I wrote a while back about the Secret Mall Apartment on Netflix, mostly about the social conditions behind it. And I only briefly mentioned my memories of weird living with fellow artists and the assorted art, all-nighters, constant talk, crazy schemes, weekend parties, home movies, endless music, artwork, and all the general insanity that goes with it.
image reflected in the water, aren't they?
Back in the mid 70s I shared a house in Atlanta with 5-6 other people. (It varied: My boyfriend and I moved in together, but broke up six months later, and about time, too. Similar things happened to others.) We each paid $25 per month, and we sometimes had trouble making that. Every room in the house except the kitchen, bathroom, and living room (and a lot of people crashed on the couch) was turned into a bedroom.
After the break up, my room was the back porch, which had wrap around windows and a gas space heater I lit with a match. I loved it. It was, for me, the equivalent of Tarzan's treehouse, my private sanctuary. I made a desk from a door on boxes with my typewriter and paper and a broken down chair; a mattress on the floor; a makeshift closet; a huge row of books, and FREEDOM!!!!!
On a tight budget.
Did I mention poverty? We were all broke, all the time. Like the Secret Mall Apartment artists, none of us were above moving through a restaurant and pocketing the leftovers as we went. We shopped at the day-old bread store (5 loaves for a buck), which also carried such delicacies as dented cans of tunafish (I still can't stand the smell of tuna), smashed boxes of Kraft Mac'n'Cheese (we used water instead of milk in it), and other yummy treats. The only thing I still like from those days is oatmeal.
I got all my clothes at GoodWill or a couple of the vintage clothing stores in Little Five Points. Including my wedding outfit: a WW2 wedding suit in tattle-tale grey, complete with a half-moon hat with a veil for $15. We had a 1930s-40s themed wedding and we all looked GREAT.
When we did splurge on dining out, we went to Doby's on Ponce de Leon and got a vegetable plate (4 veg, cornbread) or breakfast or 1 meat, 2 veg, cornbread or biscuit for about $1.75-$2.25. We were indeed the working poor, working all the time, part-time or full-time jobs at all hours of the day or night and then came home to work on our own stuff. I could type 90 wpm, so I worked as a secretarial temp around the city as much as I could during the week and filled in on weekends or slow work times at the corner market a couple of blocks down the road. We ALL did shifts at that market.
It's because of that last gig that I watch Kevin Smith's Clerks with great nostalgia. And it was just as crappy a corner market as Kevin's Quick Stop Groceries: No fruit, no veg, just chips, crackers, jerky, pop, etc. If you lived on their food, you'd die. Unless you were pickled in alcohol, which some were. Every Saturday, the local delivery truck dropped off two cases of Polly Peachtree aftershave. The first time that happened, I had no idea why these suddenly appeared, but I found out on Sunday morning: Georgia was a blue-law state, and while no alcohol could be sold on Sundays, the aftershave was 51% alcohol. So all the winos showed up in a long, long line. They bought two bottles: they'd drink the one and puke it up, drink the second and keep it down...
The liquor and cigarettes were kept behind the cash register. Next to the door there was a bin by the door of paperbacks with their covers ripped off. It didn't take long for me to find out that they weren't just bargain basement fiction, they were detective / spy / porn novels that were so bad they defied belief that anyone had ever written, much less actually sold any of them. But they gave me hope that I'd get published, too, because I sure as hell knew I could write better than THAT.
There was also a gang that ran the neighborhood, and they strolled through regularly, shoplifting. One night it finally happened: one of the guys on night shift got a gun poked in his face. He emptied out the cash register (none of us were going to die for the owners, who were barely paying us minimum wage), came home, and we all agreed we had to find other work.
We also made home movies, but get your mind out of the gutter, they weren't the dirty kind. One of the guys had a Super 8 film camera, and he and I cowrote parodies like "Combination Reefer Madness/First Date" (with me as the ingenue), "Dung Stew" (Kung Fu was big at the time), etc. Everyone had a part, including the dog - "Ringo the SuperDog!" - who rescued me on the railroad tracks early one summer morning...
Meanwhile, I was teaching myself writing by writing like a maniac and reading a stack of books every weekend. I had a guitar and wrote songs and poetry and eventually my first short story.
One of the guys painted this great mural on his bedroom wall, so that became a thing. Murals went up everywhere, now waiting to be discovered by some future art historian. There was a lot of experimenting in mediums, styles, genres, etc.
There were fights and diatribes, discussions and debates. People walking out, coming back a couple of days later and everything picked back up. Everyone had something to say, and we said it endlessly, especially with enough beer or wine or weed in us. And we were young enough to stay up all night, show up at work the next day, and come home and (occasionally) do it again. That or crash so hard we looked like we were dead.
Yes, there was a lot of sex. Or hope for sex: once a couple of the guys had somehow gotten a date with two student nurses, and went out and rented a porn flick to show them - you can't fix stupid. (Pro tip: probably shouldn't START a date with porn.) But then years later, a friend of ours invited us over to his apartment to join him and his date to see a French film that had just come out: Betty Blue. Turned out it was a first date, and it opened with about 5 minutes of hard-core banging. It's a guy thing, I guess.
And there was also falling in love. The real stuff:
Allan and me, 1978 - madly in love and ignoring everyone else at the party.
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Six months later we were married... and still are.
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Told you. Half-moon hat with a veil…
