• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

The Valley Citizen

Pursuing truth toward justice

The Valley Citizen

Pursuing truth toward justice
  • Arts
  • Education
  • Environment
  • History
  • Nature
  • Politics
  • Wit
  • About

Inside 624: The Horror

September 4, 2017 By Eric Caine 1 Comment

Inside 624

You follow her inside and the dark spaces become a shroud that makes it harder to see. You have to squint and it’s important now to see and see well, but it’s hard. The floor yields the way living things do, like fungus or moss. So does the hand rail, and your hand jerks away, as though it’s encountered danger; it’s instinctive.

Upstairs, in the trashed hallway, food manifests as smears, smears everywhere. Some of it isn’t food, not precisely food, it’s been processed. There’s a blind man in a wheelchair, two women in attendance. He rejects counsel and offers of help loudly. He will not be moved, not from the entrance to his room, not by tender reason nor by pleas for his own safety. His powerful upper body is going to seed. How does he get down the stairs?

Trash everywhere. A woman steps into the hallway and her swollen ankles are circumscribed by large red bands of coruscated skin. She’s distracted by her mumbling adult son and his pale friend. They need something she doesn’t have. The attorney’s talk is of rights and rat mites.

Everyone speaks of rats. Rats that bite and chase the dogs. Greasy rats and big rats and rats that come out at night and cover kitchen counters and climb into the cupboards.

Inside the rooms—oh, the rooms— some of the floors are wet and there are wet turds. In the darker places, bedbugs and ticks skitter and swirl wherever there’s room on the bare floors. Some climb the walls. The cockroaches are casual. Dogs bark everywhere. There are no cats.

In one room sits an old man on a bed, holding a cane. There are no chairs. The room is clean, the floor linoleum. He has a large television and three small dogs. “I mop every day,” he says, then shows where the holes are in the bathroom and in the walls behind the cupboards. “Las cucarachas come and they bite me,” he says, pushing up his sleeves.

Hot shaft from hell

Downstairs, you walk into a room where every step involves precision and care. In the bathroom, bright light cascades from the collapsed ceiling, like a hot shaft from the Inferno’s Fourth Circle. You want to back out fast, but you’re afraid to put a foot anywhere you can’t see and you don’t want to turn your back to anything. The preferred position would be with your back against the wall so you could see in all directions, but you don’t want to touch anything, not even with your back; not even with the soles of your shoes.

The smell of cooking arouses, confuses, disgusts—spicy top notes, bottom notes of raw sewage.

Dogs perch atop piles of blankets and clothing where human forms are inferred from an arm or a leg protruding. Everything startles the eye.

The building inspector for the attorneys says it was worse during the crack epidemic in Oakland, when squatters invaded abandoned houses and were together with the rats on the piles of garbage, but this is bad enough; more than bad enough. No one would want to see worse than this.

There’s a bug on the counter, not a cockroach. It’s ugly and tawny brown, and has large wings, not something you want on you. Why are most of the flies outside?

The young attorney comes stock still and stares at something on the floor. It could be matted hair, hairy excrement, or a something new to science.

“What IS that,” she says, transfixed. You want out.

Outside, in the periphery of your vision, flash-framed predators peer around corners, down hallways, through open doors. They’re attached to tiny, meth-fueled bicycles that can dart down alleyways, through traffic, and disappear around corners.

They have shaved heads and ugly tattoos; they’re muscular and compact and quick. One appears to have sharpened his teeth to points. They take quick inventories of everything and everyone. If they find someone old or infirm who has cigarettes they become friendly and confiding and hang around for a convivial smoke or two, exercising an age-old rule of extortion. Their eyes narrow and they alert at the slimmest opportunity to take and go.

So many wheelchairs. Some are folded into stacks and some with extra wheels piled on the chair cushion.

There are women too old to be in tight shorts that look like panties; they wear flimsy blouses that fall around their shoulders. They walk stiffly on skinny legs and seem ready to fall.

