hey there,
so, i figure it is time for another more personal post. you can either tu
ne out now and click on to something else or read forward if you would like, really, no offense taken :) it might be of interest of you lived in or near Pittman new jersey in the year 1993. or if you take a particularly keen interest in my personal history. otherwise.... naaaa...
this one time, in 1993-ish maybe (?) i moved to pitman, nj. i lived in a house on west ave, next to one of my sister's first houses she rented. pitman is a terribly inbred place (not that we inbred - come on! but that everyone knows everyone and houses are sometimes recycled from family member to family member, and not by handing down, but just by re-renting from the one landlord family that own(ed)s them all. hi robin!
so i moved there. and i brought my friend Dennis from California - poor thing. California culture to nj culture might be more of a shock than cali to euro depending on the country. none the less, he trekked on over.
but before he arrived i had already moved in. one day i came home from work and there was a girl on my front porch. i hesitated to say girl since she was legally an adult. but i suspect that even she would say that compared to the woma
n she is now she was a girl at the time? it was J. i walked up to the porch and said something along the lines of "hi, this is my house, can i help you?" and she said something along the lines of "yes actually, i am K's girlfriend, we met following the grateful dead - i was the 'kind veggie burrito girl' and he said i might be able to stay here?" I said, oh, ok. K was my friend from high school and we had been on many adventures (including but not limited to seeing BOTH a squirrel get run over by a car and lay twitching for minutes in the street AND running into my dad at the supermarket on the same day WHILE i was having a rather uncomfortable acid trip.....) So being 20 something and ready for more adventures i said "S
URE!"
I think me and D lived in the bedroom and poor J had to stay in the "baby room" which was about 8 ft long and 3 ft wide.
So we settled in.
What is the point of this story? Is there a point? Does there need to be one? Why have I suddenly started thinking about capitalization?
ok. trying to follow the holy sinner Kerouac i will just forge ahead, stream of consciousness so...
there are three stories i want to tell:
1 the car door
2 R freaking at the sink on who knows what
3 the night i bolted upright and scared D
4 and the day i found the pot plant growing in the back yard
these are not in chronological order.
1: the car door. we had a tiny back yard where J - the only one with a car, would park after she was done her shift at any of 15 jobs she had that summer. if there was a way to be a professional application submitter/interview taker she is it! there was not a day7 that she was unemployed. whoever she talked to hired her immediately whether they needed her or not. that's J's magic! so she came home one night and tried to squeeze into the tiny tiny tiny b
ack yard parking space we had and crashed in to the fence. i think - i think - that the basic summary of the story is that she could then no longer open the driver's side door and had to crawl across her Volkswagen rabbit to exit. she entered the house rather distraught but as we learn, these early crisis turn out to be rather mundane once you hit 30's/early 40s
2: this is classic R, and there are two R's in my little world, this is not the R who rests in the grand canyon. This is the R that does anything but rest in Philly. so - there were various substances floating around among those who came to that house. oddly, and this is not just a legal defence, i was over almost all mind altering substances by this time except alch. so he does what he does on a particular night when we had invited everyone over that we could possibly think of. We noticed things had gone awry when he started talking to the sink. the jist of the conversation (with the sink and with whoever interjected) was that R was going to cut himself into tiny little pieces and stuff himself down the sink because no one cared. Ok, this, in more ways than one is like deciding to nail yourself to a cross. What do you do after the first hand is nailed? How, after, cutting oneself up into millions of pieces would one be able to stuff oneself down the sink. He did disappear shortly after the first person raised just that question. Surprisingly for Pitman he wandered around tripping his ass off and returned safe and snug as a bug.
3: One night i was sound asleep = don't eve
n remember dreaming, which i always remember. And suddenly in the middle of the night i bolted upright and said something (i think i might have said "what"...?) and there sitting wide awake looking at me as if he were awaiting a response was D. There is a theory about this night that the other R(the grand canyon one) had dosed someone with something. But I bolted upright and D and I began a conversation as if nothing had happened, as if it were expected.
4: One day I was bored and went into the "baby room" where J lived and was looking out the window wistfully and I spotted an almost fully grown pot plant growing along our fence. Weeds would not surprise me. We did very little to fit into the lower/middle class neighborhood. I threw our compost out the window directly above the kitchen sink - hey - what's the difference i thought, it's all compost... we didn't do much about the yard if anything i planted a tree or two and let nature take it's course. not surprisingly our neighbors did not like us. the objected to the laundry we hung over the front porch rails. most interestingly our landlord walked by our house one day - at the moment i had an obsession with Ethiopian liturgical music (obscure) and still do to a tiny degree. it fascinate(d)s me because it sound like a perfect mix of pentecostal speaking in tongues and Islamic chant. so i was apparently playing this one day when our landlord R walked by. I can imagine him walking actually, why wasn't he driving, but that's beside the point. He walked by and he heard this music thought he open windows. apparently he was alarmed because he mentioned to my brothers that i was listening to some kind of "Islamic music" and he was concerned. anyhow - he became much more concerned when he let himself into the house and found 1/2 of us moved out and 1/2 still living there, it looked like a bomb went off, all of us sorting our paperwork and artistic treatise etc etc and discarding anything we deemed unnecessarily into the middle of the living room floor, where R found it all, piled a mile high. Well, at any rate it was all cleaned up and fine and repainted and scrubbed and such and such as any guilt ridden son of an Irish mother would do.
and that's it for the moment. mostly i would love to hear any comments from others who witnessed this time. I know it was when we met LK and others, so please, there is certainly much that i left out.
and that is the story of west ave in pitman in 1993(ish?)
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