postwar baby-booming diet of chipped beef casserole and denial, and the visceral struggle to maintain, much less obtain, traditional family values given their lack of limbs and genitalia.

     But unlike those poor sods marinating at Pompeii, it took more than imminent suffering, destruction, and death to wipe the hypnotic smiles off their lily-white Playskool faces. Their resiliency and stoicism are timeless testaments of courage applicable even to this day, each time, for example, I decide to douse my bedroom in Febreze instead of kerosene.

     It wasn’t uncommon for my parents to whisk me away to that house, maybe for a holiday visit, or sometimes a blunt weekend drop-off like a UPS driver hurling a dented package out the window, or a French Quarter w***e tossing beads during Mardi Gras. Anything to reset your attention and my parents’ dangerously volatile relationship with mood stability.

     The image on the left depicts an accurate-ish replica of this castle: turrets, a theoretical moat, an androgynous yet well-mannered king and queen eagerly greeting company from atop the lowered drawbridge, their servants, neighbors, and executioners having long since succumbed to the ravages of the Red Death, much more theatrically fitting than the Black Death and a hundred times as lethal as the Paisley Death. My own arbitrarily cobbled royal family, pressured in no small means by the armed legion of 25-cent plastic mercenaries scattered about every corner of the bedroom, regularly invited peasants like Peaches to dinner. With similar grace they’d sweet-talk their enemies into climbing the stairs to the top of the turret for a refreshing after-dinner view of the kingdom where, invariably, these guests “accidently” plummeted though the trap door and into the black bandwidths of eternal void.

     But to conclude this business with the toy castle. Over and above, far and away, as steadfast as gravity, my favorite features were the turrets stationed on either side, one of which, as I mentioned, secreted a trap door on the topmost open battlement that proved so ultra-sensitive to the weights of the gentle plastic people that not a single one, not even poor Granny, was immune to the perilous plummet three stories down to their theoretical deaths, the lucky ones, at least, in the ground floor dungeon.

     That castle is still an endearing childhood memory, one that could have been lost forever at the bottom of the bargain bin of my subconscious had my inner-bloodhound not sniffed out an amazing docu-series that premiered the summer after my high school graduation. And after watching all three installments (Castle Ghosts of Scotland, England, and Ireland), my impression of the castle tilted away from the glamorous, Neuschwanstein-esque splendor, bustling with the clomping of merchants’ horses coming and going through the snowy entrance while cheerful shapeshifting laborers tended to the upkeep of every corner upon mutating into musical birds and mice. Now, I was embroiled in the classically sinister scenario of wars, horrors, torture, a gloomy smorgasbord of undeads.

     And either way, all the while, the king’s a*s never left the seat of his jeweled, gold-embossed throne, poor chap; he was dismissed by the servants as a life-sized humanoid sex doll in drag, touched up occasionally with margarine and turtle wax.

 

 

 

     But any-the-hell-who, why am I so obsessed with ancient, possibly un-haunted, certainly unfumigated old European fortresses when I live I Louisiana, historic home to some of this country’s most unique vestiges of grandeur, luxuries inextricably knotted to nightmares, to shameless and unpunished barbarity, to the brutalization and purchase of human beings regarded as livestock by “noblemen” whose dumb, delicate wives couldn’t be bothered to even dress themselves?

     Sometimes nothing is more inhuman than actual humans. We have to remember that.

    

 

 

     One last thing about the toy castle. My favorite thing: the trap door through which the king hurled those treasonous Playskool power-grabbers, piling so high you’d think they’d learn their lesson, but no, this was drama after all.

     In short, Leap Castle, along with a laundry scroll of bloody historical blasphemies, sheltered its own hidden turret of doom wherein prisoners and traitors and singing te were shoved several stories down into something of an empty elevator shaft, at the bottom of which, amidst heaps of skeletons and corpses in varying states of decay, were metal spikes upon which, if the victim were lucky, would impale and extinguish him instantly, if not a wee bit quicker than his starved predecessors. How fortunate we are to exist in a time and place where such backwards savagery is buried, forgotten, and long gone, where civilization has evolved and understands that cooperation, equality and mutual respect are the commonsense keys to enhancing the quality of life for each other, our planet, and all future generations.

