The one in Rocky’s gut
When Rocky (aged 58) says he wants to fight again in Rocky VI, he tells Paulie it’s because he still has “stuff,” and when prompted to elaborate, he adds “in the basement.” He gestures loosely at his stomach. This moment, I’m realizing, created my first real interest in Rocky. The first Rocky movie came out the year before I was born and won Best Picture, and I studiously avoided it and its series of roman-numeral sequels that followed. In fact, the most I’d known about the Rocky movies before the line about the basement (which I saw in the trailer for Rocky VI) was a roman numeral joke: the one that Bart makes in The Simpsons when he adds Rocky II to Rocky V and gets Rocky VII: Adrian’s Revenge.
Rocky VI is properly called Rocky Balboa (Rocky VII is properly called Creed) and the line in the movie about Rocky having stuff in the basement is in its trailer, which I watched with morbid curiosity, which is how this whole thing started. Something about it — some element of that gesture at the stomach, that uncertain questing, from an actor well past his prime in the sixth (the sixth!!) movie in a joke of a franchise that I’d never paid attention to, slipped my guard. I have an underdog thing, which makes it all the more ironic that I didn’t really perceive the Rocky movies before then as being about an underdog so much as being about Rambo beating up Russians and Mr. T. But over-the-hill Rocky in the Rocky Balboa trailer isn’t just an underdog; he’s an underdog in an underdog movie, a decades-later follow-up that no one was looking for to what had been a fifth and “final” Rocky film that nobody liked, which made Rocky VI an act either of supreme hubris or thoughtful reclamation (or both) which we can now look back on as (remarkably) presaging the entire modern fixation upon “legacy sequels.”
Rocky beat them all out of the gate — John McClane, Indiana Jones, the original cast of Star Wars, even Stallone’s own Rambo — with a “return of the old guard” movie. It’s a movie with a premise that makes no sense whatsoever (a virtual-reality simulation of a theoretical fight between in-his-prime Rocky and the current heavyweight champion of the world somehow lures retirement-age Rocky back into the ring to prove he can still do it, which remained an insane plot hook in my eyes until last year’s Tyson/Paul fight made it real). In what I would come to learn was the fine tradition of the Rocky movies, Rocky Balboa was also really just a character study of its titular character’s will to get it done.
Back to the basement: I thought about that basement line a lot when I quit my job. “Burnout,” I said at the time (still do), but that wasn’t it. It was cuz I had stuff [gestures at belly] in the basement. A weird feeling of dried and desiccated things all jumbled up in the gut, which I’d long since ceased trying to pass; unsorted Lego blocks, crackling around when I moved. Bas relief outlines on my stomach as I slept. I didn’t know what the pieces were for, particularly — I’d written a spec screenplay a couple years before, my first in twenty years, but that was just supposed to be for fun, not desiring to become anything, just to get a funny idea out of my head and out of my system and onto a page to see if it could breathe.
It did breathe. And I couldn’t get over the mumbly rumble of Stallone in my head, whenever I thought about it, telling me that the breathing meant I still had “stuff.” In the basement. That in spite of my passing all the sanctioned milestones of adult life and having found myself settled in something like a path towards a comfortable retirement, there were things I hadn’t done that I still wanted to try to do, even if I couldn’t see what they were yet, or (more importantly) what they were for. The first rule of magic is containment, and I was full of it. And I was old, old like Rocky (ten years shy of his 58), needing to prove nothing and wanting, just, to see what happened if I applied my will to get it done.
It was not lost on me that, unlike Rocky, I’d never previously worn the belt. Never been a champion. Whatever Rocky had “in the basement” was connected to an earlier vector in his life; it felt the same for me, but my vector was unproven. It was a story I’d never had the courage to finish, something I’d been too narcissistic or too frightened or too the-wrong-kind-of-clever to really look at and hold in my hands, until I had nothing left to lose.
I waited as long as I could in my life till the basement was the right level of no-longer-scary, and then I went down.
The one with all the centipedes
When my family moved into our house (I was three years old when we moved there, but by any reckoning this was “our house”), the basement was unfinished. Cold poured concrete floor the colour of wine, and dim, grime-smeared windows along the alleyway at the side of the house, which let in just barely enough light to be terrifying. Most important of all was its ceiling, which was both substantively too low — six feet high in general, with a load-bearing support beam across the centre of the room that shaved another foot off the walking-around height — and, like the rest of the basement, unfinished. There was the architecture of a potential finished ceiling, like the framework for the places that the ceiling tiles could go, but there was nothing there. It was open floor beams for the main floor above, and electrical work and pipes; and that was the basement ceiling, a dusty, chaotic mess. It scared the bejeezus out of me.
Like most families in this situation, the basement was where everything went that couldn’t be anywhere else. As you’ve already guessed, this means that our basement — like all basements of the unfinished and abandoned type — was a haven for creepy crawlies; ours in particular was beloved of centipedes. Brown (ha!) house centipedes. The feathery-looking motherfuckers whose proportional running speed is equal to that of a cheetah. One time, my brother and I went down to the basement to get something — we’d only go to the basement to get something, no one ever went down to the basement to just be in the basement — and we moved a box or opened a closet or something, and there was a centipede there and the centipede ran away and my brother ran away and my brother did not go back into the basement for two years.The fear for me, though, was less that I’d move something and a centipede would run out from beneath it, than that the centipedes would be in that open, unfinished ceiling, unseen. Splatters of sienna paint perfectly hidden in those grotty rafters, waiting to come alive and drop down on me. I could feel them so viscerally on the back of my girlish neck anytime I had to enter the basement to find something that every single hair on body would stand up at once, doing a passable impression of those eyebrow-sharp centipede legs, so much so that I could electrostatically feel them, the legs touching down on my arms, my shoulders, the crown of my head, the sensation compelling me to duck lower, and lower, and lower till I was nearly crawling, grabbing the thing whatever the thing was that I went down there to get and then running back up the stairs like a dog, all fours, the terror flooding out of me, the adrenaline pouring out of every cell, every pore, my vision infrared and ultraviolet, lightning finally reaching the ground through the soles of my feet when I stood, wet and breathless, on the finished kitchen floor.
