Bye-Bye Jerk Haus

March 31st marks the end of Jerk Haus -- eviction and building sale. The last show/party is this Saturday night with a million bands playing. Rudi is putting together a zine. Here is what I wrote:


Notes from downstairs:

Six years ago, lying in my bed that was once Rudi’s box spring, I wrote, “growing up means listening to sad songs and country tunes and folk music but not necessarily because you are sad but because it makes you remember ‘the good old days’ and ‘times like those.’ ” But how was I to know? For at that time, for me, not even an adult, “times like those” and “the good old days” were just beginning to unfold before my eyes upstairs on the third and fourth floors and up the fire escape and onto the roof.

I had dropped out of school and moved in. The first night I slept at the Jerk Haus on Rudi’s box spring with her sheets after sipping whiskey and beers in dim light talking, for now I thought, “we are adults” – Rudi and I were no longer two teenagers strange to each other meeting at a party in Westchester. Now, we are in our home, the downstairs, the underbelly of a sagging brownstone. I got used to watching the ceiling throb when shows were being had, and I anticipated its collapse. I sweated the summer in front of a three-inch fan and lit fireworks off the roof down towards the street below. The stairs always sagged, the carpet was always torn. Window sills cracked, bottles shattered. The kitchen was always slanted. The house swelled in the heat and then shrunk into a new shape.

We helped each other grow up by staying young. We shared meals and nights. Rudi taught me not to dump bacon grease down the sink, I taught her to drink alone. We shared our dreams and made plans.

Kever’s mom gave him a ham for Christmas so we baked it. We sliced potatoes and roasted them. We bought a can of collards and heated them. We cooked a box of macaroni. We bought pumpkin pie filling and a crust and filled that crust and put it in the oven but not long enough for it to cook all the way through. We sat down stoned and drunk to a table of food. We lit candles and adorned our ham with cocktail umbrellas and sliced canned pineapple. We ate and ate and drank cheap wine and laughed and hollered until we felt tired, sick, and sated and Duncan fell asleep on the dining room’s couch.

A year flew by in no time at all. Soon enough it was time to peel stickers off the white walls, time to abandon the milk crates that composed our home and put them on the curb. Soon enough it was time to move out. Rudi took down her empty bottles of Gordon’s Dry Gin that sat atop the moldings. I untacked my posters and pictures from the walls. I sat on one of the last milk crates gazing out the window at the neighborhood kids boxing, fighting, smiling under the sun that promised autumn.

Now I remember photos that I’ve lost and some that I’ve kept. A still of drinking beers outside during the first snow, sky black as pitch with snowflakes blurred and falling. Next, of Rudi and myself from her 21st birthday. We grin, weary-eyed and happy for it was late at night. Or it was early morning. We don’t show our teeth. She is smirking and wearing a cardboard crown, I sit on the floor with my fingers woven around a 32oz. of Sol.