The first girl that Justin Two brought home to the basement immediately imprinted on me and started following me around like a newly hatched baby duck in a cartoon. There are a couple of things about her I feel like I will never know for certain: I’m not sure if she was actually as much of an airhead as she presented herself as or if to some extent it was an act cultivated to appeal to the male gaze. Similarly I will never know for sure if she was actually infatuated with me or had merely grasped onto me as a means of escaping Justin Two’s “sex for drugs” transactional demands.
Her name was Sabrina but she was trying to change it to “Niaomi” pronounced kind of like the cute cat sounds that human characters make in anime. She wanted to move away from the “teenage witch” associations of her birth name because, in her own words, “they get burned” and her cultural background seemed to incorporate a heavy disdain for anything occult:
“My whole family hates ghosts! They think they’re devils!”
There was a very tragic pet bunny living at the Red House called Bun-Bun, I think Kiki might have brought it home. Justin Two used to put Bun-Bun inside of a clear acrylic bread box and hotbox it with crack smoke. I feel guilty in retrospect that I didn’t stop him but it somehow never gave the thing a heart attack. Bun-Bun also ended up getting fed these bright red processed hot dogs that somebody had brought home a giant bag of. After that everybody who slept on mattresses directly on the floor would sometimes wake up to the rabbit gnawing on their fingers.
The poor thing was obviously starving and looking for the closest thing it could find to the meat it had become accustomed to. Eventually Bun-Bun developed one of the sizable tumors that white laboratory bred animals such as mice and bunnies seem to be especially susceptible to due to a general lack of biological diversity. I’d like to think that Bun-Bun was humanely euthanized but I actually don’t know – I just remember the tumor getting bigger and bigger then one day it wasn’t around any more.
Anyway Bun-Bun was dyed purple on the day that Niaomi followed me out of the basement and saw it scurry across the floor.
“Is that bunny naturally purple? Does that mean that one of it’s parents was purple?”
I don’t think I actually made the obvious joke about Bun-Bun having a red father and blue mother, I don’t think I said much of anything throughout the entire encounter. That was how I constantly ended up in those kinds of situations, I never told anybody no. If someone decided to attach themselves to me and start following me around I always just let it happen. It wasn’t the best habit – it would lead to me having sex with people I would have preferred not having sex with and showing up at shows and parties with extremely sketchy random people from the street in tow.
Eventually I learned the very basic skill of establishing minimal boundaries with strangers and casual acquaintances but it took me a very long time – it wasn’t until after I was thirty years old.
On this particular day I needed to walk to the nearby DePaul University Computer Lab to check my e-mail and use the internet. Nobody at the Red House had a computer so this was one of our habitual excursions. The other one was going toward North Avenue to steal books from a Crown Books that seemed to exist in a state of perpetual disbelief that it hadn’t gone out of business yet. We would continue on to Wicker Park to sell the stolen books in the different used book stores then on to the West Side to buy drugs.
On one of the quiet tree lined streets I found an abandoned aluminum briefcase that had evidently belonged to some kind of doctor. The following exchange took place when I picked it up off the ground and opened it:
“Is that your briefcase?”
“It is now.”
“Are those your business cards?”
“They are now.”
“Can I have one?”
“Sure. Here.”
Niaomi seemed to be glowing with excitement as I handed her the card as if it represented some token of my affection in an alternate universe where it could actually be used to contact me.
“I’ll call you! You’re MY doctor!”
I didn’t have a phone. She knew where I lived. Back in the basement Justin Two had accepted the impossibility of creating any sense of sexual obligation in Niaomi and was smoking crack with her in resignation. She leaned over and shotgunned the hits into my mouth as a pretense for a kiss. I lay on the living room couch reading a Peter Sotos book as she snuggled against me in perfect contentment.
She disappeared back into her usual life and I never saw her again.
It seemed impossible that somebody who was more or less successfully navigating adult life could exist in such a state of naïveté without even an elementary understanding of cause-and-effect or the other laws governing the universe but there it was. In the sixteen or so hours we spent together she never once broke character or allowed the mask to slip. I’ve met other people with the “ditzy hot girl” persona in the intervening years but never again to such an exaggerated degree.
Our landlord lived next door to us and had introduced himself by showing up on the porch drunk and in a dress and pelvic thrusting as he delivered what we obviously took as a challenge:
“Nobody parties harder than I do!”
We called him Party Sean but he would soon learn that we actually did party alarmingly harder than he did. He could often be heard stumbling through the alley and talking about how he wasn’t usually so drunk so early in the morning. He had gotten some kind of a sweetheart deal on the house because the elderly couple that raised racing pigeons didn’t want to sell to anybody they didn’t know and apparently didn’t have kids to leave the house to. We represented an opportunity to start collecting rent without undertaking any renovations or improvements but he soon regretted it.
Justin Two had been driving through alleys at night to collect discarded wooden pallets in one of his many quick cash schemes. The pallet recycling center was closed or he ended up with a bunch that were the wrong size but for whatever reason he ended up just stacking them up around the back door of the house. I knew that change was in the air when I started to hear Party Sean and his lawyer discussing fire and liability in regards to the pallets. He had also kind of figured out that we were all on hard drugs and probably concluded that it was only a matter of time before we created major damages, a crime scene or both if he didn’t get rid of us. He vocally bemoaned his earlier decision:
“I could have rented this place to a nice Mexican family!”