Geoff’s
When I was a kid I had one friend and one friend only, easily (if not more so) as queer as I was, and we spent most of our time together in the basement of his grandparents’ house, which was where he lived. His mother lived downtown, and his grandparents were raising him, and he went to my school and I was his one friend and he was mine, and after some moment in the second grade when one of my parents had mentioned that I had Geoff over to my house a lot and should (for politeness’ sake) go over to his house more, we just sort of started spending all of our time over there instead, in some unspoken overcorrection. There was a teacher’s strike in, I want to say, grade 4 (?), and we’d spend (what felt like) entire months of school days slumped on ratty furniture — his basement was only slightly more furnished or finished than mine was, but it had a ceiling, thank fuck — watching soap operas (Another World) on an old TV that his grandfather had stowed at the very back of the house. We wouldn’t see an adult or guardian, his or mine, for what felt like entire epochs of time but were probably just the hours between ten and four.
Geoff’s grandparents’ basement was divided into two rooms. “Our” room was the one described above, where we watched TV or played Supergirl or once (quite improbably) had a girl from our class over to play, who insisted on giving each of us a kiss before she’d go back upstairs when her Mom came at the end of the day to get her. Through a thin brown communicating door near the stairs, though, there was a second basement room, even less furnished than ours, which was Geoff’s grandfather’s room. Not his bedroom; just, his room. Nowadays someone would call it a “man cave,” but they would be broadly misdescribing it. Whatever kind of man Geoff’s grandfather was, it was mannishness of the Silent Generation, and his room reflected it — by which I mean, “his” room was the boiler room, and it had nothing in it besides the boiler and perhaps some tools, plus one small reading desk with a single-bulb lamp and no chair, where Geoff’s grandfather would stand for (what was, from my limited vantage point) entire days, reading the newspaper, with his knuckles pressed down on either side of the broadsheet.
I doubt that’s actually how he spent all of that time. I think he might have listened to the radio, and done woodworking projects, and he probably wasn’t actually in the room as much as I think he was. I doubt Geoff’s basement was actually some kind of a time-lock, but it felt that way; like his grandfather was stilled, and the entire universe outside our room of the basement was stilled too, and the only beings that moved or breathed or spoke or thought or felt were us, Geoff and I. I doubt that Geoff’s grandfather was substantially older then than I am now. I know there were times he wasn’t in his room, because we’d go in there and snoop around and look through his papers and try to piss on the concrete walls through embarrassed erections. Geoff’s grandfather had some god damned enormous whale of a car that probably cruised around the neighbourhood on leaded gasoline so that he could go out and do some thing or another that kept him out of the house and out from under the heels of Geoff’s grandmother (who secluded herself on the second floor, two floors away from us, most days) and far away from us. But my point is that whenever he was gone, the basement became some other thing entirely, something that still feels tactile and soapy in the back of my throat when I think about it. Something subconscious and subterranean and boyish and girlish and deeply, deeply warm, a pale magenta and shag-rug orange womb beneath the daylight of the world where whatever the hell Geoff and I were, we were able to just be, and time was just gone. It would be forty years before I recognized that for reasons I still cannot fully wire together, Geoff’s basement felt to me like the only true and safe place in the world — a place where secrets were under no threat of exposure, and where behaviour could not be seen to be policed, and where nothing evil waited behind any corner, waiting to jump out.
A lot of what I dredged up when I started dealing with the “stuff” I had “in the basement,” I discovered, came out of that basement. I still feel the strange coupling with that other child, Geoff, who disappeared from planet earth when we hit puberty and hasn’t been heard from since, and is therefore likely keeping my secrets as well as I’ve kept his (at least, until you’ve read this, just now). Things that happened in Geoff’s basement and were allowed to happen there — the pleasure of looking and the ecstasy of being seen, even by one other person, now rendered imaginary — were the soft layer at the bottom of all this. Below the hard bits I carried “in the basement” there was this whole other basement, a sedimentary layer that was still soft, an inch above the water table; and I think I can sense the water now, and feel it moving darkly beneath the world.
The house, Geoff’s grandparents’ house, has been knocked down like nearly every other house in my parents’ neighbourhood, save theirs; and my parents did finally finish the basement, by the way, when I was in high school. No more centipedes (though I still don’t much like it down there). My “stuff,” well, it’s evolving. There was more down there than I thought. When I walk to my parents’ place up the old streets and pass the new house standing on what was once Geoff’s lot, I expect to hear howling from the energies trapped beneath the fatuous, 21st-century-modern replacement. Neither angry nor mournful. Just present: the things that soaked into the earth down there are stains that, thankfully, will never lift.
I’ve been writing a short story every week in 2025. This began as one of them. Want to read more stories like this? Don’t forget to subscribe, if you haven’t already.