     How I suck at science fiction.

 

 

 

     You dig deeper, you canvass and backtrack and excavate, but every dud mission leaves you defeated and depleted until the day you finally stumble upon something, an artifact, a totem, a relic that manifests its significance by the chilliest shimmer, an impossible hum; unable to communicate further it relies on your memory to crack the code, dig even deeper, and if nothing works you step away, clear your head until the desperation to link the two languages, to translate how the secrets of your findings explain the secrets about yourself, recedes, and only then does something click, a stone comes loose, and all at once you’re flailing through a landslide of memories.

     Sometimes, after trying so hard you’ve busted your every last blood vessel, you accept that it’s gone.

    And sometimes, for me at least,  the beginning was right here all along, six blocks away on the left in the middle of my hometown’s residential subdivision, a sprawling corner house wasting away while devoured a quarter of the block.

     “It’s haunted!”

     My insistence was aggressive enough for my mother to fork over the blunt facts, that it was a gigantic run-down clusterfuck of apartments.

     Innocuous from the front, nothing setting it apart or spookifying the premises save the autumn overcast and the house’s plausible resemblance to the old Myers place from “Halloween.”

     Ho-hum, you’d say if you weren’t a Louisiana native. Riding past as a child I noticed it, the offness that reminds me of the hero of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot trying to elaborate his dread of the old Marston House.

     Now, instead of riding, I drive past this house almost every day, and maybe because I’m distracted by the street as it distracts me from flipping through radio channels or the tracks on my CD or experimenting with various wallpapers on my android’s home-screen, or maybe it’s because it’s always 6AM sharp and as dark as midnight when I pass that corner, but it’s strange that I forget it’s there, and that I’d forgotten the peanut butter and chocolate perfection-blend of excitement and terror that only a child understands, and so much so that we’d sooner go trick-or-treating at a booby-trapped white supremacist survival compound than go near that gaping portal to hell.

     The photographs tell only part of the story. There are several of those white staircases encircling the house, and just as many chimneys. But the lower level of discolored bricked walls. Puzzling at first, and as I grew so did my imagination. You see, in Louisiana residential basements, below ground quarters, are unheard of. There might be an underground Cold War bunker scattered here and there, but when it comes to home interiors, particularly in the center of the state southward to the Gulf, no matter if it’s a hovel or a castle, basements simply do not happen. Exceptions always abound, such as hospitals or banks or sometimes hotels, but never in cemeteries. Nobody wants to watch scores of corpses floating along the floodwaters like a parade of the dead undead. Again.

     Presently, as someone who by definition meets the requirements of a middle aged adult-man, I’m sure this house, like everybody else’s in town, is basement-free, and the only sinister creatures lurking beyond that white ground-level door are globs of mold and cat-sized cockroaches. Still, this house, crouched in silence like a giant spider, its upper windows hinting at a mysterious third floor, fostered more than my grade-school fascination with the supernatural

     Not unlike the stable genius at the local zoo who sidles up to the gorilla cage, curious as to whether he’ll be left alone, slaughtered, or merely maimed, my excitement over the unknown, the personal premise best captured by the title of Agatha Christie’s ambitious novel So Many Steps to Death. Not that I’m flirting with the Grim Reaper or mulling over his offer for a friendly game of Connect 4, trust me, he and I have gone head to head more times than I can count, and so far I’ve escaped. Sure, I was wounded and diminished but somehow alive, a survivor, the Final Girl in my own horror movie franchise.

     But I can’t look at that house without basking in a surge of intrigue. My imagination runs wild. If ever I do win the lottery, I think I’ll tear the rug out from under the current owner, buy the house for myself, call in the national guard to forcibly evict all of the tenants and clear the house of anything that passes for furniture, plus wall hangings and so on, have the whole thing fumigated, sanitized, sterilized, and scrubbed so that its creepy ground floor shines gloriously enough to be seen from outer space.  

