front_door raze cleaning out the garage means getting rid of what used to be the front door of this house. it should have been gone a long time ago. it's been sitting there for more than a decade, soaking up humidity and bad weather. taking up space. i thought looking at it would bring back the day it stopped being a front door — the day some guy i'd never seen before knocked on it when it was still what it was supposed to be. he had one of those musical knocks that went da-da-da-da-da, da-da. he asked for james franco, and i thought, "that's the guy who was in a pretty decent made-for-tv movie about james dean," and when i told him no one with that name lived here, he said, "fuck man," and walked away. i looked through the blinds. i watched him walk to the end of the driveway, say something to a guy who had a beard, and walk with him back up onto the front porch. they started knocking again. they rang the doorbell. they wouldn't go away. i thought it was weird. then i started to think it was creepy. i stood in front of the door with a baseball bat for a few minutes. i felt like an idiot. i put the bat away. i went upstairs. the noise stopped. then it started again. i thought about calling the cops. what was i going to tell them? "there are these two guys who keep ringing my doorbell because they think peter parker's best-friend-turned-arch-enemy lives here. could you come over and tell them to go away?" there was some money on my dresser. i put most of it in my sock drawer. i called my dad. he was out of town with his girlfriend. i told him what was going on. i asked him if it sounded strange to him. before he could say anything, i heard the knocking change. it wasn't knocking anymore. now it was loud banging. now it was something being kicked. the banging became the sound of wood splintering, and the door stopped being a door and became a thing that was broken. "they're breaking in," i said. "call the police," my dad said. they were in my room before i could hang up the phone. the one who was looking for james franco said, "i got a fucking gun!" i asked him what he wanted me to do. "get your fucking face down." he grabbed me, got me on my knees, and shoved my face down on the bed. "you fucked my girlfriend," he said. "you're gonna fuckin' pay." "i didn't fuck anybody." "shut the fuck up! come over here! get in here!" he dragged me into a spare room across the hall. "stay on the fucking floor! on your face! you fucked my girlfriend! you fucked cindy! i'm gonna fuck you up!" "i didn't fuck anyone. i don't know anyone named cindy." "you're a fucking liar!" "i swear to god, i've never even known anyone named cindy. i've never fucked anyone in my life." "you fucked cindy! she gave me this address and said it was a guy with a beard! you fucked my fucking girlfriend!" "i'm telling you it's a mistake. i didn't do anything." "shut the fuck up! don't fucking move!" he saw the phone off the hook in my room. "you called the cops, didn't you?" "no." "YOU CALLED THE FUCKING COPS!" "i called my dad." "why the fuck did you call your dad?" "because i didn't know what was going on." "where's your dad?" "he's in forest." "where the fuck is forest?" "in ontario. i don't know." he kept screaming at me about how i fucked cindy and how i was going to pay for fucking cindy and fuck fuck fuck. i kept telling him i'd never slept with anyone and i didn't know anyone named cindy. i heard him and the bearded guy throwing things around in my bedroom behind me. the bearded guy never said anything. "don't you fucking move!" the guy who didn't have a beard screamed. "keep your fucking face down!" i wasn't moving. i wasn't doing anything. "you can have anything you want," i said. "you're fucking right i can have anything i want. YOU FUCKED MY GIRLFRIEND! where's the fucking money?" "i have some money in my top left dresser draw—" "WHERE THE FUCK IS IT?" "it's in my top left dresser drawer. underneath a pair of underwear." i heard the drawer slide open. "it's not there! you're fucking lying! fucking shoot this guy!" "if you let me get up, i can show you where it is." "don't fucking move! stay on the fucking ground!" "there's a bit of money on top of my dresser too." "yeah, i got that fucking chump change already." he kept asking me where the money was. i kept telling him where i put it just before he broke in, trying to draw him a map with my mouth. he kept screaming at me that i was a liar and it wasn't there. "i'm gonna fuck that ass of yours good and hard," he said. then he changed his mind. he thought he'd get his friend in on the action. "come in here and fuck this guy! fuck him up good!" he said he was going to tear my ass up. i heard him come into the room. i heard him breathing heavy behind me. just standing there. i kept waiting for him to shoot me through the back or start raping me. i didn't know what would happen first. i wondered what it would feel like when the bullet tore through me. pain beyond any pain i'd ever felt? something duller? more distant? i wondered how much blood there would be. i wondered how long it would take me to die. how long it would take me to bleed to death. i wondered how many times he would shoot me. i wondered how much it would hurt when he raped me. i wondered if it would be better if i got the gun first and he raped me after i was dead. i could hear the dial tone from the phone in my bedroom going beep beep beep beep until someone ripped it out of the wall to shut it up. the guy who was doing all the talking found a vhs tape. "what's on this tape? IS MY GIRLFRIEND ON THIS TAPE?" "no. nobody's on that tape." "you fucking liar! you fucked my girlfriend! i can't believe