THE LAST OF THE BOHEMIANS

Lawrence Holzworth

BOHEMIAN:
A restless vagabond; originally an idle stroller or gypsy (as in France) thought to have come from Bohemia, a country of central Europe, once part of the Austrian empire;

In later times often applied to an adventurer, in art or literature,   of irregular, unconventional habits, questionable tastes, or free morals.

These stories are based on actual events.
The names have been changed.

There were rats in the basement. They had chewed holes in the foundation by the backyard and from the yard, they could climb through the chain link fence to the vacant lot next door, cross the street and jog into the park. There were 200 homeless people living in the park in tents and makeshift shelters made of grocery carts and cardboard. Their leavings were a banquet for rats and other scavengers.

The backyard of the building was a square about 20 x 20 feet and faced east. It was bordered on the south by the outer brick wall of a six story condominium, on the east by a cinder block wall separating it from another courtyard and on the north by the chain link fence, the other side of which was the lot where the church had stood. The church bad burned down years before and the lot had been cleared and trees and weed grass had taken over.

From the back door, a concrete walkway ran from the door along the south wall and along the back wall. The remaining square was dirt covered with ivy and nearby the fence, an apple blossom tree, which would cover the ground with its lavender flowers every May. About eight feet above the concrete floor along the back wall was a wooden roof supported by two by four inch vertical posts and underneath I put together a small bar from wood scraps I found in the basement. Some bar stools collected from the street, paper lanterns, candles and tiki lights made it comfortably cozy.

The first time I became aware of the rats, I was entertaining a small group of friends in the backyard on a warm evening in the beginning of October. Everyone was happily conversing, beer in hand, when an adult rat climbed through the fence, scampered under the ivy and disappeared into the house.

My friend Eve said, "Lawrence, I just saw a rat." I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise. No one else had noticed.

The next day, sitting in the second story living room with my housemates, Daryl and Jack, we heard a rustling in the kitchen. The kitchen was an addition to the original building built on what might have originally been a porch, and had two doors from the living room separated by a four foot width of brick wall.

I leaned back on the couch to look through
the left door and saw a large rat shuffling along
the cutting board counter that ran along the back
wall of the kitchen below the window. The rat
hopped down onto the covered garbage can and
into it through a hole that had been chewed in
the plastic lid. He began to forage noisily in the garbage.

"This will not do," I said to the guys."We have to get rid of the rats."

In a cabinet drawer in the kitchen there were two large rat traps like the little spring-loaded mouse traps you might be familiar with, only bigger. Someone must have addressed but not solved the problem.

I asked around and a friend recommended I make a mixture of plaster, steel wool, and broken glass to plug up the holes in the back yard. The plaster fills the hole, the steel wool keeps it in place while the plaster dries, and the broken glass stops the rat from chewing through it. I found three holes, plugged them with this mixture and set a trap by the door to the backyard.

That evening, Daryl and I walked down to the art bar and had a couple of beers. When we returned, we went out to the back to see if we'd caught anything in the trap. Sure enough, the bar of the trap had snapped shut on the neck of an adult rat and he lay there immobile.

Thinking the rat was dead, Daryl reached down to lift the bar and suddenly the rat jerked to life and tried to free himself. Startled, Daryl released the bar and jumped backward, the bar falling back on the animal's neck and once again confining him in its grip.

"O, Daryl, its still alive!" I shouted excitedly.

"I know, Lawrence," Daryl laughed. "I'll go get a two by four from the basement." I watched the rat vigorously working his legs trying in vain to free himself. Daryl came back with a three foot piece of wood and smashed it into the rat's head until it stopped moving, making sure it was quite dead. I got a plastic bag to put the carcass in and tossed it into the garbage.

The next day I was walking by the stair that led down to the basement and I heard a plaintive crying, "Eep, eep, eep…"

Turning on the light, I descended the stairs and there at the bottom was a large still rat lying on the cement floor quite dead and two tiny baby rats chirping in distress at their mother's immobility. "I can handle this," I thought, and went to find the two by four.

CATS

"I have a friend who has two cats," Daryl said one day. "She's a dancer, she travels a lot, and she's looking for someone to take her cats."

"Well, we got rid of the rats," I said. "A couple of cats would keep new rats from moving in. Tell her we'll take them."

So the dancer came over with her boyfriend and her two cats and a litter box and so we had cats. One, the older and bigger, was a male who was fixed. He was white with black spots on his head and back and had a black tail. His name was Roscoe. The smaller was just a kitten, a female. She was calico, of dark and light browns. Her name was Creole.

