a lot of damn holes

A few months ago, I was forced to make the first real decision of my adult life. It was easier than I thought it would be.

Our lease was up, so it was: Do I stay in Madison another year, dicking around aimlessly, making 6 bucks an hour and drinking away $3.50 of it? Do I acknowledge that I am truly lost and confused and hopeless and shiftless and does the acceptance of all of that make it even worse?

Or, do I take a week, a day...even a couple of hours...to focus and think about what's next? As I watch my friends disappear one by one to real-life jobs in real-life cities, do I finally feel sick enough about my own lack of ambition to get off my ass and try to make a real life for myself? Do I move to another city? Do I move back to New York? Do I interview for a real-life job? I was a journalism major. Should I go be a journalist? Seems like it might be a pain in the ass.

It should come as no surprise that when decision time came, I signed another one year lease. I'm still right here in Madison and will be until at least August of 1993. I love this town and I love the simplicity of my life and I really like the people who are still around. I know I'm going to regret this, the signs are everywhere. But I didn't know what else to do.

In Madison, at least in the parts near campus, all the leases run August 15th thru August 14th. It's a college town and the academic year dictates a lot of stuff. In May, one of my roommates graduated and left town. Two more just finished last week. Everyone is leaving...except me. Me and Milo and Max. Max has finished his second 1000 hour stint on the trayline and is about to start law school. Milo is in his second year of medical school. They are on the path to bigger and better.

Me? I don't have an exact number, but I'd say I'm up to around 850 hours in my first trayline stint. I swear these last 150 hours will be my last. It's just about the shittiest job I could ever imagine, but I'm gonna ride it out. When I first started, it was just something to help me pay the rent. Then, after a few weeks, I convinced myself it was a real growing experience, a glimpse into blue collar life, an honest day's work for an honest day's pay and all that. That lasted about a week. Then somehow I decided I was gonna grit my teeth and get through my 1000 hours, just for pride (and rent). I dunno what comes next.

One thing we knew was that we had to move. So Milo, Max and I signed a lease for a rather nice three bedroom apartment, the second floor of a house on West Wilson street -- $780 between the three of us. $260 a month: I can actually afford this.

As moving day approached, I started to feel all melancholy. Two of my roommates were leaving town for good, another reminder that I was not. We wanted to get as much of our security deposit back as possible, so we had a "cleaning party" on the 12th. The place was a total disaster, if it had been a pet we would have put it to sleep and not looked back. The building was only about four years old, but the apartment aged about 25 years in our two year stay there. Carpet: sticky and discolored. Walls: filthy. Fixtures: all busted up. Bathrooms: coated in mildew and grime and gunpowder (from the old "light the firecracker and slide it under the door while your roommate is helplessly taking a dump" move that had become popular in our house).

Unfortunately, the cleaning party turned out to be mostly party and very little cleaning. With so many dudes heading off in so many different directions, emotions got the better of us. It eventually disintegrated into a bunch of beer-soaked man-hugs and drinking stories we'd already told 100 times, like the time we stole a homecoming float (a giant piranha with a "W" on its side) and managed to hoist it up onto our second floor balcony, where it became a one-day attraction for motorists. Later that afternoon we were forced to return it to where we'd stolen it from, under threat of police involvement.

We got enough cleaning done during our party to fool ourselves into thinking we were all set. However, there were two major problems lurking.

1. Our living room wall was covered in approximately 3000 small holes. These holes were left from plastic darts that had been misfired over the last two years. Sometimes you want to throw a fastball, you know, and fastballs can be a little wild. There were even days when we would stand on the sidewalk one story below our apartment, and throw the darts through the open screen door without even being able to see the board. It was a good forty foot throw. Occasionally you'd hit the board, which always got everyone fired up (I think someone once got a bullseye, for sure somebody got a triple 19). The rest of the time the darts would slam into the wall, either lodging all the way in or just puncturing it and then falling harmlessly to the floor. I suppose there was a day when there were like 40 holes in the wall where we had a conversation like, "Wow, that's a lot of damn holes, we better cut this crap out" and somebody said, "It's too late now, might as well have fun." Maybe not a real conversation but there was an understanding that the wall was so fucked up that we'd have to deal with it eventually so we might as well keep throwing darts.