Everyone asks, “How could it happen?” Inside the Inferno, the gods are laughing. “How could it happen?” they say in unison, and laugh, and laugh again.

Filed Under: Featured, History Tagged With: 624 Ninth Street Modesto

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Condemned Building Burns – The Valley Citizen says:
    October 3, 2017 at 3:52 pm

    […] freezing, starving, and totally wretched in every way, I would not go into that building. I know what’s in there, and with the tenants gone and the place boarded up, the pestilences in there have only gotten […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Note: Some comments may be held for moderation.

Primary Sidebar

Off The Wire

Oath Keepers leader Rhodes sentenced to 18 years for Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy
Oath Keepers leader Rhodes sentenced to 18 years for Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes faces a prison sentence up to 25 years in the first punishments for seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
www.washingtonpost.com
Opinion | America?s Poverty Is Built by Design
Opinion | America’s Poverty Is Built by Design
How did the U.S. become a land of economic extremes with the rich getting richer while the working poor grind it out? Deliberately.
www.politico.com
Republican Jewish Coalition Blasts Gosar Over Staffer's Ties To White Supremacist: Fuentes Has 'No Place' In Congress
Republican Jewish Coalition Blasts Gosar Over Staffer’s Ties To White Supremacist: Fuentes Has ‘No Place’ In Congress
The Republican Jewish Coalition slammed Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) following a  TPM…
talkingpointsmemo.com
Newsom restores floodplain funds, adds $290 million to flood control budget
Newsom restores floodplain funds, adds $290 million to flood control budget
After widespread, bipartisan criticism, the governor revised his budget to include $40 million to restore San Joaquin Valley floodplains.
calmatters.org
New Study Finds a High Minimum Wages Creates Jobs
New Study Finds a High Minimum Wages Creates Jobs
Conventional wisdom had long suggested the opposite.
nymag.com
Spiraling in San Francisco?s Doom Loop
Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop
What it’s like to live in a city that no longer believes its problems can be fixed.
www.curbed.com
San Diego to open homeless camp sites at two parking lots near Balboa Park
San Diego to open homeless camp sites at two parking lots near Balboa Park
The two lots could accommodate about 500 tents and would be an alternative to congregate shelters
www.sandiegouniontribune.com
K-12 enrollment: Does the increase in homeless students indicate a worsening trend?
K-12 enrollment: Does the increase in homeless students indicate a worsening trend?
California’s overall K-12 enrollment declined, but a lack of affordable housing may be fueling an increase in homeless students.
calmatters.org
Sugar Justice: The Clarence Thomas Story
Sugar Justice: The Clarence Thomas Story
Did you see the latest Clarence Thomas bombshell? To head off any…
talkingpointsmemo.com
California's colossal snowpack has yet to melt: 'Less and less places for that water to go'
California’s colossal snowpack has yet to melt: ‘Less and less places for that water to go’
Only about 12 inches of Caliornia’s snow water equivalent melted in April, leaving most of the Sierra Nevada snowpack poised to flow down downhill.
www.latimes.com
The fastest-growing homeless population? Seniors
The fastest-growing homeless population? Seniors
Included in the increasing number of homeless seniors are those experiencing homelessness for the first time after age 50.
calmatters.org
Perspective | The greatest bird artist you?ve never heard of
Perspective | The greatest bird artist you’ve never heard of
Rex Brasher painted more birds than Audubon, and he never owned slaves.
www.washingtonpost.com

Find us on Facebook

The Valley Citizen
PO Box 156
Downtown Bear Postal
1509 K Street
Modesto, CA 95354

Email us at:
thevalleycitizen@sbcglobal.net

Footer

The Valley Citizen
PO Box 156
Downtown Bear Postal
1509 K Street
Modesto, CA 95354

Email us at:
thevalleycitizen@sbcglobal.net

Subscribe for Free

* indicates required

Search

• Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2023 The Valley Citizen

Dedicated to the memory of John Michael Flint. Contact us at thevalleycitizen@sbcglobal.net

Editor and publisher: Eric Caine

Website customization and maintenance by Susan Henley Design