I put them first in the backyard. The male was so frightened he was shaking but the younger female made herself right at home, exploring her new environment. Soon enough, both cats were well acquainted with the premises, inside and out.

There were no new rats, so that was good. There were mice, however. Creole would catch one, Roscoe would take it away from her and swat it around a little. It would try to run, Creole would pounce, take it into her mouth, and chomp, chomp, it would be gone. We watched this scenario many times.

Roscoe soon became my little buddy. He would climb the stairs to my studio on the fourth floor and scratch at the door. If it wasn't completely closed, he could push it open with his head and make a theatrical entrance as the door swung open. Then he would brush up against my leg and curl his tail around it the way cats do. I'd take a break from my painting, lie on the futon to admire my work and he'd climb up on my stomach and purr. In the summer, I'd be shirtless and he would lick the sweat off my armpits. It tickled.

The second floor common space had big windows from side to side and almost floor to ceiling, giving us a cinematic view of the park. There were five windows; the ones on the ends opened on a central pivot. There were no screens and they would be open all summer. The cats would climb out onto the ledge and chase birds.

When Roscoe disappeared, it seemed natural to assume that he had fallen off the ledge and run into the park. He was too timid to simply run away. I went over to the park and called his name with no results.

Ester was a Turkish woman who was staying with us at the time on the couch in the living room. After a couple of days and no Roscoe, she printed up some flyers that said lost cat with his picture on them and my phone number and we put them up by the dog run in the park and on lamp posts on the corners. Another day passed and no Roscoe.

Early in the morning on the next day, my phone rang, waking me. I heard the answering machine in the studio pick it up. "I've got your cat," a voice said. I jumped out of bed and ran to the phone. "Hello, I'm here," I said. "I've got your cat and I want a thousand dollars," the voice said. It was a rough voice, it sounded like an actor portraying a gangster.

"A thousand dollars! That's a lot of money for a cat!" I was still half asleep.

"That's right," he said, "and if you think I'm foolin' wit' ya, I'm gonna cut off his paw and send it to ya in the mail!"

O God, I thought, this is all too much! I hung up the phone. Could poor Roscoe be in the hands of some creep? How could he send me a paw in the mail? We didn't put our address on the flyer. went back to my room and lay down on the bed. It just can't be… it just can't be! I was beginning to feel ill. I got up and went downstairs where Ester was working at her desk. I told her about the phone call.

"You should go to the police," she said. At first I didn't think that would do much good, but as the day passed, I started to get angry that someone would try to extort money like that and then threaten to cripple an innocent animal. Cut off a paw! I also began to doubt that he had the cat and to suspect that his intention was really to hit me over the head and take my money. So I took a walk over to the police station.

I went up to the reception desk and told my story to the policeman stationed there and he told me to wait because they had one policewoman who was in charge of animal kidnapping.

Quite commonly, a dog owner will walk his dog to the grocery store, tie him up outside, and while he is shopping, the perpetrator will grab the pooch, who's wearing a collar with the owner's information on it, and hold it for ransom. It is animal kidnapping and it is against the law.

So I took a seat and waited and waited. Finally, in comes the night shift, and the sergeant who preps them looked at me and said, "Sir, the public is not allowed to attend this briefing, you'll have to leave."

I did not have any way of contacting the alleged kidnapper, so it's unlikely the police could have done anything about it, like setting up a sting operation or something. No use bothering with the police, really, unless the creep called me back, so I left. He didn't call.

A couple more days passed and I began to smell something funny in my room, like some really nasty old socks and started looking around to see what might be the source of so foul an odor. In the corner, in the back of my bedroom, hidden beneath some hanging clothes in an otherwise empty cardboard box, Roscoe lay quietly dead. Old age, I suppose, must have killed my little buddy. Well at least he died peacefully at home and not in the hands of some sadistic creep.

I called my friend Eric and he came over and we dug a hole in the backyard and buried Roscoe there. His leg didn't quite want to stay down and Eric maneuvered him into position while I tossed the dirt over his inert little body and tried not to cry.
 

THE ARTIST GHETTO

When I first moved to the city, I stayed with an old friend of mine in a small studio apartment he was subletting on the upper east side. It didn't take me long to figure out that downtown was where the artists were.

After a few months, I found a share downtown with a fellow who was an accountant by day and a drummer by night. He had a long, narrow apartment, commonly called a railroad apartment and he rented me one of the center rooms. The room was small, had a loft bed and doubled as a corridor, but the rent was cheap enough that I could also afford to rent a studio to do my artwork so I set out looking for one.