So the night before we had to move out, my roommate Bob and I spent a few hours painting the dart wall, over and over again. No spackle, just layers and layers of paint on top of the holes. We did it until we reached a point where we knew that it wasn't gonna get any better. That's all you can do. From certain angles, you can't see the holes at all. From other angles, you can see each and every one of 'em. Let's hope our security deposit checks are cashed before one of the new tenants catches the bad angle.

2. Normally you reach a gentleman's agreement with the tenants who are vacating the apartment you're moving into, so you can actually move in anytime you want on the 14th, instead of waiting til the 15th as the lease technically stipulates. This agreement prevents you from having to put all your shit in storage and find a place to sleep on the night of the 14th. It's just an understanding. Everybody does it. Except the three chicks whose apartment we are taking over. They said we couldn't move in until 9pm on the 14th, and we had to have all our shit out of our old place by 9am on the 14th. We were borrowing a friend's pickup to help us move, but it was gonna take about three trips so we had to figure out what to do with our shit for 12 hours.

Solution: we put all our stuff on the front lawn of our old apartment (the one we were leaving), a huge pile consisting of everything we had: TV's and garbage bags full of clothes and comforters and basketballs and boxes of books and our big nasty sofa sitting right in the middle of it all. We vacated the apartment at 9am sharp, but kept about 50 bottles of Old Mil in the fridge, nice and cool. We sat out there on our lawn-couch listening to music and drinking and playing catch all day. It was the best move ever. The new tenants arrived around noon and started loading their stuff in. We kept passing them in the hall as we went for new beers, and they had no idea what to make of us. We couldn't have been friendlier to them, and technically their lease didn't start until the next day, so they had nothing to complain about.

Of course eventually they DID complain, not to our faces but to the building manager dude. He came by around 4pm and told us we needed to get our beer out of the fridge but by this point he was dealing with drunks and he stood no chance. We reminded him in slobbering tones that we still had some sort of legal right to be here as our lease went through the 14th, and he eventually went away. He promised to come back and straighten it out but he never did. By 6 o'clock we decided it was safe to move regardless of what the chicks had said, and we packed up 1/3 of our crap and drove the 8 minutes to the new place, leaving one man behind to guard our pile on the lawn. When we got to our new home the girls were still there but the place was 99% empty. We just started bringing bags in and didn't even say hello. We could tell they were pissed and they could tell we were piss drunk so nobody said a word. Oh, actually, I did say one thing not-quite-far-enough-under my breath. We had all seen Unforgiven a couple of weeks ago, so I hit them with "Every asshole that doesn't want to get shot best clear out the back quick." I thought it was funny. They didn't.

We were moved in by 8:30pm and I collapsed on top of our gross little couch in our tiny living room shortly thereafter. When I woke up around 8 the next morning there were birds singing and my head stung. I had a futon being delivered that day, my first-ever bed, and I walked into the first bedroom I could ever call my own and started trying to figure out where stuff was gonna go. Then I got bored and everyone was still sleeping so I walked across the street to the little newspaper vending machine on the corner and got a Wisconsin State Journal. I came back upstairs and read it while eating cereal.

The futon came around noon and even though I could tell immediately that it was an uncomfortable mistake, I went back to sleep. I slept hard and long and woke up when it didn't hurt anymore.

We've been in this apartment for four days now and most of our crap is unpacked and set up. My room is charmless and comfortable, just the way I like it. Everything I own in the world is sitting right there: a futon (no cover), a dresser that I found on the street, a closet full of clothes (8 pairs of wearable pants, five pairs of emergency pants, a bunch of button down shirts), and a shelf with all my sweatshirts and athletic wear. On top of the dresser sits my pathetic little sound system. It's a decent CD player lined into a $59 SONY boombox that gets terrible sound. Sometimes I imagine myself throwing everything into the trunk of the car that I don’t have, saying a few brief goodbyes, and heading out somewhere alone without any idea of what I'm going to do. I feel confident that I would be happy in such a situation, much happier than anyone would guess. But I won't do it because we have plans. Immediate plans.

Tonight we're going to the Pinckney Street Hideaway, the magic bar, the best bar in the United States, and we will drink down some $3 pitchers of Leinenkugel’s and something incredible will happen. I guarantee it.