she fucking fucked YOU, you fucking piece of shit!" the tape had a few episodes of "northern exposure" on it. i taped them when i was in high school. my life didn't flash before my eyes. i didn't cry. i felt like i was going to throw up, but that didn't happen either. nothing happened. i just thought, "so this is it. this is how i'm going to die." after what felt like a year, the bearded guy said something for the first time. it sounded like his voice was coming from downstairs or out in the hall. "we gotta go, derek. the cops are here." "no they're not." "yeah they are. we gotta go." "no they're fucking not!" "i'm telling you the cops are here! we gotta go now!" "NO THEY'RE FUCKING NOT!" he went downstairs to prove his buddy was full of shit. he wasn't full of shit. the cops were here. i heard him scream, "WE'RE FUCKED!" and there was a voice i hadn't heard before screaming, "GET DOWN ON THE GROUND! GET DOWN NOW!" it sounded like something out of a movie. i kept waiting for someone to come back and shoot me just to get it over with. when that didn't happen, i looked around for something i could use as a weapon. anything. the best thing i could find was an old pair of manual hedge trimming shears. i heard quiet talking coming from downstairs. maybe it was over. i grabbed some photo id from my room. everything was thrown all over the place. my laptop was gone. my little cd printer was gone. my dvd player and digital cable box were on the floor. they still worked. all my clothes were on the floor. i picked up a pair of underwear. there was the money. right where i said it was. i stood at the top of the stairs and shouted, "is it safe? is it over?" no one answered. after a while a cop came about halfway up the stairs. he glared at me. "is it safe?" i asked him. "keep your hands where i can see them," he said. i told him i lived here. i told him my name. i told him how old i was. i told him i had id. "throw it down to me," he said. i did. "stay there," he said. i did. he went downstairs. he didn't come back. i found out later my dad called the cops after we got cut off. they froze his phone. they wouldn't tell him what was going on. they wouldn't tell him if i was alive. he drove like a maniac to get here. he almost beat the cops. he got back to the house when i was still waiting for someone to come upstairs and tell me anything at all. the first thing he saw when he walked through the door that wasn't a door anymore was blood all over the floor. no one would tell him if it was mine. "oh, cool!" his girlfriend said. "they've got csi here!" she was geeked. she loved "csi". the sergeant and detective who ended up working the case asked me questions while a bunch of cops went through my things like i was the criminal. i had to go downtown and give a video statement. i kept getting the sequence of events fucked up. i couldn't keep it straight in my head. i knew what happened, but it was a mess of information i couldn't process. "maybe this is my punishment for being weak and falling prey to the sins of self-gratification," i said. "you're killing me, johnny," the detective said. i learned the names of the two guys who broke in. i learned how old they were. i learned the one with the beard used to have his own business before he started smoking crack and his life fell apart. i never learned if cindy was real. i never got any good answers about what happened or why. i gave the sergeant and detective each a copy of "the_chicken_angel_woman_with_a_triangle". i don't know why i did that. they probably never listened to the cds. after i didn't die, i thought i was fine. i wasn't fine. i was in shock. cats knew what was wrong with me before i did. they wouldn't leave me alone. it took a while for the ptsd to kick in, and then every day was about trying to convince myself i wasn't going to drop dead of a heart attack or a stroke all the time, and every night became a fight against my brain confusing sleep with dying. it got better, but it took a long time. it's taken me this long to get to where someone ringing the doorbell doesn't make me jump. looking at the old door now doesn't bring any of that back. it's just wood and glass and rusted brass. it's just a thing that got kicked in thirteen years ago and stopped doing what it was made to do, and now it's garbage. 210819 ... raze we tried to donate the door to habitat for humanity. thought maybe they could fix it up or repurpose it somehow. they wouldn't take it. they said there was too much damage. 211202 ... raze a scrapper came to the house this morning. he was here to grab two decrepit air conditioners so he and his partner could pull them apart and turn the metal into money. he took the door with him when he left. it's been standing on its side and leaning against the back of the house for a year now. it's strange not to see it there anymore. stranger still to watch it disappear on my birthday. there's a long line of dirt on the ground where i figure its left arm used to be. near the end of the trail, i found two dried-out twigs curled into circles that didn't quite close. like emaciated shower curtain rings. like dead worms the sun couldn't keep itself from cooking. like coat hooks gone to seed. if they were hands, they would have been holding each other. they would have died doing that. i picked one of them up. it broke in half. i tried the other one. same thing. and every broken piece i touched broke into something smaller and weaker and less willing to stay, until there was nothing left for my fingers to hold onto. i don't know how you let go of a thing like that. i guess you just do. 220816 what's it to you? who go blather from