Dad was on a first name basis with the inimitable character actor Seymour Cassel, who lived next door to my grandmother in a one-bedroom apartment on the 11th floor of the Santa Monica Shores apartment complex’s northern tower. They’d greet each other in the elevator as it rose or fell so leisurely. One time we went on a cruise to Barbados and Seymour Cassel held onto the packages my grandmother received while we were gone. She was addicted to catalogues, my grandmother, she was amassing packages endlessly, kitchen goods and Thomas Kinkade prints and half-melted chocolates.

When my grandmother first got sick, I moved in with her. Only she didn’t realize it. I lived in her oven. She hardly cooked so that was not much of a concern.

Through the proscenium or reverse-proscenium of the oven’s window, I spied my grandmother spending more and more time with Seymour Cassel. He didn’t mind that she was sick. They were just around the same age. They were both born in Detroit, even. They had stuff to talk about, is what I’m saying. I didn’t understand any of it. I’d never been to Detroit.

Dad came looking for me one day. I was surprised it took so long for him to appear. He questioned my grandmother— “I know he’s here,” he said, “I can smell him,” which wasn’t a very kind thing to say—but quickly he grew distracted by all the gizmos Seymour Cassel had left strewn about my grandmother’s apartment, immersion blenders and weight belts and deep tissue massage guns. “He’s right next door, what a prick, he could keep these gizmos in his own apartment,” said Dad. “He’s loaning them to me,” my grandmother said. I chuckled at that, and my dad said, “I knew it, I knew it he was here.” I buried myself in the gas line as he examined the oven’s interior, it was so dirty in there (which wasn’t all my fault) that Dad didn’t find me. He abandoned his search, figuring I’d found a new father of some sort. 

I learned to love natural gas in those days. Not in a political way—it was a defense mechanism. My grandmother used the oven so rarely that all I smelled was gas. You’d think it wouldn’t work that way, but she avoided sticking me with any curdling meats, and so, it did. Dad didn’t come back around for months. Seymour Cassel came around nearly every day. Sometimes he slept over. I thought it was platonic, but I couldn’t be sure, I couldn’t see into the bedroom from the oven. It was good he came around so much, anyway; he always brought my grandmother take-out, so she never had any excuse to use the oven.

As I subsisted entirely on gummy vitamins and ketchup packets, Seymour Cassel brought my grandmother food from Wildflower Pizza and Chinois on Main and Schatzi on Main and Chaya Venice. Seymour Cassel didn’t know this, but my grandmother had tripped and fallen onto her bones on the brief stairs outside Chaya Venice. She had sued Chaya Venice and they had settled out of court with her. “Chaya Venice is gonna pay for your Pepperdine someday,” Dad would tell me often after that ordeal. He really wanted me to go to Pepperdine; he’d gone to Pepperdine and even though he was Jewish he still felt his time there was the best time of his life. He wanted me to go and live in Malibu before it washed away or burned beyond the point of any recognition. I told Dad I would rather attend the School of Visual Arts. I was nine years old. My grandmother gratefully accepted Seymour Cassel’s offerings of Chaya Venice and never filled him in on the significance that establishment held for her clan. If she thought about it, Chaya Venice was, in a way, totally enmeshed with her reality, representative of her past (her injury, along with—she couldn’t deny it—all the better, earlier memories she’d made in there), present (Seymour Cassel bringing her boxes of the Chaya Classic Bento and the Kaisen Poke and the Spider Roll and the Soy-Braised Angus Beef Ravioli), and future (attending her grandson’s graduation from, say, Pepperdine University or the School of Visual Arts, whose attendance at either institution was made possible by Chaya Venice so graciously setting aside some funds for his schooling).

One day my grandmother started begging Seymour Cassel to bring her blander food. “Maybe from the Enterprise Fish Company,” she said. She said that all the richness was just feeding her sickness, in a twisted way she was eating for two—my grandmother’s affliction being her companion there, is what she meant, she was far too old to bear children. (If she’d had kids then, they would come out rumpled, I thought. It was rude of me to think along this line, but I’d grown bitter during my tenure in my grandmother’s oven. They would come out looking like six-month old newspapers, I thought.)

Seymour Cassel had two kids. They never came around. They must have been pretty cool—I just now read (so, writing-me, not oven-me) on Wikipedia that Slash from Hollywood Rose and Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver and Guitar Hero 3 said in his autobiography (co-written with Rolling Stone’s very own Anthony Bozza)—a book which is too entitled Slash—that it was Seymour Cassel who’d initially bestowed him with the nickname Slash, because Seymour Cassel’s son was friends with Saul Hudson, which was Slash’s name before Seymour Cassel rechristened him. (Guns N’ Roses surrounded the Cassel family as a timeless, undulating force, just as Chaya Venice surrounded our clan as one.) Anyway, if Seymour Cassel’s son was hanging around with Slash (even pre-Slash Slash) and Seymour Cassel was inventing the moniker Slash, it isn’t baseless to assume Seymour Cassel’s daughter was cool, too, going off nature/nurture (SLASH!) alone. Seymour Cassel never talked about her with my grandmother, though. But he didn’t talk about his son either.

I had no mirror in my grandmother’s oven—my head and neck were far too pressed up against the oven’s itty window to take advantage of the reflective properties of its glass—but I imagined I must resemble a coal miner now. Not being political here. I had nightmares about oven cleaner, I have them still. My grandmother never once cleaned her oven while I resided there, but I was kept up at night, haunted by the thought that she would. I’d never clean an oven in my life, I vowed. I knew that if I was spending so much of one of my most formative periods in an oven—just as I was now doing—that there was always a chance another troubled fellow would do the same in my future-oven. Maybe it would even be my own son or kid.

Seymour Cassel disappeared for excruciating stretches, which must have been him shooting Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums. In the silence of his absence, I could no longer live with the mystery of my filthiness. I thought about the pool down below, built so cutely between the complex’s northern and southern towers (a stretch which also contained a small cafe, a conjoining grocer, even a post office which opened out onto the adjacent street, Neilson Way). It was and still is one of the most beautiful pools in Southern California, if not in the US or across the entire Earth. (It more recently stood in as the pool at the Disneyland Hotel in that episode of Mad Men where Don takes the kids to Disneyland [thus, to the Disneyland Hotel and to its pool] and brings his secretary, the future Mrs. Megan Draper, along, too.) I was not a strong swimmer but still I ached for the pool. With a porcelain creak, I exited the oven to swim. I’d earned it, I felt. I raced downstairs, as much as the downward speed of the elevator allowed for such a racing. The pool turned to the color of burned-out shit. Douglas Emmett the landlord closed the pool for two weeks to deep-clean up after my swim.

I went home to live with Dad. He thought about grounding me but decided against it. My grandmother never became less sick and, in fact, grew sicker. I could not look Seymour Cassel in the eye again—though, at nine years old, I could not at all articulate why I could not—as he’d exit my grandmother’s apartment, right as Dad and I were heading in. (Eventually, they both died—my grandmother first, then Seymour Cassel—as people—let alone sick, infirmed, isolated, and aged people—tend to.)

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Z.H. Gill lives in Hollywood, CA, with his cat Hans. Twitter: @BurialMagazine