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04:21:2002 Entry: "Music to Plumb By"
Music to Plumb By
I hate it when I can't remember my dreams, even though I know there was a plethora of them swirling around in my brain. Maybe there were too many and they got their identities confused and convoluted, hence diluting their impact. Yeah, that's it.
Well, I'm starting to recover from New Year's Eve--no...I didn't get drunk...I had one gin and tonic around 8 pm and drank tea for the rest of the night...I didn't even go OUT. I was still so shaken over what happened to Plato, that I just wanted to stay home and snuggle with him. We had Tim over and watched Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars video, but I don't think Tim was really into it...he was depressed about his condo problems. Tim was the one who got drunk.
Well, welcome to the club, Tim...life bites.
I don't know how many times my life has been turned upside down by water leakage in a home or rental. Tim's worry is is that the insurance won't cover it, and the water heater and furnace are new. Well, water heaters, comparatively speaking, are CHEAP. We installed one ourselves a couple years ago...it was outrageously and happily surprisingly inexpensive...I'll have to ask Stan but it couldn't have been more than $200...if even THAT.
The worst time was when we were living on Mulberry Street, the first place Stan and I lived together (picture above...taken 2001 on our trip back out to Colorado...no, that's not our car!). This was back in the winter of 1984/85. The apartment we dubbed "Bohler's Hole," named after Mrs. Bohler, the elderly landlady. We had been living there for about a year at the time. Yes, it was a pit, but it was better than the tiny firetrap evenmoreso-pit that Stan had been living in before, and it was better than living with my parents. We had graduated from college about six months before that, and by that winter, our jobs at the university were running out. You could stay on with your student status job after you graduated for only six months, then you were out on the streets. The jobs weren't great, but $6.00/hour for us at the time was as good as it got, and much better for anything else we would have for a long while after that. Let me reiterate...this was Colorado. In the mid 80s. Double Digit Unemployment. Bust economy. Reaganomics. Bachelor of Fine Art Graduates. Get the picture? $6.00/hour job GOOD. (Hey, I started at even LESS when I moved to Madison! And when it comes right down to it, that sort of equates yearly to what I make now with my feast and famine irregular artist type work...) OK, so I admit we spent most of it on vinyl (ah, the good old days), so we thought we had the greatest deal renting an apartment for $235/month all utilities included (you can pick your chin up off the floor now). Lots of money left over for our record collection. Until our student jobs ran out.
We were the punks living downstairs. The deadheads lived upstairs. I'm not exactly sure of the roommate permutations that went on up there...There was JD...he was a Bohler's Hole institution. He probably still lives there. Then there was this little trust fund brat who had fights with her no-good coked-up boyfriend who threw things at eachother all the time...Then there were various and sundry people who crashed there often during their late night 4 am poker parties (hell...it was complete hell...especially since we had jobs to go to the next day), and then there was this bloke we dubbed "The Decrodipated Hippie." He looked like he was literally falling apart. Each time we saw him, different appendages were bandaged up. It was creepy. I'm glad we moved. The water event was what stimulated the move.
The building was originally built as a duplex/townhouse. The east side of the building had the up and downstairs, and our west side of the building had the same. At some time a landlord decided to divide it into four living units instead of two, so the people in the downstairs units got the nicer kitchen, the people upstairs got the nicer bathroom. (You don't even want to know what sort of hideous bathroom we had to deal with...that's in another story...but let's just say it froze up every winter).
Then, during the final winter of our stay there, during a time when our jobs were running out and I was having to scramble to find anything (unemployment compensation does not cover you if you were a student), the deadhead's bathroom upstairs started to leak. And it leaked over our kitchen. This was at a time when we couldn't exactly afford to eat OUT...we sort of depended on our kitchen for survival, you know? Mrs. Bohler called one of her handymen/plumber to come fix the problem. The guy showed up right when we were fixing a bowl of macaroni and cheese. This was our meal of the day. And he shows up having to fix the leak that instant. We couldn't even complete fixing our meal. We decided to go out anyway, and left him to his work. We had been playing music, and for some reason Stan put on Fripp & Eno's "No Pussyfooting" and left it on one of the sides and fixed the stereo so that it would keep repeating. (I'm not sure if it was the Heavenly Music Corporation side or the Swasticka Girls side...it was before I liked Eno...in fact I saw Eno as an enemy of all things I held dear at the time, drawing derogatory little cartoons of snobby artistes with "Eno is God" t-shirts...funny how we change). But we had a chuckle over that..."music to plumb by."
When we returned to the house later that day, the problem had been fixed...no more deadhead dribble in our kitchen. But Mr. Plumber had gathered up all our towels to absorb any water! All our towels (which weren't many, but they were the only towels we had) were now filled with deadhead bacteria! Not only was it unhealthy to our constitution as supposedly you can't even bleach that crap out, but it was unhealthy to our punk karma! We threw all the towels out. I don't know how we got more towels, if my parents took pity on me and gave me some of their old ones, or if we went out and bought some. See, this is how credit card debt gets started...you don't have a job, some deadhead's bathroom explodes above your kitchen, unprepared plumber uses your towels to clean up his and their mess...yet I digress.
And as I recall, the year just got worse after that. Sorry, Tim.