     And then I’d strategically knock down particular walls in particular places and frame them into elaborate doorways, thus connecting all of the apartments, transforming the house into an irrational labyrinth whose rooms I’d paint with fearsome, fortifying colors, no pastels, and all of it mine.

   

      In a Rorschach Test kind of way, I’d be fascinated to learn what a sufficiently diverse range of people would see when shown the floor plan of a mansion, or more importantly, what they would feel.

     Maybe nothing. Maybe confusion, at best apathy.

     I was ten years old when I discovered that there were entire magazines dedicated to floor plans, all styles and sizes, real or envisioned, interiors, exteriors, they piled up neatly beside my own creations, the stacks of green papers. My father, a math teacher, no doubt mistook my fascination for something logical and pragmatic and $$$, like architecture, if not interior design. He even brought me down one of the country roads that wraps itself in a loop around the wilderness of our town’s outskirts, the only road accessible to the new and snobby cluster of gigantic homes and their bumblefuck species of subhuman dwellers, a neighborhood into which one of his colleagues would soon assimilate once construction of her new home was completed.

     With her permission and with dusk closing in, he brought me inside the husk of the house, a two-storied Victorian-shaped skeleton.

     I don’t recall feeling anything beyond the urge to get the hell out of there. Its beams and splinters and transparency from one end to the other made the wide open space feel as roomy as a casket.

        

 

 

      The grandiose, non-suggestively overcompensating Louisiana State Capital is proud to be the most phallic tallest in the nation. Although the first capital building, a verified WTF castle ripped from the tales of King Arthur, was just as proficient if not more convenient, proficiency is no match for ostentation and insecure old white men. Do you really think that soap opera stars snag their parts through merit, talent, and experience?      

     This isn’t a term paper, so I’m exempt from  delivering a Ben Stein information dump about the building’s history. That leaves me with two anecdotes: first, as schoolkids on more than one field trip to Baton Rouge, after enduring the same rigmarole about immediate expulsion should we spit over the ledge upon reaching the top, I remember the marble walls of the hallway outside the legislative chamber and beyond riddled with bullet holes from Governor Huey P. Long’s bodyguards going full on Tarantino on his dumb prick of an assassin.

     Years later, throughout the summer after our high school graduation, my cabin-fevered best friend David and I embarked on several road trips, once to the top of the capital building, another awarding him a head start on his straight-guy bucket list by dragging me and another friend to a sumptuous two-course dining experience at the  prestigious culinary reckoning known as Hooters.

 

              

     Is it a fixation or obsession? Does it need a name, does it need an excavation, a vivisection, a translation, if such a thing were possible, a mechanism that exists without language yet its explanation printed, chiseled, or set in cold type for cold roving eyes. And therein lies the solution and the paradox, that when such a personal abstract, something deified, something as nurturing and affirming as mutual affection yet more consuming and out of control than a tornado is coaxed from a city's outside toward its inside; spoken, written. Why does God seem to hate most of his reaction disintegrates, the fever breaks, sometimes forever.

     It’s like taking your mint condition Camaro, sleazy-red with nary a crumb on the passenger side floorboard, out on its maiden voyage only to have it sputter to a smoking halt at rush hour in the middle of downtown Bayou Goober. What was I supposed to do in the little leagues with my hundreds of re-imaginings of the American castle? The foundation can only bring you so far; I couldn’t teleport into my own creations and hope to bask in glamor and adventure. Even if I imagined the most addictive reading room at the top of a five-story tower overlooking the jealous peasants of my hometown, it would mean that I was still trapped, but at least with money to burn.

     With maturity and the relief of such pent-up frustration comes not only the death, the falling away of a part of myself, but the loss of powerful magic that most of us lose at some point, whether we know it or not.

     I’ve studied, stared at, and scrutinized floor plans most of my life, but particularly throughout my pre-adolescence into my early teens. As bittersweet a compulsion as it was, this one-dimensional infatuation contingent upon the convergence of my imagination, my curiosity, and my humorless vulture of an inner tax attorney who oversaw from a stiff distance the diminishing appeal of everything I cherished as a child, one toy dinosaur, and improbable mansion at a time.

