I lived in this kooky pink dwelling for a year during college. (It has been referenced here and here.) A friend and former occupant, who happens to be back in Orlando this weekend, took this shot of it as it looks now. (Perhaps not so weirdly, it always seems this out of focus in my mind’s eye. The drugs I did at the time helped, sure, but also it seemed like it was out of sync with the rest of the world, that it could slip from this dimension to another at any moment.) It appears now uninhabited and given the state of home foreclosures it likely is. It was a marvelously odd house, set back on a dirt road and near a cow pasture. It had three bedrooms. Well, two normal sized bedrooms with a shared bathroom between, then, off the kitchen, a dark little hovel we took to calling the Gestapo Water Closet, a boxy space with a claustrophobic half-bath en suite.
To see it again reminds me off all that we managed to cram into a year of communal living. The time our landlord, a smarmy lout with a porny mustache came by and, finding no one home, decided it was proper to climb through the window of the laundry room. The party with the bonfire that grew so out of hand we had one of the roommates directing traffic and parking cars in the adjacent lot. Our bi-curious redneck neighbor Rick, who one morning showed up with his grubby teenage friends and a vat of shroom tea. The rainy night when Brady channeled CB radio transmissions through his guitar amp. Each strum summoning scratchy, ethereal voices, snatches of conversation too elusive to understand, but too entrancing to not listen to. The week we all went on the cabbage soup diet. The squirrel (or squirrels) making a home in the attic. I’m still not sure if the house found us or we it, if it was funky and magical because of the energy we collectively brought, or it was imbued with it on its own.
Oh, that sounded treacly and sentimental and dippy, that last part, didn’t it? No, it’s true! Though it’s not terrible to be reminded of a time when not everyone seemed guarded or opportunistic, or career-minded. To remember that age when you needed to have roommates not just out of financial necessity, but because you were building almost a second family unit. When watching a movie was a reason to invite ten friends over. When a tarot card reading could seem revelatory and applicable, really. When playing surrealist games was a way to spend an evening, and a glow stick dance routine by a roommate was near high art.
