Faded Red Tin

The ghost who lived in my childhood home wore dentures and had hemorrhoids.

The big house on Lunt Avenue sat empty for twenty years.

The last person to live in it before we moved in was a dentist who liked to hunt. There were a dozen moose heads hanging in the attic of the sprawling Queen Anne in Rogers Park, zebras and antelopes and tigers on the landings, tusks and umbrella stands made out of elephant legs in the living room, bearskin rugs on the floors, side-tables with legs made out of zebra legs in the library, and much, much more.

My parents didn’t buy the house — they never owned a house together — so the contents of that spooky old house didn’t belong to my family. All those heads and rugs and umbrella stands belonged to our new next-door neighbors. Dennis and Kathy kept one of the moose heads for over their fireplace and sold the rest to the “old-timey” pizza places that were opening all over Chicago in the late 1970s.

I found the small red tin in the medicine cabinet of the tiny bathroom in the attic. I thought it was hilarious because I was ten years old. For years, I showed it to friends to make them laugh.

Our parents, our new landlords, and the other adults who lived on Lunt wouldn’t tell us why the house sat empty for twenty years. But the neighborhood kids were happy to fill us in: The last person who lived there — a dentist with a passion for traveled all over the world to kill things — blew his head off in the attic with his elephant gun.

We knew the part about the dentist shooting himself in the attic was for sure true but we didn’t know if the part about the elephant gun was for sure true. Even as kids it occurred to us the actual was a little less gory and some kid in neighborhood made up the part about the elephant gun and it that version of the story was passed from kid to kid for twenty years before we moved in.

But it seemed plausible. We knew the man who lived and died in our house hunted elephants — there were pieces of more than one dead elephant in the house — and his gun rack was in the attic.

And then there was the paneling.

Every room in the attic was finished — walls and ceilings — with knotty pine paneling installed in the 1940s. Every room except the room where it happened. (And. yes, that’s what we called it.) That room had been re-paneled with darker paneling before we moved in. The fact that one room —and room only — had new paneling lent credence to the story about elephant gun. Because putting a regular gun to your head and pulling the trigger with your finger only makes a mess of the carpet. But putting an elephant gun under your chin and pushing the trigger with your toe? That would make a mess of the walls and the ceiling.

My brother Billy took that bedroom when we moved in, and then an aunt who came to live with us took it, and then I did. No one in my family was afraid to sleep in the room where it happened.

I showed off my rectal medicone tin a lot when I was ten because I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. But when the same kids who’d told us about the elephant gun started calling me a faggot a few year later, I stopped showing the tin to other boys. Butts weren’t funny anymore, they were incriminating.

My dad moved out ten years after we moved in. A month later, my mom went next door to tell our landlords we would all be moving out. She didn’t want to tell them why — she couldn’t afford the rent on her own — but they kept asking her why and she told them the truth. Our landlords cut the rent in half and never raised it again. Our family may not have been intact anymore but our family home was. It was our home for another ten years.

Fifty years later, the medicone tin sits on the shelf in my dining room alongside the denture powder I found in the same medicine cabinet. I don’t think about butts when I notice now. There are plenty of other things in my house I can look at when I want to think about butts, including actual butts. No, when I see the tin now, I think about how incredibly generous our landlords were to my mother and the sight of this small red tin — now so faded it’s hard to read — reminds me to be like Dennis and Kathy.

And it reminds me that butts, when you really think about them, are pretty hilarious.