Friday Fourteen: fourteen homes

A revealing measure of my state of mind right now: I’m looking hard at that word, fourteen, wondering whether it’s spelled right.

Fourteen? Forteen? It’s forty, right? Or is it fourty?

Don’t worry. I’m not making too many more critical medical decisions today.

Below the cut, a theme I’ve robbed from Dean: fourteen places I’ve lived. Pix to follow when I get the chance.

1. San Gabriel, CA. Earliest childhood. I didn’t understand how a ranch house could be a ranch house without cattle. When my dad said he was going to put in a “bar” near the kitchen range, I couldn’t imagine how we were going to balance our breakfast dishes on the bar.

On a rare clear day, we could see Mt. Wilson and the Mt. Wilson Observatory from our back yard. We had two back yards, actually. The first one had guava and lemon trees and a St. Augustine lawn. The one behind it had red ants and sticky burrs and succulents. The clothes lines were back there, and maybe a swing set, although if there was a swing set, it didn’t last too long.

We had lizards back there, too — fence lizards, racers, horned toads.

Yeah, I could probably write a whole Thirteen about that house. One of these days, I will.

Walnut with his sis and bro. Note nifty white belt and trademark scoliotic posture.

2. Arcadia, CA. My dad got a bleeding ulcer selling that house on Southview; I remember visiting him in the hospital. For all of my mom’s hypochondria, it was my dad who spent the most time in the hospital — another spell of bleeding ulcers later on, back problems requiring traction.

The house in Arcadia had a garden shed which I called my own. This was my lab. It had poor ventilation and wooden work benches — just the place to fire up an alcohol lamp and try to smelt mercuric salts back to elemental mercury. That self-inflicted brain damage produced the Walnut you see before you today.

I went through adolescence here, fell in love, broke up, went to college. I brought my wife-to-be back to this house; she developed her first symptoms in this house, and I spent sleepless nights there while the local hospital docs treated her for God only knows what.

My dad made a nice profit off this one. No bleeding ulcer this time.

3. Berkeley, Part 1: the boarding house on Ashby, one little room overlooking one of Berkeley’s busier streets. We shared a bathroom and a small fridge with the other boarders.

In dreams, I come back to this home more than any others. Basements and attics abound. My mind is convinced that this place was thousands of square feet bigger than the real deal. The shy, young woman under the stairs: was she real, too, or did she only appear in my dreams? When a place becomes such a staple of the subconscious, reality becomes smudged, out of focus.

We had a pay phone downstairs. I saved my change, called my girlfriend whenever I had ten dollars in quarters. I never had enough money for a conversation of decent length — the woman could talk. Still can, in fact.

4. Berkeley, Part 2: Griffith Hall, my one year in the dorms. You’ve heard too much about this place already — what can I add?

The hairy dude is my friend Stan. The surprised one is Vaughn and the cute one is Elaine. On the ground: Domino’s Pizza. I remember how it smelled . . . going down and coming up.

I endured my first hangover here. On a Saturday night, I discovered Riesling does not mix well with College Ave. vodka. My dorm friends abandoned me when I developed a sudden crying jag. (I am NOT a good drunk.) Next morning, all I could do was sip orange juice and read the comics.

Took me two hours to read those comics.

I broke up with my girlfriend Christmas of this year.

5. Berkeley, Part 3: the apartment on Milvia, where I roomed with Russ and Roger. This is the place my cousin found by dowsing a map with a quartz crystal, the place my friend Debbie bequeathed to me when she graduated. We watched Gone With The Wind here with her lesbian roommates. Here, she showed me the pencil outline of an old boyfriend’s hand, too large to fit an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of bond. Here, Karen and I had our first hot-and-heavies. And here, she nursed me through chicken pox.

Karen will likely kill me for posting this one, but I think she’s pretty damn cute here. We’re opening my graduation presents — cookware, a spice rack, and a “jumbo fry pan.”

6. Atherton, due west of Menlo Park (I think) — I rented a room for $125 a month, which was a steal even in 1983. Wood floors, wood-paneled walls, bare wood ceiling. Mattress on the floor, a desk, a box turtle named Cujo who escaped one afternoon.

Cujo would only drink running water. I used to take him out front in the afternoon, turn the hose on, and let him drink. I would sit on the porch reading my anatomy book. One day, I dozed off — I swear, it was just for a few minutes — and Cujo buggered off. Those bastards move fast when they want to.

7. Palo Alto, married student housing: postage stamp kitchen, living room big enough for a green vinyl sofa, one small dining room table, a TV, and a snake cage. At first, we kept Baby (our Columbian Red-tailed Boa) in the bedroom with us, but she would wake us up at night. She liked to “climb” the walls of the cage, would eventually get unbalanced and fall over onto herself. Slither, slither, THUMP. Obnoxious creature.

