The Hacienda

The other day, my wife complained there was nothing to do.

I said, “Let’s burn Myrtle.”

She gave me a strange look.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “But listening to it will give you something to do.”

So I recounted how in the mid 1950s my parents bought a house in a working-class neighborhood in what was then south Kansas City. To make some extra money, Dad converted the detached double garage to a rental space. In size and ambition, the place was like a studio apartment. The roof, ten feet off the ground, had a non-threatening pitch. Only the biggest cowards in the neighborhood were afraid to climb on it and horse around.

“What’s this have to do with burning poor Myrtle?”

I told her Myrtle rented the apartment for a while. She was like any other old lady; there was nothing especially flammable about her. When we were little kids, a cousin and I were loitering near the apartment. Looking for something to do, he said, "Let's burn Myrtle."

“Did you boys burn Myrtle?” my wife asked.

“No. We made poison instead.”

“Poison? What a couple of ghouls you were.”

The poison was an agglomeration of water from the hose, kitchen scraps, mud, cigarette butts, piss, dead bugs, and leaves. The poison was not meant for Myrtle; she was off the hook by now. We intended to feed it to some Japanese soldiers, if any happened into my back yard in 1967.

Riding a wave of momentum, I told her about others who’d rented there: loners, vagabonds, dowagers—the kinds of folks Kris Kristofferson might celebrate in song. I spent a few minutes recalling a pair of journeymen laborers named Stony and Clyde. The duo once appeared on “Gone’ Fishin,” a local show hosted by Harold Ensley, a man so gentle that if Satan were his son he'd probably never even spank him. Stony and Clyde reeled in lots of good eaters but always tossed the fish back, an act my father never could accept. Each time, it seemed to catch Dad by surprise. He'd make an anxious sound effect—a wet inhalation through clenched teeth—and say, "Stony, no! No!"

As the 1960s ended, my family had less need for the rental income and more need for the space the apartment offered. Nine of us ten kids still lived at home. For the next twenty years, one sibling or another held squatter's rights there. In the mid 1970s my brother Joe had dibs on the place, and he christened it The Hacienda, though there was nothing Spanish about it.

One of the beauties of The Hacienda was that you could live there and escape the stigma of living with your parents, though in reality our parents—and their refrigerator, medicine cabinet, and laundry facilities—were just thirty feet away. And so well into my twenties I lived in that converted garage, where I spent most of my hours pondering life’s bigger mysteries and grousing about man’s inhumanity to man. I also found time to co-write a screenplay inside those walls, called “University Times,” a rollicking adventure that chronicled the exploits of Mafia stooges, librarians with cleavage, and a zonked-out dormie named Squid.

As I slept in The Hacienda one chilly night in November of 1988, an explosion at a construction site a couple miles away killed six Kansas City firefighters. Two pumper trucks had come to the site around 4 a.m. to douse a fire in a pick-up truck. They were unaware that 25,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil were stored in a semitrailer near the truck. The blast, at 4:08 a.m., killed them instantly.

The explosion broke my deep sleep, and I bolted upright, much in the style of a character rising from a nightmare in an Aaron Spelling melodrama. Those days, natural-gas leaks had caused several area homes to explode, and the enormity of this blast convinced me it had happened again. In the darkness of The Hacienda, I rushed from the bed to the big front window, which was now dislodged from its frame, and saw that my parents' home was intact. Relieved, I switched on my police scanner just as the first confused calls were crackling across. All over town, folks were claiming something had blown up in their neighborhoods. After four or five minutes, the correct location was determined: the site of the expressway under construction, near 87th Street and South 71 Highway. On another frequency, I soon heard the fire dispatcher plaintively call for someone—anyone—from the pumper trucks to respond over the air. The ensuing silence was louder than the explosion had been.

In 1989, with our neighborhood ravaged by Reaganomics, my parents bought a nicer house out south. A poor couple scraped up enough money to buy our home. To avoid legal complications, my dad disengaged The Hacienda's faulty plumbing and blocked off the pipes with cement. Before the contract was signed, Dad made sure the home buyer understood the implications of this plumbing shutdown. Still, after the deal was sealed, the buyer shook my father's hand and said, "Now you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna rent out that place and make me some money!"

My wife said, “If he did, I bet he could add a few good stories to its history.”