     He failed, however, to drain me of every spark of passion, and the most innocuous spark can provoke a wildfire. Granted, the inevitability of maturity extinguished most of those flames, as well it should, but the longing and the fantasies and the craft transmogrified into something more civil and culturally mellow. I still drive through majestic neighborhoods, still fawn over the turrets and towers of every photographed castle I happen upon, aching to be there, to climb the winding stairs to the top of every belfry or seemingly superfluous Gothic skyscraper. Except Leap Castle. A pity; it would have made for one bloody hell of a senior class trip.

 

Reviews

[Fran Marie]

Seth. This was a most interesting read.i thoroughly
enjoyed this biographical story of your Louisianan
upbringing..especially your fascination with the
castle and architecture design and descriptions
have you ever read Aya Rand's The Fountain head
it's about the character) Howard Roark and his
uniqueness in being his own person True to himself
and he goes against the architectural establishment
there conventional standards
and does it his way ...thats what I thought
about when reading this..also enjoy
the fact how graves are above ground
or else deal with floating zombies..i
really liked how you wrote this one
so many good references Agatha Christie
Is another one I enjoy reading and Truman
Capote Stephen K et al..nice work here
sending 100 blocks your way

[Seth Cason]

Hi Fran Marie!
I have to admit that I wasn't feeling so great earlier, so I dozed off and reluctantly stepped inside this here cafe with no intention of ordering, and then your review put a big smile on my face, so I extend my thanks. The original final draft had at least five pages worth of photos and illustrations scattered throughout, but I didn't feel like getting standing before the Supreme Court on a copyright infringement charge where, as my own lawyer, my opening arguments would have been, "Did you read the story? No? Then leave me alone before I have YOU arrested, your Honor!"

Yeah, my brain's still a little muddled. Anyway, this review means a lot to me. Thank you again,

Seth
P.S.-- not to be a bother, but could you send those 100 blocks via UPS?

[Fran Marie]

you're so welcome Seth ..
Send ups? you little pest
I'm joking..ha and
no pastels I promised;

[lightsong]

Sethy, I must admit that I had been reading this AGES AGO and I wasn't surprised to see another something similar between us (aside being terrible dancers and swimmers), I was going pretty well UNTIL my eyes and mind began to wobble and I cursed my English being a second language and gave up almost half the way, now reading it all I must admit too that I am a CRIMINAL translating almost the whole piece, did You by any chance met my poem (homeland) before?!

one of the things (because I wanted many!) I wanted to study after my high school is archeology, but my dad said "NO!" and no matter how much I rebelled (yes I am a rebel one, did You know that he "my father" used to nickname me Tsunami?! hell yes) NO meant NO! so the poor me ended up into Civil Engineering, luckily though I like my specialty of it, always there is God's plan I accepted at that time that God wanted me to go that road so I did with satisfaction, and You say Dinosaur? You didn't meet my new little friend did You? oh wait and see! ok, back to the subject, You know Seth, even now You still hold that passionate little Sethy, of course as I my own self understand your ending parts here but I can't but see You the same passionate adventurer soul, even that reality hits hard but at least You still dream (didn't we agree to Italy here we GO!!! or maybe Scotland since Kurt wanted to buy a castle there too ) your writing may be difficult for me to read and grasp all their essences but I do catch those little Seth's touches that only You can write like them, the very seal of You which I always adore them, on the other plate, I've noticed something (psychic me is talking) You write with REAL details specially from your childhood, this I think on the later years weighted more on You, detailed memories of childhood can be curse or a blessing (stealing words from my new poem which You don't know yet), well who am I to know!? all I know that I missed saying THIS to You, Coffee scent being sent through air (luckily her talent is much better than mine) with chocolate and walnut and to add pencils and papers and colors and castles!!!!

Note1, in case You didn't know it already, Thank You for coming back here, for meting me and be a part of my life.
Note 2, did I read "AGEING" You are a Lion, of course besides the Wolf and dragonfly and a Lion's Heart DOES NOT AGE!