[Read Part Two]
Part Three: Sunday, going home
I watched Peter and Tony drive away in the pale dawn and went back into Michelle's house. Exhausted from a night with the band, breakfast, and bonding, I collapsed onto Michelle's living room couch at six a.m. I pulled a blanket over myself without the energy to change into pajamas or search for a pillow. Michelle and James woke up at eight a.m. to get ready for church.
“You people are crazy,” I mumbled into the cushion as Michelle skittered around the living room, tidying the things I had moved in my 36 hours in her house.
She waved a hand at me and smiled, “Bah! We just live different lives.” She slid an arm around her fiance as they closed the door behind them.
I tried to sleep for the next forty-five minutes before I gave up. In the first twenty minutes, their cat joined me and tried six different places to sleep, before she jumped off and settled onto the adjacent couch. Manny the pit bull followed, wanting to cuddle and completely unaware of his mass, and buried me in the couch. I finally pushed him off and got up myself, resigned to the two hours of sleep I had achieved.
I went immediately to the bathroom and stripped off the clothes that I'd been wearing for over twenty-four hours, drenched in the grease and smell of Golden Coral, Miller Lite, cigarettes, and pancake syrup. I climbed into the shower and turned on the faucet, stood under the water and let it rinse the weekend out of my hair and pores. The guest bathroom soap smelled like tangerine, and the shampoo made my hair soft. It was a nice change from the tiny shower stall at my apartment, or the sliver of soap always at the Compound. I stood in the shower a few extra minutes, breathing in the steamy air to clear my head.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, hair slicked back and dripping, wrapped in the fluffy lavender towel, they had returned from church, and Michelle was on the couch in the living room with a girl I'd never met before, a box of wedding invitations spread on the coffee table. I half-waved and pulled the towel tighter as I leaned down to grab my duffel bag next to her feet.
“This is Tara,” Michelle introduced us. “She's getting married next year to Phil. Remember Phil? He works with James.”
I didn't remember Phil, so I decided to skip that question. “Hi, Tara,” I flashed her a huge smile and reached out to shake her hand, keeping my grip on the towel and tucking my bag into the crook of my arm.
“Nice to meet you!” Tara responded, shook my damp hand politely, then wiped her hand on her jeans before picking up the card Michelle was handing to her.
“So for these, you can just get the stamps for the little flowers at any craft shop, and they used three colors of the cardstock in layers here...” Michelle was explaining while I ducked back into the bathroom.
I turned on the fan, tucked my towel along the crack in the door, cracked the window, and ran the faucet. From my bag, I pulled out my underwear and my pipe, packed with the single bowl I'd brought along for the weekend. I put on my underwear and smoked the pipe, blew the smoke out the window. Michelle probably wouldn't be worried about the weed, but I didn't want to scare her friend, with the brown ponytail and the Reebox and the eyes dancing with the dreams of her beautiful wedding day. I took three quick hits, then brushed my teeth before I turned off the faucet, pulled on my clothes, and stepped back out.
As soon as I stepped into the living room, Michelle pulled two swatches of brown satin out of the box that held the invitations.
“Which one do you like better?” she asked, holding them up in turn. “Cocoa, or java? For the bridesmaid dresses.”
I pointed to one of the swatches. “The lighter one.”
She held up the darker swatch. “Everyone else voted for the java.”
“They're both fine,” I shrugged. “It's not my decision, right? It's your wedding. I'll wear java.”
She reached for her laptop. “Come see the patterns we're looking at!”
Tara scooted closer to her, and I sat on the other side, and the three of us peered at the computer screen while Michelle clicked on links to designer websites. She pointed out the two dresses and explained the pricing and the pros and cons of each. The way each might look on me and on her taller, skinnier bridesmaid, and on her shorter, fatter bridesmaid. How comfortable each might be while we danced at the reception. Tara added a few words here and there, and I nodded along. The dresses were both beautiful, and both pretty similar-- as similar as the two brown swatches she'd shown me.
Tara finally left after the dresses, and the wedding talk ceased, and Michelle lay down for a nap. I grabbed my camera and wandered around her house. I snapped shots of the cat lounging on top of the baby grand piano, basking in the spot of light from the dining room window; James in the garage on a creeper under his '71 Roadrunner. Michelle curled into a corner of her bed with Manny sprawled across the rest; the spare bedroom littered with flowers and wreaths and swatches of materials for the wedding; the three-foot-tall clock built onto the wall, framed with giant rod-iron numbers that James had molded in extra hours at the shop.
