Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

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.)

The store sold not only handsome tools and garden equipment but lots of sturdy clothing in third world fabrics cut in large, smocky styles. They sold little palm-sized books of spiritual inspiration, which lined the aisle leading to the cash register along with various kites, banners and wind socks in pastel solids or rainbow stripes. During one visit Sissy grabbed one of the wind socks and shook it at Miranda.

“What?” Miranda said. Sissy waved the festively colored fabric tube back and forth in front of Miranda’s face. “Don’t do that.”

“Wind sock people. They are taking over this neighborhood. They take over all the neighborhoods after we’ve made them cool,” Sissy said.

“I didn’t make this neighborhood cool. I just moved here.”

“That’s not the point,” she said, shoving the wind sock disdainfully into her large shoulder bag. Later she would wave it at someone, or toss it in the garbage. It was true, though. Miranda noticed that the owners of more than half the cute bungalow houses in this neighborhood refurbished them and then seemed to mark or declare themselves with a colorful wind sock. In the suburbs where Miranda grew up, people either hung cute “crafty” wood cutouts of ducks and dogs on their front doors or a year-round wreath of dried pastel flowers and brambly twigs. Here in the city they hung wind socks or sometimes wind chimes instead. The subterranean front door of Prairie Fire, covered in flyers and blocked by kids smoking cigarettes, looked shabby and degenerate next to Mother Mercantile’s marbleized portico. Prairie Fire was as much an anomaly in the neighborhood as the Black House. You knew eventually that the wind sock/hardware store element would not tolerate the Black House element, or its bookstore hangout either. But for now it all coexisted, in that exciting way city spaces sometimes contain things in opposition and transition. You could catch actual physical manifestations of larger cultural changes. For the moment tolerance was still the word, and the wind sock contingent considered Prairie Fire a good third place — a social space — for the neighborhood youth.

By the time Miranda starting going to Prairie Fire, Nash’s open-door policy on group meetings combined with the growing social divisions in the neighborhood to create a volatile mix, irresistible to people like Miranda and Sissy. Miranda could feel things gathering their own energy. She could see things happening. And she thought herself quite lucky to have landed, only weeks after leaving her mother’s house, so much amid it all.

Miranda sat beside Nash and again had admonished him about drinking Coke, which became sort of a running joke. Since she began regularly attending his Prairie Fire meetings, Nash increasingly engaged her in long, seemingly discontinuous conversations. No matter the subject, he responded to whatever she said with certainty and as if what he said wasn’t off-kilter and incongruent with what had been said previously. She did think it funny — if someone were to tape them, it would seem as if big chunks of essential conversation had been erased. She attempted to be equally absurd in her return statements. He could read it as flirting, but that would be a mistake. At least Miranda didn’t think she was flirting.