I could overhear the Land Lord talking to my dad.
"What are you doing, bowling up there? We live right below you and we have had about as much as we can stand. When you signed the lease you had only three kids, but now you have five kids. You are nice people, but we are retired and five kids upstairs is more than we can handle."
I got red in the face. I knew my dad would be furious again. I was only nine years old, but he sent me to the library to research in old newspapers where we can find a house he could afford. Nobody would rent to a family of five boys. We had to buy a house. Somehow we found the perfect house.
My parents bought that house in the Spring. We weren't even moved in yet, but I had a paper route that started April 1st. I had to stay in the new house alone for one night. There were two bedrooms on the first floor and I tried to sleep there but there was no bed and the windows seemed to be screaming at me when the wind blew. I ran upstairs.
The second floor was an attic bedroom with slanted ceilings. The beds were not moved in yet, but the second floor room had a soft floor. It also had connecting crawl spaces throughout the entire length of the house. I could begin at one entrance and crawl through to the other side sixty feet away. The ceiling was not tall enough for an adult to crawl through properly but it was just tall enough for a nine year old boy to squeeze through.
In some parts of the corners of the attic the crawl space became larger until it looked like a small cave. I could sit up at one point and spread myself out in the cave. That is where I slept that night. I had my pillow and my blanket with me and fell fast asleep. The next morning I was up early and delivering newspapers around the neighborhood.
When my older brother came home later I told him to go upstairs. The first step he put his foot on creaked. When he got up the steps he bumped his head on the ceiling. He looked around the room and said,
"This place sucks."
I showed him the closet and he bumped his head again. He said,
"keep the crawl space door closed. It's freezing."
When I told my brothers I wanted the upstairs room as my bedroom they all agreed. I was excited to have my own room. For my whole life I had shared a room with my brothers. Now I had my own room and a secret world beyond the walls of the crawl space. In that narrow passage I managed to find one corner of the roof I used as my secret man cave.
On one half, I kept a Lego building called "the club" and I parked my matchbox cars there. All those cars were parked there because the club was the place my band played. It was just me humming like I was playing a saxophone, but in my mind it was the best music on earth.
Our old apartment was next to a popular Jazz club and I missed the sounds of the band. Sometimes when I was humming to myself in that crawlspace I would hear the sounds of a jazz guitar and drums. At first I was sure that I must have been imagining the jazz and blues music coming from the walls. I wondered if it was my brother playing records in his room, but he didn't play much jazz. I found out later that the guy who bought the house next door was a guitarist for a blues band and he was making the walls shake with his funk guitar.
The other side of the roof was called planet Holt. It was so cold that it reminded me of the Rebel Alliance base from the Empire Strikes Back. There I kept Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca. They were the guardians of the attic crawl space. Here time stood still. There was no school. There was no homework. There was no scolding or nagging. Instead I was with Chewbacca who always understood me and gave me a Wookie hug:
"RRROAARRGGGHH!
It was cold, but I stayed there because it was safe. When I was in Holt I felt like I was part of the hidden rebel resistance base. No adult could enter my fortress of solitude and no one could find me. If I had problems then I would run in there and hide and sometimes cry with Chewbacca to comfort me. Sometimes I would skip dinner and find that I fell asleep in the cold crawl space. I would wake up to chills and crawl back to my room in the middle of the night wondering what time it was.
As I grew older it was more difficult to fit in the crawl space and it just didn't seem very magical anymore. Part of me was lost when I left home and Chebacca and Han Solo were put in the basement.
Now more than forty years have passed. Today some millennial might give me good money for my action figures or my records, but I lost them years ago. I think Luke Skywalker's head fell off and we put it back on by burning the plastic and melting his head to his shoulders. I don't know where the other toys went. They had a yard sell at one point, then my brother sold the house. The house is almost a hundred and twenty years old. There is probably some kid in the attic crawl space today. Maybe he found some of my old toys there and made his own man cave.
Now I live in a penthouse above the city of Seoul. It's almost as magical as an old house in Chicago. The magic is not the attic, but what is inside the attic. My own kids had their own action figures growing up. Sometimes I found the youngest one under the blankets building a city of Lego imagination and racing little cars.
He has grown up a lot but he hasn't lost that magic.
I'd like to say that magic is still in me.
