Punk Houses!

I've lived in a couple of punk houses in my time, and tho' none of them were quite as punk rock as those l the punk houses described in this New York Times article, they had their charms.

There was the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, in which we fought a never-ending battle against giant attacking cockroaches, and there were impromptu punk rock jam sessions in the basement. There was a giant Led Zeppelin collage in the bathroom which I guess isn't very punk rock, but was very cool. Also, there were monkeys. At one point we had an infamous punk rockstar living behind a curtain in the laundry room (cheap rent)...

And then there was the All Girl House where no man was allowed to set foot, and no meat was allowed in the kitchen, and we painted Viking runes on the walls of the enclosed porch, and the giant red bathroom which I have written about earlier, and the hallway full of bikes. This house was in such a bad neighbourhood that you could only leave the house at night in groups, which was a super big drag, but the rent was cheap. It also had no heat, and so we used to sit in front of the open oven when it got really cold, which, in retrospect, was probably not so very smart. I was standing in the kitchen of the All Girl House when I heard on the news that Kurt Cobain had killed himself...

Tho' the Times article sticks only to punk houses, of course, there ain't nothing more punk rock than living in a tent. There was the time I lived with various members of the Horses of Instruction, down by the China Basin pig processing plant in a punk shebang made out of flour sacks and a leather duster that I kipped from the cloakroom of the Blue Duck. It's a hard call to say who was grubbier--the pigs or the band, and that part of the basin has a tendency to flood when it rains, so it was awfully damp. The band's drummer finally set the shebang on fire trying to make chile brownies (lesson: clean the soot out of your stove-pipe!). After that, me and the leather duster (I think it might have been an old duster of impenetrability because it didn't burn) moved to a room over the Mono Real where I was working as a pot-girl at the time. This room was small, and smelled of always as coffee, but at least it was dry and it didn't also contain a ten piece band and a praterhuman drummer that spit sewage.