8. Menlo Park. We lived across from a huge field, property of a local monastery (or theological school?) Honestly, I don’t remember this apartment very well. My old gf’s sister came to visit us once with the guy who would become her husband. He had an odd sense of humor: he liked to pretend he was stupid. It made him feel good to think he had fooled you into thinking he was a cretin. For example, when he came into our apartment, he spotted our two red-bellied newts, who were chowing down on a load of tubifex worms, and he said, “Oh, look at that! These must be the snakes!”

Karen had a falling-out with our landlord one day when he wouldn’t fix the windows — a burglar could have lifted them out, no problem. And suddenly we were in apartment-hunting mode again.

Did I ever tell you the story about the (potential) landlady who was nice as can be until we told her we had snakes? She said, “You seem like such a nice couple . . . but, I don’t know. Anyone who would feed a cute li’l bunny to a snake must be sick.”

Me and my Friday Flickr babe.

9. San Jose, CA, at the luxurious Oakwoods Apartments, where the rental office gal convinced us we could “eat fewer steaks a month to afford the rent.” I’m convinced they hired beautiful young Asian women to bobble in the hot tub just for me. Rental Office Gal understood her mark.

Oakwoods featured a weight room and a swimming pool, both of which I used infrequently, and tennis courts, which I never used. Oakwoods also came with a 18-year-old boy who thought he could sing like Simon Le Bon. Weekends, he would camp out in the exterior stairwell (for the resonance, no doubt) and practice his crooning. Karen and I would laugh until we cried.

10. South Pasadena, CA. Every apartment we looked at in Pasadena was oh, so dark. How odd! And this little place on Fremont Ave. was no exception. We discovered the Internet in this apartment, made our way through Mirsky’s Worst of the Web to find Slutboy. Nowadays you’ll find dozens of Slutboys, but none of them have the tacky, trashy splendor of our Slutboy.

You couldn’t have a decent car radio in this place. One of ours got stolen, so we bought one with a detachable face plate. Son of a bitch stole the radio without the face plate and broke the window, too.

11. Alhambra. This was one of my favorite homes, perhaps because it was a true home (i.e., not an apartment) — our first. But still a rental. Anyway, lots of nice associations here: we raised chameleons in this place, and the place in South Pasadena, too, but here we truly had room to fill our home with critters. Karen’s health had improved. She went through her pregnancy here, delivered Jake, raised him to age seven months. I finished residency while living in this place. Lots of good associations.

Jake with his nanny, Julietta.

12. Boerne, Texas. Okay, stay with me on this. In the 19th Century, a bunch of Bavarians colonized the San Antonio area because the 19th Century equivalent of a real estate agent told them it was “just like Bavaria!!!” They brought sausage and beer and German names and oompa music (which has heavily influenced Mexico’s traditional music — think about it). Some folks in the area still speak only German. “Boerne” was one such German colony, but the locals don’t pronounce it like good Germans. They call it Bernie.

We didn’t last long in Texas, just long enough to buy an almost new house, turn around and lose money on it. But hey, a year later the whole area flooded, so perhaps we got out in the nick of time. Anyway, this place had an open floor plan, big bedrooms, a HUGE (they call ’em “Texas-sized”) walk-in closet, scorpions, chiggers, and the best kitchen I’d ever had. We had an acre of land. Weekends, I would walk the acre with my tortoise, Sydney. I was looking for fire ant mounds to poison, he was looking for love, or, barring that, some break in our perimeter defenses so that he could find love. Eventually, he made his break. I don’t know if he found love.

13. Crescent City, CA: back to rentals, this time to a faux Victorian with a floor plan from hell. Our landlord had designed and built the place, and had wild fantasies that we would ultimately buy it from him. In his dreams. It would take a topologist to figure out how to fit furniture into that living room.

This house overlooked a mosquito-infested lake. On the upside, we had lots of brilliant green tree frogs jumping around us every Halloween; on the downside, we still had scads of mosquitoes. We were glad to leave this house. Well, maybe Jake wasn’t glad; he had lots of older girls to play with next door and would stay out until all hours. Sure, he was only three, but how do you draw the line? Who am I to discourage him from honing his important social skills?

14. Harbor, OR: We bought it despite the brown-and-gold shag carpet in the living room, the Brady Bunch Yellow kitchen, the baby blue shag carpet in the master bedroom, the whole house wired for sound . . . provided you have a few eight-track tapes handy. Yes, it’s a Seventies Nightmare, a big fixer-upper which we will never, ever finish fixing up. But that’s okay; we got a steal on this one, and we didn’t buy it for the interior. We bought it for the view.

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If it’s Friday, it must be Friday Snippet Day at Tam’s place 🙂

SxKitten came home from her vacation with COOL BUGS!

Jona celebrates her daughter’s birthday & gets all thoughtful on us

D.