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When I had been living with my aunt for a couple years, me and some kids I shouldn’t have been running with, a group of boys already prepping for their future arrest photos and a series of warrants, broke into a big washateria in downtown Tyler, Texas.

It was night and there was no one around, and it was easy. A back window slid up and we went inside. The floor was smooth tile like the tile in the country club’s hallway. The washers and dryers were like big, stout, polished cannons.

It occurred to me in some strange way then that all the people that came there came with dirty laundry and a pocketful of quarters to wash away dirt and blood and, in some cases, social sins that had stuck to their clothes. A wife’s dress with semen on it, semen that didn’t belong to her husband. Blood on a man’s shirt that was due to a fight, maybe even a murder, perhaps of the wife with the wrong semen on her dress. Shit in undies from too many fresh vegetables or a touch of ptomaine, sweat of hardworking people, spittle and urine, clothes worn by the prosperous, the blue-collar slogger, the dignified, and the insane.

I imagined I could feel all the people that had worn those clothes. Their ghosts filled the air, or at least they filled my head, and it made me sick to realize how fragile we were as human beings. I didn’t really understand that feeling right then; it was just this uncomfortable sensation I experienced in the moment. I turned and went out the window, and that was the end of my association with my hoodlum friends. I ran out into the night and all the way home. I showered for a long time, hot and soapy, until I felt almost clean.

I’m sure there were good stains and good dreams in those clothes as well, love and affection, peanut butter from enjoyed sandwiches, fabric containing stains made by happiness and the best of intentions, but over time I came to feel what I had sensed in my hoodlum moment was the knowledge that humans were a pitiful and, in the greater scheme of things, insignificant lot.

That awareness scared me, made me soul-sick. The feeling would pass eventually, but sometimes on dark nights when I thought of my father, it came back. His ghost was their ghost, and we were all pitiful. Even those powerful assholes in the photos on the country-club wall were not free of it.

There were photos that had been taken at different times in their lives. In some they were young, in others middle-aged, and some of the photos were more recent. No matter what age they were, in a way they always looked the same. Smug and arrogant, eyes like glass beads, sour manipulators, small-town royalty with golf carts and permanent memberships to the country club.

The door at the end of the hall was opened by Winston and we stepped into a ballroom of enormous size in height and circumference. It was brightly painted with lots of lights and lots of tables, all of them stacked against the wall, one on top of the other. Only a few of the lights were on, and the others awaited the touch of a finger to illuminate them. There was, of all things, a disco ball in the center of the ceiling. I found it hard to imagine the members of the city council getting down to Donna Summer or the Bee Gees, considering their current age.

Winston seemed excited about his position as tour guide. He hustled me through another door and into a room not as big as the ballroom but still impressive. In the center of the room was an obsidian-black triangular table. There were three seats on two of the sides, one at the broad end, and no chair at the point of the triangle. On a raised dais was a tall chair with an ornately designed back and a large hole on either side of the headrest.

I walked around the table, looking at it, running my hand over it. It was a large chunk of wood, and it had been polished smooth as a baby’s bottom. The chairs were made of wood too, but with soft cushions in their seats and other cushions hung on their backs.

On the walls were bookshelves that ran around the room in a horseshoe shape, and there was a ladder for rows of books near the ceiling, which was high. The shelves were filled with thick tomes. No airplane reading there. There were a series of tall, curtained windows on one side where there were no bookshelves.

More interesting were paintings on the wall of nude men and women, and it took me a moment to recognize, due to having seen photos when they were young, that they were of the city council’s big three when they were young. They were tasteful in a carnival painting kind of way. Kate Conroy had been a looker in her early days, if the painting of her didn’t lie. She still had those cold button eyes, though.

There was one set of closed cabinets behind the chair on the dais. I opened them and stepped back at what I saw. It was crude and made of scorched-black wood. It was like a totem, two feet high and crudely carved, a piece of creosote post that had been whacked into a squatting statue with wide, flat feet, knees spread, arms tucked between its legs, hands holding an erect oversize penis. Its face had been sculpted so that it had a wide smile full of black pointed teeth, and the eyes were almost like skull sockets, but deep within them were little red pupils that looked like chinaberries but were blobs of red paint. The ears were large and donkey-shaped. Its nose was long and had crude nostrils drilled into it. So this was Creosote Johnny. It was simultaneously silly and disturbing. I took hold of it. It was heavy and you could smell where the wood had once been scorched and you could smell the creosote as well. I felt as if I were handling a venomous reptile.

I turned it in my hands. On the back of it were a lot of small marks in several rows, like someone had been keeping score of something.

Winston came up behind me and thumped the penis and made that gargling-glass sound he used for a laugh. It startled me. I carefully put the statue back and closed the cabinet doors. I wiped my slightly black-smudged hands on my pants and took a deep breath of refrigerated air.

Winston led me to a locked door and did something with a key he had gotten from somewhere, most likely lifted at one time from this very facility. He jiggled the lock, opened the door, and switched on a light. There were chairs all around the room, a couple of velvet couches that looked as if they had been stolen from a Jane Austen novel, a long table between the couches, and some large cushions on the floor. The room swirled with dust and there were cobwebs in the corners; it looked not to have been used in ages.

Behind the chairs, many of them facing the walls, were metal file cabinets. They were large cabinets built into the walls, and each had little paper markings in slots on the file drawers. Every paper slip had a year written on it. They went back for many years, long before anyone on the council today could have been involved. I tugged on a few of the file drawers, but they were locked up tight.

This place gave the vibe of being more a lair than a country club.

I thought there might be more to see, but my guide was all out of enthusiasm, and truth to tell, I was feeling spooked.

Winston turned out the light, grabbed me by the sleeve, and yanked me in the direction we had come. We ended up in the beer and wine cellar damn quick.

Winston had left the door open. We slipped in there, and he pulled the section shut, careful to save his fingers. It fit tight enough that it would be easy not to know the wall entrance was there.

With his light on, Winston led the way until we reached his inner sanctum with the stolen funeral clothes, the rotting food, the hordes of rats, and the disintegrating truck.

It seemed in some way nicer there than in the country club. I felt as if I had escaped the confines of hell.