Casa Bonita

To my memory, it was among the simplest propositions I’d ever heard. It would have been some time around April last year, when Matt Brown slammed a tall glass of drink and leaned across a table in a dimly lit blues bar and asked “So Muir, are you serious about handling our living situation?”

About two months and several hassles later, I found myself smoking a joint on my very own, and very first balcony. Ramshackled with jutting nails and loosening boards though it may have been, it was still a good three feet above the ground. High enough so that passers-by wouldn’t look at you, but low enough that you could climb up when you forgot your keys. It was more like the deck of a pirate’s ship than the deck of an apartment – high enough so that you felt like a captain, but low enough that you could walk the plank without drowning. Bottles of rum all around, and only the stars to guide us.

And NO, you wouldn’t have seen our kitchen in any Ikea catalogues. Our plates didn’t match our cups, and our forks didn’t match our spoons. I think one of our pans matched one of our bowls, and that pissed me off. Most of the fluids in our fridge leaked out of the fridge itself. Most of the greenery in the vegetable crisper had actually grown there. Unmarked tupperware, unacknowledge for months on end, had an amazing ability to produce new life. New species. New civilizations. And we were their gods. 

You couldn’t look in any corner without seeing something that could produce music. And not shitty music. I mean good music. I mean the kind of music that makes you pretend that you’re playing the drums – the kind that makes you make faces like you’re fucking. It wasn’t a living room with instruments in it. It was a jamspace with couches in it. And not stylish ones. Comfortable ones, with bouncy yellow foam bursting through tattered red fabric.

It’s two thirty on a sunday night, and while the world sleeps in anticipation of monday morning, we crash through the door into a world of bright colours – blue, green, red, amber – and celebrate the fact that, for now, monday morning can’t catch us. Disoriented, and uncaring of the world beyond the unpainted walls of our apartment, we misinterpret Bob Marley’s lyrics, and can’t remember falling asleep.

Now it’s two thirty on a wednesday night, and we’re not sure if the last weekend is over or the next one is just beginning. All we know is that it’s apparently March now, and the Christmas lights are still up. The rain drenches the courtyard outside, the light from the television floods the room, smoke fills the air, and somebody gets their ass handed to them in Street Fighter. Homework lies piled, unattended and impatient in some dark corner, on some forgotten desk. And there it stays. 

Now it’s five oclock in the morning, and nobody has any clue who these chicks are, or how they ended up in our apartment. For that matter, nobody can remember why there is a full drum-kit set up in the middle of the room. The only thing that’s certain is that the drunk chicks and the drum-kit in the middle of the room we’re inevitably going to find each other. And she’s off the balcony. Man overboard! We sail on. 

Now it’s dark and quiet, and there is a certain gloom in the night. Hooded and cloaked, two figures prowl the night, armed with a saw and screwdriver. Deeds are done, and that’s all that need be known. But let it be a reminder, that it was our neighborhood, and even the shrubbery knew it.

Now it’s four in the morning, and I’m jarred awake by the sound of plastic bowling pins and a human body crashing against my door. I thought everyone had left. But one had remained. I laugh silently to myself at the sound of him resetting the pins. There is no need for a ball. I fall back asleep with a crash. 

And when the night finally came, and our couch lit the night sky like a fireball, fueled by gas-can wielding drunks on the beach of some distant lake, I felt that a part of my youth had ended. 

But the truth is, it was only the beginning, for as each lurching drunk doused the flames, and the couch sent its fiery soul up into the heavens, I realized that I was happy to be there. And so shall I be.

   ~Andrew