Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (2 page)

Is this the place? Are
we
the people?

JENAE AND I
met in graduate school in Boston. Neither of us really knew what we were doing there. It was graduate school. School for graduates. Even the phrase implied we were doing something we had already done. We didn’t know what we wanted out of it, just that we didn’t want lifedom proper to officially start.

Initially I wore a blazer and glasses to class, even though I didn’t really need either of them. My thermostat runs hot and my eyes were fine, but I had seen pictures of the Kennedys; I was doing what I thought I had to. Jenae arrived in Boston straight from Nebraska, sight unseen, with a couple hundred dollars, no place to live, and nothing—no shit—but a duffle bag over her shoulder. She was a pioneer in reverse. She was astonishing. I immediately noticed three things about her: (1) she did what she wanted, (2) she said what she thought, and (3) she wore really short skirts. I don’t know that I’d call this feminism of the purest order, but something like it.

The first day of class, I sat next to her. Paul, our professor, had us arranged in a circle. The whole group soon devolved into a brutal argument about the nature of communication and the dim prospect of anyone actually knowing anyone else. To prove this point, Jenae and I disagreed violently with each other. The next class, I sat across from her. And not because of her skirt. I was so irritated and bothered, but also helplessly smitten, I felt like I was sitting on broken glass. She was the most contemptible, contrary, downright ornery woman I’d ever met. I’d seen
Casablanca.
I knew what that meant. I was
in
for it.

All the new students were invited to attend an informative gathering with something called The Bridge. At first I wondered if it wasn’t some pre-AA thing for those of us seeking a way out of the beer-and-vomit-soaked undergraduate days. It turned out to be a student-run, nonprofit theater company made up almost exclusively of transplanted flatlanders, and it put on overlooked works of well-known writers. Guaranteed obscurity, in other words.

Despite my social awkwardness and complete lack of theater experience, I auditioned for and got the part of Duff in Harold Pinter’s
Moonlight.
I think my casting had more to do with the likelihood of my being able to grow a mustache by the show date than histrionic promise, but who knows. The mid-nineties, at any rate, were not a grand time for twenty-two-year-old mustachioed men in greater Boston. I looked like that washed-up, back-from-the-Yankees scourge Wade Boggs. Not a welcome sight in the shadow of Fenway where I lived. But it was all for art, I told myself.

When the day of the show came, my joints went to jelly. I rode the T with my mustache and Irish tweed cap and vest, clenching my unlit pipe as if my virginity depended on it. When I got to campus the theater was awry with the whine of power tools and the smell of wet paint.

Just then a girl in overalls, a goofy bucket hat, and pigtails came up to me. She held a paintbrush in one hand and with the other grabbed my arm and whispered something supportive. Her hand—I thought it was mineral spirits—her hand
burned
my arm. I had never been held quite so firmly or so hotly. It was Jenae. From school. She was working with The Bridge? She seemed so different outside of the classroom. She stood there. She smiled. She held my arm. Lordy.

“I think I’m supposed to say ‘break a leg,’” she said, her words like subtitles of a sweet silent film. Power saws sparked in the background and the lighting rig rose right over our heads.

I was vaguely dating a severely pale Connecticut girl who lived in an apartment where Edgar Allan Poe once vomited, and Jenae was going with a guy who had purportedly gotten her to eat steamed mussels on an early date. I told myself that that mattered. That we were in relationships.

“So,” she said, “break a leg.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I just might.”

My Fenway apartment cost $750 a month, as much as the lease on a Maserati in those days, but the kitchen was so small that you couldn’t open the oven if the refrigerator was ajar, and when you were in the bathroom you had to be in the tub or on the toilet before you could shut the door. But on summer afternoons I could hear the organist at the ballpark practicing everything from “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to “Blitzkrieg Bop.” The Museum of Fine Arts was a five-minute walk across the Fens, and sometimes I’d go just to look at this one Hopper painting,
Room in Brooklyn,
which made me feel as if I were peering into a mirror that transformed me, awkwardly, into a mopey girl who sat around in her underwear waiting for something to happen. I was living alone for the first time and, for the most part, loved it, but I was also more lonely than I had ever imagined I could be. I only had classes a couple of times a week, and play rehearsals were infrequent. That left acres of time and space between me and the next human contact I’d have. If I didn’t count clerks, bus drivers, and panhandlers, I could go for days without talking to or touching anyone.

