To be different, eschewing society, was always in my DNA. Being part of The Gang provided needed camaraderie, but everything else was still somewhat theoretical and tentative. Migrating to Minnesota was the first major step in leaving Dwight Eisenhower's world behind. Starting college, taking classes in anything and everything for the identical reason Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest, thinking original thoughts: this was the kind of nirvana I craved. But then, meeting the queers on Fifth Street somehow cemented everything in place. Though I hadn't read Oscar Wilde yet, I now knew deep down inside:
We are not sent into this world to air our moral prejudices.Damn, how I loved those nuts...
That group led lives crowded with incident, believe me. Allow me to tell you just a few of the madcap adventures I recall.
One night I had a date at their place with my sweetheart Kay. Her younger sister was visiting there from the West Coast. We three, along with Bill, Scotty, Timmy and Suzy all crowded into the sofas and overstuffed chairs of the drawing room for a bit of a soirée. Also in attendance was their weird little dog, Soya by name. Soya sort of looked like a black Lab, but was so tiny, perhaps fifteen pounds or so.
Of course with that crowd, the laughter was nonstop and boisterous. Try to imagine this ebullient gathering, shrieking, guffawing, all seven of us essentially thumbing our noses at society, I chasing Kay for a quick grope, and Bill chasing me for the same reason.
The doorbell rings. In this house, which probably was once quite regal in the late 1800s but now was exceedingly dilapidated, the front door was framed on either side by decorative window panes. I suppose the intent was to let the inhabitants look out and see what ruffian might be standing on the stoop. This night, however, the looking was happening in exactly the opposite direction.
One of the guys noted it was the paper boy on his collection route, a lad of perhaps 12 or 13. Before Bill opened the door for him, however, Kay's sister approached one of the windows on the side, stripped off her teeshirt and pressed her bare boobies against the glass. (If any readers are curious, they were exceedingly ample and a delight to behold). Somehow the financial transactions of the newspaper business were taken care of and the lad exited with alacrity. I've always wondered how he spent the rest of his night then.
Kay's sister could always be counted upon to do the unexpected. I can't remember if this was the same night or not, but the little doggy Soya was having a frolicking time, running from one to the other of us being rewarded with dog biscuits. Without warning, Kay's sister pulled off her pantaloons, sat down on the middle of the floor in the midst of the remaining six of us, naked legs akimbo and a placed a biscuit in her crack. Soya approached dutifully, then daintily retrieved it to wild approbation. This performance was repeated several times. Curious scene, that! And just one more lesson learned whilst starting life.
Thinking of the sister, let me mention that as a teenager she went missing for a spell. Eventually she was tracked down to Los Angeles, panhandling on a street, naked except for a blanket encircling her. No money, no possessions, no identification. That seems to have been the start of something; a decade later she used my name unbeknownst to me as surety for some sort of medical treatment and I got stiffed with the hundred dollar charge when she skipped out on the clinic. I paid it out of fealty to Kay.
A little after that, and she was murdered in a desert of Arizona.
Back to my friends. A year or two later, the group was booted out from Fifth Street and wound up--still as a coterie--at a duplex on Clark, I believe it was. The owner lived on one side, and my five friends on the other.
Being a duplex, it of course made sense from a plumbing point of view that when the place was constructed the kitchens would be back-to-back; nothing but a wall separating the two abodes.
So, the owner takes a vacation one weekend and asks my friends to kind of look after everything, taking in the mail and so forth. He left on Friday after work.
On Saturday, their kitchen sink began backing up, and no amount of plunging would liberate it. So they tried a plumber's snake, again to no avail. Finally, Scotty ran down to Madsens, just a dozen blocks away, and got a can of compressed air especially designed for blowing out drains. Just a spray can with a rubber nipple to wedge tightly into the opening. A couple bursts...and success! Their drain was flowing freely once again.
Sunday comes, and the landlord returns. My pals didn't think much about it, until they heard the most ear-splitting hollers and shouts from next door. (Remember, it was a duplex with but a single wall separating the twain). Next thing they know, he's pounding on their door, swearing up a blue streak. They had no idea what was the rants were about, so the landlord summoned them to his kitchen. They all crowded in to see, and there it was: black shit all over the place, in the sink, plastered on the walls, on the ceiling, on the floor, on the fridge, everywhere black gooey, smelly effluvia.
Seems the duplex kitchen sinks, being back-to-back, connected jointly to a common outlet. And compressed air packs quite a wallop.
I mentioned in Anasyrma how my friends were always strapped for cash, as all us starving college students were. Somehow they scraped together enough moolah to make a king's feast one night. One meal out of all in a year where they could kick back and enjoy the high life. They had just enough coinage to procure the fixin's for an elegant lasagna. With gleeful anticipation they made it into an all-day event: the whole afternoon luxuriating in what was to come (after a year of living on 25 cent macaroni and cheese packages, with saltines for dessert).
Then the prep work commenced as the sun went down. Boiling pasta, brewing the tomato sauce with herbs, browning the Italian sausage, mixing the two cheeses. Layer after layer, all five joined in the preparation, laughing and singing the while. A real meal!
The pan was complete, and rested on the range while the oven preheated. The revelers retired to the living room for a bit of a repose. One of them headed upstairs to use the powder room.
All of a sudden, they heard shrieks (sort of a recurring theme with this group, don't you think?) from above. My friends raced to the second story to find the toilet was plugged and overflowing gallons on the floor. Someone had the sense to shut off the stopcock, and a bit of plunging soon set things right, despite the water oozing all over the place.
But, they soon laughed it off, knowing that their one good meal of the year lay ahead. Heading back downstairs, it was time to pop the lasagna into the preheated oven for an hour, and then...feast time.
Faces dropped when the five entered the kitchen. All eyes immediately beheld the ceiling tiles, totally saturated, with a steady drip, drip, drip coming down...right into the middle of their pan of lasagna resting on the range.
I'll let you, dear reader, conclude this vignette for yourself.
Really, the only point of this installment and the previous two is simply: I rather like it when someone is different from me, when they follow their own lights and not society's. And that I got to learn that valuable lesson just when starting my own life in college.
Aquarius was not and is not a fad.
Next installment: Weight
