Jan 17 2006 05:30 PM
Edited 44 time(s), most recently on Feb 10 2006 01:56 PM
A group house. Not a group home.
Historic Mt. Pleasant was a particularly wealthy neighborhood once upon a time, and it remains today lined with stately federal-styled rowhouses filled with four, five, and six bedrooms apiece, plus habitable basements, long after Washingtonians were having any more than one and three quarters children, plus no live-in servants. In the extended housing slump that began after the 1968 riots and didn't end until the fall of Marion Barry, these were lovely littlle anachronisms. Some got subdivided into smaller units, but historic preservation laws in the eighties put the kibosh on that.
In such an environment, the houses started being rented to groups of 4-7 adults --- singles arriving in town to knock the world on its ass but currently with limited resources, like me a dozen years ago. The rent would be a couple hunnert, usually little enough that you could still cover it with your savings if you got busted from that barista job you took until you got a chance to knock the world on its ass. It was the utilities that could kill you, if you kept the A/C on all summer, or the heat in the winter. But suffering molds character, and living like a sucker in a former luxury dwelling shaped a few characters. And we sealed up the windows and, as often as possible, went without.
Our place was owned by a bigwig politico who would go on to be the head of NTSB at the time planes were crashing into buildings in September of 2001. She was mean and cheap and made at least three of our tenants cry. She claimed that she couldn't believe what we did with her beautiful house, but we kept it pretty nicely, particularly after Cha moved in. Some of the older slackers in the hood would come through for our parties and recall how ours used to be the neighborhood punk rock house, with a ten-foot-high anarchy A on the living room wall. There was an occasional incident with vermin, including our persian kitty Annie infesting the second floor with fleas one summer, but that was dealt with forthwith.
Six adults in every house on the block --- and usually two more in the basement --- really made the place a nightmare for parking, I'll tell you what. And there was no metro stop at the time, neither. The homeowners who were still family-unit residents were pretty mad about it, and gave us the cold shoulder. Of course they were largely the ones who won historic preservation status for the neightborhood, so they were somewhat to blame for keeping smaller families out, and inadvertantly turning the hood into a post-collegiate slacker Mecca.
Of course, few of us ever did knock the world on it's ass. Kenneth might have been a fine writer like his Pulitzer winning uncle, if he could have owned up to his boozing and his latent homosexuality. Paul was a talented policy analyst who specialized in North Korea and disamament issues. He and I were in an accidental race to see who could get more depressed. He's getting treatment now, so maybe he's winning. But I stopped trying to be cool and he didn't, so maybe I'm winning. Paul's girlfriend from the south would make prolonged visiits and clean during the day when he was at work. She eventually moved to DC and I'm still friends with her, though her relationship with Paul makes mine look stabile.
Rob was a talented architect. He did all right. It was an asset of his that he got attention because he was a handsome well-spoken black man, but it could also work against him because his colleagues would assume he was succeeding because he was a handsome well-spoken black man.
Rosanna was a passive-aggressive Mennonite, whose adoption of any progressive cause was offset by hilariously retrograde perspectives. I remember getting messages for Rosanna, like "Tell her the 'Issues for Contemporary Women' group is meeting tonight and ask if she can bring something to dip in chocolate." Men, as a topic at these meetings, tended to suck ass, all agreed. I thought she had a good heart but she was one of those with a chip-on-her-shoulder maternal instinct, where she had to show the world how damn good a mother she would be, conspicuously baby-sitting the toddlers of her fellow church congregants and changing the cat's diet and litter to something more scientific every few months, which the cat would respond to by shitting and puking in my tub. She took the cat with her when she left, even though it didn't technically belong to her. It was dead within five months.
She eventually cornered a poor fellow into marriage. They adopted an Indian child. Good for them and wonderful for the child, I guess, but in the one photo I saw of happy parents and child --- and I may have been fooled by a grainy early digital photo here --- she seemed to have dyed her hair dark brown and tanned her skin in a strange attempt to better facilitate bonding with the child.
Rusty was the guy who got me into the house. He was the only guy I knew in DC, the college chum of my brother's high school chum. Rusty was hardcore. He had the grossest of the stories of group house depradations. He loved to reheat yesterday's coffee in the coffee maker. He thought it tasted better. Well, so did the two cockroaches who were swimming in yesterday's pot. He boiled their asses up, poured them into a cup, and damn near swallowed them before pulling them out of his mouth. Damn, Rusty, you made me so sick I lost eight pounds.