In the grocery store nearby, there was a bulletin board on which I saw a small notice advertising studios for artists to rent. I called the phone number on the notice and made an appointment to see the studios. They were located in a small building two blocks east of my new home on the far side of a park. The building was quite dilapidated. It was pre-war, probably pre-civil war. It was leaning like the tower of Pisa toward the vacant lot on the north. The plaster façade was peeling off the brick and there was ivy growing up the north wall that had crept over to the front.

I had been told by the fellow on the phone that the doorbell didn't work so I pounded loudly on the door. After a short while, a handsome thirty something white man with black hair opened the door with some difficulty as it caught on the floor. He was of medium height and I guessed by his mannerisms that he was probably of the gay persuasion.

"Hello, I'm Lawrence," I introduced myself.

"I'm Adrian," he said. "Nice to meet you. Please come in."

I stepped through the front door into a small vestibule and then through another door. Adrian closed the doors behind me and then called my attention to the lock on the second door.

"This door has a police lock," he said. It consisted of two long bars hinged in the center of the door which extended horizontally to either side of the door where they would slide through catches on the door frame when you pulled out and turned the knob on the center hinge.

"We always close and lock this door," he said, "Once, thieves broke into the building from the back. They had to leave the television set they were trying to steal because they couldn't figure out how to open the police lock. They had to go out the way they came in and couldn't climb over the wall with the TV."

He led me up the first flight of stairs. They leaned with the building but were still attached to the wall and rumbled as we ascended. The wooden railing was missing a few vertical supports but was fairly solid. We reached the second floor landing and made an about face, crossing the landing to the next staircase.

"The studios are on the fourth floor," he informed me. "You have twenty four hour access but they are for working only, no living."

"That good for me," I said. "I have a place to live. How about music?" I asked.

"Music is okay," he replied. We began to climb the staircase to the third floor. It was not as solidly anchored as the first. In fact, it had been pulled loose from its original mount on the wall by the settling of the building and was more like a suspension bridge.

"There was a church next door that burned down several years ago," he explained, "and this building settled a bit, leaning to the north side. The two upper staircases shifted down, but we've been using them for years with no problem."

I could see where the staircase had originally been attached to the wall by the indentation there. It had dropped by about an inch. Climbing this stair was noisier than the one below. It rattled, and the railing was a little bit shaky, but it held.

The third and final staircase was a repeat of the second one and we went up without incident. There was a doorway at the top facing the stair. He said, "This is a common bathroom you would be sharing with my roommate and I," indicating the door. To the left was another door through which we entered the studio.

"There are two studios for rent," he said, "This is the smaller one."

It was about fourteen foot square and had a large window facing east, looking out the back and leading to a fire escape. From the window, I could see two courtyards separated by a wall and then a tenement building which was a couple of stories taller. The room had its own entrance to the bath. From the bathroom door to the window there was a long narrow cabinet, about four feet high with sliding doors opening to an inside shelf.

Against the far wall, there were two large wooden cabinets with a long, wide, flat piece of wood laid over them creating a table. Next to it, close to the corner, was the exposed brick of a chimney from which the mortar was slowly flaking away.

An additional floor of grey plywood had been laid down to make the floor level. There was a door leading to another room through which we walked into the other studio.

"And this is the larger studio," he said. "This door can be locked, there is a separate entrance."

The room was L-shaped and about twenty four feet long by fourteen wide at one end and twenty at the bottom end of the 'L' which was at the front of the building. It had three windows overlooking the park and a small window looking north over the vacant lot. This room was empty except for two low dressers, again with the wooden table top. There were some large canvasses leaning against the wall.

"These will stay here," he said, "They belong to an old roommate who moved away," The floor in this room hadn't been leveled. It sloped like a ship leaning with the wind. The windows were like parallelograms.

He told me the rent he wanted for each. I chose the smaller studio and gave him a deposit to seal the deal. "The house is heated electrically," he told me. "Each month I'll estimate your share of the electric bill and leave a note on the dresser at the top of the stairs. You can put your money there and also the rent." Delighted with the arrangement, I shook his hand and took my leave, four keys in my hand, two for each of the front doors.

The next day, I was on my way to the art supply store for canvass, brushes, and paints, which I carted back to my new studio in the old building. I had a bunch of crayon drawings of expressionistic faces, some of which were to prophetically resemble people I had yet to meet and I wanted to make large paintings from them. They were to be my first series of paintings completed in the city.