Tag: King Cake

I had been nominally living with Stephany Colunga across two apartments and the better part of a year but in practice this generally meant that Stephany lived with some of my things and the cat Night Beaver while I was off on the rafts or the bus tour or a tour with CAVE or any other number of things. Eventually I stopped pretending and moved most of my stuff including records and large plastic kaiju monsters into the spacious and completely unutilized attic where I would unfortunately never return for any of it.

I had a little bit of a going away party where I attempted to give away some of my clothes but my personal style seemed to be too eclectic and specific to be much use to anyone else. I didn’t want to see all of the stuff wasted but the little bit that was repurposed ended up being equally psychologically painful. There was a really cool King’s Dominion long sleeved shirt that had belonged to my father and had pictures of the different rides printed along the sleeves. Will Leffleur took it but he cut the sleeves off and threw them away: maddening.

I ended up getting blacked out drunk and unreasonably aggressive as the night progressed. The party concluded with me spraying Will with whipped cream and then urinating on him as he lay in a pile of my unwanted wardrobe. The next morning I just piled it all into garbage bags and left it in the alley. A charitable but completely untrue explanation would be that I was trying to spare Stephany the emotional pain of losing her favorite roommate so I behaved like so much of an asshole that she would be able to be happy with my departure.

The last time that I performed live music also happened to be the last time that I ever saw Will at a Halloween party several years ago. I improvised some backing drums while singing about destigmatizing opiate use, testing for fentanyl and being sure to carry nalaxone in order to be able to reverse overdoses for your friends. At this point in the party Will was already passed out on the ground so he didn’t hear the performance although none of it would have been new information for him.

On the first day of the following year I got the news that he had died. Passing out on the ground had been more or less standard party behavior for Will and allowed everyone to keep an eye on him and make sure he was still breathing in the course of normal partying. He had just gotten his own van which was a warmer and more comfortable place for him to pass out at. It also meant that nobody was there to check on him in the critical moment.

It could have happened anywhere. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

Anyway in early 2009 I had showed up in Oakland for the Living Hell reunion show and John Benson invited me to stay in a special attic room he had set up for his daughter Quinn above his own room at the Purple Haus. I actually have barely met Quinn even though she and John had done a band together for a few years called Evil Wikkid Warrior – I was never in the right time or place to see it. In a way it felt like Quinn and I played a similar role in John’s life so both of us being around at the same time would just be excessive. That probably sounds completely random but even in this situation – I was in her room because she wasn’t there.

John first started living at the Purple Haus while he was a student at UC Berkeley and eventually ended up owning it before transferring that ownership to a non-profit created specifically to sustain the house as a true cooperative. The space has been known for shows and parties, with some concerts for legendary East Bay Crust group Dystopia, as well as serving as a host kitchen for Food Not Bombs and similar community resource programs. When my father first went to scout out San Diego as a place for my family to move to he crashed at a hippy party house that eventually became more of a punk party house that my sister and I went to shows at.

The Purple Haus probably has a similar history but I wouldn’t know exactly how far back it goes. It’s cool to imagine the same living room I’ve played in hosting poetry readings for jazz era beatniks but I couldn’t tell you if it would also be accurate. Somebody probably could.

One of the Purple Haus traditions is to celebrate the Mardi Gras season with a sequence of parties and finally a parade centering on a large papier-mâché frog that usually rests on the porch. For somebody with an amphibian totem I know way less about this parade and tradition than might be expected. The reason for this is that the whole thing was ever-so-slightly soured for me for reasons that I’m about to explain.

One of the long time residents of the Purple Haus co-op was a woman named Terry Compost with graying dreadlocks and a slightly Mediterranean complexion. I spoke in the last piece about the necessity of having a system for keeping out undesirables if a punk house is going to properly function. Terry stepped into this role with a bit more enthusiasm than most of her housemates might have preferred. When John invited me to stay in the attic I had been warned about Terry insofar as she would almost certainly give me a hard time and I should make efforts to avoid getting on her bad side.

A couple of the earlier chapters talk about a woman named Eleanor who John Benson had been helping convert a box truck to run on vegetable oil toward the beginning of 2007. I was told that Terry had made Eleanor cry.

I was making a specific effort to avoid spending too much time in the kitchen but I did drink coffee at the time and the Purple Haus kitchen is the perpetual home of a freshly brewed pot of coffee. I made extra special sure to rinse my mug out in the industrial style sink every time I was finished. My mother had a very considerate habit of buying me subculture adjacent books that she thought I might enjoy if she came across them in the thrift store.

She bought me my first copy of Naked Lunch when I was fourteen years old and had gotten me a copy of Crash around the time of the David Cronenberg movie. There’s actually a story I like about that copy of Crash and this is probably the best excuse I’ll get to tell it. I had heard that a girl who went to my High School had been in a serious car accident that resulted in metal pieces being put inside her body to repair a broken bone or whatever.

I think it was supposed to be on her skull in the upper jaw area. For reasons I can’t completely explain this information excited me sexually and I started to feel intensely attracted to her. I suppose she must have been appealing to me physically but nothing of the sort had crossed my mind before I heard about the car accident. I gave the copy of Crash to her in an awkward and completely ineffective attempt at flirting.