He had red hair down to his waist and had been disfigured in face and shape by two separate traumatic childhood accidents. But his attitude was so fuck you that it didn't matter. Girls couldn't get enough of him. They wanted to dip him in chocolate at their women's meetings. Young men with badass progressive posturing gravitated to him and tried to borrow badass authenticity from him. But Rusty stood out among the poseurs. He had been run over by a car and simply. didn't. give. a fuck. Rusty had a way of simultaneously psyching me up and psyching me out for dates. I would go back and forth from the bathroom to my bedroom getting ready, as he followed me laughing maniacally: "She asked you out?"
"Yes, Rusty, get out of my way."
"I've seen this girl. She did not ask you out."
"Well she did. Now dammit, I'm late."
"Well, I guess she'd have to, considering you make your moves in geological time. Jeezus, Edgy, what have I taught you!?"
He eventually married a rich Chinese girl and moved to the sort of working class Philadelphia home he came from. (He actually came from Reading and had a mad thing for the Phils.) Their agreement was that she could pick out the place if he was allowed to poster one entire wall of their bedroom in his favorite iconic photograph of Chuck Bednarik rejoicing over a fallen Frank Gifford who he has just knocked unconsious. "You know," Rusty would tell me every other football Sunday, "When Gifford was marrying Kathy Lee, he supposedly had to tell her that, if she was going to take his name, she'd be hearing the name Chuck Bednarik quite a bit from that day forward." Shortly after they moved, he came down with a serious case of Hodgkin's Disease. As his trademark hair that he'd worn long since he was 14 started falling out, he took his wife to Italy and re-connected with his grandfather's people. They took it slow, broke off contact with most of us, but beat the disease into remission. They own an Italian restaurant in Philly; last I heard.
And then there was Kelly. She and I moved in the same month, so we had a bond of sorts as we tried to reform the house from falling under the intertia of the burned out veterans of the residence. She was an athletic tomboy with a nice smile and we'd laugh at the post-modern irony as she'd come in from working on her car covered in grease and find me in the kitchen baking and covered with flour. She hit on me once while I was shaving. At least, I'm pretty sure she did, but Rusty was right about the geological thing. We were both kind of with other people, so I passed. She was a star I wouln't have been able to hang onto --- untroubled and untethered by the burdens I was still trying to shake off and leave behind in New York. She and her boyfriend Tony cut out for Portland around the same time everybody her age in America was lighting out for Portland. I heard they tried to open a donut shop, but I don't recall Kelly ever in a hurry to get up before noon.
But here's to you, Kelly. My luck to have been depressed and mopey at the same time you were beautiful, semi-available, and one flight up.
There was Melissa (moved in when Kelly moved out), the fresh-faced young congressional aide (Moynihan, D--NY) with the cockatiel. She smashed that fresh face of hers up in bad bike accident that nearly killed her. She was from Maine and had done some modelling for LL Bean and was terrified she had been, as she would say, "beat down by the ugly stick." But Rusty's fate was not hers, and she recovered fully and went on to law school.
Gwen was a pristine little Catholic thing who traded men in like pawn shop items, always getting them to the point of complete devotion before cashing them in for someone 10% more successful. Charlene hated her. Not so much because of her self-serving thing with men, but because she walked around in a bath towel and chatted with us as her hair dried. She also was a supposed liberal who got a cushy job at the American Enterprise Institute, so how's that for opportunism? She also went off to law school --- University of Chicago, I think.
Jen was an 18-year-old Jewish girl from Brooklyn and was certain she was the only 18-year-old Jewish girl ever to be from Brooklyn. She also lisped about how goth she was. She was into Paul's shit and made his girlfriend very uncomfortable.
The place had it's own mythology. There was one room that was cursed. Happy people would move in there and grow depressed. Healthy people would grow sick. Nice people would turn into evil blue meanies. People lost their talent in that room. Tons of mythology surrounded Kenneth. His prize-winning author of an uncle was also childless. When said uncle died, Kenneth inherited, among other things, the collection of props from the movie adaptation of his huge megabesteseller. So if our house didn't look surreal before that, it sure did after. Eventually, we got Kenneth to take everything upstairs and add it to THE ROOM THAT IS SO MESSY THAT WE MUST CHARGE PEOPLE AND GIVE TOURS. If Kenneth was truly the tortured closeted homosexual that pretty much 100% of us had concluded he was, he sure smashed the gay=neat stereotype to smithereens.
