The close-in, walk-everywhere, hey-howya-doing feel of my Adams Morgan neighborhood is a welcome throwback to Minneapolis' Wedge neighborhood where I stomped, crawled, and flitted around during my youthful days. My last apartment in the Wedge was on the corner of 22nd and Hennepin. My bedroom was on the alley where, if I went to bed before bar close, I might be awoken by stumbledrunks passing under my window on their way home from Liquor Lyle's or, once, by the laughter of two friends who had tried to reach my window by standing on the dumpster and had instead fallen inside. There was an old man who lived below us who had a suspicious retinue of young women up and down the stairs to his garden-level apartment. My roommate, Claire, said he had to be a pervert of some sort. I, however, kept an open mind.

That was 1993, the year that two young men were arrested for digging up and stealing a little kid's body from a Minneapolis cemetary. The crime had happened in 1990, but some high-tech police work (otherwise known as waiting for someone to squeal) had finally broken the case. The news went from "Wow, that's crazy" for me to "holy shit I know one of those guys" when the names of the alleged graverobbers came out. What was especially freaky was that I had worked with him in 1992--after the crime and before the punishment. While we were both working at an environmental group, he was ostensibly the peace-loving, urban hippie-punk. But while he was smiling beatifically at the office, he apparently had pieces of the kid at home in his freezer.

Claire and I talked over each new development in the case as it unfolded. Why would someone dig up a body? We would always end up in two opposite camps: I blamed an almost reasonable morbid curiousity mixed with the recklessness of youth and an anti-establishment mindset I could reconcile with my knowledge of at least one of the desecrators. I mean, it's not like he killed anyone, right? The poor kid was already gone. Claire, who had a lifetime's worth of Catholicism to instill a gothic imagination and fear of the devil in her, could only conclude that disturbing the little boy's eternal slumber was true evil at work. I ran into my former colleague, out on bail awaiting ajudication, as he waited on me at the Hard Times Cafe. I pretended not to know him. Not to shame him, I told Claire later, but to spare him yet another awkward encounter. Because, anyway, what would be the point? "Yeah", Claire replied, "and what would you have said, anyway? How ya doing, Digger?"

One night when I came home by myself, Grandpa (as we had begun to refer to our downstairs neighbor) was entertaining another gaggle of neighborhood Suicide Girls. Something about the languid body language of the intergenerational group reeked of indolence and an unappealing sensuality. You're right, I wrote to Claire on our message board inside, Grandpa is a pervert. I'm convinced. And I was the one willing to give Digger the benefit of the doubt.

Digger had to go to jail, of course, and the story sort of faded. Grandpa continued to keep spurious company. A couple of guys broke our window while wrestling in the kitchen. And so the summer drained to a trickle. After a big birthday bash for me in October, I left for a week to visit my brother in California. The first night I was gone, the apartment caught fire as Claire lay sleeping. While the firefighters were helping Claire out of the building, I've heard that Grandpa was on the sidewalk screaming "You've got to go back in! There's another girl in there! There's another girl!"

God bless the old reprobate. I had sympathy for the wrong devil that year.

A few months before the fire, I named my new kitten Digger. Claire said, half-jokingly but kind of not, that the name was attached to evil and would doom our souls. Of course, that made the name even more appealing to me and, try as Claire might to change my mind, the name stuck. Curiously, Digger survived the fire though the smoke killed my beloved six-toed mutant feline, Ronnie. Over the years people have asked me about Digger's name. "Does she like to dig?" Sometimes I tell the real story, but usually the strained smile and revolted eyes tell me the asker isn't feeling the irony and wishes she hadn't asked. 

I've taken to saying, yes; yes, she does indeed love to dig.