Down my block was a bar and grill called Thornton’s. It was owned by two Michigander brothers, Bud and Marty, and they gave me a job as a busboy and paid me in cash. They wore ponytails, T-shirts promoting tequila or light beer, and silver-tipped cowboy boots. If there was a God in Bud and Marty’s universe, it was Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band, and they tried to persuade their bartender Rock, an Iggy Pop stunt double who controlled the stereo, to play the great B.S. and the S.B.B. at least once a day. All of their sandwiches were named after Jack Nicholson movies or Grateful Dead trivia. Jerry’s Missing Fingers, for example, being the least popular, if most intriguing.

Jenae, I learned, was paying $350 to share an apartment with a girl named Stacey, from Ishpeming, Michigan, and a forty-year-old finance guy from Framingham, Mass., who followed them from room to room turning the lights off to save money. This was in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood where shop signs were in English, Irish, or Spanish.

The Bridge people hung out fairly often at the Brendan Behan, just down the hill from her apartment. From the outside, it was a prototypical black-and-gold-lettered Irish pub where you imagined there would be a fiddler and a tin-whistler and somebody in a burly sweater beating on the old tam, but once you opened the door you were nearly leveled by the sound and smoke. The place was tight and loud, and it felt as if you were trapped in the hold of a submarine working its way through a barrage of depth charges. We’d scream over the Fugazi or 7 Seconds about what a genius/prick James Joyce was and whether Samuel Beckett would have written for
Sesame Street
or
The Electric Company
if he were alive today. A pint of Guinness at the Behan would set you back six bucks, so we tried to stretch things out by drinking on an empty stomach or after donating blood.

“It’s coming down to quitting drinking or selling plasma,” Jenae said, looking balefully at the bottom of her empty glass.

I told her about Thornton’s and how, after work, everybody got a free “shift beer,” which often turned into a six-pack, so long as it wasn’t anything fancy. She was intrigued. She had worked in, of all the world’s mysteries, a seafood restaurant in Nebraska.

The next day, I asked Bud if they needed any more help.

“Is she hot?” he asked.

I blushed, said I guessed so.

“Tell her she can start tomorrow,” Bud said. “But she better be hot.”

After class let out one day, the rain caught us both. I asked Jenae how she was getting back to Jamaica Plain.

“I haven’t melted yet,” she said, unlocking her bike by the door.

“I—” I said. I had to use one hand to keep the other from trembling. She hadn’t yet started at the restaurant, so we still hadn’t spent much time with each other. “I could give you a ride?”

“I bet you could,” Jenae said. “But I’ve got my bike.”

I told her I had a bike rack. It was true, but it felt like a line anyway.

“Do you know how to use it?”

“I—” I said. I almost threw up.

“You’re sweet,” she said, putting her helmet on. “But I’m meeting Stacey. We ride home together.”

I did some quick calculating.

“It’s a two-bike bike rack,” I said.

When I pulled up to their skinny building, which was shingled in tarpaper made to look like bricks, Stacey hopped out first.

“You ought to stay for a while,” she said. “It’s Wednesday. Root beer float day.”

“I don’t like owing people anything,” Jenae said. “This is probably a long way for you.”

I told her not at all, even though I was so lost I was probably going to have to hire a taxi to follow back to Fenway—I had only ever taken the T out there, and the roads were strewn about between here and there like a pot of spilled noodles.

“How about this,” she said. She pulled a strand of hair from her lips. “You come up for a root beer float and we’ll call it even.”

“Deal,” I said.

And it was.

We were soon spending upward of a hundred hours a week together, slinging burgers during the lunch shift around Fenway, dozing through classes in the afternoons, fumbling through play rehearsals in the evenings, and then pounding clam chowder out of bread boules at Doyle’s or Guinness at the Behan, fighting over Heaney and Yeats, playing darts till bar time at the Silhouette in Allston, whirling around greater Boston in a daze of heat, grease, beer, and shellfish. Pretty much before either of us knew what happened, there we were, a tangle of knees and elbows on my futon on Park Drive, the sun climbing up the Prudential Building before we even shut our eyes.

