Where Will They Live (Part 2)

So Alexi and I cruised the town that we would soon call home, listening to Joy Division and savoring the tastes of the Woodstock’s Pizza we had for dinner. We spent that night at the place where Jeanette would be living the next year, this guest house directly behind the landlord's house. I personally think that it was a shed that the guy transfixed with a bathroom and cheap kitchen set up. Janny Sue was sharing it with her professional ice skating sorority sister; her name escapes me, but her over-enthusiastic and fake smile and her tight blond curls made me think of what happens to those child beauty pageant contestants when they get to college age. She seemed like she would crack that happy facade at any time and would be taking out whoever happened to be nearby.

Alexi and I spent that night brazenly breaking the no smoking rule and lamely attempting to hide it by sitting beneath the open window and blowing the smoke out. It was one of those delirious evenings where you spend a number of hours in the dark and laughing so hard that it feels like you've eaten a live bear the next morning. We mainly stuck to four words that entire night, but they consistently made us laugh like special needs kids - "naughty little puss puss".

I think it was riding that giddy line between being a child and pretending to be an adult.

The next day we had breakfast at what used to be a phenomenal breakfast place downtown and went out looking for an apartment. What we had actually found was an adorable house on 1st Avenue. I fell in love with it from the point we walked in the door. The rental agency robot pointed out the "swamp cooler", a term I had never heard before but has been sitting in the active, front portion of my mind ever since. There was also the basement that ran the entire length of the place where, Alexi and I agreed, Damon would be perfectly comfortable shutting out what little light actually made it down there.

We ended up not getting the place because of Damon, which is ironic when you consider that he ended up never coming up there to live anyway. I used to often think that if we had actually lived in that house, would Damon have come and not disappeared off the face of the earth? Would Alexi and Amy Lou have worked things out and stayed engaged? Would we have met Rob and Colin who took their turns at gently shaping who I was to become in those formative years?

The answer is probably not, any of them, but more important than any of that, I probably would not have found my amazing and beautiful Bif.

Wow Joy Division, you cracked open a big messy chapter of my life for my perusal. Thanks for that.