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By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter One
May 31st
The Walbridge road house fell through. The owners are worried that letting a bunch of twenty-somethings turn it into a group house will "expose the property to unnecessary harm." Whatever that means. Sad, we'll never live among its mildewed carpeting or its walls that are flaking into lead-paint poison dandruff.
The real estate agent was very apologetic and kept telling us that we were his favorite customers, that he wanted to develop “a longterm working relationship” with us and about how -- with his 15 years of experience -- he knows the D.C. real estate market better than anyone else could.
It was almost as bad as last week when he heard Nellie talking about her Transiberian railroad trip and told us that he’d done the same thing, but when Nellie asked him more detailed questions he couldn’t name any of the stops or say what happened there or tell any stories about the people on the train or describe Vladivostock. Nell thinks he’s never made the trip and was just trying to impress us. No success there.
* * *
June 1st
Nell and I looked at two more houses, both in Mt. Pleasant. The one on Park was the most promising...5 bedrooms, wooden floors, 2 kitchens, 2 bathrooms and a carport where Brenna can put her mufflerless monoxidemobile.
Mt. Pleasant is isolated (over a mile to a metro station) and rises in big reaching stretches of rock and underbrush from the valley of Rock Creek Park. The house is just one of a row of old brick townhouses with square porches. It's set into the hill and faces into the forest-void of the park. You can only get to the street via a long broken concrete stair.
Behind the house, the backyard is tiered to keep the hill from ending up as a swamp of mud behind the house. At the top is a gate that opens out to a quiet alley and to the carport. The real estate agent, in a very strange move sales-wise, admitted that one of the notorious shotgun murders from last year took place in the alley.
In his courtroom testimony, which I'd followed avidly, the shotgun killer had talked about “following old women” and “picking special corners” from which he could shoot them at point blank range. There were some corners he couldn’t fire from, but from which ones he could and which ones he couldn’t were known only to him. “The good ones would glow blue,” he’d said. “The ones where I couldn’t were covered in gray smoke like someone had thrown a wool blanket over everything.” Six people were murdered before he was caught.
Nell asked the real estate agent where in the alley the murder took place, but he didn’t know. We inspected the large white paving stones as if they’d still be covered in blood.
Vines grow all over the alley's crypt-like garages and carports, their tendrils reaching around to grab trees and trashcans. The story of the murder made the quiet oppressive; it became a loud quiet? Like something just below the range at which I can hear was talking in a language I didn’t understand.
The only drawback to the house is that the fifth bedroom is the size of the refrigerator box Frank used to sleep in when he was trying to make that point (don't ask me what the point was, I never got it) about homelessness. On the way back, we made the real estate guy stop at a pay phone so we could call the others. We only reached Jean and Brenna. Without having even seen the it, Jean said she'd take the small room if she could pay half as much rent as the rest of us. This seemed sort of symmetrical since Jean used to sleep in the refrigerator box with Frank.
Brenna’s reaction was less enthusiastic. "Do you want to get it?" I asked her."I thought you guys were deciding," she said. "Well, you have to live there," I said. "Tell me where to live and I'll live there," she replied and then refused to meet us for a beer.
June 2nd
On my way home from work, I swung down Connecticut on my bike and rode down Klingle and through Rock Creek Park to Park Road. I stopped on the street and looked at the house perched there on the hill looking imposing and arrogant, then rode up and around the curve into the alley. The words "Remember Mia Zapata" were painted (had been painted?) in big uneven red spraypaint letters on the side of one of the garages. Was that there yesterday? If so, I hadn’t noticed. But there it was, as vivid as one of those bleeding cuts that you have without remembering how or when you got cut.
Nell had been more interested in finding traces of the murder site and must not have seen it either. If she had, she'd have said something; she’d been a Gits fan, still was a Gits fan and she'd taken their singer's rape and murder pretty hard and railed on about the shittiness of men (as if all men were capable of such a thing) for a truly epic amount of time.
Everything that was wrong with everything came down to Mia Zapata being dead. If she wasn't dead, would I notice that she was alive? Would she have faded off to obscurity? Two dreadlocked kids and an Italianesque mini-mansion in the ‘burbs somewhere? Would that mean that the world was OK?
But she was dead and that meant that it wasn't and I'd always have to be distrustful of my maleness, my lust. Did every man have the capacity for violence, for betrayal, wrapped up in his sex drive, his ability to love? Bondage, rough sex, whips, chains: did every human? Maybe it was too bad a sign, this reminder of murder in a place of murder?
"You don't like the house?" Nell had asked at the bar yesterday after we’d first seen it and nothing had had a chance to settle into my brain. Her almost too-big, unfocused, sky blue and hidden-behind-glasses eyes had looked disappointed.
"No, the house is great," I’d said, but I don't think she’d believed me.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
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2004 Me Three