by Vikki Warner
My old buddy Dan and his husband-to-be Steve were moving to Rhode Island after a stint in Phoenix, and I decided they’d be my saviors. I would not accept them moving anywhere but to PennHenge. Dan is one of my favorite human beings on the planet; he was and is one of the most original, creative, and tenaciously loyal people I’ve ever known. James and I had lived with him in Boston for a couple of years, and the three of us had gotten close. Dan taught me how to cook; I brought him to the hospital when he broke his collarbone. We perfected our own brand of a droll nihilist communication style. He had his quirks—loudly coming home at 4:00 a.m., drunkenly singing along to Xiu Xiu; taking baths so long my roommates and I had to knock and make sure he was still alive; providing lengthy descriptions of his new-favorite-record-of-the-week, which tracks were best, and why. Ever politically incorrect, his standard joke was to ask me where I’d been and—regardless of my answer—suggest that I’d actually been turning tricks in the nearest subway station. There was another one about how he’d come home to find me crumpled in the bushes, with my hair a mess and “one pump on.” For every crack lovingly chucked in my direction, he doubly made fun of James, lampooning him for his overbitter worldview.
Dan is my brother. I love the man very much.
Steve and I got along great the few times we’d hung out. And I liked these two together. They had three dogs—two Boston terriers and a Chihuahua—who were all deranged and hilarious. I visualized a happily chaotic scene, lots of booze and grilling, game nights, goofing off, the dogs weaving paths among us. I presented this cozy picture to Dan and Steve, and they decided to take the place—or possibly, I pushed until they relented.
I still had the summer months to kill before the boys could leave Phoenix and attempt a cross-country move, and another friend, Dennis, needed a place to stay in the meantime. Dennis is an honorable, funny, big, bearded guy who is extraordinarily beloved around town—the sort of guy who’d sacrifice just about anything for you if he loves you while simultaneously having little use for the bulk of society, for the law, for religion, for a job, for money. As a touring musician, he kept his financial obligations at a minimum and relied on fast food, chance, and the kindness of friends. Safeguarding my sanity as I was, and looking for a good person rather than a moneyed person, I told him he could stay in the second-floor place for the summer; it was no problem. (I had gone back to taking on freelance editing work so that I could pay the extra chunk of the mortgage while the place was empty.) Dennis agreed to help me with a few projects around the house and slide me a “hundo” when he had it.
Dennis moved in—though it could hardly be called moving when one’s possessions consist of a tiny TV set, an Xbox, a milk crate stuffed with black T-shirts, a sleeping bag, a bike, and a wetsuit. Oh, and a couple of firearms, which I allowed him for some senseless reason to store (sans ammo, at least) in the basement. Dennis spent a good part of the summer at PennHenge, being my buddy and helping me paint and fix things occasionally. He slept directly on the floor—no mattress, no pillow, just a beat-up sleeping bag—and had a snore for the ages. Somehow, I found his snore comforting. Subjectively, I could overlook this momentous chest rattle, which could be heard from almost anywhere in the house, and probably next door, because I liked the rattler himself; coming from someone like Dougie Peppers, the same sound would have been grounds for eviction.
As was now our Fourth of July tradition, Seth and I had another true-to-form power holiday—biking to his parents’ place for the now-requisite parade viewing, grilling session, badminton, and bay kayaking. He moved with alarming speed between leisure activities, and again I struggled to keep up without copping to my exhaustion. In the afternoon we returned to Providence, noted with bemusement that the neighborhood had not lost any of its gusto for fireworks, and escaped again on our bikes. Winding our way through the West End streets, we chose one that was unofficially closed to traffic because of a large family barbecue. Seeing a pair of uninvited guests show up, a swarm of kids on bikes quickly tightened around us, yelling at us to get off their street and half-assedly trying to knock us off our bikes. As we turned onto the next block unscathed, we howled with laughter, caught our breath, and continued on.
