Bonnie's House

I should have been suspicious when I moved in, for he had an old Rambler parked in the driveway. The inside of this car had been filled to the top with papers and junk, and all four tires were flat. I came home one day to find Bonnie rummaging through the trunk of this car. The trunk of course had been filled with papers, and these were now scattered over his driveway. The object of his quest was a 5 lb. slab of government surplus cheese he had put there five years before. That slab of cheese had been aging in the trunk of his car through five freezing winters and five scorching summers. Bonnie pronounced it still delicious.

Another day I returned home to find Bonnie using my hose to wash something off. It turned out to be a package of beef neck bones, covered with a thick layer of mold. He ate them with no ill effect. 

No one ever went into his house; I assumed it to be something like his car outside. Bonnie must have been a sloppy bicyclist, as he was continually getting hit and ending up in the hospital. His first request would be to have the nurses page me, for I was a medical student at the time. When I answered, the nurses were always tentative, explaining there was an unusual patient named Bonnie asking for me.  Bonnie was a talkative and friendly sort of guy. He never bathed, however, and his aroma greeted you long before you saw him. His appearance was disheveled, to say the least. I'd come to see him, and the nurses would give me a look that said "How do you know this guy?"  I told them he was my eccentric, filthy rich uncle.

One of the times he was hospitalized he asked me to bring him his vitamins. He said they were just inside the door. Once in, I couldn't resist checking out his house, and decided to record a little of it for posterity.

When one entered the house, there was a tiny path to the kitchen sink. Retracing the path back to the door, another tiny path led to the toilet. The bathroom sink and tub were filled with papers and junk, and the other rooms were totally inaccessible, so the only place to sit was the toilet. There was no place to lie down in the house.

I moved away in time, and saw Bonnie only on his periodic trips to the hospital. He asked me to see his daughter, a fifty year old paranoid schizophrenic who used to be a homeless person in New York city, but that's another story. One day his doctor mentioned he had been put in a nursing home, and then died. I noticed his house was sold and transformed back into an ordinary bungalow. I still miss him.

This is the hallway from the outside door to the inside door. I remember a box of maybe fifteen ketchup bottles there, each with about an inch of ketchup in them.

                                                                                             This  is the view from the inside door. The stove and refrigerator were buried behind these piles.

This is from the sink looking back towards the inside door.  The entrance to the living room, at right, was completely blocked.

                                           The only place to sit in the house.