Reed St.

I can't remember how I ended up on Reed street. I think that the impetus was my aversion to living in a studio apartment. It might also been yet another move inspired by a break-up, because this was around the time that Jennie and I called it quits. I had a number of housemates in this house, including Chad who, while we were living there together, was my companion on an epic, 8000 mile road trip. Chad, with his band, The Earles of Newtown, ended up singing at our wedding when Jeanine and I got married a few years ago.

Another housemate, who shall go unnamed, tried to overdose on pills and ended up moving out. Yet another housemate, who I think was named Sheila, came home one day with two black eyes, looking like she'd been attacked. When I asked her what happened, she said she'd fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a bus.

We had a small garden in the front yard, but every time something started to ripen, it got stolen.

The house had two bedrooms, although we ended up converting the front room into an additional bedroom. That's where Jesse lived. Jesse collected hub caps and was a bit of an artist, if I remember right. He also liked having barbeques on the front porch,which was okay as long as uninvited people didn't show up, like this crazy homeless guy known as Mundo. I seem to remember Mundo leaving some graffiti behind.

I'm pretty sure that one of our neighbors was a prostitute, if her mode of dress was anything to go by. She would emerge in the evening wearing shiny, short, skin-tight skirts and wander up the street.

There were illegal aliens living in an old airstream trailer out back. They made a living picking fruit, and would sometimes share the bags of fruit that they brought home. Somebody ended up calling the cops on them, and our landlord suspected it had been one of us. Our response was something like, "no! They give us fruit!"

There was also a converted garage at the back of the property where some other people lived, but I don't think any of us ever had any interaction with them.

When we lived there in the mid nineties, the rent for the whole house was $800.00, which won't even cover a studio apartment these days.

While I lived there I was going to San Jose State (for the second time) to get my Environmental Studies degree. I also still worked at Tower, where I was on again/off again (mostly off again) romantically involved with a coworker named Laura. I could walk to school, but the commute to work was much longer. I was still delivering papers at night too.

We briefly had a housemate named Stacia, who had just moved away from her parents' house. Often, the only indication that she was living there was the pile of empty bottles of alcohol that built up in the kitchen. Once, she came home drunk and passed out in the front yard, where she slept all night. She was lucky. It wasn't the kind of neighborhood where a young, attractive woman stood a good chance of emerging unmolested from such a judgmental error. She sure liked her alcohol.

Next door, looming over our driveway, there was a building that looked like it was about to fall over. I remember once getting blocked in my the mail truck, and having to drive down the sidewalk in front of our house to the next driveway so I wouldn't be late for work.

Like all of my other similar living arrangements, this one eventually fell apart due to the nomadic nature of twenty somethings. People moved out and moved on. I was the last one to go. When we vacated the premises, we left our couch (which we had bought for $15.00 from the neighbors) on the front porch. We naively thought that whoever moved in next might want it. I can't remember how much of our deposit we got back. Probably not much.