Our destination was a house show in a desolate area of Providence dominated by a decaying highway, where a bunch of bands were playing in a garage. This was a cheery crowd of not-very-nationalistic musicians and artists; we fed off of the general din, the copious beer (cider for me), the block party atmosphere, and each other, happily immersing ourselves in the rare feeling that we might all be okay because even in a country full of twits we had this, a community of headstrong and smart people with good beliefs and good instincts.
I gazed at Seth across the asphalt, watched him talk music with a friend. We were moving along at a comfortable clip; we were close, we understood one another. We made each other more adventurous and more lighthearted. We maintained a spirited independence—even at this party we stayed social and didn’t stick to each other—but we considered one another’s needs; we diverted our routines to make time. We had fun, but we got deep. We traveled together well. This person loved me; there were times I knew it. I didn’t need him to say it. And I loved him too: his thoughtfulness and his confidence and his lack of pretense. We were too evolved to be cloying. It was exhilarating to love someone without requiring confirmation of his feelings for me. It was a little like being at the edge of a cliff.
People My Age
Having given Providence a last round of his legendary sweaty bear hugs, Dennis moved far from us, and I waited for Dan and Steve to make their own cross-country trek in my direction. They arrived in November. We had a jubilant reunion, hugging, jumping, yelping, being leapt upon by their dogs. But we all felt new stresses closing in almost immediately. Their moving truck was weeks late, and some of their stuff was broken on arrival. Dan quickly became depressed when he couldn’t find a job in deep-recession Providence; at the time of their move, Rhode Island had the highest unemployment rate in the country.
With Steve at work all day, Dan spent the mornings applying for jobs, and the afternoons taking solitary walks around the wintry city, picking up industrial garbage or cast-off building materials and stuffing them into his backpack. When I’d arrive home from work, I found he’d employed the materials in decorating, first his own apartment, and then the back stairwell. After a couple of weeks of his immersion in this task, patinaed bricks, thick bolts, bits of old rope, rusty film reels, and dried flower wreaths mingled with small bits of artwork all the way up to my apartment door. It looked great—a juxtaposition of harsh and soft—but I worried that Dan wasn’t happy in the house, or in Providence, and that his busy beautification was born out of serious anxiety.
The boys and I had a great time together, making dinners and listening to music, but it was clear that something was bothering them. The first-floor dudes partied loudly and stayed up late, doing little to curtail the noise even when Steve went downstairs to plead for quiet. And they felt bad about their dogs, who barked and tore up the grass in the yard. I knew pretty quickly that living at PennHenge wasn’t suited to them, but I hoped that when Dan found a job and life cooled into a routine, our arrangement might be more appealing.
A few months in, though, Steve came upstairs to officially let me know they’d be breaking their lease and moving to a new place, a freestanding house with a huge fenced yard for the dogs. He was appropriately contrite about it, but I felt ditched, as if they were saying the house wasn’t good enough for them. “Okay, so because we’re friends, I have to let you break the lease? And I have no recourse? Seems like a shitty thing to do to a friend. Yeah, leave. Do whatever you want.” Steve’s face fell, and he quietly apologized and hurriedly retreated.
I couldn’t have expected them to stay, especially after those first few telling weeks. I had dragged them into living at PennHenge half-knowing it wasn’t really what they were looking for, so why was I surprised to have them confirm it for me? I was irri
tated by my fragility. When would I stop receiving this news defensively, like I was being broken up with?
Not one to let an argument fester, I apologized to Steve and Dan the next day; in fact, it was more of an apology fest, as I apologized to Steve and Dan and each of them apologized to me and to each other. I owned up to feeling rejected and to irrational thoughts about the house’s inferiority, and we had a big GF dinner and laughed it off. Our love for each other fully restored, they agreed to do a few extra things in exchange for being able to break their lease. Dan offered to list the apartment on Craigslist and to bravely field the incoming phone calls. Still not ready to get back on the horse after the gravity of the Neil experience, I gratefully agreed.