In the basement lived Scott and Ellen. Cha and I tried to be friendly --- if not friends --- with them, as it was neighborly. But they were into some bad shit. They were the type of neightbors where some strangers would come around asking for them and, if they weren't home, would sit on the curb for nine hours waiting for them. They would also have some terrible fights that had us going down to invite one of them upstairs until they cooled down. They had us down to dinner one night, and it was sweet. Scott was a marvelous chef, but it soon came out that he had learned to cook in prison and it seemed they were trying to get their act together, and we were the only (or closest thing to) respectable people they knew. It was clear they were trying to cultivate a relationship with us in their effort to get straight --- drug-wise and otherwise. It was touching and we tried to reciprocate.
That came to a skidding halt the day the US marshals showed up one Sunday morn and thrust a picture of Scott in our face. "DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN!?"
"Um, yeah..."
"DOES HE LIVE HERE?"
"Downstairs."
"HAVE YOU SEEN HIM?"
"I can't recall the last time..."
"ARE YOU BEING UNCOOPERATIVE?!"
"I truly can't recall the last time."
"DO YOU HAVE A KEY TO THE DOWNSTAIRS APARTMENT?!"
(Now I am being uncooperative.)
"I don't know. Do you, um, have a warrant?"
"THIS MAN IS WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH FELONIES IN THE DISTRICT AND IN THE COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA. HE'S NOT ANSWERING THE DOOR. IF YOU DON'T PRODUCE A KEY, WE'RE BREAKING IT DOWN!"
(I'm a little pissed now. That door goes down, the landlady is going to hold it over the head of anybody who is convenient.)
"Yeah, um, do you have a warrant?"
"WE DON'T NEED A WARRANT!"
"I'm pretty sure you do."
"OUR WARRANT IS AT THE DISTRICT STATION!"
"You came out, together, Metro Police detectives and US marshals. Six of you, and nobody bothered to bring a copy of the warrant?"
"WHY ARE YOU BEING UNCOOPERATIVE?!"
(I am finally pissed.) "You haven't even identified yourselves yet. I'm just guessing who you are from your stupid patches. You don't even have your shields out...!"
I am shaking mad. I'm shaking as I'm typing now. Then the keys flew past my shoulder and onlto the stoop. (Thank God they didn't hit Detective Dickhead.) I hear Charlene behind me scream. "Here's the fuckin' keys! You know, he's been trying to trying for a year to keep me from hating cops. Thank you for this morning because I WON!!"
So the men bust in on Scott and Ellen. Scott gets hauled off on all sorts of charges and ends up in DC jail. During the few months of his sentence (his initial sentence, as it turned out) Ellen is all sorts of fucked up and shell shocked from the bust. You had to make sure you didn't surprise her when you said good morning because she'd hit the ceiling. She was clearly having trouble making rent. But then a 6-4 musclehead moved in with her. A lunk of a guy who cut down trees for a living, who'd clearly fight anybody anywhere. The joke on the block was that she met her men at skanks.com, but nobody said that anywhere within earshot of big Allen. I told Ellen to tell Scott about it. We fretted that Scott would come home, fly into a rage, and Allen would kill him. Scott was mad alright, but all it took from Allen was a few muscle flexes and Scott knew he was beat. He disappeared into the night. I'd see him around town from time to time and he'd brag about the restaurants he was working at, but everything about him said junkie. He eventually ended up being one of the few white inmates at Lorton. He wrote me from there. I didn't get the letter until I was moved out and it was forwared to me. Cha forbade me from replying, and I guess it was right. I opened up the paper a year ago and he was arrested for sticking up banks. Not a bank. Banks.
So who lives in your basement?
I felt bad to cut off communication with a tortured guy --- especially after finding that he was lonely, but he was clearly bad news for women to be around.
And out of all the folks I know, he was --- in his sad, confused, fucked-up, junky way --- the closest thing to a world beater to come out of 1810.
Until now. Jill Carroll, hostage to the Iraqi insurgents, is the one who moved into Paul's room after Paul moved into Charlene's room. Come home soon, Jill Carroll.
