For a time in college, I lived with eight other guys in a house that appeared to have survived a direct nuclear blast.

It rested on a small hill on a crooked foundation. It was brown inside and out, as though it’d been buried, unearthed, and then sprayed off. The porch sunk in various spots, and gnarled paint chips clung to the porch ceiling. The house had no air conditioning, either. In the spring, the sun would set almost directly on the face of the house, cooking the worn siding and convincing everyone inside that the Earth had abruptly switched orbits with Mercury.

There were eight shabby rooms inside the house–well, seven really. One was a large closet that had been transformed into a room by the unlucky guy who chose the short straw.  

I slept on a mattress on the floor in one of the rooms downstairs. The little money I had went not toward box springs and a bed frame, but feng shui. I nailed a giant maroon tapestry with a fancy design on it to the wall and invested in a bundle of incense that the neighbor girls later said smelled like wet dog.

On really hot nights, I’d set a box fan in the window next to my bed and blast it on high. Occasionally, I’d wake up in the morning soaked in a film of dead bugs that had been sucked in through the fan from the muggy outside.

Guests pretty much treated the house the same way it looked. The doors were always unlocked for anyone to pass through, so we were never entirely sure who our guests actually were. One time, I came home in the middle of a harsh winter to find our thermostat knocked off the wall and shattered to bits on the floor, as if it’d been bludgeoned with a crowbar. That night I doubled up on sweatshirts and lit a dozen candles around my bed for warmth. It was as though I was simulating my very own wake. Another time, someone had flushed a whole roll of toilet paper down the toilet.  The culprit was never caught.

To be fair, we who lived there didn’t treat the house with much respect, either. Once, we invented a nameless game where we would crank the music and hurl butcher knives at a dartboard hanging on the kitchen door. Our aims weren’t always a 100 percent accurate, which pretty much tore up everything within a 10 foot radius of our target.

Spring quarter, some strange entity living inside the house must have burrowed into my housemates brains. What else could explain why they decided to, out of the blue, pull themselves away from their Dallas reruns and mix a hulking, reeking concoction of all the old expired food in the house (and there was a lot of it) and dump it on our front lawn? It was pink, chunky, and heaving and looked like a pool of dinosaur vomit. I was at class at the time, or I would have tried to stop them.

When I discovered the toxic pool, I was so mad that I conked my housemates over the heads with the meanest sarcasm I owned. I mean, this stuff would attract every varmint outside of town. I imagined waking one morning to find a bear and her cubs lapping it up. Instead of retorting my remarks, though, my housemates just stared at me with goofy grins as if their minds had been taken over.

Eventually, the blazing sun boiled the dinosaur vomit away, leaving behind an ungainly dirt patch in the lawn. I half expected a small garden of radioactive plants to sprout there. Instead, it may have contributed to the birth of a new species.

Right around the time the vomit disappeared, an outer-space bug the length of a toothbrush with eyes as big as dimes and wings as long as a raven’s was found dead in the shadowy corner of the kitchen. Whether it died from natural causes or from the hostile environment of our house, we could not tell. The bug had no identifiable stinger. Nonetheless, a mean bite it most definitely had. Or, I’m sure, it could have simply knocked you unconscious with one of its wings. Looking back, I imagine its main food source was either rodents or trout.

We should have alerted some scientists about our great discovery. Instead, my housemates chose to hang it by a thread from the ceiling–a fitting ornament for the place.

Strangely enough, I kind of miss that house.

Categories: Life
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