Dan had good instincts. He meticulously screened out Craigslist crazies and set me up to show the place to a guy named Eric, who would be moving in with his girlfriend Jess. They’d been living in a cramped and loud little apartment right here in Federal Hill; the landlord was a dick and they were ready to get out.
Eric was so thin he looked brittle; though he was twenty-five, he could have passed for a high school kid. He wore glasses and sported a Pearl Jam stick-figure-boy logo tattoo on his ankle. While the latter feature would normally be the first, second, and third strikes against him, I forced myself to stay impartial and judge this guy on his personality and smarts, rather than on superficial features, which had only gotten me in trouble in the past. He was an affable guy, a little jumpy. He had a tendency to ramble, but in a way I could hang with. He was also gainfully employed, responsible, and (over email) asked a multitude of bright questions in full sentences and with punctuation. Was I actually going to live with a Pearl Jam fan club member? It was looking that way.
The next time we met, Eric brought Jess. She, like he, was from a little town in upstate New York, a smart, curious, and friendly lady with a nervous air and a rather amazing head of fluffy, curly black hair. She worked from home, so she’d be around most of the time, keeping an eye on the place. She had no immediately visible Pearl Jam tattoos.
They were in.
Their arrival heralded a shift in the age dynamics of my landladyhood. Eric and Jess may have been the first tenants whom I thought of as “young” and not just “around my age.” It’s an odd prism through which I’ve watched myself get older. So I’ve observed Eric—who is still here at PennHenge today, bless him—as he navigated his mid- to late twenties, and hit thirty. He and Jess split up after a year or so of living together here; she was his tether to their more conservative hometown and his teenage self. When she left, he became free to break out and see who he was. He’s a goofball and a good person. He’s had a few whacked-out girlfriends and roommates; he’s been beaten up on the street; he’s flown around the world to see Pearl Jam (still don’t get that one); he’s developed into something of a beer and bong aficionado. He’s become a formidable long-distance runner. He handles crises the way I do: calmly, with bemusement, without overreaction. He rarely complains, and although he constantly forgets his keys, he is otherwise reliable and steadfast. All of this is great for stability, because his roommates have been so numerous that I can’t remember all of their names.
Eric has become a specialist in the area of sublets and short-stay roommates. I’m not sure whether he just loves having a variety of freewheeling people around or whether he is secretly fleecing them for extra rent, or both, but during the summer months the extra room turns over monthly. Sometimes the additional human in question is Eric’s good friend; sometimes she/he is a minor acquaintance. One of his friends crashed with us for six months while he was going through a complicated breakup that involved a co-owned house. One of my favorite short-termers, with us at the same time, was a rakish surfer guy named Kerry who seemed completely comfortable wherever he found himself—like the universe was at his confident command but he was choosing to keep it casual and not exploit his power. He’s exceedingly smart and had some visionary freelance tech job that I couldn’t iterate if you paid me. He traveled to far-flung locales for activist and artistic causes. He blasted electronic dance music; he was mostly naked most of the time. He and his gorgeous girlfriend had loud sex that made my entire apartment shake mightily. His motto was “No stress, man,” which coming from him was somehow inspiring and not at all vapid.
