5 - Apts - ASU years

Gap Yar

I wish. Maybe I could have talked my parents into funding something between high school and college, if only over the summer, but instead I chose to burn my bridges. The day I graduated I moved out into a shared apartment with some of my closest stoner friends. To support myself, I got a job at a local car wash thanks to another friend. I was on my own.

My first (shared) apartment was in a large, sprawling complex on the southern edge of Scottsdale closest to Tempe. It was pretty bland. This was on the edge of the Salt River floodplain (usually dry) and one of our closest neighbors was a large cemetery. The grave stones here were all flush with the ground (to make it easier to mow the grass, I believe) and when they buried someone they would set-up a steel shelter over the grave for the ceremony. We would come out at night and sit under the shelters to better enjoy the spectacular thunderstorms that seemed to follow the course of the river in late summer. The visibility was great though it would occasionally occur to one of us that sitting under the only steel structure around while watching lightning might not be the smartest thing in the world.

One of my roommates was the guy I had quit my restaurant job for. He had a motorcycle he insisted on parking in his (carpeted) bedroom -- there went our deposit. The other roommate, K__, was a guy I haven’t mentioned before but have a good story about (see The Trip). Starting a trend of living in tiny places, I occupied what could be loosely termed a walk-in closet.

Chilling

After a long shift at the car wash (see Car Wash Blues) in over 100, often over 110, degree F heat I would head home to try to re-hydrate. I would often drink a pitcher of lemonade or eat a large bag of grapes by myself. And then we would get stoned. None of us were making much money so paying the rent was always a challenge, and it got worse for me when college started and I was only working weekends -- I distinctly recall roaming the aisles of the local convenience store looking for anything I could afford to buy for breakfast. Often I would end up with a pack of mini crumb donuts and a small bottle of an orange juice like drink. Other mornings I would just have to ride off hungry.

One of us was making ends meet by selling weed. For me this meant participating in the occasional “key party” -- “key” as in kilo.  If you were to describe 1970 marijuana in two words those words would be “poor quality.” Kilos of grass from Mexico were purchased from mysterious contacts and brought to the apartment densely compacted and wrapped in plastic. The grass was dumped on a big table and separated into sections. We then methodically removed the stems and seeds which went to make tea (which I don’t actually remember drinking because we had all this fresh weed to smoke). Then the “manicured” grass was placed into baggies and weighed or measured. I think lids -- the usual purchase unit -- were originally four finger bags and then, as the supply dropped, became three finger and then two finger bags. And after all this was accomplished, we tested the product… thoroughly.

Now I think about it, this is the reason our apartment was so well supplied with teen girls that summer.

Living conditions

The roommate situation where I moved after high school fell apart during my first freshman semester, and I ended up back at home again. (K__ had already moved out and been replaced by an older guy who was a decent musician but worked throwing pizzas at Smitty’s and recreated by shooting anything he could find into his veins. I’ll say this for him, he introduced me to the wonderful Les McCann and Eddie Harris Swiss Movement album, then newly released, by playing it non-stop for a month or so).

The good news was I was eating regularly and didn’t have to ride my bike to ASU every day, since I could also ride with my mother. The bad news was that I was back home again. After a couple years I found another roommate situation, this time with students from college. I finally settled down in this funky ground floor, corner apartment in the heart of what passed for urban Tempe. 

My door is right behind the car. Later I moved up to the 3rd floor. Those are orange trees next to the palm and in March-April it smelled like heaven.

Previously these rooms had been the offices of the New Times weekly, alternative newspaper, where several of my friends worked. There was a disco on the other side of our bedroom walls and crowds of drunks outside our kitchen windows weekend nights. But otherwise it was pretty great. It’s best feature was a commercial grade “Swamp Cooler” that dumped tons of moist air on my bed on summer nights.

In Arizona, air conditioning is known as refrigeration and, while relatively effective, it is expensive and results in very stale, unpleasant air by the end of summer. The cheaper alternative is evaporative cooling (swamp coolers) that consist of big fans that draw outside air through moist, aspen fiber pads and then direct the air inside. Usually there isn’t enough air movement in a house to make it effective (and it's even less effective late in the summer when the air is more humid). But in my Casa Loma corner apartment, it was perfect and I’d never slept better.

The other disadvantage of living off campus like this was that my parents weren’t paying my rent when I wasn’t attending school, so I needed to find a job. I was no longer at the car wash and the wedding photography brought in money from time to time but it wasn’t that regular. Fortunately, the taxi gig came along to keep me going for a couple years.

The problems with shared housing are too familiar to go into, but I will mention my roommate, from what was then the nation of Dahomey and is today the Republic of Benin. Every night he would burn a pot of rice for dinner. I don't think this was intentional like "burned" Persian rice. I could have lived with that, but his English was so poor that all my friends finally just gave up leaving messages (ah, the days before answering machines and cell phones) which all but ended my social life. I finally moved up to the third floor where I had a small place to myself -- and I've never shared since. 

My new unit had originally been a hotel room. I had a tiny kitchen but only a half bath (toilet and basin). There was a shared shower room out in the hall. Sadly, this unit had a small refrigeration unit mounted in the window instead of the lovely, big swamp cooler -- another reason I wanted to work nights in the summer. 

Xerox and then gone

When I stopped driving taxis (see TAXI !!) I was already planning a move out of Arizona but wasn’t quite ready to leave, so I got a short term job at a copy place. We only had one, really basic, Xerox machine -- you had to copy one page at a time, no feeding in a stack of pages -- and a variety of binding equipment. It was dull and it didn’t even pay well, though it was an easy walk from my apartment. The only interesting thing I remember from that job was a Mormon family history I made bound copies of that talked about the early settlement days in Utah. What made it memorable was the passage where some guy was found to be sleeping around with other guy’s wives -- so they castrated him. Sounded like a pretty biblical solution to me.

By this time I had discovered three cities where I would love to live: Montreal, Boston, and San Francisco. I figured there could be problems getting work permits for Montreal, and I’d been in Boston in the summer and was hoping to get away from heat...  so I decided to move to San Francisco. Around the time I started telling friends about this, I discovered a bunch of my friends had independently decided to move there as well (for very different reasons). So, in the summer of 1976, I made the first, and so far only, move of my own from Arizona to San Francisco. (See also: ASU - The Slides of Architecture, ASU - Bad Teachers, ASU - Freshman Adviser, ASU - It's All BS, ASU - Nietzsche, ASU - Photography, ASU - Phyllis, ASU - Socratic Elevator, ASU - The Logic Man, ASU - War & Resistance, Changes HS to ASU, On the Road - Arrowhead, On the Road - Colorado, On the Road - East Coast, On the Road - Monterey. Next: 6 - Apts - SF - Japantown )