Midway through the eviction process I ended up taking acid for what was the first time in my life. I got caught in some paranoid thought loops and convinced myself that I had been roaming inside the house completely insane for months but none of my roommates had wanted to contact my family or the authorities about it. I walked up and down the rear stairs until time broke and I saw infinite copies of myself frozen into a kind of figure eight in every possible position ascending and descending the stairs and pulsing with all of the colors of the visible light spectrum.
I tried to lay on my mattress and force myself to sleep but the strings on my electric bass (I’d left it on the bed) felt like writhing snakes that were shocking me with electricity. I ripped all of my clothes off but then immediately felt like I had to get out of the house so I pulled on the first thing I could find. This ended up being a pair of skin tight black jeans that were airbrushed with graffiti style bubble letters from a San Diego Thrift Store. They said “BILLY RAY THE BANDIT” with a large microphone by the crotch and an image of Bart Simpson as a stereotypical pimp.
I wandered into Party Sean’s house where, true to nature, he was having a crazy party. He made a flourish to present me to his guests, a mostly younger Hispanic crowd:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, Jim Morrison!”
I could hear people joking about how I smelled like crack (this wouldn’t have been true on this particular day) but I was too out of my mind to be bothered by it. Everybody was smoking weed out of an old school vaporizer where it sat on a tiny sculpture of a skull in a jester hat inside a glass bubble. They tried to show me how to smoke it but I couldn’t really figure out the plastic tubes and how you were supposed to put your finger over a tiny hole. There were platters of cocaine all over the place too but I wasn’t really interested.
Party Sean said he felt bad about having to kick us all out and I told him not to worry about it. I said we were used to it. Eventually the sun came up and I realized it hadn’t actually been months and went home. I wasn’t “out of my mind” tripping anymore but I was still tripping and I couldn’t sleep. I shot a bag of heroin but it didn’t seem to do anything so I immediately shot another one. I woke up soaking wet having evidently just overdosed on heroin while still tripping on acid and then gotten narcanned.
Justin Two took me to a small neighborhood Carnival in Humboldt Park. I ate a coconut paleta and we rode the Ferris Wheel. We spent about ten minutes watching a snail climbing up and eating a yellow dandelion flower. Eventually I did go to sleep and woke up not on acid anymore but in another way it really does last the rest of your life like people say to fuck with you the first time you ever take it.
Everybody at the Red House spent all of their money on drugs and we all ate really badly. Once me and Matt found a dried out piece of cheese under the couch and we boiled it until it was soft then made instant mashed potatoes by using the water we had boiled it in as milk and the chunk of cheese as butter. Me and John found free passes to an early screening of A Knight’s Tale starring Heath Ledger. The movie theater exit passed through a kind of dry storage for it’s Concessions Stand and we stole two gigantic silver bags of nacho cheese that the house pretty much lived on. We ended up using that stuff to make instant mashed potatoes a lot, we kept it in the cabinet because it didn’t have to be refrigerated.
I can’t remember if Party Sean ever went through any of the official eviction paperwork. The pressure built up until he kicked in the front door and turned off the house circuit breaker and yelled that he would kill us if we didn’t leave. Nick and Janice had found an apartment just on the other side of the underpass that marked the beginning of the West Side open air drug markets on Chicago Avenue. We started getting all of our things together to move into this new apartment. A couple of Party Sean’s Goomba friends harassed us and made vague threats about how we and our parents would be “sleeping with the fishes” as we loaded everything into a car. I don’t think any of them were actually Italian.
I do remember one of my housemates rolling their eyes and asking one of our self styled intimidators:
“How’s that Bud Light treating you?”
Party Sean’s lawyer came to all of our jobs to drop off subpoenas. I got mine while I was working at the Italian cafe on Wrightwood. Matt and Joe had broken back into the house to see if we had accidentally left anything important behind and found a Manila envelope full of photos of the house before the mess and superficial damage we had caused got repaired marked “EVIDENCE”. They took it with them.
On the designated day we all showed up in court. Kiki had forgotten she was carrying this cool skull shaped knife so security ended up keeping it. The judge told us all that it wasn’t legal for his lawyer to have served us all at our places of employment. Party Sean and his lawyer tried to talk about damages to the house but the judge said that the hearing was only concerned with whether or not we had surrendered the premises. Somebody handed over the last copy of a key. Janice raised her hand:
“Your Honor, I don’t know if this means anything but I have a photo of our landlord wearing a dress.”
At the time I didn’t understand why she said that but I now understand how brilliant it was. Party Sean had presented himself as a fellow resident of a lawless world of hedonistic opulence then turned around and attempted to weaponize his asymmetric power in the waking world of respectability. He didn’t show up at our front door in a dress as an expression of fluid gender identity but to signify that he was a “wacky” drunk.
The judge had just told him in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be able to lay a finger on us legally and Janice took the moment to remind him who he was.
I don’t know what happened with the house next but if he didn’t die young he probably made a decent stack of cash on it. I’m trying to remember his face – he was probably just hitting forty and looked a bit like a red haired Robin Williams.
I’ve met a great number of people who partied harder than he did but he did party harder (in the drugs and alcohol sense) than the only other person I’ve known with party in their nickname. Not in the knowing everybody sense though because almost nobody knows Party Sean but there’s a good chance whoever’s reading this knows who the other person I’m talking about is.
It’s Party Steve.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 