Because Eric works for an arts organization that sponsors learning and tech incubator programs of various lengths, he’s always meeting international geniuses who need a friendly place to stay for a few weeks. There was a web developer from Brazil, a cute Peruvian digital experimentalist and occasional DJ, and an Indian physicist and mathematician. To my horror, Eric also invited an eighteen-year-old girl from Wisconsin to stay for a good chunk of one summer. I had visions of this young person, away from her family at last, slamming down shots and dancing on tables somewhere. I implored Eric to watch this girl, do not leave her unattended for long. I told him I’d need to meet her as soon as she arrived so I could get all Mom on her and explain the rules. I sat her down at the picnic table and looked her over. She was rather adorable: short hair, glasses, a T-shirt with a comic book character on it, jeans, an artist’s manner. She had a diminutive but determined voice. But I couldn’t let her innocent appearance sway me from the intelligence I was collecting. I told her that, in a way, I was substituting for her parents while she was staying at PennHenge, and that even though she was on her own for a little while, she could always call me or Eric if she needed anything. No drinking, no drugs. She was unmoved by my speech. A little haughtily, she said, “Ugh. I hope I never even want to try drinking. It’s so disgusting.” The more we talked, she voiced further repulsion with the way most people her age behaved and the things they liked and found important, a stance I would have echoed in nearly the same words at age eighteen. Compared to this young woman, though, at that age I was Sid Vicious. I’d imagined a need to shield her from all the pitfalls of city living as a young adult, but she turned it around on me. As the summer went on, she openly judged the PennHenge crowd for every “bad” behavior we exhibited—really just wine and cigarettes, staying up late, and being loud—and she and I talked it through. It was rather bold of her to speak up, and I was cool with her criticisms because I’m twice her age and I have a soft spot for complicated young people.
I never registered the fact that I was only a year older than her when I got my first apartment, and that the landlady, sweet Mrs. Caruso, never sat me or my roommates down to tell us what not to do. She certainly never claimed to be a parental proxy.
I had pictured this young woman alone in a new city, with a bunch of comparatively old weirdos around, and wondered if she would know what to do. She did.
Right before she left, she told me she planned to change her name when she returned to Wisconsin. She had picked out a futuristic name that sounded like an anime character. She was really going to do it; she was excited to shrug off her parents and her high school friends and make this bold move. It made me remember the delicate nature of eighteen, how hard it can be to have no idea who you’ll turn out to be, while being perfectly aware of that fact. She was putting her bet on the table with this new name—wagering that it would help her become tough and spirited and arty, and not spend time fretting about what “people her age” did.
Months after she left, Eric told me that our young friend was trans. Her summer in Providence was her first real time away from home as a woman. Apparently, she knew more about who she’d turn out to be than I’d given her credit for.
Rumblings
Over the years, the goals for my apartment have gone from radical—a rooftop geodesic dome and garden were once considered—to ordinary. Basic maintenance has become enough for me. I thought by now this place would be under tight control, clean, of a piece, thoughtfully arranged. But just buying a house did not turn me into an orderly person. In a sense, the house and I are a perfect match: we’re both willing to accept a little defeat, even as we go on trying to self-improve.
I’m a fully f
ormed, set-in-my-ways old lady now, just like the house, and we both have to make peace with one unpleasant fact about me: I am no domestician. I have avoided admitting this personal flaw since I slouched into my first apartment, hoping it might not be a permanent part of my personality. I’m not a total slob, but I am indifferent to spotless-ness. When I clean something, I irrationally expect it to stay clean indefinitely. If I scrubbed the bathroom sink two weeks ago, I’ll feel that a grave injustice has occurred upon noticing that a layer of toothpaste spittle has formed.
That I don’t delight in keeping my apartment white-glove ready is not so awful. But couple that trait with my poor understanding of spatial organization and tendency toward inertia in all things decorating, and the result is a failing score on the Marie Kondo scale. It’s not that I have an emotional urge to hold on to things—I actually relish trashing stuff I no longer use—it’s that once I put something somewhere, I stop seeing it. I just start working around it. Because my apartment has only one closet, a lot of things just have to be left out in the open. Piles of things—books, mostly—seem unlikely ever to move again. And if I start a project that goes unfinished, the cans of paint or jugs o’ spackle might sit for months before being relegated to the basement, because I was just about to get to that.
My internal shakiness is echoed by the house in a very real way. While I’m perched in my third-floor hideaway, with no warning, the flowerpots and the canisters of rice and tea rattle against each other. A subtle clanking is heard. The walls waver, delicately but unmistakably. The couch or the bed trembles for a minute, stops, trembles again.
