Sissy’s house was known around town as the Black House. This was for two reasons: it was, in fact, painted black, and it also housed various black blockers, or want-to-be black blockers, kids from depressed rural backwaters and nearby college towns who came up for shows or political tests and demonstrations, and they were free to crash wherever space was available. The Black House was a squat but a benign quasi-squat. It was condemned but still standing. The people who lived there paid rent to the guy who owned it, but just enough not to get in trouble for trespassing. One day he would tear it down, but meanwhile he collected money on the sly and didn’t do anything to keep it up. It had running water and electricity but no heat. The large L-shaped wraparound porch was still in pretty good shape, despite the kids forever perched on its rails and balusters. The house had a secret feel — it was set back from the road and hidden from view by large red maples growing in a row across the front yard. This kept the sun off the walkway to the house but also created an odd canopy of drizzle-edged dryness in all but the most dramatic downpours.
The asymmetrical entryway led to two connected parlors on the right and a stairway with a wobbly, oft-ridden-and-climbed banister to the left. One parlor was used as a bedroom; the other, with pretty triptych bay windows, was used as the common room. Which meant it was always covered with sleeping bags of crashers and visiting friends. There was one lone couch: a formal-looking Empire-style thrift store find. The upholstery was ripped and the wood scratched by the three cats that lived in the house. And although there was a makeshift coverall on it composed of an Army blanket further covered by a batik red-and-white throw (which could well have been someone’s abandoned sarong left after a party and made part of the decor by happenstance), Sissy quickly warned Miranda that she would get fleas from reclining on it. “That is if you are the type of person fleas like.”
Miranda moved there in mid-May, bringing only two suitcases of clothes and a cheap boom box. Her room was on the second floor, toward the back. It actually had a little anteroom attached to it, and someone had hung black beads in the threshold between the two rooms. With candles lit and her futon on the floor, it was practically paradise. Her main room even had its own dormer window, with black shutters that were permanently nailed open. It looked out over a side alley and beyond that Fifteenth Avenue. She could see a streetlight through tree branches outside the window, hear people talking as they walked by at all hours of the night, and she couldn’t quite believe she lived in such an exciting place. Her first night she could barely sleep thinking about the whole city around her and actually residing right in the middle of it all.
The morning after her first night she discovered it wasn’t necessary to sit on the couch to get fleas. She scratched frantically at her ankles. She woke early, stumbled out of her room half asleep and went to the kitchen to make coffee. She found three sniffling teenagers huddled by the stove. The electric oven door was pulled open and the heat on full blast, as well as all the burners on the stovetop, the coils glowing in the dark. The kids leaned over, warming themselves. The early morning air could barely be called chilly, but they rubbed hands along skinny arms, sniffling in self-pity and surprise at how they actually had to huddle for warmth — they were like real poor people, they really were. Later she would learn that the kids who did a lot of methamphetamine, or various other speed-type drugs, were often freezing, skinny and sniffling. She just stepped over them and hoped they didn’t set the house on fire.
With the exception of the heat, which was an issue a few months a year, or in the early mornings or late nights of early summer, when enough partying and all-nighters might give someone the chills, and despite the various infestations of fleas, mice, roaches and cats, there were few other major deprivations at the Black House as Miranda saw it. The bathrooms on both floors worked, she had her anteroom and dormer window, and it was still, under it all, a good old house. But more than that, Miranda was certain it was a special place that might help shake the suburbs off her forever.
As they sat on the porch sharing a hand-rolled cigarette of tobacco and hash, Sissy told Miranda the impeccable pedigree of the Black House. How everyone knew the house, and how it was actually notorious in youth circles. It had existed for years as condemned but lived in, first in the late ’80s and early ’90s as a crash pad for rock kids (a strange conglomeration of Olympia and Eugene hipsters, fat girls with attitudes, post-grunge scenesters, and finally latecomer vultures). Now it was overrun with straightedge anarchists, militant earth liberators, vanguardist pop culture pranksters, and hybrid testers and toppers from the very same hinterlands and suburbs. But no matter who lived there, the whole house smelled perpetually and deeply of tobacco, cat piss and Nag Champa incense.
There were no rules, but a few things were clearly not forgiven, depending on who dominated or paid the rent at any given moment. Most recently things were under the sway of a particularly humorless cadre of radical animal liberationists. Consequently, the food one found around was vegan and soy and free from animal traces. There was a big sign in the fridge indicating that out of respect for the vegans, the top two shelves were to be kept entirely meat free. The currently ascendant cadre also tried to make the Black House into a more formal experiment in group living. In addition to rules, they organized house meetings to divide chores and make group purchases of bulk food items. Sissy laughed it off. The house seemed fated to resist order, what with more and more baby anarchists camping in the parlors and hallways. Miranda followed Sissy’s advice and put a padlock on her door. She soon discovered whatever food she put in the refrigerator was ipso facto communal and took her toothbrush and towel back into her room each night and each morning. The Black House was both the cushiest squat and the worst legit apartment she could ever hope to find. Paradise, though — pure post-suburban paradise for a girl like Miranda.
Living at the Black House indirectly led her to meeting Nash. It took several weeks for Miranda to get the nerve to actually enter the common room. She was looking for a phone, which she didn’t find. People who wanted to make phone calls used their own cell phones. Sissy told her she could make local phone calls and even check her e-mail at Prairie Fire Books, where Sissy sometimes worked. The bookstore was just a block down Fifteenth Avenue, right next to what Sissy called Lesbian Hardware (because that was what it was, although the actual name was Mother Mercantile). Many times that summer, particularly after they smoked together, Sissy and Miranda would be on their way to Prairie Fire but get sidetracked and end up either blinking in fluorescence at the QFC supermarket or wandering through Lesbian Hardware.
Mother Mercantile was the fanciest hardware store Miranda had ever seen. It was run by middle-aged women with short, salt-and-pepper haircuts. Sissy referred to them as corporate dykes. (Sissy loved to shoplift there, mostly things she didn’t want or need, like a piece of eco-conscious recycled Astroturf, or a very expensive garden spade with an ergonomic “Placoflex” handle made of durable polypropylene covered in a forgiving thermoplastic elastomer. Once she stole a can of Enamel Baby nontoxic acrylic latex paint; soon after, Miranda saw two people at the Black House inhaling deeply as they slathered the paint on the front of the refrigerator. Despite its being toxin-free, eye-watering fumes permeated the whole house.)