the living room

[Dave Cook]

many years ago, when i was just a kid, in my 20's, a bunch of us career derelicts took over a corner of a parking lot in a cleveland suburb; this was adjacent to a dairy, and as a result, there were milk crates all over the place. for some arcane reason, the management of this place was pretty tolerant of our being there, and we sort of co-opted this small area, which we called the living room, and for the best part of one summer, we were the sole occupants, unmolested by police and blissfully left to our own blotto devices. Those milk crates became sofas, easy chairs, end tables and once in a great while, beds. handy and fun.
we were a very diverse group of drunks: there was jesse james, a vietnam guy,a tormented and beautiful cat, who could laugh like a gleeful child one minute and then morph in a second into the most haunted and spooky soul you would ever meet.... bob villhauer was a genius on may levels but couldn't keep a woman, every one of his female companions hurt him in some very ugly way, and he had a lot of scars to prove it....
crocker lou was an old retired jewish painter, he lived in an apartment laundry room courtesy of a childhood friend who owned the building. at midnight or in the wee hours of the morning, if you needed a beer, it was okay to visit lou's "beer garden", the backyard of his apartment building, where he'd stashed loose cans of beer under each bush and among the flower beds. warm but available in an emergency. shyhood was a wildman, born jewish (his mom) and evangelical baptist (dad) and as you could imagine, lived with a huge turf war of beliefs within his already compromised head, a bucketful of neuroses, but loveable. my buddy tick was a more or less normal dude, capable of great mischief, but for the most part harmless, though easily led. he did possess a great voice, and could boom out john fogerty vocals with enormous gusto. there were many more friends and brothers in the living room that summer (1973), but the above-mentioned guys were the chief antagonists.
we had little to do, but look at the pretty girls and get stuporous, every once in a while one of us would find a gem of a girl and veer away from the living room but it was understood that these digressions were short-lived and never interfered with our loyalty or friendships with each other.
we all had some type of income, in my case it was unmployment, and we weren't above hustling or doing odd jobs to keep the buzz going. a few of us could shoot pretty fair pool, and we would suppliment our earnings with the bread we earned off the tables at the C-Saw, a notorious biker bar, the scene of many ugly incidents. we frequented the place, but warily: once bob had blundered into a biker in there , a completely innocent accident, except this was a bonafide Hell's Angel, and this dude and his 'hero' pals stomped bob so badly that he was hospitalized for three weeks after having his cheekbones and facial bones reconstructed.
there was a kosher chicken market next to the dairy and sharing the parking lot of the C-Saw; on a few very drunken nights, we would set all but one of the live chickens go in the wooded areas adjacent to the living room. the one that didn't get away became a midnight snack, we'd behead it and have it dressed and cooked in less than an hour, and while that might seem kind of basic in our fast food world today, it was just the way that we were back then. one night we constructed a huge pyramid of concrete blocks across the entrance to the parking lot that gave access to the living room. in the morning, there were at least 4 or 5 of these live but terribly stupid birds perched on this wall of blocks. after erecting our masterpiece, we ran across the street to watch the expressions on the commuter's faces as they drove down the street on their ways to work.
it was fun, stupid fun, but none of us were out to be rocket surgeons then, we were just looking for a few laughs and some companionship.
i have a lot of stories about those guys and those days...i am going to try to share some of them in here, unless that's too obnoxious of an idea. basically, they were good guys having a good time and not trying to look to deeply at anything. which isn't such a bad way to live, if you can do it.
here i am 33 years later, and i'm still looking for the same thing: fun, friendship, and adventures. the textures and themes of these might have changed a bit since then, but, we are all cut of the same cloth, basically, and just like having some fun, feeling free (or as i like to put it, "be in a state of grace"), and leaving a mark somewhere to make a note of our acheivements or having simply passed by.
by god i am tired now. i'd no more meant to write so much but for the amount of beer and tequila i've consumed, and forgive me for not deleting this gibberish, but it took a while to produce, and at this hour, i am not willing to say that i wasted my time at the keypad, so into the mix we go!! and good night! more living room stories to come, for better or worse, i promise (or threaten?!)