I finally wore myself out, and I lay down to try to sleep again around 12:30. Greg called at one pm.
“How was your weekend?”
“It's been fun. Long day, late night, early morning, as it goes. Emotional. Did you miss me at the Compound last night?”
“Of course. I didn't get home from work until four a.m., and I've just been sleeping. I'm ready to see you.”
“Me too. You can come up whenever you're ready.”
We said goodbye, and I lay back down, knowing I wouldn't sleep again until tonight. Greg would be there in a couple of hours, and Michelle was starting to make lunch.
Greg picked me up in Appleton and drove me to his mom's place in the quiet east-side neighborhood in Madison. “Mom's B and B,” he was calling it, a respite for us in exchange for house-sitting for her. I dropped off my bags and made a cup of coffee, and we went back out for groceries for the week. We made pasta for dinner with his specialty pesto, and walked to the Weary Traveler afterward for drinks and desserts.
“Every time someone comes to visit, this is always the first place we go,” he informed me. “It's the perfect place to welcome you to the neighborhood.”
I thought back on my weekend, three beds in three nights, and I liked the idea of being welcomed here, a place to settle for just a moment. We had just a week here before his mom returned. I wondered what neighborhood I might be welcomed into next.
Greg told me about the Madison Saturday night I'd missed, the guy he had to kick out of the bar at eleven p.m., the bit of the show he'd caught at the Comedy Club. After a Bloody Mary, a coffee, and a piece of Key Lime pie, I was beginning to drift off and lose focus on the conversation.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked.
“I think I'm just tired,” I said, and squinted apologetically. “We should probably head home soon. Or head... back. I'm feeling kind of transient already, disconnected. I like the freedom of all of this, but the idea is exhausting, not sure where I'll be after this week, you know, who will stick around? It's a new feeling, losing everything that grounded me.”
He nodded. “Why don't you come stay at the Compound after this? The boys will hardly notice; you're there most nights already.” He smiled. “We'll stick around.”
I shrugged and nodded, relieved, and realizing that that's exactly where I had hoped to end up. “Thanks,” I said with a tired smile.
The Hart Compound isn't the first Compound I've lived in, and I'm not surprised that the collective unconscious would bestow the title on completely separate dwellings. When a crew of artists are drawn together to fluctuate haphazardly through the rooms of a downtown flat, home never quite has the right connotation. Home suggests family, pets, garages, fences, dinner at five around the table, a daily schedule and regular weekends, fresh lavender towels that match the bathroom walls. Home suggests permanence. A Compound welcomes travelers and transients, artists, writers, musicians, performers, the unemployed. They wander through, sleep where there's room, and no one asks whose name is on the lease.
It's probably not unusual, at this age, at this point in life, for any artist to turn to some form of transience. Settling down means obligations, plans, schedules, responsibilities. The artists' life has no time for those. A lease means I had to know where I wanted to be a month from now, a year from now. How could I make a commitment to one thing for an entire year? A million possibilities come along in a year; to commit to one would completely hinder my ability to embrace another.
Never during this time did I ever consider myself “homeless”, in the general sense of the word. I had a home because I had friends. I could always find a bed; that was no concern. I was never short of a cafe to write in, a bar stool to roost on, a bed to crash in, a meal to share. But, to take it more literally, I was quite “homeless” after I left my apartment; I had no permanent connection, no obligation to be in, pay for, maintain any type of place. It came with all of the freedom and fear, autonomy and loneliness that are inevitable when all ties to one's former life are lost.
A week later, as we drove down the quiet street away from the neighborhood of single-family homes and groomed yards housing dog fences and jungle gyms, towards the street lights and the drunk college kids, deeper into the bustling downtown, I sighed and laid my head back on the leather car seat. I closed my eyes and took in the silence for a moment. I wanted more than this place.
Without opening my eyes or turning my head, I said to Greg, “Do you want to go to California?”
“Sure.”
“Let's move to San Francisco and see if we can make it through the summer.”
“Yeah, that sounds good.”
