Bobby’s place was the second and third floor in the back of a 200-year-old mansion on Rutledge, a couple blocks north of Colonial Lake. The front of the building was flat stone and imposing, coming right up to the sidewalk, with giant wooden doors and a metal plaque beside them to commemorate its historical significance. Bobby’s part was a wooden extension built a little over a hundred years ago, and to get to it you had to walk down a long driveway of cracked pavement, then climb a flight of dilapidated wooden stairs that threatened to collapse with every step. The inside was a classic example of frat house austerity— old and regal but littered with beer cans, weed paraphernalia, and discarded food.
The first room you entered was a living room with three blue walls and one white wall that looked like it’d been added later on. There was blue and white striped couch and a matching chair, a palmetto-patterned rug that might have once been white but was now beige and covered in stains, ash smears, and speckles of mold; a defunct fireplace with a big gas and flame space heater right in front of it, an old nature painting over the fireplace and two model ships on the mantel, beer cans on every imaginable surface, and in the center of it all was a mahogany table I recognized from 69 Bogard. The top surface could be turned over to reveal a maroon poker table or put to the side to reveal a maroon bumper pool table underneath. Bobby and Lee had been storing it on behalf of their roommate Paul who’d dropped out of school and moved back home to Wisconsin, but at the end of the year, when they were supposed to see about how to return it, Bobby had made up a bogus story about it burning up in a house fire. Now it was his permanently, and it, like the other things he stole, was one of his prized possessions.
Bobby had agreed to let me stay the weekend on the living room couch, but I could tell he wasn’t too enthusiastic about it. He’d only agreed because it was Hunter who’d asked him if I could stay there, and he worshipped Hunter because Hunter was famously generous with his cocaine and always managed to have some on him, even when the rest of the city was in a drought or when, as was the case this weekend, everyone was scared shitless about the narcs. The first night I was at the house we all hung out in Bobby’s room on the third floor, everyone smoking weed, drinking cheap beer, and taking the free lines as Hunter doled them out on a framed photo of Steve Jobs that Bobby had for some reason. I felt more relaxed than I had in a long time, and I even took some hits off of the joint and the dry piece as they made their way around to me. I didn’t feel any panic coming on, and that alone made me almost euphoric. There was a dog running around, an old schnauzer mix they called Dog Man because he supposedly had the demeaner and intelligence of an old man. He belonged to girl named Kat who lived on the second floor but was out of town.
They all hated Kat for one reason or another. Bobby said she was a whore and Bobby’s other two roommates, Joe and Marvin, said she did nothing but blast electronic music all night, flood the bathroom, and make terrible abstract paintings. Joe was a tall white guy with a crooked smile and a sardonic sense of humor, poking fun at everybody for anything he could find to roast them on. Marvin was a short but athletic goofball with terra cotta skin, a shaved head, and sparse facial hair that had grown into whiskers and a thin moustache. I immediately picked up on the fact that Marvin and Joe were a duo, in the sense that they preferred to hang out with each other than with Bobby, but as long as people were over and cocaine was being passed around they’d be happy to partake,
At some point Hunter and Lee slipped out without telling anyone, and Joe, Marvin, and I went to their spot in the back of the third floor to get away from Bobby, who was now insisting we play videogames but was infamous for hogging his only controller. I didn’t see Hunter or Lee again for the rest of the weekend, and I was scared that they’d been arrested or killed. Both their phones were off and they didn’t post anything on their social media. Joe and Marvin were good entertainment, though— drinking every night, making bullshit attempts at freestyle rapping, smoking blunts, and taking me to the basketball court by Colonial Lake to play 21. As we passed the lake I pointed at a purple house that had caution tape blocking off the front porch.
“You see that house? That’s the first place I ever stayed in Charleston. When I visited here in high school. A guy I know from New Orleans lived in that place, had a room on the top floor.”
“Weird,” Marv said. “You know what happened there last week right?”
“No, what?”
“You heard about the police raid right? When like seven C of C kids got knocked? That was in that house. That’s why the tape’s there.”
Weird indeed. It felt I was a part of the city’s history, and now that I was back I could once again be a part of its future, whatever future that might turn out to be. When I drove back to New Orleans the next day, I knew I would be back, sooner rather than later. I had no idea that I'd be living in that same house, 81 1/2 Rutledge, with Bobby, Marvin, and Joe, and I had no idea how profoundly those random people or that shitty old mansion would change me.
TO BE CONTINUED
