Story telling prompt: "Roommates."

I didn't get picked to tell a story at the Monti tonight but here's the one I prepared.

In Cambridge MA in the 70s, group houses were hippy versions of the Addams Family. I lived in one, a beautiful Victorian house with a turret, inside the turret on the third floor was a jungle of hanging plants and there you'd find Anne H. sitting on the couch when she was high, working macrame plant hangers out of jute twine and beads. I had a great bedroom jutting out over the front porch, with a bay window, stained glass at the top, a primo view of the street corner where there were frequently non-fatal traffic accidents near the liquor store. I built a tall bed out of 2x4s so I could prop myself on my elbows and watch guys jump out and curse each other over the broken glass of their fender benders.

The house was ruled by Victor S., son of the Sauerkraut King of upstate New York, making him the Prince of Sauerkraut, but he disdained the family business so was in self-imposed exile. He actually had a car! He tricked it out with a special ionizer, in the tin foil hat family, to align the car's air molecules optimally. Eventually he went back home to rule his kingdom, the money being too good to pass up.

His replacement, my college friend, music critic Jon P., rolled up in his mom's car and decanted a gaggle of friends and siblings, they made a bucket brigade from the car across the sidewalk across the porch through the front door, hand-over-handing his endless boxes of LPs up the stairs. Just a year later the process was reversed when he left for Manhattan to write for Rolling Stone and then the New York Times.

Some among us wanted the next roommate to be an uptight intellectual, others wanted a laid-back hippy. Our barely adequate compromise candidate was another Jon, one I later married, that's another story. He was a poet, and bike mechanic at the "Mystic Cycle" collective, so hip its female co-owners had rejected the patriarchy completely and had no last names.

Jon and I might never have gotten it on, because you shouldn't sleep with your roommate, but the owners of our paradise sold the place and threw us all out, so he and I went looking for a new place together. It had to be cheap - he earned $2.68 an hour and I was supporting myself writing sonnets, which is another story. We moved to working class Somerville, now gentrified but then a grotty city where men carved parking places out of snowdrifts and defended them with garbage cans and fists.

We had three roommates at 45 Spencer Avenue. There was Kathy M., an anthropologist who while doing her fieldwork in a Francophone fishing community in northern New Brunswick had fallen in love with one of her fishermen subjects. She tied up our phone chatting in French with Bernard. There was Dick P., he made a good living turning high end Renaissance recorders on his lathe, tinting them with Lady Clairol hair dye, and selling them for $700 a pop. And there was Scott, last name forgotten, he worked a graveyard shift repairing copy machines. He said he was a science fiction writer but he never wrote, he had a jazz band, Laughing Moon, but he never gigged. What he DID do was tend a massive marijuana plantation in the attic, so scientific, littlest plants out by the eaves and as they grew (robustly) he moved them towards the center of the attic where the gro-lights were higher. Every day he hauled himself up to the attic, harvested a very generous armful of weed, then baked it in our oven and consumed it all himself. Then he'd lie on his bed, tootling into his trumpet mouthpiece because he was too damn to actually stand up and play the entire trumpet.

Eventually we felt we had to leave. It wasn't the awful hippy bread made of soy flour and brewers yeast. It wasn't the deafening weekly bassoon quartet rehearsals. It wasn't the book "Hitler was a Sugar Fanatic" that Dick waved at us or the sarcastic post-it notes left anonymously on the towering piles of dishes in the sink. Nor was it the flagrant disrespect of the chore wheel.

No, it was tuna casserole. Scott baked it every week when it was his turn to make dinner, and every week Jon told him: I don't like tune casserole, and every week there it was again, finally one day we came home and smelled the smell of our house, baked marijuana and tuna casserole, and Jon lost his mind! He ran upstairs to where Scott was lying on his bed tootling into his trumpet mouthpiece and yelled "I F&*#NG HATE TUNA CASSEROLE," and so soon we went to live in a group house in an Armenian neighborhood in Belmont, with a couple of glassy eyed anthroposophists and an ancient Wiccan shrine in the back yard. But that's another story.