Suddenly it was August. We had acquired a puppy and had lived together for a year, and now we were packing a van at midnight to move to Columbus, Ohio. More grad school for me, and who knew what for Jenae.

I couldn’t believe it. She was coming with me. We were actually a couple. I could hear Pinter, Yeats, and Hopper cheering us on from behind their lonely tapestries.

When most people would have felt around for a ladder or a rope, Jenae jumped. To leap from this clutch of artists, expert liars, and aspiring drinkers; from this town rich in history, fish and chips, and beer at any cost; from the first home away from home for both of us, newly settled in and barely explored, to . . . Columbus, the heralded meteorological groin of Ohio? If ever there was a brave explorer, I daresay it was not the namesake of our future hometown, but Jenae.

At first, of course, it was rough. The day we arrived, the sky was green between apocalyptic blasts of thunder and lightning, and the air gagged us with humidity. The rivers smelled sordid and flammable. People ate at White Castles, as though there were anything royal about steaming their hamburgers. This was going to take some getting used to.

Early on, a couple of guys in my grad school program took me to Mickey’s Bar and I bought a round with a five-dollar bill and got change back, after the tip. And then I realized we were talking about writing. Not like in Boston, where all we could talk about were writers. We were shooting pool, wearing cheese-stained T-shirts, listening to George Thorogood slice through pantywaist indecision by ordering three drinks at once, and we were talking about writing.
Our
writing.

At Ohio State, my peer mentor was this burly, bighearted Texan named Bruce. We talked on the phone just once, and before we hung up he had arranged for Jenae and me and Maggie, our sweet, six-month-old English cocker spaniel, to stay at his apartment while we looked for one of our own. Even though he was going to be out of town. Even though we had never met.

Bruce quickly became the kind of friend to me that brothers rarely make for each other. A friend of his from Houston, “a poet,” he warned, was entering my program too: a grizzly-bearded chain smoker named Bryan, who was as infamous for his iambs as he was his kilts. Though Bruce and Bryan were from Texas, they both had a strong proclivity for the North and all its trappings. Snow, pea coats, upland birds, dark beer, and soups, stews, and chowders for starters. Bryan, despite his most recent return address, was born in Cleveland, “by mistake,” he insisted. And I, despite having lived most of my life in Wisconsin, was born in Denver, which, granted, didn’t make me an obvious member of their clan. Then I met Bruce’s father, Allen, who showed me an 1845 map of the Republic of Texas—the only one a true Texan would abide. According to the map, where the panhandle shoots up clear through Colorado and even into some of unsuspecting Wyoming, I was a northern Texan, but a Texan nonetheless. Somehow or other we were all fellow expatriates and found ourselves, more often than not, smoking, grilling, swilling, and prevaricating on Bruce’s stoop on 6th Avenue. We were as unlikely as unreasonably good friends.

Bruce was married to an Arkansan named Emma, who seemed to follow whoever was cooking and scrub behind them as though salmonella were predatory. She did something with computers for which people flew her all over and paid her a lot of money. Their ebullient apricot-and-white Brittany, named Irma Jean, could bounce high enough to lick your teeth and liked to lounge on the back of their sofa as though it were the instrument she was born to master. Bryan was married to Sarah, a social worker from Denver, who had the patience of a glacier and needed every cube of it, given Bryan’s demeanor, which was as surly as it was sweet. Their cocker, named Cordwainer (aka Bubba), could sniff out a bagel in a safe and flattered me by peeing on no one’s shoes but mine.

Jenae was working at the Columbus AIDS Task Force, which was as meaningful a place to work as it was physically and emotionally exhausting. The fact that Bruce and Bryan and I were great friends and grad student idlers and that Jenae and Sarah and Emma had real jobs and didn’t have all the time that we did to coalesce as friends, things were a little cockeyed, but I was happier than I had ever been in my life.

After the afternoon workshops technically ended, classes would migrate across High Street to Larry’s Bar & Seminar, as it was called, for pitchers of swampy Molson Golden, baskets of chile-dusted peanuts, and the even straighter take on the shop talk that night. I got home from “class” one night, four pitchers to the wind, with bits of peanut shell stuck between my teeth, to find Jenae tear-streaked and furious.