Around this same time I would routinely fantasize about another girl I was attracted to shooting me in my left shoulder with a low caliber bullet from fifteen to twenty feet away. This kind of industrial eroticism has only ever appealed to me as a pubescent teenager. LaPorsha and I got into a bad car accident in 2020 that necessitated the addition of metal parts to both of our skeletons but nothing about this information does anything for me (or her) in regards to our shared intimacy.

Anywho big detour. In 2009 my mother had just given me a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels. I was holding the book when I went down to get coffee and carrying a book is always a good pretext for a person who was looking for an excuse to start talking to you to start talking to you. She asked me what I was reading. I answered which segued nicely into the actual sentiment:

“Speaking of the Hell’s Angels what are you doing here?”

I do have to admit that I’d been wearing a lot of studded black leather around the time and it was reasonable to presume that I might end up presenting some of the problematic behaviors of the outlaw biker club. I answered, of course, that I was staying in the attic room that John had made for Quinn and was, at that moment at least, cleaning out a mug I had just used to drink coffee. She mentioned an upcoming Mardi Gras party that she needed to make a King Cake for and asked if I might be interested in helping to make it.

Of course this whole thing was something of a test and it wasn’t like I needed to impress Terry or earn her approval but it did sound like the kind of thing that I might be interested in. I had gone to Mardi Gras in New Orleans for the first time the year before but I was either too late in the season or hanging out with the wrong people to actually cross paths with a King Cake. I had heard of the pastry and surrounding traditions though and I was certainly curious.

I actually did like baking a cake with Terry. The whole thing would have been an overwhelmingly positive experience if not for one detail I’ll be getting to in a second here. On the positive side: I had never worked with live yeast before, and actually haven’t since, although recounting the story is making me want to do it again. It’s fun: the dough puffs up as if by magic and then you punch it down and wait for it to puff up again.

This next bit actually left a lasting impression on me as a baker. Rather than using standard food colorings for the frosting Terry thought it would be fun to look for ingredients that would add the required colors naturally. She used powdered spirulina for green, turmeric for yellow and a dark berry jam for the purple. The best part about this is all of these things do have distinct flavors even if they end up being subtle ones.

Later that year I made a layer cake with jalapeño jelly in the middle and spirulina with minced mint mixed into the buttercream icing. The final step was to carpet the outside with nasturtium leaves and a few flowers. The final product gave an appealing contrast between cooling and heating mouth sensations and whatever you call what spirulina tastes like.

A few years later me and LaPorsha got into making cakes and icings with Kool Aid powder for color and flavor. Very different from, but still in part inspired by, Terry’s more organic King Cake colorings.

Anyway enough of the sweet – let’s get into the bitter. The big tradition with King Cakes is that an inedible object is placed inside the ring shaped cake while baking and whoever finds this in their slice is obligated to host the next party of the Mardi Gras season. I think this might have been a button back in the Middle Ages but nowadays it’s generally a small plastic baby. The Purple Haus tradition is to use a small ceramic frog.

Back in 2009 there was a squat called Hellarity around the corner from Purple Haus on Genoa. Hellarity depended on the more stable and established Purple Haus for a million little things – most importantly an extension cord that was run from the backyard. Not the whole time, they must have been stealing power from the city in the usual squat way for at least part of it, but at one point at least.

Terry didn’t want Hellarity to host the next Mardi Gras party. There were lots of people from lots of different punk houses in attendance and her general instinct was that almost none of them would have done an acceptable job of hosting the next party. She was making the same kind of assumption she’d made with me – that these people wouldn’t even help make a King Cake and the fact that this assumption had turned out to be wrong in my case didn’t change her general outlook in any meaningful way.

It wasn’t about what she wanted though, it was about what she did. She knew exactly who she did want to host the next Mardi Gras party and she slipped the ceramic frog into that person’s slice of cake right before she gave it to them. She essentially dosed somebody with an obligation. Obviously this did not sit well with me.

I care about things like ritual, tradition and magic. The King Cake tradition is designed the way it is for a reason and I didn’t appreciate seeing it thwarted. It felt like a perversion of a thing that I had honestly put my time, effort and energy into and nobody likes how that feels. There were things I liked about Terry – she was into folk music, she cared about the environment and I did actually appreciate how ready she was to challenge and be unaccommodating to strangers. It’s an important role and somebody’s gotta do it.

The thing with the frog was a dealbreaker.

Ultimately Terry didn’t quite click with the way most of the other Purple Haus residents wanted to do things. It wasn’t a good match and I think she eventually moved on more or less organically. I’d imagine she did a lot for the house – there’s probably still things growing in the various gardens that she originally planted and things that are organized a certain way in the kitchen because she organized them that way. I mean I wouldn’t know at all, I’m just guessing.

I do hope she’s doing well wherever she ended up. The whole thing reminds me of this Will Oldham song I like:

“Did you like the cake? Some of it was nice

I have made a cake like that in my own home once or twice…”

Happy Mardi Gras season everybody!